Authors: Wesley Chu
Eventually, after the men had finished combing the ship and taken their bribes, James and Grace were allowed to go into the next room, where they had to pay their security fee, an exception fee, hangar service fees, five disavowed fees, and last, a you-look-like-trouble fee just so they could continue in.
Grace fumed as she checked their scratch. “Isn't the whole point of being autonomous from government that you don't have to pay exorbitant taxes?”
James grinned. “Funny. You just called it a tax. Let's just call it what it is: a bribe to a bunch of greedy assholes.” One of the guards overheard and glared. “Sorry, no offense,” James added, not really meaning it.
The guard shrugged. “None taken. We
are
a bunch of greedy assholes, and we'll be right here to take your exit bribe when you leave.”
They exited the hangar and entered the main residential levels of Bulk's Head. Other than the fact that it was inside the dead hulk of a ship and controlled by pirates, the colony seemed almost like any other, except for the fact that everyone they came across was armed to the teeth. This particular colony was under the protection of the Puck Pirates, one of the larger and more dangerous pirate conglomerates in the solar system. Few corporations or governments were willing to incur their wrath. It was almost never worth the hassle.
Bulk's Head was one of the larger travel hubs in the Wreck, so most people paid them little attention, though a few did give Grace a second glance. Not many people survived to her age in places like this, though the glances probably had more to do with the fact that she carried herself like the High Scion of the Technology Isolationists instead of just an old woman walking through the crowded halls of a pirate den. James reminded himself he'd have to have a talk with her about this soon, lest one of these bandits decide she must be someone worth robbing or kidnapping.
“Is it going to be a problem that you have a sizable price on your head?” Grace asked when he threw back his hood.
“That's one of the few things I don't worry about here.” James chuckled. “Bounty hunting is one of the few laws they strictly enforce. Most of the guys here have prices on their head. If they were to allow it, the Wreck would implode within a matter of hours.”
James felt safe as they crossed the different levels, passing the merchant district, slavers' quarters, import markets, and made their way through the busy passageways to the residential levels. He didn't completely let his guard down, though. Crime was still high, and people often disappeared in the middle of the night. The bounty on James's head was large enough that it could tempt someone to risk Puck Pirate justice. Greed made men foolish and reckless.
The two rented a small one-room residence just big enough to sit together without having to crawl over each other, yet not large enough for both to sleep at the same time once the bunk was lowered. The room's oxygen usage would also be an issue. Each residence was allocated a certain amount of air every day. Anything past that would incur overage charges.
“I do not understand.” Grace frowned when he explained it to her. “Why is air so expensive, and wouldn't air just flow inside once you open the door?”
“Air has to be constantly recycled and filtered in the colonies, especially older places like this that constantly leak.” James pointed at the dim blue lights lining the door. “Sensors at the door measure oxygen intake and count it against our allocation. We pay daily penalties for going over.”
“I studied the Wreck's economy on our way here,” said Grace. “It's large enough that there are opportunities for points of entry, but small enough to be manipulated. It'll be a fun puzzle to solve. I should be up and running in no time.”
James headed out the door. “I'll start getting a lay of the land on a possible salvager. Maybe I can find a doctor, an ex-chronman, or an illegal jumper.”
“Keep an eye out for an access hack as well,” she yelled after him. “And stay away from the bars.”
James looked up and down the rusted and warped hallways and randomly picked a direction to stroll to get to know his new environment. Familiarity with his surroundings would be important in case things went bad, and if Grace's plan to manipulate the market succeeded, they might make some enemies. He hoped she knew what she was doing. He stopped himself. Of course she did. Grace always knew what she was doing, and in this case, she had to. Their success depended on her.
It had been months since James had last walked among civilized people in the present, if he could call pirates and smugglers civilized. The place was surprisingly clean for a pirates' den, though to be honest, after living underground in the ruins of wasted cities, any place seemed clean. Still, Bulk's Head struck him as pretty civilized, up until he rounded the corner and saw a corpse decaying in a back alley.
He continued on, first mapping out the paths near their residence to make sure they had multiple routes to the
Frankenstein
if they needed to make a quick escape. Then he toured the main halls and different sections of the colony, mentally categorizing the vibe of each place, making sure to mark down points that might prove useful.
He continued upstream against the busy crowds, getting bumped constantly at intersections. It had been a while since he last was in a space station. Funny, he didn't remember ever having to deal with this before. Then he realized: he was no longer of the tier. For so long, he had taken for granted the aura of fear surrounding chronmen. Now, no one gave him space when he walked down the halls; no one paid him any deference. For once, he was as invisible as he had always wished to be when he was a chronman. He was just like everyone else, a commoner. A nobody.
And he hated it.
More and more people shoved past him, pinballing him into others who reciprocated by pushing him into even more people. James resisted the urge to lash out. He took a breath, remembered his new place in the world, and followed the flow of traffic. The more he explored the colony, the more depressed and suffocated he felt. The place reminded him of a mixture of Himalia and Mnemosyne Station, two of his least favorite places in the world. Though in truth, most stations these days looked like this.
Before he realized where the crowds had taken him, he found himself in front of one of the colony's many seedy bars: the Drink Anomaly. Of course he would end up here. The temptation was strong. If he was smart, he would keep walking. Grace had found one of his liquor stashes in the hold one night on the way to the Wreck and berated him so loudly her voice echoed across the entire ship. She had thrown Sasha's name at him over and over again, bludgeoning him with her sickness.
The thought of his sister gave him pause and filled him with a mixture of relief, anxiety, and guilt. Relief that she was back in his life and that he could finally let go of the guilt that had plagued him for the past twenty years. It was accompanied, however, by the crushing anxiety and burden of parenthood, knowing her safety and wellness was once again in his hands. He had failed her the first time; he didn't think he could survive failing her again. For twenty years, all he had cared about was himself. Now, alongside his concern for Elise, it was almost too much pressure to bear.
