Lethal Cargo

by Felix R. Savage

  We got dressed in the dry things—I gave the guy my wet clothes, to dry and pass on to the next Shifter that came along. Then we walked off and sat with our backs to the seawall. Some way away, a homeless vet lay on a cardboard box, his bearded face dead to the world. You see all too many of them in Smith’s End. The low-angled sun turned the bay to copper. Way off to our right, the lights of the Ferris wheel had already come on. They were red, white, and green, in honor of Founding Day tomorrow.

  Dolph lit a cigarette. “We were standing upwind,” he said, his voice shaky.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We were definitely upwind.”

  I remembered the glitter swirling around that intersection. The way people had gasped in wonder. And I hated Rafael Ijiuto with a fiery hatred born from the sheer injustice of it. I realized this was probably how Dolph felt about lots of things, lots of the time.

  Now, however, Dolph seemed diminished. Shrunken by fear. With his wet hair flattened to his skull, he even looked frail. He was still shivering from the exertion of the swim and the cold of the water. He doesn’t really have enough body fat to be a dolphin, but that’s the form he had his heart set on since we were kids.

  “Here’s what we have to decide,” I said. “Do we tell the police? Or not?”

  “Jesus, Mike, I don’t know.”

  “Here’s what we do know,” I said. “Eight thousand nine hundred and ninety-fucking-nine of those fairies are somewhere in this city. And the last we saw them, they were in Sophia’s possession.”

  “The bears,” Dolph said.

  “I’m starting to think Parsec might be getting used here. I just don’t see him leasing out his trucks with permission for special overrides that would allow them to pick up hitchhikers, or run a guy down in the street.”

  “No,” Dolph allowed. “I can’t see that, either.”

  “Silverback didn’t really know anything about Mujin Inc. He didn’t even know what was in those crates. He thought it might be drugs, for Christ’s sake. Maybe Parsec doesn’t know, either.”

  Dolph grudgingly nodded, but he said, “Then why’d he kidnap Lucy? Why would he go that far to distract you from finding out the truth, if he doesn’t know it himself?”

  I gritted my jaw so hard that a spike of pain drove through my temple. “Because Sophia does know the truth,” I said. “She built the damn fairies herself. And while she might be cool with hundreds of thousands of people on the PdL suffering a horrible death, she’s not cool with the same thing happening to Lucy.”

  Dolph exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I guess not caring only goes so far,” he murmured.

  “I guess so,” I said. Rex and Irene had theorized that Sophia had kidnapped Lucy out of simple maternal motives. They may have been right, as far as that went. Sophia was not quite inhuman enough to let her child die.

  Dolph interrupted my thoughts. “Maybe we should go to the police.”

  I had guessed he was going to say that. I even agreed, in principle. I now had exactly what d’Alencon had asked me for: hard evidence that Mujin Inc was tangled up in bad shit. But I was, too!

  “Bones thinks I’m mixed up in it,” I said. “Or at least he’s pretending to think I am. He wants me to find him some dirt on Parsec, to clear my own name.”

  “That works,” Dolph said.

  “But I can’t!” I said, pleadingly. “Those crates were on the St. Clare! There’s no way I can argue I didn’t know what was in them. It’s my responsibility to ensure that my cargoes are legal.” I glanced at Dolph’s profile, praying he’d see it my way. “If it was just data … or drugs, or something … but bio-weapons?”

  “What happens if they hang it around our necks?”

  “I don’t know. It would depend on the charges, but I can’t see any way I don’t lose the ship.”

  “Man, who cares,” Dolph said with a bitter snort of laughter. “She’s an ugly old bitch, anyway.”

  I knew that Dolph loved the St. Clare as much as he loved anything. In fact, the only two things in the world he did love were his bike and our ship, oh, and whatever gun held his fancy at the moment. When he said something like that, he was carving a piece out of his own heart and throwing it away, and it felt like he was taking a piece out of my heart, as well.

