Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  “Why not build another one?” Beck asked. “I mean, even if it’s not as durable as the original—”

  Rossi barked out a laugh and interrupted. “Honey, where do you think you are? Does it look like we’re swimming in raw materials out here, or fabricators to process them? Do you think we were waiting for a young woman from the city to show up and tell us how smart it would be to just make another one?”

  Beck opened her mouth to snap a retort, then closed it. “Yeah, okay. You’re right. I didn’t think before I spoke.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Rossi said. “I have a lot of work to do, and no budge to hire a kid to help me even if I trusted you to do it, which I don’t.”

  Beck put her hands up in surrender. “Okay, message received. Two more questions, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Fine,” Rossi said in a long-suffering voice. “Ask.”

  “I get that you don’t have what you need here,” Beck said. “Have you not found supplies you can use out in the badlands? I did some reclamation work with the Watch. I know there’s a lot of stuff out there.”

  Rossi nodded, perhaps a little less irritably. “Answered your own question. Deathwatch can range a lot farther than we can. They snap up everything we might use. We have to make do with scraps. Second question?”

  Beck scratched her chin. “Do you happen to have a copy of the turbine’s technical specs I can download onto my terminal? I’d at least like to study them.”

  Rossi shrugged. “They’re in the public archive. Knock yourself out.”

  Beck thanked the surly woman and left, plans for far more than study dancing through her head.

  Later that evening, Andres had some words of wisdom for her.

  “Are you suicidal or just a fucking idiot?” he asked.

  Beck waggled her hand. “Eh. Can’t it be both?”

  The stocky man, standing with his beefy arms crossed while leaning against the wall, closed his eyes and tilted his head back until it thunked against the stone. “You want to go out scavenging. That strikes me a phenomenally bad idea, especially on your own.”

  Karen, who stood near Scott on the other side of the kitchen, nodded in agreement. “It’s dangerous. And you won’t be able to take anything you didn’t bring with you. You’d be going out blind and without much in the way of supplies.”

  Beck shrugged. “Supplies might be a problem, but I think I can manage. I have ideas.” She didn’t want to lie to them, but mentioning the cache she and Eshton had access to wasn’t on the table. “As for going in blind, no. That’s not true. I’ve got a good idea of what kinds of places I can hit. I had to study the logs of other Reclamation agents during my training. I don’t think it’ll be that hard to avoid the Watch, and any place they go regularly will have less Pales wandering around. Worst case, I run back here.”

  There was a lot more to it than that, but she was limited in what she could tell them. It felt like a betrayal considering how completely the trio had taken her in.

  Scott turned to Eshton. “What do you think?”

  The younger man raised his eyebrows. “You’ve met her, right? If anyone can go out and pull a win out of thin air, it’s Beck. I’m not going to try to talk her out of it. She can handle herself.”

  Though he knew perfectly well that she would have more resources at hand than the others knew, the words still had the ring of truth. She loved him a little for that. Rare was the man who happily accepted that a younger woman was fully capable of dealing with threats. Gender bias was squeezed out of people in the Watch, but rarely was it ever truly eradicated.

  “Is there some reason I wouldn’t be allowed to go?” Beck asked. She looked at Andres.

  After a long pause, he shook his head. “Other than common sense, no.”

  “Okay. Then you’re just going to have to trust me,” Beck said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  There would be time to let them tell her how dumb and reckless she was after she got back. If the schedule hadn’t changed, she had four days until the place she was planning to hit would be visited by the Watch. There were precious few troves of technology left this close to any Rez, but those remaining were visited regularly.

  Rather than put herself through countless rounds of guilt trips and leave out groggy, Beck excused herself and went off to get some sleep.

  She woke before dawn, as usual, but when she stepped out of her small room and into the kitchen, found everyone waiting for her.

  “I’ve got to get to the maze,” Eshton said. “Just wanted to see you off. Be careful.” He stepped up and gave her a quick one-armed hug. “Don’t make me have to come out there looking for you.”

  “I won’t,” Beck said with a grin.

  “I don’t like it,” Karen told her after Eshton made his exit. “You’re not telling us something, that’s obvious. Does it have to do with your exile?”

  Beck didn’t rise to the bait. “If you think there are things I’m keeping from you, do you think I’m doing it frivolously? Or that I might have a good reason?”

  Karen frowned. “You’ve always been straight with us, so I’m a little concerned about the timing here. You come to live with us and suddenly need to leave but hold back whatever it is that makes you so confident you’ll be fine out there. It’s…worrying, Beck.”

  It struck her then what the problem was. She’s been so stupid. Of course they’d gone out on a limb for her and Eshton. Months of slowly building friendship couldn’t fully displace years and decades of mistrust between Protectorate and Remnants.

  Beck walked over to the small island, around which the trio stood. She looked each one of them in the eyes in turn, making sure they saw her face. Not the mask she assumed in the Watch. There was no controlled passivity or neutrality here. This early in the morning, with her defenses not yet raised, she was as close to being wholly Beck as it was now possible to be.

