Scavenger Alliance

by Janet Edwards

  The boy leaned forward eagerly. “Sean Donnelly organized the militant arm of the Earth Loyalist Party in an escalating series of protests about the drain of Earth’s resources and population to other worlds. When those failed to achieve any change in the United Earth Government’s colonization policy, Sean Donnelly formed the Earth Resistance and took up arms to … You’re that Sean Donnelly?”

  Donnell nodded. “Yes, I’m that Sean Donnelly. For an off-worlder, you seem incredibly well informed about Earth’s history.”

  The boy looked oddly wary. “I’m good at remembering things I read. My name is Tad, and these are Phoenix and Braden.”

  “The polite response would be to say that I’m pleased to meet you,” said Donnell, “but frankly I’m not. I was already struggling to keep things under control here, and your arrival has made the situation far worse. You must have noticed that the people downstairs aren’t pleased to see you. In fact, most of them would like to kill you.”

  “I don’t understand why they want to kill us,” said Braden. “We haven’t done anything to hurt them.”

  Donnell pulled a face. “Those people would argue that you off-worlders haven’t just hurt them, but destroyed their lives. Try looking at things from their viewpoint. They’ve spent the last few decades fighting for survival on a depopulated ruin of a world, watching loved ones die in stupid accidents or from the lack of basic medicines, while knowing that the people who wrecked Earth were living in well-fed comfort on planets in distant star systems. They hate you for that, and by our rules I’ve no right to protect you from their anger.”

  Phoenix’s eyes widened in alarm. “You can’t let that mob kill us!”

  “When you walked in the door, I had to make a split second decision on how to react, whether to let you get lynched or try to protect you. I decided to do my best to keep you alive, but I’m not going as far as shooting my own people to do it, so I’ll need your cooperation.”

  Donnell paused. “As I said, I’ve no right under our rules to protect you, but people will accept me doing it if they think I’m interested in one of you as a future partner. Given my past history with relationships, that future partner has to be you, Phoenix.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t possibly marry you. I’m in a committed relationship with a woman on another world.”

  Donnell sighed. “I’m not really planning to marry you, Phoenix. This is just a pretence aimed at keeping the three of you alive. No one will harm my future wife, and I can extend some of that protection to Tad and Braden if we claim they’re …”

  He broke off his sentence and studied Tad and Braden. “Sadly, I don’t think anyone will believe those two are your brothers, so we’ll have to settle for them being your distant cousins.”

  “Oh.” Phoenix frowned in thought for a second. “Well, so long as we’re just pretending …”

  “You have my word on it,” said Donnell. “If I explain the plan to my officers, and get them to drop a few hints about my feelings, then it shouldn’t take more than an occasional gesture in public to convince people.”

  I’d been utterly bewildered by Donnell’s behaviour downstairs, but now it made sense. Donnell wasn’t interested in Phoenix, he’d just been acting a part to stop the off-worlders from being murdered. I still didn’t understand why Donnell had included me in this meeting though. I caught Luther giving me a confused glance that showed he didn’t understand it either.

  Donnell turned to Tad. “Now where are you from, why were you fool enough to come to New York in this weather, and how did you break your aircraft?”

  “We’re from Adonis,” said Tad.

  Adonis! I blinked. Cage had been quite right with his mocking comment about “their lordships”. Settled nearly a century ago, Adonis had been the first and worst of the leeching colony worlds, grabbing huge amounts of Earth’s resources to make itself into the richest of the new worlds, famous for the wealth of its aristocrats.

  I looked at Tad with fresh eyes. He wasn’t just any leech, he was a lord of leeches. I folded my arms and glowered at him, and he threw an anxious glance in my direction before speaking again.

  “We’re a team from the Adonis Institute of Cultural Heritage. We portalled from Adonis to Earth America Off-world on a routine museum retrieval mission. We’d been warned that none of the portals in the New York area were working, so we brought an aircraft with us to fly here, but we’d no idea there’d be snow.”

  Donnell gave a despairing roll of his eyes towards the ceiling, Luther’s dark face was filled with amusement, and I couldn’t help laughing aloud.

  Tad gave me another look, one of embarrassment this time, and hastily continued with an edge of self-justification to his voice. “The inhabited continents of colony worlds were all chosen to have mild climates, so we don’t have snow in winter.”

  He paused. “When we arrived at Earth America Off-world, we had to be vaccinated against Earth diseases and go into quarantine. We were only released from quarantine two days ago, and it was impossible to fly in yesterday’s blizzard, but there was a clear sky this morning. There was no problem with the flight itself, or even the landing, though the snow was far deeper than we expected. It was when we came out of the museum …”

  “My fault,” said Braden.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Phoenix.

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Tad. “The wind was gusting very strongly, so it was perfectly sensible of you to move the aircraft closer to the skyscraper for shelter. That huge sheet of glass falling on it was pure bad luck.”

  Both Luther and I laughed this time.

