Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  Eshton paled, which made his medium brown skin look unhealthy. “Seriously?”

  “Congratulations?” Parker said, unsure what was going on. “That’s great, man. Happy for you.”

  Eshton’s head fell into his hands. “Yeah. Wonderful. Couldn’t be more thrilled.”

  Bowers burst into laughter, long and deep. Eshton looked up in alarm—the old man rarely did more than smile for effect. “Sir?”

  “Brogan, you’re too easy,” Bowers said. “Honestly, how you got so far in the Watch being that simple to play with is a mystery. It’s a cover. You will do just enough of the real work to keep up appearances. The rest of the time you and Park will work missions together. You’re two of my more talented assets, and your teamwork is superb.”

  Eshton blinked. “But I’ll be based out of Brighton?”

  “Yes,” Bowers said. “It’s best to leave my assistants spread out so their travel times are reduced when I need to send them to a specific Rez far from Deathwatch headquarters.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Eshton said, and Parker heard the sincerity in the words. “Also, you’re a cruel and hateful man sometimes.”

  Bowers grinned. “Only to the people I care about.”

  Parker snorted. “Well, I’d hate to see what you do to your enemies, then.”

  “Yes,” Bowers said simply. “You would.”

  And that cryptic statement well and truly put a stake through the heart of Parker’s appetite for the day. Which was fine with him; he wanted to finish unpacking his lab and get back to work. He had new equipment to take for a test drive, and for once thought he could use a few hours of solitude. No matter how much he grew to like these people, they were to a person so much more grim-minded than him that he never expected the gap to close.

  Sometimes he just needed a break from it.

  7

  The tableau laid out in Stein’s office was deliberately crafted. Beck was the only figure in armor, helmet off and tucked beneath her arm. Unlike the rest of the team, who sat on a shallow bench folded down from the wall opposite the desk, she stood. Beck had used her overrides, computer access she wasn’t supposed to have, to shut off their ability to send messages. None of them knew it, as not a single one had tried, a fact for which Beck was grateful.

  Stein stood as well, though she did lean slightly against the desk with her arms crossed. A striking woman in her forties, their Warden radiated command in a way even Bowers had a hard time matching. Perhaps it was because unlike the High Commander, Stein still made her way to the field from time to time. It gave her an edge the old man had let dull if only to the smallest degree.

  “Well,” Stein said. “We’re in quite a pickle here.”

  Beck said nothing, only favoring her superior with a slight nod and a grunt of assent.

  “Ma’am,” Jeremy said, acting as always as the spokesman for the others. Beck considered this a wise move. He had more grace than Wojcik and Tala, more control of his mouth than Jen or Lucia. Nearly as much self-control as Beck. And he was smart. “Warden, I’m not exactly sure why we’re here, but we don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  Stein arched an eyebrow. “Who would be in trouble, Sentinel? Is there a violation of protocol or a Tenet crime you’d like to tell me about?”

  Beck wasn’t worried about actually being kicked out of the Deathwatch. Stein knew just as well as she did that Bowers not only allowed her to modify her suit with weapons and technology running the spectrum from questionable to wildly illegal, he ordered her to carry on. One person willing to experiment regardless of the danger it might pose to them could reap enormous long term benefits in a host of ways.

  No, her fear was rooted in having to put on a show of pretending to be kicked out. Of being separated from her friends and sent to work in secret at the new base or in another Rez. The idea of being pulled away from them cut at her. The major annoyance of having to live so secretly wouldn’t be a lot of fun either.

  Jeremy hesitated, and Beck’s heart went out to him. He was in the impossible position of having seen something he absolutely should report and knowing the cost of doing so would fall on his friend. Someone he looked up to. “Ma’am, I don’t have anything to say at present.”

  Stein gave him a measuring look, one every green Sentinel knew well. Her gaze raked the rest of the team, stopping on each face and weighing them like an old god. “What about the rest of you? Is there a crime you want to report to me? You can do so privately if you wish. No one has to know it was you.”

  Beck didn’t focus on any individual face, instead taking in their reactions as a whole. None of them so much as twitched with apprehension. Instead, every one responded in unison with words drilled into their heads.

  “No, ma’am,” they intoned.

  Stein blew out a breath. “Well, Park, what do you think? Can they be trusted?”

  “With my life, Warden,” Beck said instantly. “With anyone’s life.”

  Stein waved a hand. “But can they be trusted with everyone’s life?”

  The question hit Beck in the chest like a ball of lead. Of course Stein and Bowers hadn’t just brought her team here to give her someone to talk to. They knew the only way to keep the Movement alive was to swell its ranks with loyal people. She considered the question far longer than any of her friends would have thought necessary, because she knew the stakes and they didn’t. She turned over what she knew of them, how she believed they would react if given all the information she was, and came to a single encompassing conclusion.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Beck said. “I believe they can be trusted with the truth and to be loyal when the time comes.”

  Stein nodded thoughtfully again and let her gaze travel upward. Beck had observed few mannerisms in the older woman that she would call habits, but this was one. When passing any kind of judgment, the Warden of Rez Brighton always took a moment to look away from the judged. Beck thought of it as a way of gathering strength, or perhaps needing to mentally pull away from the whoever was in front of her. A pause to refresh.

