So it was just past noon when Zenn again found herself in Otha’s venerable pickup. But this time, she was at the wheel, concentrating hard, attempting to avoid the fragments of old, shattered pavement that littered the road from the cloister into Arsia City.
In the passenger seat next to her, Liam Tucker lounged, offering occasional irritating comments regarding her driving skills, while in the cargo bed behind them Hamish crouched on top of half a dozen crates of freshly shucked gen-soy beans. She was to barter the gen-soy for rhina grub at Wilson Ndinga’s grocery store.
While truck-driving wasn’t part of the test, making sure that the pod and the other elements of the in-soma run were ready was her responsibility. So, in a way, the trip to town was part of the whole process. Plus, Zenn had gotten the impression from Otha it was high time for her to take over the periodic supply runs into Arsia. Despite her general aversion to towners, this was fine with her; she liked driving the truck. And, after a few practice drives in the open field between the infirmary and the southwest compound wall, she was now at the point where she no longer ground the gears each time she shifted.
Wilson Ndinga’s little store on Arsia’s main street carried a hodge-podge of off-world herbs and a few other hard-to-get foodstuffs along with his standard fare, and Otha had arranged with him to occasionally obtain exotic animal feed for the cloister. Wilson knew Otha would pay – or, would promise to pay – especially well for the grub, so Wilson had a standing order with orbital ferry pilots to bring some back to Mars whenever a starship returned from a visit to the Tandua system.
After her initial attack of nerves at having Liam along for the ride, Zenn was finally beginning to relax and enjoy herself at the wheel. The feeling of speed and freedom, even on a dirt road never intended for fast travel, was exhilarating. It made her wonder about what lay at the far reaches of the road, what it would be like to just keep driving and driving, over the next hill, around the next curve in the canyon wall. Her momentary lapse in focus was broken by a vicious jolt when they hit a good-sized chunk of pavement.
“Nice aim, Scarlett,” Liam said, bracing himself with one leg against the dashboard. “You hit that one dead-on.”
“You think you could do better?” she shot back.
“Whoa,” he raised his hands defensively. “Just trying to be helpful.”
“Right,” she told him, swerving hard to avoid the next fragment. “Well, I can do without the help, thanks.”
Hamish’s presence on the drive into town made sense: he could lift the gen-soy crates with one arm; that would come in handy when they unloaded. Liam, Zenn assumed, had just attached himself to the trip to avoid being put to work back at the cloister.
As they neared the first sorry-looking huts of the shantytown ringing Arsia, Zenn down-shifted and they slowed. The scent of campfires wafted through the truck’s open windows. An old man with a blanket draped around his shoulders huddled beneath a tarp he’d stretched from the top of a large shipping container to form a sort of lean-to. He didn’t look up as they passed. Ahead, there was what appeared to be an entire family walking in a group at the side of the road, two adults and four children, the adults in their mid-thirties, the children young. The man pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with what looked like all their worldly possessions. As Zenn pulled up alongside them, the woman moved to herd her children away from the road, and Zenn saw her face.
“That’s Sindri Govinda,” she whispered to Liam. He leaned forward to see. Zenn called out, “Sindri?”
The woman stopped when she saw who it was. The rest of the family stopped too, and Zenn braked to a halt. The woman wore a tired, empty expression, and said nothing, but just stood as the smallest child, a girl, came and put her arms around her mother’s waist. The whole family was dressed in multiple layers of clothing, and they all shared the same coffee complexions, black hair and dark eyes.
“What are you… Are you alright?” Zenn asked.
“We’re moving into town,” Sindri said, speaking as if describing the death of a loved one. “We couldn’t stay at the farm.” She lifted one arm to indicate the wheelbarrow. “This is all we had time to save.”
“The bary-gens go off-line out at your place?” Liam asked.
“Yes,” Sindri said. “The generators. They all failed at once. Not just our place. The whole canyon. We were lucky to get the kids and escape before the entire valley decompressed. Now…” She raised her gaze to survey the grim prospect of the shantytown, but she had no further words. Her husband came up behind her.