  “You were extremely lucky that glass landed on the aircraft instead of one of you,” said Donnell. “It must be over sixty years since anyone bothered to do any maintenance work on the Manhattan skyscrapers, so pieces often fall off them on windy days. The ground over there is littered with glass, masonry, even whole windows, but you wouldn’t have seen the debris when it was covered in snow.”

  There was a short silence before Tad spoke again. “We saw the smoke coming from this building, so we headed for the Unity Bridge to get across the Hudson River and come here.”

  Donnell looked at Braden. “How did you hurt your leg?”

  “Hole.”

  “He fell into it and cut his leg on something.” Tad expanded on Braden’s depressed, single word reply. “The hole must have been at least waist deep, but it was hidden by snow.”

  Luther put his hand over his mouth, to smother yet another laugh at the off-worlders’ incompetence, but I didn’t find this funny. I’d seen too many people hurt in similar accidents.

  “Again, you were extremely lucky,” said Donnell. “The hole could have been much deeper. There are places where you can fall straight down into cellars or underground storage tanks. Did you find what you were looking for in the museum?”

  “No,” said Tad. “Someone must have already collected it.”

  “A big disappointment for you. Will your institute be sending another aircraft to rescue you?”

  “They can’t. Most of the old aircraft have broken down, and they can’t be repaired because the Earth factories that made replacement parts closed down decades ago. Ours was the only aircraft still in working order that had detachable wings. You need to remove the wings to get an aircraft through a freight portal, so …”

  “I see.” Donnell drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “I’m not risking sending people to escort you to Fence in winter, so you’ll have to stay here until the spring.”

  “What’s Fence?” asked Phoenix.

  “The defences protecting the citizens’ settlements to the south-west of New York,” said Donnell.

  “We don’t need an escort,” said Tad. “When the snow melts, we can make our own way south-west.”

  “Really?” Donnell gave a disbelieving shake of his head. “You’ve only been in New York for a few hours, and you’ve already destroyed your aircraft and injured one of your party, but you t
hink you’ll make it all the way to Fence without any problems?”

  Tad frowned.

  “The mere fact you think you’d be better off travelling after the snow melts, tells me you’d be dead long before you reached Fence,” added Donnell.

  “What’s wrong with the snow melting?” asked Tad. “Surely we could travel faster without it?”

  “Yes, but there are predators in New York,” said Donnell. “They’ve all taken shelter from the cold at the moment, but they’ll come out to hunt as soon as the temperature rises above freezing point.”

  “Nobody warned us about predators.” Tad exchanged glances with Phoenix, and groaned. “I suppose you’re right that we can’t travel alone. So, what’s the situation here? If these people are the remnants of your Earth Resistance forces, where did all the children come from, and why are you finding it so difficult to keep things under control?”

  Donnell grinned. “When a large number of men and women are together for over thirty years, you tend to get children. As for me struggling to keep things under control … That’s because it isn’t just the Earth Resistance here.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I formed the Earth Resistance to fight in a last desperate attempt to save our home world. Our first attacks were aimed at the interstellar portals, but those were difficult targets. The problem wasn’t so much that the Off-worlds on all continents were heavily guarded, but that their interstellar portals were in constant use. We’d no wish to kill random groups of men, women and children, so we decided to target the United Earth Government instead. We came up with a plan to occupy the United Earth Regional Parliament complexes on all five continents. We succeeded in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australia. We messed up in Asia when …”

  He shrugged. “Well, past mistakes don’t matter now. During the first year, there were several attempts to throw us out. We lost Australia, but we held on in the Americas, Europe and Africa. By the second year, the United Earth Government had stopped bothering us. With law and order breaking down in the cities, the Regional Parliaments preferred to meet in safer locations anyway.”

  I frowned. I didn’t understand why Donnell was explaining so much history to the off-worlders. They only needed to know the basic fact that we shared this building with four other divisions, and those divisions included some very violent criminals.

  “I had to evacuate my people from Africa in 2380 because of massive flooding in Lagos,” continued Donnell. “That left the Earth Resistance split between London and New York. Both cities were rapidly emptying back then, with people either leaving for colony worlds or moving to rural areas. The remaining citizens were fighting off gangs of looters, and putting up barricades to defend their neighbourhoods, but we had surprisingly little trouble. Most of the citizens sympathized with us, while the looters didn’t want to tangle with an organized group of fighters.”

  I was growing increasingly bewildered by this. I remembered the odd way Donnell had acted downstairs, pretending that he was attracted to Phoenix. Was the same thing happening again? Was Donnell giving the off-worlders all this information for a reason I didn’t understand?

  “The real problems started when London was officially abandoned in 2382,” said Donnell. “When the authorities shut down the power and water supplies, the last of the citizens pulled out to join the new settlements in small towns. I sent all of my people who weren’t on record as political criminals to join them. Any chance of the Resistance halting the collapse of Earth was long gone by then, so I felt anyone with the chance of salvaging a decent life for themselves should take it. The looters were left stuck in an empty city, running out of food, and attacking my remaining people to steal their supplies. I portalled over to London myself to …”

  “Portalled?” Tad interrupted, leaning forward eagerly. “Our information was wrong and you have working portals after all? But in that case, we can just portal back to America Off-world.”