  When Stein looked back down, her face was impassive. Without a word she circled her desk and tapped the terminal screen embedded in it with several deft touches.

  “Bowers,” said a voice from the speaker.

  Stein pursed her lips. “Sir, I believe Beck’s unit is ready. A little early, but circumstances have become…fluid.”

  “Aren’t they always,” Bowers said. “If she vouches for them, then I have no reservations. A short leash, however. A very short leash.” The channel clicked off.

  Stein steepled her fingers together and surveyed the team once more. “You didn’t give up your friend. For what we need from you, that’s far more important than following protocol. The first thing you need to know is that Sentinel Park here,” she said, waving lazily at Beck, “is not simply in scout training so she can join Reclamation. In reality she is part of Special Projects. As to how she came to join the Watch in the first place, well…what I’m about to tell you will put your lives in incredible danger. You might also help us save the world. And to be clear, no, you don’t have a choice. You’re with us.”

  Beck listened as Stein gave them a speech nearly identical to the one she’d heard all those months ago.

  “We call ourselves the Movement,” Stein began.

  The briefing wasn’t going to be short or easy, but Beck tapped out five minutes in to Stein’s series of explanations of the rules. Beck already knew the need for secrecy and understood its importance, but mostly she just wanted a drink before the team was finally free and decided to come at her with endless questions. Deeper down than that, she didn’t want to stick around to see their anger at her. She kept secrets from them because she had to, but she felt terrible about it.

  So she doffed her armor in her private quarters in the chapterhouse rather than in the general maintenance bay and changed into civilian clothes. There was one place she could always go to get away from the stress.

  The bar w
as only half an hour from closing when she walked in, but Beck knew Fisher would spend as much time with her as she wanted. The older man had been a friend of her father’s before his death—the thought of his smile, now gone forever, sent a tiny spark of pain through her heart—and had taken care of her when she needed it most.

  He also had some connection to Remnant humans living out in the badlands, though the specifics had never been made clear to her. All she knew for sure was that he’d facilitated the tenuous peace and cooperation between the Movement and the local Remnant population. Eshton had passed his role as liaison with the odd group on to Beck when he was reassigned to guard Parker Novak full time.

  “Beck!” Fisher said, for once not behind the bar. The place was mostly empty—according to Parker, something that rarely happened near closing times in bars in the old world—and Fisher was doing his nightly routine of buzzing around cleaning before he had to lock up. “How are you, girl?”

  Beck plopped down on a stool and arched her back, trying to crack it. “Girl no more, old man. Remember, I’m a woman now. Fully adult.”

  Fisher rolled his eyes as he moved behind the bar, a rarity made of actual wood, and poured her a beer. “Pssh. You were born grown up, from what I understand. Just took eighteen years for your body to get the message.”

  Beck knocked back half the beer in one go, wiping her mouth and letting out a satisfied breath. “Yeah, and getting older every day.”

  Fisher cocked his head at the tone of her voice. He knew she was in the Deathwatch, of course. Most people from her old life did. Anonymity was only the default setting—an agent could choose to make their identity public if they wanted. That very few did was a function of the sometimes terrible choices the Watch had to make, such as killing those who presented with symptoms of Fade B.

  A problem that no longer existed, thankfully. Not that Beck would have kept herself hidden away had they not ended that particular threat. At first she had planned to take the traditional route, but once she came home it seemed wrong somehow. She had few friends and no family left, but those she did care about were close enough to understand that she hadn’t magically transformed into a monster by putting on the armor and taking the oath.

  “Had yourself one of those days, huh?” Fisher asked, though he clearly knew the answer.

  Beck nodded, then polished off the rest of her beer. “You have no idea. Stressful doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “Want to talk about it? Can you talk about it?”

  Beck shook her head. “Sorry. You know how it is. Other than generalities, I can’t say much. Got caught in an ambush, my team had my back. My friends. But I put them in danger and it’s not sitting well with me.”

  “Did you have another choice?” Fisher asked, determined to be supportive despite his distaste for the Watch.

  “Plenty of ’em,” Beck said, taking a refill of her beer when he offered it. “Not one was good. It was the best I could do, I just don’t like that I had to do it.”

  Now that was the fucking truth. She hadn’t wanted to draw the others into the Movement, at least not as a group. Though now that she thought about it a bit more, it might have been the only way to safely bring them in without destroying unit cohesion. She got away with being secretive and weird because she was the leader they chose, and she had come into the group of friends last. They expected her to stand apart. To be different.

  That would all change tonight. Once Stein was done with them, they would retreat to their quarters and wait for her to come back. The questions would pour in, not the least of which would be to ask how she could keep something like the death of her family a secret from them.

  Those wounds were not yet scars, and from what Eshton told her they never would be. Some rawness would always exist below the surface, waiting for sufficient force to break the wound open again. Never truly healing, only dulling far enough that days could go by without it throbbing.

  “Seems like you don’t have anything to feel bad about, then,” Fisher said. “If you can look back at it and say you made the best choice with what you had, then dwelling on it is pointless. You’d do it all over again, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Beck confirmed.

