by Tom D Wright
I am not surprised that the mine was abandoned. After 3D materials printing came of age in the Twenties and robots became versatile enough to take over not only building robots but designing them, manual labor and skills pretty much vanished in all but the most impoverished nations. By the time of the Crash, the only humans with any crafting skills left were a handful of diehard anachronistic hobbyists, most of whom died in the Demon Days.
“What were they mining?” I ask.
“God knows what,” Doc shrugs. “I have no idea, nor how they processed the ore. That’s why I need those texts, so I can identify the symptoms of chemical poisoning, as well as find treatments. It can be a very insidious disease.”
“Well, at least you can treat it,” I say, waving my spoon at him. “Much better than radiation sickness. I’ve seen what radiation can do to people. It’s about the nastiest way to die that I’ve ever seen.”
“Is it really as bad as they say it is? Down south, in the Dead Zone?”
I stare into my bowl before responding to Doc. That poor bastard we found floating in a canoe off the coast of what used to be California barely resembled a human being. His hair had fallen out, his entire body was covered with a sunburn from hell and the man was lying in a pool of diarrhea and vomit.
“Whatever you’ve heard, it’s worse. It’ll be generations before anyone goes east of the Appalachians or almost anywhere in California. Or at least, anyone who’s going to come back to talk about it.” The canoeist was alive when we found him, but the sounds he made before the morphine put him out of his misery were not words.
Danae emerges from the kitchen and loads up a bowl, then joins us at the multipurpose table. “I cleaned everything up, so we can leave as soon as we’re done eating,” Danae remarks as she digs in.
“The hell you are!” I spit out. “This isn’t a sightseeing trip, and we’re not going out picking berries.” It is not just that having Danae with us would be awkward for me, to say the least. She has no idea of the thousand and one ways that a retrieval can go wrong, nor just how bad some of them can be. I know, I have seen most of them.
“I’ll bring a bucket just in case you change your mind,” she replies sweetly, then turns to her father. “You said it’s just a few hours each way, and that you’ll be back tonight.”
“True enough, child. But it’s a hard day’s hike and not for the faint of heart. You won’t enjoy it.” Doc does not sound very determined; I hear surrender forming in his voice.
“Not for a faint heart!” Danae snorts. “That certainly rules you out. You know full well that I can hike to places you haven’t seen in years. Besides, I’m not coming for fun, I’m coming to make sure you get back.”
“You don’t need to worry, I have the Archivist to look after me,” he protests.
“You’re absolutely right, Doc.” I slap my bowl on the table. “Having her along won’t speed us up, but it could definitely slow us down. If we run into trouble, I don’t need someone else to watch over.”
“Papa,” Danae pleads, “you know I’ll just follow behind. If you’re really worried about my safety, you might as well keep me with you. Unless you plan to tie me up.”
I am about to ask where they keep the rope when Doc caves in to her plea. “Dee, you are just like your mother,” he responds with a sigh. After running his hands through his hair in resignation, he continues. “You are just as stubborn as she was. I guess I can’t say no to you any more than I could her.”
Danae gives her father a hug and shoots me a smug, satisfied smile before she heads back into the kitchen. I suspect she is coming along just to annoy me, but I shrug and turn back to my breakfast. As long as I get what I came for, I truly do not care if Danae gets blisters.
After breakfast, Doc and Danae waste little time preparing backpacks, which are now routine gear everywhere. I always keep mine ready to grab, literally. More than once I have barely had enough time snatch it and run. I will not say I cannot live without my backpack, but there is no question that my retrieval work would be far more difficult without all the goodies stashed away in one or another of its secret compartments.
When we are ready to leave, I take my staff and follow Doc out the door, then pause, barring Danae from coming out while I quickly scan the street. No sign of the Disciple, and if his goons have recovered, they are keeping out of sight.
Across the street, a small pack of several mongrel dogs is intent on digging up a small animal burrow in an abandoned lot. Dogs are still companions for humans everywhere I go, but only the working varieties. Aside from a minor baron that I found maintaining a small pack of King Charles Cavaliers, I have not seen a show breed in decades.
For several years I kept a German Shepherd companion, but for her own safety I had to leave her with a trusted contact on a mission in Peru. She probably still has not forgiven me, I reflect, with a pang of guilt.
A few pedestrians trudge by on the street, going to whatever chores await them, and they chat nonchalantly while ignoring us, so the coast seems to be clear. After I move out onto the porch, Danae glares at me before she locks the door. I respect that she likes to be her own boss, but not on my retrieval. I have probably been doing this longer than she has been alive.
Other than a few puffy clouds, the sky is clear, and the morning light gives me a better view of the residential section of Port Sadelow. The simple houses are small and relatively featureless, fashioned out of rough-hewn wood and mostly unpainted. Now when I examine them, I see that the rustic, austere structures are built stronger than I first gave them credit for. Most yards have vegetable gardens and a few have compact flowerbeds. The large house on the corner even has a second story.
We turn at the corner and follow several long, dirt street blocks until we reach the edge of the modest town. There are no city walls, just a plain wooden fence marking the transition from town to farmland. As we move into the fields, a light, gusty breeze beats steady on our backs, and the brackish smell of inter-coastal water follows us on the worn path that leads up a gradual slope into the trees.
