Scavenger Alliance

by Janet Edwards

  I stared at him in disbelief. “What’s gone wrong is the fire defences have broken down, just like everything else in this city breaks down.”

  “They all cut out at once,” said Tad. “The emergency power system must have failed, or perhaps just run out of stored power. It would only take a light accidentally left on for a few decades to …”

  “Tad, it doesn’t matter why the fire defences stopped working. The fact is they’ve stopped, so we need to leave.”

  “This building hasn’t even been singed yet, and it has just been drenched with water. Just give me two more minutes to work on this. If we move you now, we’ll seriously damage your shoulder.”

  “It’s already had twenty-four hours to heal, so it’ll probably be fine.”

  “It won’t be fine, Blaze. There’s an intricate group of tendons and muscles in your shoulder. The slightest interruption in the muscle regeneration process can make those tendons and muscles attach to the wrong places or even fuse together.”

  I chewed at my lower lip. If we messed this up, then we wouldn’t have another chance to heal my arm, at least not before I had to face Cage. My head was a battleground of conflicting fears. I was afraid of Cage. I was scared of being left with a useless arm. I was terrified of fire.

  “All right,” I said. “But only two minutes.”

  “We need power.” Tad paced round the room, muttering rapidly to himself. “Power has been building up in the New York power reservoir for the last eighteen years. There’s plenty of power if I can just reach it. This building is part of power grid reference TT617/388. The power grid control system is … Chaos, I need security codes to access it. Well, naturally I’d need security codes, because … Yes, it’s accepted the old Wallam-Crane family security codes! I’m into the power grid control system!”

  He was jabbering so fast now that I could hardly follow what he was saying. “Everything is set to off because they shut down the whole New York area power grid. I just need to turn on grid reference TT617/388 and … Chaos, it won’t let me do that. Why won’t it let me do that? Maybe I need to turn on the … No, it won’t let me do that either. What fool designed this system? Well, if …”

  There was rain on the roof again. I gazed at Tad in awe. “The fire defences are working again. You did it!”

  “I think I did rather more than I intended,” said Tad. “I was desperate, and couldn’t think what else to do.”

  I didn’t understand the anxious look on his face. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s not wrong exactly,” said Tad. “It’s just that I couldn’t work out how to turn on the power for this specific building, so I turned on the whole New York area power grid. Look!”

  He pointed at the windows. The view through them wasn’t dark any longer. There were lights out there. Hundreds of lights, thousands of lights, tens of thousands of lights. Mostly white, but some in reds, and blues, and greens, and one massive flashing sign on the side of an apartment block showing an image of a girl dancing.

  The heir of Thaddeus Wallam-Crane was standing beside me. He’d just had to think an order and New York had obeyed him. The magic of the past was alive again.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Blaze, wake up!”

  I opened my eyes, and saw the shadowy figure of Tad kneeling next to me. It was still dark in the room, I could still see the blazing lights of New York through the windows, but something had changed. It took me a moment to pin down what it was. The sound of rain on the roof had gone.

  “The fire defences have stopped working again! Why? What’s wrong this time?”

  Tad laughed. “Nothing’s wrong. They turned themselves off hours ago when the fire in the building next door went out.”

  “Oh.” I felt a fool.

  “I woke you up because it’s been thirty-six hours since your first injection of regrowth fluid. Your shoulder should have finished healing.”

  I expected Tad to unseal my sleeping bag, but instead he stood up and went across to the door. I wondered where the chaos he was going, but he stopped by the door, flicked a switch, and the room was flooded with light. Of course it made perfect sense to turn the lights on now that we had power. I was just so used to wandering round abandoned buildings waving a flashlight that the thought of turning the lights on hadn’t occurred to me.

  Tad came to kneel next to me again, and this time he did open my sleeping bag. I started shivering as he undid the belts holding my left arm to my body. Partly from cold, but mostly from fear. If the treatment hadn’t worked …

  “Go ahead and try moving your arm.” Tad sat back on his own mattress and watched me anxiously. “The doctor says it should respond perfectly normally now.”

