Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 94
She finished her cold toast and tuna, and caught a trolley back to the pub.
Pats was already inside; the oven-stove kept the place piping hot, and Pats had shed her coat. The pub owner, Maliki, wore suspenders over a sleeveless undershirt, showing off her brawny, tattooed arms.
“Look at you,” Maliki said. “When Pats said you’d pay for her drink, I knew you’d be in here asking for a favor.”
“Not from you,” Abijah said. “Need to see Popsy.”
“You think she just sits around waiting for jobs?”
“Yes,” Abijah said.
Maliki rolled her eyes. “Go on back then, but I want pay for the drink now. No IOUs!”
“Sure, give me a minute,” Abijah said, pulling off her hat as she went into the backroom where Popsy’s workshop lay. Popsy, Maliki’s kid, bore a huge monocle over one eye, surgically implanted. She stood over a veritable loom of disembodied interfaces that spurted green organic vistas and shimmering red torture chambers. She glanced back at Abijah with her big, magnified brown eye, and squinted. Her hair was bright purple, swept back from her brow into a great, shocking fan soldered into place with glue or gel or saints knew what.
“Hey, Popsy. I have some alien tech I need you to decode.”
“Great. Up to date on your bar tab?”
“Sure. I’ve gotten better at that. And I gave you that favor I owed you, too, that girl with the flaming hair? How’d that go?”
“None of your business. Give it here.” Popsy didn’t offer her wrist, but her open hand. Popsy knew six different kinds of alien specs.
Abijah dropped the communicator fob into her palm.
Popsy examined it with her massive surgically implanted lens. “Boy stuff, huh? Pretty primitive. What you want out of it?”
“Need to know who he contacted here.”
“Tomorrow work?”
“Could really use it today.”
“I could use a new hoverboard today. Ain’t going to happen.”
“How about I owe you a hoverboard?”
“Your IOU’s sit for months. I can get one myself by then.”
“Then I’ll owe you another favor.
Popsy heaved a sigh. “Go have a drink. Give me thirty minutes.”
“Thanks, Pops.”
Popsy waved her away.
Abijah sat with Pats and bided her time over a bartered drink. Maliki softened when Abijah paid half her tab through her interface with some of the funds Zoya had fronted her.
When Popsy called them back, Pats came with Abijah.
“We have two calls that came in back-to-back,” Popsy said, “after three days of nothing. These last two.” Popsy pointed at a map projection of the city. “The first was to this factory, here. A munitions company owned by Zoya –“
“Yeah, I know that one,” Abijah said. “You get a recording?”
“Sorry, only the pattern he called. This dead tech is really primitive, like I said.”
“And the other?” Abijah asked.
“Here,” Popsy said, pointing to a blank spot past the city center, deep into swampland. "Immediately after ending the first, too fast to dial a pattern, so I think –"
“What, he paging dino-crocs?” Pats said.
“If it has a communicator, yeah,” Popsy said. “That’s where the signal came from. That was the second, and final, call. I believe it-.”
"Why a second call?" Abijah said. "Let's say the first is to tell someone he's coming. Is the second…. What?"
Popsy put her hands on her hips. "Would you stop blathering and listen? It's possible it was a rerun."
"What the hell is that?" Pats said.
"It's like a tracking or recording program. Every call made from the fob is recorded and then rebroadcast once ended, to a second fob. You wouldn't know it was happening unless you opened up the guts of the fob and went through the physical call history. And I doubt your carrier was a spy or some shit."
“If I know it went to someone in the factory, great,” Abijah said, “But how do I narrow that down?”
Popsy steepled her fingers. “You find somebody else with a communicator like this one. C'mon, I'm no inspector, but that's pretty obvi.”
“That whole factory is teeming with boys," Abijah said. "They’ll all have one."
“Sounds like a tough job,” Popsy said, turning off the aerial map. She offered her wrist. “Data download?”
Abijah accepted the data transfer.
“I mean,” Popsy said, “you’re an inspector. Inspect, right?”
“Yeah,” Pats said, “just inspect, Jeezmo.”
“Thanks for the confidence,” Abijah said, and turned to leave.
“Don’t forget!” Popsy called. “You owe me a favor!”
“Should I look for purple-haired women?”
Popsy’s complexion darkened further. “Don’t be foolish. One needs a companion that coordinates, not a twin. You are so old, Abijah.”
“Her billion daughters think the same thing,” Pats said, and cackled.
#
The factories across the planet all relied on off world labor. Those born planetside enjoyed all the benefits of being real people, benefits not afforded to laborers who were expected to return to the glorified tin cans from whence they’d come once their work was finished. Of course, for many boys, the work was never done. They sent resources back to their tin cans until they died. Unable to reproduce with anyone on planet, each was a single genetic line, ending neatly at the end of his life.