  “I promise you I’ll never do anything to hurt Canaan or its people,” Beck said, and she meant it. “Even if my exile was rescinded tomorrow and they took me back in, I wouldn’t harm your people if ordered to. There are things I can’t tell you, you’re right. But it’s to keep you safe. All of you. I don’t want taking us in to blow back on you.”

  They of course knew the full story about why she and Eshton were exiled. It was news all over the Protectorate—if they hadn’t told Karen and the others the truth, a mangled version of the widely believed lie would have filtered down to them through their contacts.

  “Okay,” Karen said. “I guess that’s enough. For now. Just be sure whatever you’re into stays out there.”

  Beck nodded and said her goodbyes.

  She made her way out into the badlands after that, searching for some of the gear she and Eshton had buried before their meeting with Scott. It would be enough to get her back to the larger cache hidden in the bunker, and from there she could move with good speed toward her target.

  The Movement still supported them, but it was safer for Karen, Scott, and Andres to live in the dark about that fact. The less they knew about its members secreting things away for her and Eshton’s use, the less chance there was something could slip to the wrong person and end up as gossip back in the Protectorate.

  She wondered whether Bowers would approve of using the resources he spent so much time and effort smuggling to her to benefit Canaan. Beck decided she didn’t care much either way, but still leaned toward thinking he would. They were people, after all. Human beings like any citizen.

  The most pressing reason she couldn’t tell the others about just how much effort Bowers expended on them was because doing so might make them realize that he’d aimed the investigation at Beck and Eshton specifically to get them exiled. To use Canaan and its citizens to shield them from the Cabal in ways that were impossible within a Rez.

  Knowing all the details would make this obvious. It would probably cost Beck her place in their ranks. She was pragmatic enough to live with the deception, mostly because the exile was a
ll too real. In practice, there was little difference between the pretense and the reality of her situation.

  She could bear the burden of the secret, but giving Canaan something back in return might ease the weight.

  20

  Staying alive was easier than expected. All it took was ignoring most of her training.

  Whatever the propaganda said, the badlands didn’t teem with starving Pales across every square mile. North America was big, and Pales needed to eat. They attacked settlements because of the strangely powerful urge to kill regular humans, but most of the time they clustered in areas that let them hunt wildlife. Part of why Brighton and the Rezzes preceding it were built in inhospitable areas was to take advantage of the lack of wildlife as an attractant.

  It didn’t work all that well, all things considered, but that didn’t make it a bad idea.

  Beck recovered her cache with relative ease and was more than stocked up for the run back to the bunker. She moved as silently as possible, stopping when the distant hiss of Pales could be heard and waited them out.

  Staying to the margins was work, but only mentally. Her training told her to fight, and she told it to shut up and sit down. Things only got truly dangerous when she had to leave the cover of the woods, even the stunted forest that thinned into nonexistence near Brighton. She didn’t bother going closer to home than the path to the bunker required.

  But Brighton pulled at her. No question about that.

  Pushing aside her desire was hard. Being so close but cut off from home hurt in a way that hadn’t sunk in until she began to move back toward the place. She managed it, however, and let herself into the bunker about a day after she left Canaan.

  Gearing up took virtually no time. She remembered where everything was. Of the three spare Bricks that had been left here, two remained. She took one of them. Since she was planning to come here again on her way back, there was no reason to overload herself. Though it wasn’t anything like a suit of Deathwatch armor, she still availed herself of the combat armor stored there. Its heavy polymer plates would provide some protection against Pales, as would the weapons she hooked onto the armor’s attachment points.

  A year ago, wearing forty pounds of gear would have made an overland journey nearly impossible. Now it was a minor inconvenience as she set out toward the out-of-the-way target.

  The worst part was carrying the Brick. Usually the things were seated in a set of armor, the mechanical strength of the suits making the incredibly dense batteries no trouble at all to haul around. Beck had to seat hers in her pack just below her shoulder blades to even out the weight. They weren’t as heavy as her instructors made it seem, but the thing was easily as heavy as a block of steel of the same dimensions.

  The weight slowed her as she worked her way toward the nameless complex of buildings a few dozen miles from Brighton. Tall bushes grew like mad once the dust began to thin, and Beck used them for cover every chance she got.

  Taking the road used by the Watch would have been far easier, but she couldn’t risk being seen by a random patrol.

  It took most of a full day to reach her destination. It was the first time Beck used the techniques taught to every recruit on how to survive in the wild without a suit. Sleeping in the open, even for the few hours she set aside to rest, was the single most nerve-wracking experience of her young life. More so than being shot at. It wasn’t even a close call. All that protected her from being spotted by any passing Pale was a quarter inch thick cloth draped over the hollow she curled up in, dyed to blend with the dust and manufactured with a coating to attract a layer of it.

  Waking, even deeply groggy and not feeling at all rested, was a nearly cathartic experienced. Only sheer exhaustion had allowed her to drop off at all. She was so excited not to find herself in one afterlife or another that she almost forgot to stay quiet and low to get a look at her surroundings.

