The Apocalypse Ocean (24 page)

New traffic packed Trumball’s docks. Trade had all but opened up directly with the Xenowealth, and merchants had swooped in to take advantage of the new thawing relationship between the two territories now that Xenowealth ships were heading off into League space to battle the individualists.

Kay shoved her way through the crowds, keeping her hair over her eyes. The League had cameras everywhere, and she was still technically a person of interest to them.

Thinkerer’s old warehouse was close.

That was where she wanted to start. At her own pace.

Thinkerer was dead, but he’d left behind traces. Traces that she could pick up to unravel
everything
he’d been up to. And find out what other outsiders were at play here.

She needed to learn the outer worlds beyond Placa del Fuego. Because there was something worse than aliens and Doaqs. There were the people who had unleashed them on her.

Tracing those all the way back up. She could do that. But before she did that, there was someone she wanted to help. And to do
that
, she was going to need a spaceship. Unraveling Thinkerer’s network would probably get her access to one, she imagined.

A large hand grabbed her shoulder. She whirled around, pulling a knife free from her belt. Pepper flicked it away from her. “Thinking of going on a trip upstream, are you?” he asked.

They stood for a second in the middle of a crowd that pulled away from them, expecting trouble.

But then Kay nodded. “I used to want to rule Placa del Fuego. To build a castle around me with walls. But these threats keep coming, don’t they? The big ones. You can hide in the most quiet, stable area, but the worlds, they still swirl around and come crashing in eventually.”

“I learned that lesson a hard way once, too,” Pepper told her. “Why are you sniffing around Thinkerer’s warehouse?”

“I need a spaceship.”

“For what?”

She thought about lying to him. Then thought about the moment she’d hung above the wormhole. When the ship had toppled over and the bulkhead came within an inch of crushing her to death.

“I almost died in the wreckage of the
Saguenay
,” she told Pepper. “Almost died when Tiago shot me as well. Came to thinking about what my personal code of living was.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m not like them.” She nodded at people passing by them. The crowd moving around like a river streamed around rocks. “I won’t ever be a cuddly teddy bear. I was built, designed for a purpose. I won’t ever see them as anything other than tools, will I? It’s hard to fight that. But I can make modifications. I’ve been thinking about debts – and payments.”

“Is that why you left that note, telling us to give Tiago your houses?” Pepper asked, a sudden, slight smile on his lips.

“I ran up a human debt,” she said. “He saved my life on that ship. Despite all that had been done to him. It was a hard decision for him. He almost changed his mind. I saw it in his eyes. So I tried to pay him for it.”

Pepper nodded. “You figure Thinkerer, and his people, they owe you a debt?”

Kay nodded. “Yep. That’ll be one I intend to settle. But more importantly, I think, with this new way of understanding, I still owe a debt to Piper. I haven’t heard about your ship being found. I intend to go find it.”

Pepper held out a hand. “Some people will tell you that’s a fucked up way of looking at your people. But it isn’t. I’ll help. I owe Piper the same debt. The Xenowealth doesn’t know she’s out there, but we do.”

She looked down at his hand.

She would never be able to control him. He was inscrutable to her. And dangerous.

An equal.

Maybe even a friend.

They shook.

“Nashara told me the route and plan she would use if she were in Piper’s position,” Pepper said. “Now all we need is a ship. I think we can find her.”

Kay turned and walked past him. “Then let’s go get one,” she said, as they both slid back into the crowds.

Xenowealth teams had cleaned up the wolf carcasses in the valley.

League and Xenowealth teams of scientists had spent weeks analyzing the wormholes in the clockwork animals’ throats, finding the super-dense collapsible rings that expanded and contracted them useful technology.

The wolves’ wormholes had been contracted down to pinhole size, and then placed inside antimatter containment facilities in a solar orbit and surrounded by the unstable material.

If anything came out of them, they would be destroyed.

More teams searched for any leftover debris. Men in clean suits tramped around with metal detectors and a keen eye.

But what none of them noticed the first night was the body of a wolf crushed under a piece of the rear lattices of the
Saguenay
.

On the second night of the clean up, the body stirred. It was still dead, and still limp. But something moved inside it. The wolf’s throat bulged and the mouth began to expand further and further. 