Near the top of the hill, I pause to glance around while I take out my pistol crossbow and sling it on my pack. Plots of green fields and brown dirt surround this settlement, spreading to the right and left alongside the river. Left unmolested, this might one day be a significant community.
Our route takes us inland into small rolling foothills. Just after it enters the forest, the ten-foot-wide path connects to a well-travelled thoroughfare which has the consistent width and level surface of a pre-Crash road. The years have reclaimed much of what was probably a paved two-lane road at one time; the forest encroaches from both sides. Broken asphalt occasionally shows through the decades of dirt and debris that have collected; only regular traffic keeps the route relatively open.
The moment we entered the forest we lost the warmth of the sunlight, so the air gets colder, but the breeze is also gone. After six weeks of breezes while I was at sea, escaping the wind chill makes it a fair trade. We leave the town behind as we trek down a worn pathway through a tunnel of trees.
Our small group is not talkative; the old man conserves all of his breath for hiking, and Danae falls back occasionally to take a stone out of her shoe or adjust her pack. At least she does not complain when she catches up, so I give her points for that.
The morning passes. A couple of times, we step off to the side when we encounter small caravans of traders coming our way. These groups of three or four wagons have banded together for protection; the wealthier ones typically hire foot-soldier mercenaries for protection. The drivers nod to us warily as they pass. Their mouths smile, but their eyes narrow and dart around, looking for any signs of a trap.
Not that I can blame them. There is no governance outside the towns and small cities in this region, and Disciple territory lies to the southeast across a couple of hundred miles of lawless wilderness and a small mountain range.
The Disciples like to claim that they rule with an iron rod of
Justice, which is just one reason my missions there have been few and brief and always under deep cover. I have to concede that the only offenses I have seen occur in their region are the fanatical ones they themselves perpetrate.
The lack of law and order outside the vicinity of towns like Port Sadelow is mitigated by the severe countryside and the fact that there just is not enough wealth to attract any serious criminal elements. Not yet, anyway. That will change in time, if human history is any guide.
Doc calls a halt and Danae sneaks a sideways glance at me while she takes a swig from her water skin, but when our eyes meet, she looks away. She has barely spoken to me all morning. If Doc has noticed anything odd between us, he keeps it to himself. Not that I am sentimental—the lack of any messy attachments works for me—but I am still annoyed, for some reason.
Even under the woodland canopy, the temperature has warmed enough that I hang my duster on the back of my pack. When we resume, Doc leads us into the forest on the right side. A sparse game trail winds through brush and pine trees. I suspect that an underground spring runs through this small valley, because the ground is moist.
An occasional squirrel barks at us and birds flitter back and forth in the trees, which Danae eyes warily, for some reason. Otherwise we do not see any wildlife, but that is not surprising given the amount of noise we make.
Doc manages a slow but steady pace while we follow the animal track along a gentle rise up to where it circles a small lake. When the trail begins to wind back and forth up a hillside, he begins to wheeze and has to take frequent breaks. By the time the vegetation thins out I am half-pulling him up the hill.
When we reach the ridge I estimate we have gained at least 2000 feet in elevation. Danae helps the old man to the side of the trail and he collapses against a tree trunk to catch his breath. As she helps him sip some water, I have to admit that Danae was right to be concerned.
We take a leisurely snack and water break, then follow the crest for half an hour, until Doc halts for another water break in the shade of a pine tree. Now we are back in the direct sun and the morning chill is long gone, so I would guess it must be at least eighty-five degrees.
I rarely see a thermometer these days outside of the Archives. It is not just that most of them were electronic and no longer worth the silicon used to make them. Few people have a practical reason for them now.
“It happened just up that hill,” Doc says, pointing to a spur off to the right. We sling our water skins over our shoulders and scramble along a narrow, rocky ridge that leads onto an open outlook, where a freshly-built cairn stands in the distance.
“What exactly happened?” I ask as we pick our way along the ridge. “Something that seems like a minor detail to you may have great bearing on our safety.”
Doc pauses to look at the ground, then steals a glance toward Danae before responding. “We were on our way back. Your friend said he needed a few minutes alone, so I rested in the shade under that tree back there. As you’ve seen, I’m an old man and not the hiker I used to be. Anyway, a while later I heard him cry out, once. That was it, just once. When I got there, he was already dead and I didn’t see what killed him.”
“Papa!” Danae exclaims, her eyes wide and face ashen. “You told me he had an accident. That he slipped and fell.”
“I’m sorry, Dee,” he says and his shoulders visibly sag. “I didn’t want to worry you, and the means of his death didn’t really matter to Walecki.” She crosses her arms and glares at him, until I gesture impatiently and we resume walking along the ridge.
The sun beats down on us in the ten minutes it takes to cross the hundred yards to where the cairn stands. We take our time since the path is barely boot-wide. Several times I get brief shots of adrenaline when the ground gives way under my feet. I can see why Doc did not want to drag Wally back, even if he had had the strength.
Wally’s cairn is built on a narrow rocky outcrop, but it is wide enough to hold us as well.