“Zenn, Liam,” the man greeted them, put his hands on the shoulders of his wife and child. Dangling from his belt on a leather thong was a wooden club. Zenn wondered if that was their only protection during the family’s long trek into town.
“Hello, Dharm,” Zenn said. “I’m so sorry. About the farm. Do you have a place to go? In town?”
“Brin Daws offered us his spare room,” Dharm Govinda said. “We’ll be fine. We just need… We’ll get settled in at Brin’s and take things from there.” It was clear he was trying to sound more optimistic than he felt. “One day at a time, right?”
“Well, please let us know if we can help,” Zenn said. But she knew there was really nothing they could do for the Govindas. Or for the dozens of other families who’d been forced into town over the past year. There were empty rooms in the dorm at the cloister, of course, and they’d made it clear to everyone the Ciscans were willing to take people in. But for those from outside the cloister, even life in the shantytown was apparently preferable to living alongside the Ciscan’s alien animals.
“No, no, that’s alright,” Dharm said, looking away. “Like I say. We’ll be fine.” He motioned to his family and took up the wheelbarrow handles, and the little group set out again. Zenn put the truck into gear and drove on.
“Nine Hells,” Liam muttered. “If they’re right, all of Tartarus just bit the dust.”
“Can that be true? All of Tartarus Canyon?” Zenn didn’t want to believe this. “If they lost pressure out there, what about the McCalls? The Stoyanovas? All those families?”
There were seven or eight farmsteads strung along the depths of Tartarus Canyon. If all of the barymetric generators protecting the valley really had failed, Arsia’s shantytown would be seeing a serious influx of new residents.
Zenn adjusted the rearview mirror to look back at the bedraggled family.
“At least Sindri and Dharm have somewhere to… Oh!” She stomped hard on the brakes, throwing Liam hard against the dash. The truck screeched to a halt a few feet from a group of men bent over something in the road.
“Nine Hells, Scarlett,” Liam growled at her, recovering himself and rubbing his forehead.
“Well, what are they doing in the middle of road?” Zenn asked.
The half-dozen towner men were attempting to raise up a frame of some sort off the surface of the roadway. It was as wide as the road, maybe ten feet tall. The framework was constructed of lengths of rusty pipe, forming a rectangular opening with old chain link fencing stretched across it. Strands of barbed wire ran along the top.
“They’re putting up a gate,” Liam said. “Unless you run them all down, that is.”
“A gate? To block the road?” she frowned at him.
“You don’t get out much, do ya, Scarlett?” Liam smirked at her. “It’s the gate for this north checkpoint. They’ve put them on all four roads entering town.”
She saw now that on both sides of the road a makeshift wall ran in either direction. It was cobbled together from more chain link, old sections of vehicles, miscellaneous junk and heaped-up dirt.
“Checkpoints? You mean, like roadblocks? What for?”
“To keep people out of town who shouldn’t be there,” Liam said.
“People from the valleys? The ones who lost their farms?”
“Yeah, fraid so,” Liam said. “It’s cause the shantytown’s getting so big. The council voted last month to start controlling who comes i
n. Thus, checkpoints and the wall.”
“But why would they do that? What do they think people are going to do? Rob them?”
“Already happened. Somebody broke the back door lock on Gangsted’s grainary, stole a truckload of amaranth. Everybody knows it was refugees who did it. Ren just hasn’t caught em yet.”
Zenn had to stop the truck to wait for the men to tip the gate upright. When they’d done this, she saw they’d attached metal wheels to the base of the piping. Struggling to keep the heavy structure from falling over again, they rolled it off to one side of the road and leaned it against what appeared to be a small guard shack, built of corrugated scrap metal with bars welded over its windows.
At the sight of the truck, one of the men broke free from the group and came over.
“Hey. You’re the Scarlett, girl ain’t ya?” It was Emrik Lund. “Thought I recognized Otha’s truck.” Emrik was tall, thin and scarecrowish, with a fringe of short, brown hair circling the bald dome of his head. He wore baggy, home-made hempweave pants and an old sweatsuit top with a black scarf tucked into the collar. The soles of his boots were held on with lengths of twine.