  I tentatively lifted my arm up from the mattress. “It moves and there’s no pain!”

  Tad gave a long sigh of relief. “The doctor said this should work, I knew it should work, but I couldn’t help imagining all the things that could go wrong.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I’ve been scared to death. Can I sit up now?”

  “You can do any normal movements. It’s not a good idea to lift anything really heavy with your left arm until you’ve been moving it for two or three hours. After that, you don’t need to worry at all.”

  I sat up, tried lifting my left arm up to shoulder height, and then pointed high above my head. I looked up at my own left hand in awe. “It’s better. It’s really better. Cage can’t use me to destroy Donnell any longer. Thank you.”

  Tad’s smile widened as he watched my face. “I’m truly glad I could help.”

  I lowered my arm and then reached out to take Tad’s right hand. His fingers squeezed mine, and he looked down at our linked hands.

  “We’re still not doing the relationship thing?”

  I shook my head. “No, we’re still on opposite sides. We’re enemies, but we’re good enemies.”

  “The very best sort of enemies,” said Tad.

  We held hands for a moment longer, and then I gave a sudden, bigger shiver that was nothing to do with fear, just pure cold.

  “You’d better get properly dressed again,” said Tad.

  “Yes.” I let go of his hand. “Thank you again. Please thank the doctor as well.”

  I hunted among the heap of bedding for the rest of my clothes, and put them on, glorying in the simple fact I could thrust my left arm into a sleeve without pain.

  “I’m sorry it’s so cold in here,” said Tad. “I tried turning the heating on in this row of offices, but there was a nasty buzzing sound and the heaters went dead. When I had a closer look, I found some of the corridor wiring had been nibbled by rats.”

  I pulled my jacket on. “I’m used to cold buildings.”

  “I’m getting used to the cold too. I’m not so sure about rats though.”

  I stood up, went over to the window, and looked out at a New York that was resplendent with light and colour. “I suppose you have lots of brightly lit cities on Adonis.”

  Tad came to stand beside me. “We don’t have any cities at all. People didn’t want a repeat of the ecological and pollution issues that happened on Earth, so it was decided that only one continent would be inhabited on each world, and incoming colonists would be strictly limited in number. Humanity scattered across five hundred new worlds. Adonis has the largest population of any of them, but it still isn’t that high, and people live in thousands of small settlements.”

  He paused to pull a face. “That will probably change now the portals are failing. People are already abandoning the more isolated settlements to cluster closer together. Perhaps when all the portals are gone, there’ll be cities on Adonis. It’s one of the few worlds with enough people, experts, and technology to keep some sort of civilization going. Most of the others don’t have a chance.”

  “They do have a chance,” I said. “Thaddeus Wallam-Crane the Eighth will build new interstellar portals and stop civilization from falling.”

  Tad laughed. “Do you really believe that
?”

  “Actually, I do. I’ve grown up hearing tales of a past that sounded magical, but I thought all the magicians were gone forever. Looking out of this window, seeing the buildings look as dazzling as in all the old stories, I believe there’s one last magician walking among us and he’ll succeed in his goal.”

  Tad frowned at me. “This isn’t about magic. I can’t wave a hand and work miracles. This is about science, technology, and the difficulty of manufacturing tiny components to precise standards.”

  “But the difference between science and magic is getting paper thin from my point of view,” I said. “My grandparents were webbed. They lived in a world full of scientific wonders. If they wanted to know how any of those wonders worked, they could get the information from the Earth data net with a single thought.”

  I turned to face Tad. “Those days were already fading when my parents were children. They were never webbed. They knew things like portals were scientific wonders, but they didn’t know how the science worked. Now there’s my generation.”