  “This is what I get for giving you a job when no one else would?” I said. “This is what I get for having your back at Dagda’s Knoll?” I was so angry I almost mentioned the Marie thing, but then didn’t. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be him!” I pointed to the homeless vet reclining further down the beach. “You’d be living in a cardboard box on the Strip, eating fish out of the bay, and panhandling to support your drug habit.”

  Dolph looked in the direction I was pointing. “The only difference between me and him,” he said, “is on the outside.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. I was on the edge of tears. “You know the difference between right and wrong. That’s why I always looked up to you.”

  The fact is, although Dolph and I were in the same year at school, he had always seemed older and more mature. There were reasons for that which I won’t get into right now. Anyway, he was popular, he had two animal forms by the time he was sixteen, and most importantly, he was unashamedly fair to everyone. He stood up to bullies, even if they were his own friends, in defense of the outcasts … like me. So when he announced that he was leaving school to join the army, it didn’t take much thinking before I decided to do the same thing.

  He said, “My whole life I’ve been looking for a cause good enough to die for.” He stared out to sea, his jaw set like a rock. “I never found one, because there are no causes that good.” He suddenly let out a choking laugh. “It sucks pretty damn hard to end up getting killed by a toy fairy!”

  “We were standing upwind,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster, remembering the way that specks of glitter had settled on Dolph’s hair.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Guess there’s no point committing suicide until we get the test results.”

  That’s right, we had already gotten tested for interstellar variant kuru, at Dr. Zeb’s, before we knew that there was any real reason we should. The test results would not come back for a week, so we had another few days of grace. “We are fine.” I put every ounce of persuasion I had into my voice. “MF said the IVK prions were suspended in nanoscale gel capsules. Remember? He said they would actually fall to the ground rather fast.”

  But the wind had been blowing.

  “So the risk of directly inhaling or swallowing them is low. The real risk would be if they got into the water or food supply. Then you’d have a real epidemic on your hands.”

  Which was exactly what we were going to have in Mag-Ingat, if those 8,999 contaminated fairies were not found and destroyed.

  Dolph glanced up at the coppery blue bowl of the sky, beyond which Ponce de Leon’s satellites and orbital defense platforms tracked their watchful orbits. “They’d have to deport thousands of people. Millions? Or just nuke the city from orbit?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This is Ponce de Leon. A Heartworld, for God’s sake. You have to think they would react strongly to a massive outbreak of interstellar variant kuru in the capital.”

  “Yeah.” Dolph took another cigarette out off his pack and lit it off the stub of his first one. This small action told me that he was coming back from the dark place he’d gone to. I was so relieved, I took one of his cigarettes.

  He raised an eyebrow: you don’t smoke.

  I shrugged. He passed me the lighter.

  It had been so long since I smoked, I’d almost forgotten how. But the burn in my lungs felt good, as if the smoke were cleansing my bronchial tubes, the way the sea had cleansed my face and body.

  “So the real question is,” Dolph said, “could the police react fast enough to secure the crates before someone—Ijiuto, Sophia, whoever—decides it’s time to unload them?”

  “And the answer is no,” I said. “Everything they do, they do it so s
low. Even Bones was complaining about it. Even if we called them right now, by the time the prosecutor gets off her ass to sign a warrant, it might be too late.” I dragged on my cigarette and exhaled. I could tell that by the time I stubbed it out, smoking would be second nature to me again. “In fact, Bones admitted it on the phone with me earlier. He couldn’t come right out and say it, but the overall nuance was that I need to rescue Lucy myself.”

  This interpretation came to me as I spoke. But Dolph had apparently come to the same conclusion independently.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I actually started gaming that out. I met Alec at the hoagie place. You know him?”

  “The guy who runs the range?”

  “That’s right. He came in to see if there was anything he could do. You might not realize it, Mike, but everyone in S-Town is ready to come out for you. Parsec really crossed the line. Snatching someone’s child? You do not do that. Everyone hates him, anyway. Living out on the Cape, with his normie wife and his flying car, acting like his shit don’t stink, and all the time his bears are collecting protection money from half the business owners in Smith’s End.”