“Yes. I’m Zenn.”
“Say… Zenn… do me a favor?” He squinted down at her. “Tell Otha he still owes me for the stone work I did on that foundation out to your place. It’s been a couple months now. Pel Shandin’s after me for payment on the stone. I need credits or goods in kind.”
Zenn felt her face go instantly red. She should be used to this sort of thing by now, of course. The cloister was behind on any number of bills. But it still got to her. For some reason, having Liam looking on made it even worse.
“I’ll remind him, Mr Lund. I’m sure he’ll get back to you right away.”
“Uh huh,” Emrik said. “I gotta tell ya I’ve heard that before. Look, it’s none of my business, but you folks owe money all over town.” He leaned with both hands on the door of the truck and peered in at her. “We’ve all got bills of our own, ya know?”
“I know, Mr Lund,” Zenn told him. “Look, we’re expecting a big client to pay us soon.”
His look said he’d also heard this before. “We’re taking care of a Kiran whalehound. The royals always pay on time.”
“Well, if they do, I’d like my name at the top of the list. But Pel tells me there’s a chance the cloister’s lease could get voted down next session.” Did everyone in town know about their lease? She felt her checks going even redder. “It’d be good if Otha could settle up with me before that happens.”
“I heard about the vote, Mr Lund. And I know that some people on the council are concerned about our animals, but…”
“Some people?” He raised his eyebrows at this.
“But,” she continued, “our animals, our patients have never bothered anybody. There’s no reason to make us close the clinic, to make us stop our work.”
“Oh, there are reasons,” he said. “Like the Authority and the Rift, for starters. You think the Earthers will ever do business with Mars as long as aliens keep bringin’ their creatures down here? Sick creatures? Off-wa monsters with who knows what kinda diseases right outside our town?” Saying this, he glared at Hamish in the cargo bed of the truck, then shook his finger at him. “I mean, lookit this thing you got in the back there. Nine Hells! You’re paradin’ that six-legged whatzit around big as life and expect folks not to get bent outta shape? You Ciscans need to wake up and see what’s what, missy. And you need to tell Otha to get back to me, pronto.”
“Hey,” Liam leaned across in front of Zenn to confront Emrik. “You’ll get paid, Lund. Scarlett here just told you they’ve got credits coming from the Kirans.”
Well said, Zenn thought at this unexpected show of support. Maybe having the towner boy along wasn’t so annoying after all.
“Yeah, well,” Emrik stood up and leaned away from the truck window. “Talk is cheap, Tucker. Now, if you people got business in town, go on through so we can finish up this gate. We gotta get it secure by sundown.”
Zenn put the truck into gear, and pulled ahead onto Arsia’s main street. It looked even shabbier than usual. Lined with one- and two-story buildings of stone, synthwood and the odd canvas tent, Zenn saw immediately that three or four more storefront windows had recently been boarded up. Garbage collection had also apparently become a casualty of the times, and teetering piles of trash had sprung up here and there on the curbside. Outside the derelict building that once housed the town’s only dentist, a scrawny, yellow mongrel dog pulled at a scrap of something potentially edible in the debris blocking the entranceway.
“Don’t let Lund’s bad-mouthing get you down, Scarlett,” Liam said, slouching back in his seat as they drove slowly down the street. “It’s not like everybody in town hates you.”
Zenn knew Liam meant this to be encouraging, but she also knew that what Emrik Lund had said about the cloister’s rising debt level, and the towners’ sentiments in general, was true.
When she stopped the truck in front of the cinderblock hut that housed Ndinga’s store, Wilson immediately bustled out to meet them, rubbing his hands together. He was a small, energetic man in his sixties, wearing a colorful kaftan sort of garment that reached to the ground.
“Ah, mistress Scarlett. I know what you’re here for,” he said in his lilting Earther accent, his wide smile revealing several gold-alloy teeth. “The rhina grub, isn’t it then?” He went to the back of the truck and looked in. “And what have you brought to tempt old Wilson today?”
