Penn considered Kilel’s point for about a second. “That’s irrelevant, Inspector. Please suspend your investigation until further notice.”
Damn, but what’s the real reason he wants me to stop? Her long experience in bureaucracies argued for compliance, not because of some need to be submissive to a higher authority, but for the need to bide her time. What if the colonel is at the center of the ring?
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Penn ended the conference without so much as a thank-you. In her car on the road to the Penn ranch and the wildlife refuge, she turned his words over and over, like a puzzle, and her conclusion was always the same: powers above him wanted Kilel to back off. A thought crossed the inspector’s mind, and she called up the colonel’s public schedule for the past few days. He had traveled to the Capital, and his meeting schedule put him at the Interior Ministry for most of his stay. He had regular meetings with the minister to maintain a friendly, if distant relationship. The information in the calendar entries was far too general to mean anything, but the implication was inescapable.
The Interior Ministry oversees the special military units protecting the oil fields from poaching. Mother in Heaven, is someone at Interior running this show?
♦ ♦ ♦
Anne Penn and Mike Schmidt disbelieved what the video feed of the remaining Klamath magpie nest showed them, and they climbed the ladder to the hole in the snag. Green sprouts of early colonizing plants—salal and poison oak—poked through the ash of the scorched areas of the refuge, despite the bone-dry soil. Mike was first up the ladder and he peered in, letting a hand mirror reflect the dim scene at the bottom of the hole. Dread seized Anne when Mike shook his head. He stepped off the ladder, allowing her to see the nest for herself. Among the downy feathers was the single chick, motionless. The lack of defensive behavior by the parent birds confirmed its death.
Anne climbed down and reclined against a basalt rock heated by the incessant sun. A pair of field glasses hung on her neck. Maxie panted in the rock’s shade. In previous seasons the mortality rate among the magpie chicks had been high, but enough survived to maintain the population. The fire had changed everything, and with the death of the chick, the species was one step closer to extinction. Anne missed her father more than ever. He always knew what to say or do to help her feel that life was not spinning out of control. “We did what we could.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“We’ve got the chicks in the coop.” All but one of the eggs had hatched, and they kept the human foster parents busy feeding them an insect mash with tweezers.
“What if they die? It’ll be our fault.”
“No, it won’t,” Anne said. “They’re all healthy. They’re all eating.”
“It could change in a heartbeat.”
Anne stood up to talk to her friend face to face. “Mike, you’re not helping. I don’t need you telling me that I’m going to fail.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“If Dad were here, he’d say something to me. He’d say, ‘It’s going to be all right. You’re doing fine.’”
“It’s just that—”
“No, tell me that I’m doing the right thing. Tell me that this isn’t stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.” Mike’s voice was quiet, almost shy.
Bird and insect sounds filled the atmosphere with competing melodies.
“I want to fix this, but the goddamn chicks dying on me isn’t helping.” Anne swept her hand across the burned refuge. “How come this had to happen? It was an accident. I’ve got to fix it so Dad can come home.”
“Look, shit happens.”
Anne turned on him. “Oh, fuck off. Use your brain. The species is dead, Dad is going to be dissed, and there’s nothing I can do about it. You’re the same as everyone else. You’re just like the other idiots around here.”
Mike’s face was stricken with hurt. He pushed himself off the rock and stumbled to the path leading to the ranch.
Anne realized what she’d done, and she hurried after him. “Mike, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you’re an idiot.”
“No, you fuck off.” Mike turned on her, angry. “I came up here because I wanted to help you.”
“Wait,” Anne cried. “You are helping, but I was mad about the chick. I didn’t think the chick would die.”
Mike’s anger subsided as well. “I came up here because I wanted... to be friends.”
“We are friends.”
Mike took a step closer to her. “I thought... No, there’s no point.”
“What?”
“I thought maybe we could be more than friends. I came up here, because if I didn’t, it might be weeks before I saw you again in town. I didn’t want to wait that long.”