“What sort of weapon killed him?” I ask as I circle the grave and examine the ground. Disciples are particularly fond of swords and clubs, but I suspect Wally ran afoul of something far deadlier than a Disciple.
The old man shudders at the recollection. “I’ve tended to more broken men than a beach has sand, but the injuries he suffered were like nothing I’ve ever seen. The man was sliced open in a series of parallel cuts,” and Doc holds his hand in the shape of a talon. “But the wounds were sharp, as if from a knife, not like claws from any animal I know of.”
“Can you show me exactly where you found him?” I have been dreading this moment all morning, even as it approaches with the inevitability of a rising tide.
Doc leads me about fifty feet further, out to the very end of the ridge. I know what I will find, and I am not going to like it.
Just as I expected, there it is amid dried and faded bloodstains: the shattered remains of the radio that Wally called me with. The device is sheared cleanly into several pieces.
I squat for a moment, whispering to myself, “Wally, you dumb shit. I told you being careless would get you killed one day!” A few tears gather at the edges of my eyes, and I brush them away as I stand back up. He was probably dead before I turned my radio off.
There is nothing salvageable from the wreckage of his radio. I curse as I kick the remaining radio parts over the edge as hard as I can. The pieces spin lazily, reflecting bright sunlight as they drop. I remember his last words to me, that when we got back to the Archives we were going to tap into his latest cask of ale. Now, instead, I will have to break the news to his widow. The parts clatter as they vanish into the landscape below, and I turn back to the old man.
“So where is your find?” I ask wearily. If it really is what Wally described, the least I can do is give his death some meaning.
“We’re less than an hour away now,” Doc answers as he leads us back. “Years ago, when I was still doing rounds to some of the outlying villages, I took a shortcut and found this strange metal boat, kind of like a kayak if you’ve ever seen those. I can’t imagine how it got there, but it was half buried in a hillside. Anyway, I continued on to see my patient, and after saving the farmer’s daughter, I borrowed his horse and hauled the thing to a small cave I occasionally sheltered in. It’s somewhat banged-up, but it was in pretty bad shape when I found it anyway.”
That is pretty much the story Wally relayed to the Archives, and it is the reason I am here. Doc had the Archives hooked when he said it was a metal kayak; that was one of the main reasons I insisted on taking this retrieval. We return to the main ridge, and a couple hundred yards further, we start a gradual descent along the hillside. A short while later, Doc leads us across a sloped clearing, up to a brush barrier piled against a rocky outcropping.
When he starts clearing it away, I set my pack down and start tossing branches to the side. I keep straining to make out something in the darkness; in a few minutes, the mouth of a small cave is revealed.
Deep inside, I see a glint of metal, and reach into my pack to retrieve another priceless relic: an electric light. My hand trembles slightly with anticipation as I lead the way inside the dry, dusty cave, carefully walking across a rocky, upward-sloping floor layered with dead leaves from the brush. There it is: what looks like an enclosed metal boat about twelve feet long and four feet high.
An actual spaceship.
Doc was not exaggerating, it really does look like a huge metal kayak, but without an opening for a boater, and with a few odd antennae and fins on the end, like a dirigible. It is in pretty bad shape—at least if someone wanted to fly it. The craft is crumpled at one end, with gashes torn through the unpainted metal surface, but at least the ship is still in one piece.
As I step up to it, I run my hand over the top of it. To be honest, I did not believe it would be a real ship, but Wally was right. Professor Leasson was right as well; a large antennae at the far end is snapped off, so this was probably a remotely controlled drone that Intellinet lost when i
t collided with a large bird.
I flash my light through one of the gashes, and insects scurry out of sight into an interior that appears to be reasonably intact. Encouraged, I use the flat edge of my bowie knife to pry the light aluminum skin up so I can search for the reason that I am here. Doc pats me on the shoulder before he heads outside to sit and rest, while Danae comes alongside and holds back the panel I peeled loose.
“What are you looking for?” she asks.
“I’m not certain,” I reply, “but someone smarter than me called it a manifold generator.”
Danae frowns. “What would one of those—generator things—look like?”
I have to smile; that is a really good question. Back at the Archives, while prepping for this recovery mission, I went to the Engineering Academy to talk to Professor Leasson. Like me, he is one of the original old-timers, but he did not benefit from age reversal treatment before the Crash. The years are showing, but the upside is that he makes a great Santa Claus. The irony is that the Archives can pull up all the details of life extension, but we lack the working technology to create the treatment.
If anyone could tell me what to look for, Leasson could. When I posed the same question to him, he replied, “We’ve gone over all the data we could recover, anything documenting the Exodus event. The few systems we could recover any data from were antiquated, which is why Intellinet didn’t wipe them. But from piecing together that data, we’re pretty sure the drives Intellinet used were manifold generators. Which is fine, except it’s not supposed to be possible. They must’ve found something we missed in our theories.” Leasson then picked up a piece of chalk and made love to his chalkboard for the next fifteen minutes, drawing diagrams and equations that were gibberish to me.
Finally, I interrupted. “Just tell me, what the hell is this thing going to look like?”