TWELVE
Two days later, Zenn was returning from early-morning chores when she overheard Hild talking to someone in the calefactory entrance hall. Katie had accompanied her that morning, and Zenn scooped her up into her arms, opened the door leading into the hall, and was surprised to see Vic LeClerc. The woman held a mug of hot tea in her hand, and wore an old-fashioned cowboy hat atop her white-blonde hair. She was tall, attractive in a severe sort of way, and a bit younger than Otha. She was also one of the valley’s wealthiest landowners, with a family history dating back to the earliest days of the colony. The LeClercs raised the only remaining source of fresh milk and meat in the area – a voracious herd of scruffy but adaptable little goats. So, instead of calling herself a farmer, Vic insisted she was a livestock rancher, the ever-present cowboy hat worn as proof. Vic LeClerc was also president of the Arsia town council.
“Zenn, you’re just in time,” Hild said. “Vic’s herd needs worming. She asked us if you could take care of it. I said you’d be glad to.”
“The Sister told me you’re familiar with the procedure,” Vic said, giving Zenn an appraising look. Katie stretched out to try and sniff Vic’s arm, prompting the woman to pull back, eyebrows arched.
“Can you come with me now?” Vic said, setting her mug down on the windowsill.
“Yes, sure,” Zenn said, the thrill of leaving the cloister’s confines making her feel just a little more awake than she’d felt moments before. “I just need to get the meds.”
“Otha left the pre-mix here for you,” Hild said, pointing out the large tub of homemade worming powder sitting on the floor.
“The Sister says she’s got a loaf of fresh bread for us,” Vic said. “You can take the medicine out to the truck and I’ll be there in a minute.”
Zenn put Katie down, picked up the tub of powder and carried it out into the cloister drive.
Oh no. Not him…
Leaning against the fender of Vic’s aging but well-maintained six-wheel utility truck was Graad Dokes. The heavyset ranch foreman wore bulky, insulated canvas pants and knee-high rubberoid boots. His fleshy jaw was dark with his usual unshaven stubble, and a fat ring of tarnished silver hung from one ear. He looked up at Zenn from under the brim of his leather hat and spit a gob of black tobacco juice into the dust.
“So Otha’s sending in the B-team, huh?” he said, continuing to lean back against the truck.
“He’s in surgery all morning,” Zenn said, her mood quickly so
uring at the prospect of riding out to the LeClerc ranch in Graad’s company.
“You comin’ out on your own then? For the goats? Just you?” Graad said.
“Just me.”
“Well, well. They’re lettin’ you out of Fort Freak all on your own. Aren’t we a big girl?”
Zenn said nothing to this.
Why encourage him?
“First time outside the walls all on your lonesome?” he asked.
As a matter of fact, it was. But she wouldn’t give Graad the satisfaction of knowing he was right.
“Guess we’ll just have to live with it,” he went on. “I mean, having the B-team. That being you.” He nodded at her, grinning at his own presumed cleverness, and spit again.
“It’s just worming,” Zenn said, then immediately regretted taking the bait.
“Not just worming to us, girlie,” he said, the grin vanishing. He jabbed a stubby finger at her. “Those goats are money, kid, and don’t you forget…”
A shrill animal shriek sounded close behind him.
With a spastic jerk of his body, Graad propelled himself away from the truck, arms flailing wildly at the air. “What the…?” He spun around to see Katie materialize on the hood of the truck where he’d been leaning. He raised a hand to swat her away.
“You stinkin’ overgrown rat…”
“Don’t!” Zenn screamed. He stopped his swing, dropped his arm. “She didn’t mean anything. Katie, come.” Zenn signed, and Katie hopped to the ground, ran to Zenn and leaped up into her arms.
“It ain’t natural...” he growled, red-faced. “That thing comin’ outta nowhere… Nine Hells. Damn near gave me a heart attack.”
“It’s just her usual behavior,” Zenn said, stroking the agitated rikkaset. “It’s completely natural.”
“And talkin’. Damn alien off-wa thing like that, talkin’ to humans in sign-lingo. That natural, too? I don’t think so, girlie.”
“She’s intelligent. If she’s smart enough to talk to us, why shouldn’t she?” Zenn said, feeling proud of herself for sticking up for Katie.
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