Mike’s admission stunned Anne. He was attractive and kind, to be sure. With her dad gone, though, it never crossed her mind that Mike was any more than a male acquaintance. She remembered the moment when he took her hand before they installed the camera. Am I not seeing what’s right in front of me? She was grateful he had watched over the chicks. I could do what I’m doing alone, but he makes it easier.
Anne took a tentative step toward Mike, and then a puff of dust on the road leading to the ranch caught her eye. Mike noticed her attention shift and followed her gaze. The sun glinted off the chrome of a vehicle. Anne raised her field glasses, and she spied the BES shield on the door. “Christ, it’s Kilel.”
Anne and Mike raced down the path, Maxie trailing, and they reached a short rise, which gave them a closer view of the ranch buildings. Kilel was at the coop, fumbling with the latch. The chicks are noisy. She’s curious. A thin copse of cottonwoods marked the edge of the Penn property. With Mike close behind, Anne punched through. “Inspector!”
Kilel’s head snapped around. “What is happening here? What are you doing with these chicks?”
The dog snapped at the officer.
“Maxie! Down.” Anne stopped a few meters from the coop. “Wait, Inspector. I can explain,” she gasped, winded from her sprint.
“There’s nothing to explain. Do you realize what you are doing?”
“I’m trying to save them.”
“You have no right, no right whatsoever.”
“It’s the birds’ last chance. Please, Inspector.”
“That is not for you to say. That is not for any human being to say.” Kilel glanced at her car, and the security bot trotted over to the three humans. “Anne Penn, you are under arrest for willfully interfering in a natural process without authority, and that’s just the start of things.”
The security bot stiffened, and Mike stepped forward. Kilel repressed a scream at this surge of adolescent loyalty. “Stay out of this, or I will arrest you as well.”
Anne lifted her hands, as if warding off danger. “Inspector, please wait. Let me explain. If we don’t help these chicks, the species will die out.”
“That process was set in motion by your father,” Kilel charged. “Interfering with it makes it worse. It’s that kind of thinking that has brought the earth to her knees.”
Anne couldn’t believe how petty the officer was. “You don’t understand.”
“We must restore a balance. Human beings have interfered too much with the natural order. That means we stop putting our nose where it doesn’t belong.” Kilel removed one of the magpie chicks from the nesting box. The delicacy of her motion confused Anne. She held the chick in her open palm.
“What you have done here was not meant to be,” Kilel said. “The Mother did not intend this.”
Kilel closed her fingers over the chick, as if her hand were the mouth of a predator.
The move terrified Anne. “Please, Inspector. Don’t do this. It’s the last one.”
Kilel tightened her grip on the helpless chick.
“Its brothers and sisters are the last ones.” Anne’s voice was low and firm. She had to get through to this insane woman. “If you kill it, you’ll be just as guilty as the criminals you hunt.”
Anne heard the chick’s plaintive peeps through the fingers of Kilel’s closed hand. The inspector was in a trance, as if working through something in her mind, trying to make a decision. When she spoke, her voice was distant. “I’ve sworn an oath to protect the earth from the depredations caused by greed and indifference, and my own agency is committing those sins.”
What is she talking about? “Inspector, I know you came here looking for justice.” Anne stepped forward, keeping an eye on the security bot. “We both want the same thing. We have more in common than you realize.” Anne pointed toward the copse. “The chick in the last magpie nest, out in the refuge. It’s dead. We’ve just come from there. The chick in your hand is the last hope for the species. Without us, the magpies will disappear.”
Through Kilel’s closed fingers, the chick pecked and pushed back with more urgency, as if aware that its death was near, and it fought for its life.
“Let it live, Inspector Kilel. We have a chance to fix the mistakes. We have to try.”
Almost like an automaton’s, Kilel’s fingers opened, and she returned the chick to the nesting box. She took a deep breath as she closed the latch and rested her hand on the plywood wall.