 Something pushed and wormed itself out of the wolf’s throat until a pair of hands reached out and grabbed the jaws. It flailed until it had pulled itself out and fallen onto the ground.

The figure curled up in a ball by the wolf’s mouth and whimpered. Crying softly in the quiet night.

It was cut off from everything. So little bandwidth.

Sure, it had volunteered. It had wanted to help.

But it still hurt. To have lost something so fundamental as the connection to the Structure. So important. It felt like losing a limb. Or a piece of its brain.

Nothing felt right without that connection to the Structure.

And thinking was so, so slow now.

How stupid it had been before it had joined the Structure. How simple. How low.

And it had agreed to return.

After a long minute, the figure calmed itself down. It cut the head off the wolf, sawing at it with a blade until it parted from the destroyed body. It carefully put the wolf’s head in a backpack, zipped it up, and then wiped tears away.

The figure evaded all the teams out in the valley. It moved unnaturally fast across the open ground, a momentary disturbance in the corner of the vision.

At the crest of the hills around the valley it paused to look down in the night at the lit up town far below.

Then Bakeem continued forward and walked down the mountain.

I could barely have imagined three years ago, after finishing up
Sly Mongoose
, that I would be finishing this book up thanks to the generosity of the fans of the previous three books. What a strange and awesome journey!

Due to the vagaries of commerce, ordering, and the bookstore distribution system the series had been holding flat in sales. We were losing sales in bookstores and slowly spiraling as each book got ordered less, and thus sold less. However readers were increasingly ordering the books directly, so overall we were holding steady. My editor at Tor Books and I put our heads together and decided that I would strike out in a new direction with our next book,
Arctic Rising
, to see if I could increase my sales.

But that left readers who loved
Crystal Rain
,
Ragamuffin
, and
Sly Mongoose
hanging. Many wrote to ask when Pepper was going to come back. They wanted more. And since
Sly Mongoose
had been published, the world had changed. There were more opportunities for writers to experiment with. In particular the concept of Kickstarter, a method to crowdfund a project via preorders, caught my attention. I saw Tu Publishing spring into existence via Kickstarter. Mur Lafferty hit it out of the park with a series of novellas. Tim Pratt funded a new Marla Mason novel.

For a year I conspired with Pablo Defendini, laying out the details of what I hoped would be a successful Kickstarter project for
The Apocalypse Ocean
that would allow people to preorder the book, and thus crowdfund it into existence. Pablo worked on a cover graphic, and estimated what he would need to charge me for interior design.

I wasn't sure if the Kickstarter would be successful. I had no expectations. It was terrifying to put one's self out in the public in such a way that the failure would be totally public. People emailed me, wondering about my sanity. Many were concerned about what I would do if it wasn't successful (my response: the same thing I was doing the month before I launched it).

But we
were
successful. There were enough Xenowealth readers out there that we overshot the amount needed and reached a stretch goal of getting Pablo Defendini to create a map of the Xenowealth in addition to the cover.

So this is the part where I thank the people who made this possible. My thanks to Pablo Defendini, my partner and co-conspirator in this project. I also have to thank my wife, Emily, as usual for being there as I decided to jump into writing this book. She's always got my back. I also would like to thank Alexandria Ferland for her work with initial copy edits, and to Tim Hyatt for final copy edits. All remaining errors are the author's fault.

But the real special thanks go out to the following supporters who went above and beyond to back this project on Kickstarter and make the book real through their generosity:

ArachneJericho

Selby Evans

Michael Mallette

Subterranean Press

Dan Rogart

Alex J. Avriette

I would also like to thank everyone who preordered the limited edition, signed hardcover. Your support made this real:

Fred Kiesche

Raph Koster

Chris Gerrib

Carl Rigney

Paul Stevens

John Wenger

Travis

Martin Debes

Caroline Kierstead

Atit Patel

Howard Carter

KateMacLeod

Jason Chambers

Scott Lynch

James Weber

Kate Baker

Brent Bowen

Rae Carson

rainking187

Libba Bray

ldunagan

David Chamberlain

Freya Buckell

Philip Harris

Special thanks also go out to Kevin Pratt of Black Tusk Books for coming in later in the whole process. He got us over the edge to get Pablo Defendini to design the interior map.