  I shook my head. “I’m hovering between seeing things as science and magic. I’ve travelled by portal once in my life, escaping the London firestorm to come to New York. I’ve seen you fix an injury that should have taken months to heal, if it healed at all, within a few hours. I’m looking at a girl of light dancing on the side of a building. My head knows that these things are achieved by advanced technology, and there are scientific rules behind how they work, but I can’t stop my emotions reacting to them as if they’re magic. I know that my children, if I ever have children, will just see them as pure magic.”

  “I understand,” said Tad. “When I saw the children here dancing round the portals, trying to make them work with their chants, I realized I was seeing the future of all the other worlds. Once the ability to make something is lost, then it only takes a generation or two for it to change from science to magic.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and that’s why I agree you have to leave Earth. This is the last chance to save interstellar portal technology. There won’t be another magician in the next generation, or enough experts and technology left to help him. I don’t want the other worlds to end up in the same mess as Earth.”

  “I thought you hated off-worlders,” said Tad.

  I grinned. “Phoenix and Braden are quite likeable.”

  Tad laughed.

  “So you’ll go to Zeus to build your new interstellar portals?” I asked.

  “I may go to Adonis first to see my grandfather, but then I’ll be going to Zeus. Adonis has lost faith in me, and the other planets in Alpha sector take the view that if Adonis can’t do this, then they can’t either, but Beta sector is taking a different approach. They’ve been organizing their society based on a clan and craft system, grouping the families of similar experts together, with the idea of handing knowledge down through the generations.”

  He shrugged. “Each Betan world already has clans specializing in different areas like medicine or electronics. Now one of the leading political clans is organizing the Fidelis Project. This aims to take the approach a step further, by getting every Betan world to send its best portal experts and other scientists to Zeus in a final attempt to save interstellar portal technology. The organizers sent a deputation to Adonis a few months ago, inviting me to lead the project.”

  “But you didn’t go to Zeus,” I said. “You came to Earth instead. You mentioned that was because you needed to find something called the Rosetta component.”

  Tad nodded. “I’d been trying to invent an interstellar portal that we can build with current technology, but my work had hit a concraz wall. There’s a component in every portal that’s tuned to its own position in space, and is key to successfully locating and connecting to destination portals. That component is totally impossible to manufacture now, and I couldn’t come up with a simpler version to replace it.”

  He waved his hands. “I had one last hope. I knew Thaddeus Wallam-Crane’s original prototype portal had used a different version of the Rosetta component, so I needed to get my hands on that component before I went to Zeus. The Adonis authorities wouldn’t agree to send a retrieval mission to New York, so I decided to come myself. Phoenix and Braden agreed to help me because they desperately wanted to go to Zeus. Given the limited availability of interstellar portal travel now, their only chance of getting there was if I took them with me.”

  “Why would Braden and Phoenix want to leave Adonis for Zeus?”

  Tad smiled. “When the deputation from Zeus came to negotiate with me, Phoenix got into a relationship with one of the women. Livia tried to stay on Adonis with Phoenix, but the Adonis authorities insisted on her going back to Zeus.”

  “So Phoenix wants to go to Zeus to be with her partner, Livia. What about Braden?”

  “I met Braden when I was weight lifting at the gym,” said Tad. “One day, I noticed he looked upset. When I asked what was wrong, he told me that his parents split up when he was a small child. Braden went to Adonis with his mother, but his older brother went to Zeus with their father. Interstellar mail is very limited, but Braden had had a handful of messages from his brother over the years. Now a message had arrived telling him his brother and his sister-in-law had been killed in an accident.”

  Tad pulled a pained face. “Braden was worried about his orphaned nephews and nieces on Zeus. He tried to get to Zeus to help care for them, but his application for an interstellar portal trip on compassionate grounds was rejected.”

  I made a sympathetic noise intended for the absent Braden rather than Tad.