  “I didn’t know about the protection game. Is there anything he hasn’t got his claws into?”

  “That’s it,” Dolph said. “He’s overextended himself. It’s time for him to take a fall, and if all the bears go down with him, no one’s gonna cry.” He stubbed out his cigarette and drew in the dry, loose sand with the butt, starting with bullet points. “I was shooting Alec’s truck-mounted .50 cal the other day. You really need to come out there some time. Drive the truck out into the woods and shoot at the trees. It’s like watching an invisible chainsaw. You just have to watch out for them coming down on top of you.”

  “What’s that got to do with Parsec?”

  “Nothing,” Dolph admitted. But I understood why he’d mentioned it. He’d needed to go to his happy place, to stop thinking about the violence that had been done to him, and start thinking about the violence we were going to do to—well, whatever, really. Trees. Parsec. Anyone that got in the way. “Point is, Alec said he would lend us some longs, and a vehicle if we need one with clean plates.”

  “It’s not getting there,” I said. “It’s getting inside.”

  “Getting there is part of it. Maybe the hardest part. Once we’re in, it’s a classic hostage rescue operation. We’ll want to have grenades to clear out any concentrations of hostiles, but mainly it’s just fire teams going from room to room …”

  As he went on in further detail, I half listened, but mostly I was thinking about various jobs we had done in the Fringeworlds, when the money was good, when no one would ever find out. Dolph had clicked into contractor mode. This was what we’d been doing ever since Tech Duinn, where the army obligingly taught us how. It’s what we were good at. But now I had to face the fact that this would likely be the last job we ever did. I privately resolved that if possible, I’d make sure Dolph, at least, got away with it.

  I smelled a familiar skunky smell, and glanced up the beach. Dolph’s friend had opened his pop-up for business. It turned out to be a herb shop, one of those places that offer a thousand and one all-natural ways to get bombed out of your mind. I was smelling the thanatos sticks the guy had set on the counter. Those had also been popular on Tech Duinn. I yearned for an instant for what I’d unjustly accused Dolph of—seeking oblivion.

  Dolph added a final bullet point for body armor. “Of course,” he finished with a grimace, “that was when I thought we were going to be raiding Ville Verde.”

  “Who says we’re not?” I said.

  45

  I sat in Alec from the range’s pickup, a cigarette clamped in my teeth, watching the entrance of Ville Verde come into view between the trees that lined the steep access road.

  Located halfway out along Cape Agreste, the gated community nestled in the jungle that covered the headland. The access road was narrow, steep, and winding. Most people who lived here flew in and out. They were too rich to bother using the roads.

  As expected, the visitor parking lot was empty. Weeds breaking through the asphalt showed how rarely it was used. The fortifications on the other side of the parking lot told a different story: one of fuck-off wealth.

  A double gate spanned the gap between two brick towers. They looked like faux-medieval gateposts, but were actually fire towers. They had machine guns and energy weapons up there, according to the gated community’s publicity materials. The two-meter fence on either side of the gate bent outwards at the top, and the trees and houses on the other side of the fence shimmered just perceptibly, giving away the presence of a force field.

  “Like living in jail,” said Robbie, in the driver’s seat.

  I had just been thinking how much safer I would feel if I lived somewhere like this, and veering into half-baked plans to move out to the Cape if I ever got Lucy back … no, when I got her back. I would not allow myself to contemplate failure. We had spent all last night and this morning, apart from a few snatched hours of sleep, refining this plan so that nothing could go wrong.

  “It’s all a matter of perspective,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Robbie muttered. The young wolf was in human form, sweating on account of the heavy armor plates inside his flak vest. And maybe nerves.

  He had volunteered to join in the operation, and had brought in some of his friends, including Sep and Marco, who were now riding in the back of the pickup with Rex.