  “We had working portals,” said Donnell. “We also had access to the Earth data net. Past tense. Please let me finish explaining.”

  “Sorry,” said Tad.

  “I managed to convince both sides that they had to work together to have any hope of survival,” said Donnell. “A few months after that, the United Earth Government ordered a new blanket security block on the portal network. Only people on a newly created register of reputable citizens could use the portals, and of course Earth Resistance members weren’t on the list. We could get round that by breaking into the control box on an inter-continental portal and hardwiring it, bypassing the DNA security checks to get illegal manual access.”

  Tad made an odd squeaking noise. “But hardwiring a portal is horribly dangerous. If you make a mistake, what arrives at the other end isn’t … human.”

  Donnell nodded. “It was only worth the risk for vital trips. I’d got married by then, and wanted to stay in London anyway, so I left my deputy in charge of New York. Seven years after London was abandoned, the whole situation was repeated in New York. I had to risk portalling back here to negotiate another alliance with the New York gangs. I expected that to only take a few months, but things were far more complicated than they’d been in London.”

  I felt deeply uncomfortable listening to Donnell talk about how he’d left London and my mother. No, I wasn’t just uncomfortable listening to it, I was angry. Donnell had never discussed this with me, but he was happy to tell every detail to total strangers.

  “There wasn’t just one New York gang to deal with,” said Donnell, “but a dozen, and they all hated each other. Every time I thought I had the situation under control and would be able to portal back to my family in London, another major problem flared up.”

  Donnell suddenly turned his head and looked directly at me, an oddly intent expression on his face. I hastily stared down at the table.

  “Ah,” said Tad. “So some of the people down there are criminals.”

  “Exactly,” said Donnell. “To make things even worse, we lost access to the Earth data net a week after I arrived in New York.”

  “You mean the United Earth Government put a security block on that too?” asked Tad. “There might be ways to work round that.”

  I heard the sound of movement, looked up warily, and saw Donnell had stood up and gone across to the ancient wall vid next to the window. He pressed the button to turn it on, but nothing happened. He sighed, hit the wall next to it, and the screen flickered into life and showed two words. “No signal.”

  My grandparents had had magical technology imbedded in their heads that linked their brains directly to the Earth data net, giving them instant access to information and moving images of people, animals and amazing places. My parents had had to use wall vids to get that information, and see those images with eyes instead of their minds. I had never seen them at all. Since before I was born, the wall vids had only displayed those two words. “No signal.”

  “Oh,” said Tad. “No, there’s no way to work round that. When you turn on wall vids, they automatically connect to the local data net to get their operating software. If they can’t get a signal, they’re just useless pieces of electronics.”

  Donnell sat down again. “I’ve no idea what happened, but we woke up one morning and every vid and comms device in New York was complaining about having no signal. London had the same problem. That didn’t just cut us off from the outside world, but severed our communications between London and New York as well. We were reduced to writing notes to each other and throwing them through a portal.”

  He grimaced. “That made everything far more difficult, and was totally disastrous in some situations. Words said in anger may eventually be forgiven, but written ones never fade away.”

  Donnell turned to give me that intent look again. I didn’t dodge his gaze this time, but I could feel myself blushing, and was relieved when he turned back to face the off-worlders. There was a brief pause before Donnell spoke again, suddenly dropping his detailed explanation to rush forward in t
ime to the present in three short sentences.

  “I never went back to London. Six years ago, it was hit by a firestorm, and we had to risk portalling everyone from London to safety in New York. All the New York portals stopped working two weeks later.”

  I was trying to work out what was happening here. Why had Donnell introduced me as his daughter, and given me those strange, meaningful looks? Had all that detail about him leaving London for New York really been for the benefit of the off-worlders, or had Donnell been telling me what went wrong between him and my mother?

  If that was true, then what did that comment about words said in anger mean? Was that just about Donnell and my mother, or was it also about Donnell and me? Was he finally raising the subject of our cataclysmic argument, and hinting that we could somehow fix what had happened between us? It seemed a weirdly indirect way to do it, but given we’d avoided talking to each other for the last six years …

  “If all the portals stopped working at once,” said Tad, “the fault has to be at the main New York portal relay centre. Possibly a power failure. The global portal system has its own dedicated power supply, totally independent of everything else, so it wouldn’t have been shut down when the city was abandoned. If one of the power links at the relay centre has burnt out, it could be simple to repair.”

  My fingers curled in tension, and I looked up anxiously. If Donnell had really meant that explanation for me, if this was his way of tentatively broaching the forbidden subjects of the past, then the last thing we needed was a discussion about how Seamus had destroyed the New York portal relay centre.

  “It’s not simple,” snapped Donnell. “The main New York portal relay centre exploded into several hundred thousand pieces.”

  “Oh.” Tad looked crestfallen.

  “This explanation would go a lot faster if you’d stop interrupting me,” added Donnell.