“Inspector?” Anne reached out and touched her arm. “What’s wrong?”
Kilel glanced sternly at Anne’s outstretched hand and let her breath out. “Nothing is wrong, Miss Penn.” She exhaled, as if practicing a breathing exercise. “I’d like your help.”
“You’d like... I don’t understand.” She’s talking nonsense. Is the woman unhinged?
“I need to find your father, and I know you want to find him as well.”
Steel came back into Anne’s voice. “I’ve already helped you all I can.”
“There’s something more you can do.” Kilel faced Anne. “We do have something in common: your father. We both want him alive and back home. There’s more at stake now, more than a species of bird.” Kilel paused. “I’ve lost track of your father, but I have an idea where he might be.”
Anne wanted to cheer at the news. “Where?”
“A place called Bežat in the Union of Russia.”
She was incredulous. “Russia? How is that even possible?”
“Anne, I believe he is in personal danger, far beyond what he imagined after the refuge fire.”
This was starting to sound like an awful political drama on the chans. “Why should I trust you?”
“If I go to where he is on my own, he might run again,” Kilel explained. “If you are with me, perhaps... but I can’t compel you to accompany me,” she said, rigid as always with her self-imposed rules. “It’s dangerous, but we can do it.”
Mike put in a word of his own. “Anne needs to stay. We need to care for the chicks.”
Kilel studied Schmidt. “It seems to me that you’re capable of taking over for your girlfriend.”
“My what?”
“I can’t help you,” Anne said. This new dilemma tortured her. Nothing ever stood still long enough for her to understand it. First the fire, then Dad runs away—He had no choice! —my uncle wants to be friends, and now Kilel wants my help based on a crazy guess. “I don’t know anyone in Russia. I’ve never heard of—”
“This may be the only hope you have of seeing your father again alive.”
Damn you. Will you never stop hurting me? “I don’t speak Russian. I don’t—”
“You don’t need to do anything. You’re my bait. If your father is at Bežat, you’ll draw him out. Then we’ll bring him home.”
She needs me, Anne realized. It dawned on her: She had leverage over this bizarre BES agent. “If I go with you, you have to agree to drop the charges against my dad. The fire was an accident.”
“I don’t have the authority—”
Anne wasn’t having it. “You said something about your agency committing sins. I don’t know what that means, but I think something’s going on that scares you, and you need me to get to the heart of it.”
Kilel’s acknowledgment was stiff, as if it were painful. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep, but I’ll... do what I can.”
In Anne’s mind, the inspector’s reluctance meant Kilel really did know where her father was. The risk was worth it, if it meant reuniting with him. Anne grasped Mike’s hand and squeezed it. “I have to go,” she said, committed to her new course. “I have to try.”
CHAPTER 32
♦ ♦ ♦
BILL NEVER FELT FARTHER AWAY from Anne and the life he’d built in Brier Valley. The escape to Port Simpson, the voyage to the Arctic Ocean, the unexpected encounter with Molly at Pole Station, even the sinking of the Aganippe and Aurora Borealis, struck him as otherworldly events. Simple geography proved the point of his isolation. He sat in a seat of a pilot car on the shore of the Gulf of Ob, a Russian coastal inlet he’d never heard of before Extinction surfaced in its midst. The sub offloaded her contraband crude, leaving the trucks—fifty-odd lumbering, autonomous tanks with wheels and motors following one another like elephants in a parade—to drive a twisting, rutted, unmarked military road in a remote region called Krasnoyarsk Krai. He longed for a bath and a meal that didn’t taste like paste.