  Unlike Parsec, I did not have an army on call. Dolph had convinced me to let the rippers help out. As a matter of fact, they were all too eager. The only thing they wanted from me? Permission to film.

  We’d also had help from the S-Town veterans’ association, which lent us the flak vests; a local construction company, which gave us the materials to make shaped charges; and St. Patrick’s, our parish church. The sister who worked at the Shifter Center had offered to look after Mia and Kit while their parents were … otherwise occupied. So the Seagrave children were getting a mid-week dose of Sunday school, while we prepared to go to war with the bears.

  Happy Founding Day.

  Ville Verde was celebrating Founding Day, too. Red, white, and green bunting fluttered above the gates, strung between the fire towers. The towers themselves flew Ponce de Leon flags, paired with the green and blue United Humanity flag that represents Earth.

  Robbie slowed down as we bumped across the visitor parking lot. The security guards watched our approach with mild interest. They didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Remember, Buzz Parsec lived here.

  As we pulled up in front of the gate, I crushed my cigarette between my heavy claws and tipped it out the window.

  I put one forefoot on the edge of Robbie’s seat and the other on his thigh. He flinched as my claws dug into his jeans, but I needed to get my head out the window on his side.

  “Howdy,” I smiled at the security guards. “Happy Founding Day!”

  They winced.

  A smile does look a bit menacing on the face of a black bear..

  I had learned this form a few years back for an off-world job. At the time my idea had been to pick the animal I’d least want to be in real life. I’d gone for Ursus americanus because I didn’t have the body mass to be really convincing as a grizzly bear.

  But it worked. Parsec had several black bears on his crew, and to a mainstream human, a bear is a bear is a bear, anyway.

  “Happy Founding Day,” one of the security guards echoed, with a mean smile.

  “Tell ya what I think,” the other one said, “this would be a better planet if we didn’t have to share it with talking bears.”

  I couldn’t tell him that I fully agreed, although not in the way he meant. I responded as I thought one of Parsec’s bears would. “Freedom of movement is a human right,” I said. “Meaning you’re free to move to a different planet if you don’t like it.”

  “Yeah,” said Robbie, trying to get in on my menacing act.

  “
But as long as you’re here,” I said, “how about doing your job?”

  “Sure will,” grunted the first security guard, moving to the back of the pickup. I heard him greet Rex, Sep, and Marco with a hostile “Whaddup, bears.”

  I inwardly pumped my fist. The guards assumed that all of us were bears, without me even having to say so.

  Rex was sitting on a duffel bag that contained several rifles. But the security guard did not ask him to move so he could inspect it. “Go on,” he said, slapping the side of the pickup.

  I scrambled back into my own seat.

  Robbie drove forward to the gates.

  He leaned out the window and touched the ID terminal with a card that identified him as an employee of Parsec Freight.

  Some people keep their ID on their phones. Others might elect to get a chip implanted in their hands.

  But the latter method doesn’t work for a Shifter, and as careful as we are not to lose our phones, there are occasions when you have to leave them turned off.

  Such as when you’re in a hospital.

  The bears had brought their employee ID cards to Dr. Zeb’s, and Martin had pinched Canuck’s card out of his pants when he Shifted.

  “Kind of thing that might come in handy,” he had said.

  Now it was coming in very handy indeed. I held my breath as the terminal processed the card. Canuck might have had it cancelled already …

  He hadn’t.

  The terminal turned green.

  The gates sank into the ground, one after another, and we drove into Ville Verde.

  *

  At the same moment, Dolph was driving my truck into the parking lot of Bonsucesso Tower.

  We had debated for hours whether to hit Ville Verde or Mujin Inc, and ultimately decided on both at once.

  The idea was to leave Parsec nowhere to hide. Oh, sure, he also had his downtown office, and the Trident Overland depot in Harborside … and, and … He had been lying low since the debacle at Dr. Zeb’s, and to be honest, he could be anywhere. But we didn’t have the manpower to look everywhere. We hoped that by hitting his home and his sketchy front company, we would force him to emerge from his lair.