  When she scanned the west, the edges of familiar buildings could be made out through the increasingly dense foliage.

  “Oh, son of a bitch,” she muttered, almost inaudibly. “Half a mile away and I had to sleep.”

  In her defense, it wasn’t as if the blandly repetitive landscape gave her many visual clues how far she’d come. Better to do what she had to with at least some sleep rather than attempt it while riding the edge of delirium.

  Though every fiber of her screamed to move, to get it over with, Beck told her inner monologue to shut up and sit down. What she was doing wasn’t technically theft since the Tenets held that any material from the old world not held inside a building created post-Collapse was fair salvage for anyone who could use it. The day would come when the Watch would request a Dragonfly, the giant excavation drones with universal fabrication capabilities, and the thing would be sent here to build a simple wall. When that happened, everything in front of her would become the property of the Protectorate.

  “Not today, though,” she said, then set off.

  The Brick was vital to her success, but it wasn’t the most important thing she carried. By itself the battery was useless, because stealing one of the small transport vehicles left here by the Watch was a sure way for an exile to earn a death sentence. The small bag of precision tools clipped to the waist of her combat armor was crucial for this next bit.

  Beck couldn’t drag everything she needed back to Canaan, however, which meant getting creative. The first thing she did when she reached the half-hidden cluster of old warehouses and factories was to find a vehicle in reasonable condition. It wasn’t the first time she’d considered doing this. One of the runs Reclamation agents in Brighton cut their teeth on was the scheduled trip to this place. She’d spent hours taking in the wreckage of the old world here, and gaming out possibilities that seemed almost prophetically useful considering her current circumstances.

  There were hundreds of old vehicles in the cracked and crumbling parking lots. Some were ancient by any measure, with rubber wheels and internal combustion engines. None would have run on gasoline, not by the time the Collapse happened, but whatever renewable fuel they operated on was long since extinct in North America. There was a little irony in that.

  Nor would anything with a fuel cell work. She needed…

  Ah. There.

  None of the vehicles in the lot, no matter how well constructed, were likely to work no matter what she did. A hundred years was a long time to sit idle. There were, however, a handful of large outbuildings where smaller utility vehicles servicing the factory had been housed. Beck had only been inside one of them. The others had been sealed for a century or more.

  She made her way to the nearest of these and took fifteen minutes getting into it. The heavy steel door had locked down, presumably on some final command or emergency routine being triggered, and the outbuilding was designed to withstand casual tampering.

  Fortunately Beck had recent experience getting into places she wasn’t allowed, and few doors were proof against a determined burglar with access to explosive foam.

  “Bless you, Bowers,” Beck whispered as she sprayed a small and carefully-shaped measure of the stuff into the seams of a door. She set the timing chip for thirty seconds, jammed it into the line of foam, and ran around the corner.

  She only remembered at the last second that she hadn’t put any kind of ear protection on, not wanting Pales to be able to sneak up on her.

  The explosion wasn’t as ear-shattering as expected, which was good. That meant more of its energy was spent damaging the door. Maybe she’d be able to get in and do the work without making even more noise to attract Pales.

  The door was completely blown off its hinges, a pleasant surprise. It lay crumpled like a sheet of paper inside the building.

  The empty building.

  “Oh, come the fuck on,” Beck groused.

  The second building was just as empty.

  The third was packed to the corners with so much gear it almost made her cry. She didn’t, however. The series of explosions, however muted, were sure to
attract Pales. Knowing her time was bound to be limited, she prioritized a list of objectives and dived into them. Unlock the bay door. Get a working vehicle.

  Check and, with about twenty minutes of hastily wiring the Brick with resistors to make voltage dividers from her kit, done. Other than the possible appearance of Pales, her main worry was that none of the fleet of vehicles stored here would still work. The sealed room and dry conditions were favorable, but a century was a long, long time.

  After creating her wiring harness, Beck wised up and went to the gaping hole where the door had been. She pushed a massive red chest of tools in front of it, bracing the thing in place with anything in easy reach she could find. Then came an hour of taking apart battery compartments and trying to decipher faded diagrams to work out the right voltage. Using the Brick to power one of these things was overkill—literally for whatever vehicle she hooked it up to if her shamefully rough work was too far off spec.

  The first cart she tried didn’t respond at all. She was about to move on to the second when she took a glance at the rest of its undercarriage and realized the thing had a fairly modular design. The wheels housed their own electric motors, and basically just plugged in. They were anchored to the frame with four bolts.

  A quick trip to the big tool chest in front of the door netted her what she needed to remove them. There were several carts like it, and when she managed to yank the wheels from that first worthless unit without much trouble, Beck couldn’t help grinning.

  Her second attempt worked, mostly. Three of the electric wheels spun, sluggishly at first, then more efficiently as they warmed up. The fourth wheel was dead. Beck replaced it in five minutes with one of the spares. Worked like a charm.