  Fisher shrugged. “You can’t help how you feel, kid. But don’t beat yourself up over whatever it is.”

  “I know, I know,” Beck said, now taking more reasonable drinks of her beer. “I just don’t want them to hate me for it. I came here because they’re like everyone else and won’t take their helmets off in public.”

  Fisher knew perfectly well that Beck used her freedom as an open member of the Watch as a tool to avoid her brothers and sisters when she felt like it, and he had offered this place as her sanctuary. Her room behind the bar was perpetually available.

  She spent a full hour after closing chatting with him before a polite but persistent knock sounded on the door.

  When Beck opened it, she found the team staring at her as one, all in civilian clothes and each of them looking poleaxed.

  But they were smiling.

  8

  They took the news better than Beck could have hoped for. A week after being inducted into the Movement, her team was stronger than ever. The bonds formed during their training were only made tougher by the shared responsibility and secret.

  Not that the others didn’t constantly give her shit about it. Because of course they did. Never over a channel Beck wasn’t sure was absolutely secure, however.

  “Team six,” said the voice over the general comm. “What is your status? Run into any more surprises?”

  “Negative, Guard Rodriguez,” Beck responded. “We’re solid over here. Reading about a dozen heat signatures but so far they’re keeping their distance. Two to one must look like bad odds out here in the open.”

  “Roger that,” Rodriguez, their field coordinator, replied. “Keep an eye on your Pales. We’re coming to you. Should be there in ten minutes or so.”

  “Will do,” Beck said, clicking off the channel. On the team comm, she asked for a quick update. “Any changes, guys?”

  A round of negatives rattled in her ear. The team was spread out over several dozen yards, each person monitoring a section of the town ahead of them. Or rather, its outer edge. They were farther from a Rez than any of them had ever been, at least above ground. Being in the Loop didn’t count—there was no danger in the enclosed tubes.

  They were far enough away that the team of thirty Watchmen had to be pulled from three different Rezzes and moved out on a heavy transport. Beck had never seen one in person before, vehicles other than Loop cars being rare as hen’s teeth in the Protectorate. Oh, she’d seen broken down hulks of old vehicles out in the badlands, but none that looked anything like the beast sitting two hundred yards to the south. It was a slab of metal, a rolling platform driven remotely by one of the armored figures riding it. Its treads could handle nearly any obstacle, and it was high enough to serve as a mobile defensive position if push came to shove.

  The town was mostly burned out and being reclaimed by nature. Being a hundred miles west of Brighton, the place was well outside the radius of the pervasive dust. Here lay a world completely alien to Beck, verdant plant life clawing its way into every nook and cranny. She had visited the stunted forest housing the meeting place where she and the local Remnants convened and thought it a place of thriving life beyond imagining.

  This was something completely different. Orders of magnitude beyond anything she might have dreamed.

  “Why the fuck don’t we live out here again?” Beck muttered. Apparently she spoke in just the right way to trigger her mic, because the rest of the team chuckled.

  Except for Lucia, who spoke once the mirth subsided. “The reason they wait to show us this until we’ve been in the Watch for a few months is because people have that exact reaction.”

  “Yeah?” Wojcik said. “And you know that how?”

  “My father is Deathwatch,” Lucia said simp
ly. “He told me years ago. To prepare me for the kinds of things I would have to learn to deal with when I joined up.”

  Jeremy cut in. “Why is this something we have to deal with? I mean, why is seeing this a problem?”

  “Because it shows the badlands aren’t all ash and dust,” Jen said. “If people knew all this green was out here, do you think they’d be satisfied letting the Protectorate build Rezzes in places like Brighton? No offense, Beck.”

  Beck snorted a laugh. “None taken. You think I like living out where a windy day can give me a case of red lung? I care about the people, not the location. I’d kill to live here.”

  “Exactly,” Lucia said. “All it would take is one Rez built where the trees still grow to create jealousy and anger. To destabilize things.”

  “I call bullshit,” Jen said. “I’m from Manhattan. We’ve got plenty of that stuff inside our walls. Hell, even Brighton has farmland.”

  Beck let out a small ahh of realization. “That’s the key, isn’t it? Inside the walls. People are used to Rez Manhattan and the other old Rezzes being further along. Some have reclaimed farmland outside, even. But imagine suddenly moving to a new Rez surrounded by all this out here. It’d be overwhelming. Hell, I’m starting to get mad right now thinking of the people who’ve died of red lung back in Brighton, knowing this was here.”

  Of all the horrible things the Deathwatch did to maintain order, keeping the vibrant world out here secret was not one Beck expected to become angry about. She knew on an intellectual level that progress had to be slow and steady, that it was the safest way to reach the goal of spreading the human race back across the continent without suffering another catastrophic breakdown of the social order.

  Which did nothing to take away the sting.

  When Rodriguez arrived, they went to work clearing out the few Pales nearby before reclaiming what they could salvage from the ruins of the town. It had been decided after the recent attacks that a brief but furious campaign against any Pale they could find within a few hundred miles was in order.