In the seat next to Gore, Bill monitored the nav systems. As the captain’s captive in all but name, Bill was bound to follow his orders or risk a nasty death like the one he witnessed on Aganippe. Bill had no friends within ten-thousand kilometers, apart from Micah. He was trapped with only one chance of reuniting with Anne: Find a way to link Molly with Raleigh Penn, the brother he knew about as a well as he knew Russian, which was not at all. His brother’s AI problem presented Martin Scribb with an opportunity to keep his part of the bargain with Molly: freedom in exchange for helping Raleigh. In the hours and days after Molly came aboard Extinction, Gore rarely let her out of his sight. She was with Gore and Bill in another seat of the cramped car, a holo-terminal emitter on her lap. Gore’s executive officer, Nelson, served as guard and backup driver in case the AI failed.
In some ways, Molly’s presence was worse than Gore’s or Scribb’s. Gore was easy to understand; he wanted power and wealth. It was unclear to Bill how Scribb benefited from finding Molly, though Bill didn’t care. The man’s history as leader of the disastrous Project Algid was enough for Bill to form an opinion. They’re both slimy as hagfish. His opinion of Molly was tougher to nail down. He’d loved her once, but not now. She was the mother of his child, though she had abandoned her and him. She was the same intelligent, adventuresome woman that had captured his heart as a young man, but she had gone in a strange direction.
“Why?” Bill asked the question as Molly manipulated a subroutine on the 3-D code editor.
“I assume you mean, why did I choose my profession? That’s what moralizers always ask.” Molly sighed. “After the trials, I had nowhere to go.”
The answer made no sense to Bill. “You could’ve come home. Anne needed her mother.”
“You mean to Brier Valley? No, that was in my past. Motherhood and domesticity were not what I wanted. I knew you’d take good care of Anne, so I choose other things.”
“Like becoming a whore.”
Molly ignored the condemnation. “A female relative back in the 1850s moved from Ohio to a new settlement in the west, set up a bordello, and within twenty years owned most of the town. Her name was Louise. She financed an opera company and built a women’s hospital. She left her money and property to the town’s schools when she died.”
Bill was unimpressed by the family genealogy.
“A great-grandmother of mine researched public records and found some letters Louise had written,” Molly continued. “The town tolerated her, but she was never accepted. The moralizing preachers and upper-class women who arrived after her kept her from investing in legitimate businesses she couldn’t finance herself. Other men and women set up their own bordellos, with standards far lower than hers. She prospered, but she was in a social cage. She called it a ‘jail with invisible bars.’�
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These rules exist for a reason. “She died a rich but unhappy woman.”
“She believed she was doing the town good by offering a place for men to blow off steam in safety and privacy.”
“You decided to follow Louise’s example,” Bill said acidly.
“I was out of money. No one would hire me. I escaped disidentification, but I might as well have been dissed. Louise showed me a way to start over. Another woman from Algid had the same idea. Ginny Magante and I became business partners and started the Cyprian Association.”
Ginny? Molly’s friend on Aurora’s fantail. An idea came to him. Molly had gained something from her experience at Project Algid, despite its depravity. Gore confirmed it when he purred, “It seems to me that Martin Scribb was nothing if not a classic entrepreneur. His risk-taking attitude rubbed off on Molly. I can certainly understand that manner of thinking.”
Molly kept talking as she scrolled through a section of code. “I handled the technical and operational end and she had contacts in the mining and shipping industries, which were first in line as the Arctic opened up for trade. Right after the war, we saw the Arctic Free Economic Zone as a chance to take our ideas to a new level.”
The pilot car lurched over a pothole. Scratching the week’s worth of stubble on his jaw, Bill still didn’t understand the purpose of a union for prostitutes, but he remembered the scene at Pole Station. Molly was surrounded by rich and powerful people, none of whom were ignorant or stupid. Maybe she’s doing some good, though I can’t figure out what that might be.
Molly eyed Bill. “How did you come to work for Kapitan Gore? You’re not the pirate type.”
“I had to stay a step ahead of the bessies.” Bill told Molly a brief version of the fire, his voyage on Aganippe, and his decision to volunteer aboard Extinction. “I had no idea that Aganippe was carrying oil, though I ignored the signs, looking back on it.”
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