“Pull yourself together,” he growled. “You've faced sun raiders and Plutonian cannibals. Taking care of the two women should be far easier.”
It wasn't, though, at least it didn't feel that way. Black abyss, he needed a drink. The ghosts of the Nazi soldier and Sasha were standing on either side of the bar entrance. His sister's eyes bored into him and seemed to disapprove of what she saw. She looked away.
The Nazi soldier whistled. “First time away, and that's all you can think of. I would think her death and twenty years of guilt would make you a better brother.”
“That's not true,” James protested. “I need to go inside to find her a doctor.”
“You only think that.”
“Fuck you, you little fascist,” James snapped, not taking his eyes off his sister.
“You know, I have a name.”
“Yeah? What is it, Nazi?”
“You should have asked before you killed me.” The Nazi soldier laughed and turned to Sasha. “Come on, girl, your brother doesn't care about you. He just wants the bottle.”
“No, that's not why I'm going in,” James protested. “And don't talk to my sister.” He stopped. Of course that was why. He couldn't lie to himself. He was getting pulled by the lure of the alcohol. He had been trying his best not to drink. Promised Elise, promised Sasha, promised himself. Yet here he was, at his first opportunity away from his loved ones, heading straight into a bar.
He looked down at the hallucination of his sister still standing there as if guarding the entrance. No, she was guarding him from the bar. James swallowed and felt his mouth go dry. He forced himself to turn away and stagger down the hallway, each step taking more effort than the previous. Finally, after what felt like walking in triple gravity, he turned the corner and leaned against the wall. His brow was drenched in sweat and his hands shook uncontrollably.
He took a few deep breaths and tried to refocus his mind. Focus on what his real purpose was here on Bulk's Head. He was here to help to save Sasha, the real Sasha, not this hallucination in his sick mind. She was alive now and back with Elise on Earth. He looked back around the corner and saw the neon-lit sign of the bar entrance. Below, the ghost of his sister stood, staring at him. Always staring.
James turned away with fresh resolve and walked in the opposite direction. He had a job to do here. He had a time traveler and a doctor to find. For Sasha. It was time to get to work.
Â
The dark figures disturbed the haze in ones and twos, slicing through the black and gray roiling fog that permanently blanketed the region. The numbers of bodies appearing and disappearing increased, followed by the growing sounds of thousands of footsteps. Mist swirled around the silhouettes, dancing in circles as if alive until it eventually lost its form. A few moments later, it was as if the procession had never come through.
Elise tilted her head to the side and stared at a metal sign hanging off only one corner of a leaning pole: B
ROOKLYN
B
RIDGE
, with an arrow pointing to the top left corner of the sign. Behind it, an ominous structure full of wires and beams and stone poked through the fog.
It had taken almost a week for the Elfreth to move down the skypath highway across the Long Island Sound, down the length of the peninsula, through the mostly-submerged Hamptons, then west down the lower Suffolk path until they reached the outskirts of New York City. It took another day to navigate through Queens, but now they stood on the east side of the East River entering the dreaded Mist Isle, better known during her time period as Manhattan.
Today was the first day they entered the haze, originally created by a frequency EMP bomb, dropped during the Core Conflicts in the middle of the twenty-fourth century. The lingering effects of the bomb now manifested as an unnatural, permanent fog. It prevented all frequencies from penetrating inside or out, effectively creating a surveillance and communications dead zone. It would hamper the Elfreth, but would completely mask them from the Co-op as well. A more than fair trade-off, and a necessary one.
A shriek pulled Elise's gaze out into the ocean. She saw a tall dark object in the distance, a lone broken tower rising up from the water just to the south of the island. A dense flock of large creatures shaped like pterodactyls circled above it, their high-pitched cries piercing the otherwise quiet night. There seemed to be a nest of some sort at the top of the jagged point. Something about the building pulled at her memory.
She squinted at the flying creature. Some idiot hadn't brought back dinosaurs, had they? Who knew. Elise had been in 2512 for less than a year and she had already seen things more terrifying than she could possibly have dreamed existed, from humanoid snakes to packs of seemingly intelligent lions to centipede bears; the geneticists of the future must have gone to town with mutations. It made the twenty-first-century biologist in her nauseous.
Elise studied the lonely building again and then realized why its shape seemed so familiar. It was a decapitated statue of a woman with one arm raised, cut off at the elbow. She could see a hole through the body of the statue where its heart would be.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The words came out so softly Elise almost didn't realize she had said them. They were from another time, long past and probably forgotten, except perhaps saved on some chron database server somewhere. There was meaning behind those words, a spirit of generosity and community. Words that no longer had a place.
She shivered as a gust blew in from the south, pushing such a thick bank of fog over the Statue of Liberty that it disappeared. It came in so quickly, everything around Elise darkened several shades in a blink of an eye, as if a cover were pulled over the world. It was strange, this fog. When the wind blew, she could see the mist move, yet it didn't move. Then she realized that there were two layers of fog here, one that reacted to the air, and one that ignored it completely. The scientist in her wanted to investigate further, but the Oldest in her had more urgent matters on her mind.
In the distance, thunder rumbled first from the west, then the east, and then all around, as if each of the clouds loaded with acid rain and lightning were echoing in a chorus. The crackling increased, soon followed by lightning dancing horizontally across the sky, streaking from heavy cloud to heavy cloud. The storm would be upon them soon, and when it was, it would be unforgiving. The world she lived in now didn't know how to treat its inhabitants in any other way.