  “When I found I needed a pilot to fly a plane for me, I naturally went to Braden.” Tad sighed. “This trip was supposed to be so simple. Everything went perfectly to start with. We flew to Manhattan, broke into the museum, and found what we needed packed away in a stasis box. I was nearly dancing with delight when we came out of the museum, but then we saw the aircraft was smashed.”

  “So you found your Rosetta component,” I murmured.

  “Yes.” Tad dug into a pocket and held something out in the palm of his hand. “I know it doesn’t look much, just a tiny thing of glass and metal, but combined with a lot of information only available on the Earth data net it’s given me the answers I needed. My ancestor really was a genius. I hadn’t thought of this. I could have kept working until my hundredth and died without thinking of this. It’s utterly brilliant in its simplicity, but I understand why he changed to the later, more sophisticated version. It’s all in your children’s chant.”

  “What?”

  “Dial it! Dial it! Portal, dial it!” Tad chanted the words. “If you use this simple component, you have to turn a dial to do manual tuning before the portal establishes. That wasn’t ideal, so my ancestor developed the later version of the Rosetta component, which could locate destination portals more accurately.”

  Tad paused. “It should be possible to manufacture the prototype version of the Rosetta component on Zeus. It doesn’t matter if we build new interstellar portals where you have to turn a dial manually to make the final connection, so long as they work.”

  I looked back out of the window. Tad would go back to Adonis, and then travel on to the even more distant star system of Zeus in Beta sector. The lights of New York were beautiful, but now I studied them in more detail I could see the ones that were missing. The signs that were lit up but missing some letters. The buildings that had lights in some windows but not others.

  “It’s nearly dawn,” I said. “We should eat and get on with some work.”

  “There’s not much left to do now. I’ve filled all the stasis boxes with medicines, and made notes on how to use them. I’ll get us some breakfast.”

  “No, let me do it. I’ve felt so frustrated and useless lying still while you did all the work.”

  I fetched us two meals. They weren’t quite as hot as they’d been when we arrived. Stasis boxes preserved their contents perfectly, but every time we opened and shut them the meals inside lo
st some of their heat.

  Tad looked at his meal and groaned. “Wintereat and chopped falling star again.”

  We pulled up chairs and sat at the desk to eat. After two days of not wanting to eat, I was ravenously hungry, gulping down every morsel of my food. I didn’t notice that Tad was barely eating until he spoke in a discontented voice.

  “They’ve put far too much cinnamon on this.”

  “I don’t know what cinnamon is, but I do know we don’t have any. That’s just the way falling stars taste.”

  “The last meal wasn’t nearly as …” Tad broke off and made an odd hiccupping noise. He stood up, looked round urgently, grabbed a waste bin from under the desk, and was sick in it.

  For about one second I was just shocked, but then my brain started working. I’d seen this happen to other people, and I’d suffered it myself. “Tad, I think you have …”

  “I think I have your winter fever.” Tad dropped the waste bin onto the floor, and slumped down on his chair.

  “How could this happen?” I asked. “You said you’d been vaccinated against Earth diseases when you arrived here.”

  “Those vaccinations wouldn’t cover new diseases,” said Tad. “From what I’d heard about the incubation period of your winter fever, there was every chance I’d get ill sometime in the next three days. That’s why I was working so hard to get the medicines packed.”

  “Why didn’t you warn us you were likely to get ill?”

  “What I’d learned about your winter fever terrified me. Donnell said you’d had over thirty deaths from it. That was an appallingly high mortality rate, and it wasn’t just the especially vulnerable who’d died, like babies and the elderly, but healthy young adults as well. When Donnell mentioned supply runs, I grabbed the chance to suggest we could get medicines. If I’d warned him I might get ill, he wouldn’t have sent me upriver with you, and I had to come myself because there’d be little chance of you getting the right medicines for winter fever without me.”

  He pulled a face. “I knew I was taking a chance doing this, but I’ve already messed up Phoenix and Braden’s lives by dragging them here with me. I couldn’t risk them dying of this fever, so I had to get you the medicines to treat us.”