Abijah spent far too much time in factories; they were the primary problem areas, because of the problematic labor, and the problematic people who administered it. People like Zoya.
Zoya gave her access to the personal barracks for the boys she employed at the factory, but there were six dozen of them, far too many for her and Pats to get through in an afternoon. Instead, Abijah spent some time interviewing the five foremen; two local women and three men from the sky. They all purported to know nothing of communicators among the staff – illicit or otherwise.
“No one wants to contact home unless they’ve got something to send back,” said one of the local women as Pats emptied out a few of the boys’ lockers.
Another foreman, one of the boys, piped up from the back, “Maybe somebody called the desk, you know? Called the factory floor manager.”
“We’ll check into that,” Abijah said, turning on him. “Where’s your locker?”
The kid blanched, but led her there.
Abijah rummaged through it, pulling out a spare jumpsuit, mud-caked boots, a factory-issued knife that appeared to have never been used, a bar of soap, three chewed-up styluses, and six empty vodka-and-sodas. It was like going through her own locker at home. Something bothered her about that, and it wasn't just the drinking on the job. It was like the boy tried too hard to look like a mess. She tapped the sides of the locker, and checked behind it, but no luck.
“Let’s hit the other address,” Abijah said. "See where the call was duped to." She pointedly didn't look at the foreman.
“I can squeeze them a little, Jeezmo,” Pats said.
“I've seen you squeeze," Abijah said. "Let's not." She pressed her palm into her pocket, ensuring the communicator was still there.
Getting transport out to the edge of town was difficult. Nobody wanted to pedal them out, and the solar vehicles weren’t free until several hours after cold dark descended. Abijah sat in the back of a solar-cycle pulled rickshaw with Pats, both shivering in their long coats, as they motored out past the city limits and into the swampy outskirts. Their driver left them at a divot of a pathway marker at the side of the road. Abijah was thankful for her coat and her boots, then. Pats grumbled the first hundred paces, but then began to wax on about their time during the war.
“You remember when we had those big electric guns?” Pats said, her boots squelching in the mud as Abijah tried to triangulate their position based on the communication coordinates Popsy had given them. “Loved those fucking guns.”
“They’d fry us half as much as the enemy,” Abijah said.
“That was half the fun.”
A quarter hour later, they stood in front of a rundown derelict, half buried in the swampy ground. A single orange light beamed from a loosely-secured doorway. A loose hedge of bulrush seemed to be transforming into snakes, little tongues flickering from the heads, tasting the air.
Abijah nodded at Pats, and they flanked the door. Abijah grabbed the edge of the metal masking the entrance, and pulled it away, discarding it.
Just as Pats darted in, a boy leapt out, so fast and unexpectedly that he knocked Pats down into the mud. She made a choking sound. He took off like a startled animal, pale legs pumping like pistons.
“Stop!” Abijah said. “Gardai!”
She wasn’t a garda, not at all, but it sometimes worked.
It didn’t work.
“Fucking little shit,” Pats said, spitting mud, and clawed her way up. She bolted after him, surprisingly spry. It had been a long time since Abijah saw Pats in pursuit.
Abijah ran after her, only to catch her foot on a loose root and go over. “Alive, Pats!” she yelled, because it was worth reminding her.
She managed to get back up, but pain shot up her left ankle, slowing her down. She followed the sounds of fleeing and pursuit; slap of wet branches, squelch of mud and whisper of massive leaves. A knot of movement to her right resolved itself into a giant reptile, eight paces long, wound about a tree and peering down at her with slitted green eyes; an adult from the hedge, possibly. She regretted not bringing sixteen electric guns, or more.
“Shit!” Pats yelled, far ahead.
Abijah stumbled faster, grabbing tree trunks for support, cursing her fucked up ankle. It was the same one she had twisted when Maurille, her first wife, had gone into labor, and the war department had called Abijah out of the field, though she hadn't requested leave. She had twisted her left ankle in the blasted trough left behind after the sappers had been through; her ankle was never the same. Weaker, more prone to injury. When she arrived at home, Maurille had already given birth to Marjani, and named her: Marjani Olivia Savedra. Abijah held the perfect little bundle in her arms, marveling at the tiny nose, the little fingers; a human in miniature, while her ankle throbbed and swelled, never to fully recover.
“It’s like having another arm just… walking around out there,” Maurille had told her of the child, laughing at the absurdity of it; but her eyes were certain, serious. “It’s like a piece of me is out there now, walking and talking… forever out of my control. We are responsible for a little person, Abijah.”
“Abijah!”
Abijah landed in a clearing, and nearly went over into the black, roiling depths of swampy water that wended its way between and among what appeared to be an infinite number of trees.
“He fell in!” Pats said, pointing at a rapidly disappearing figure a few paces from the shore. “He’s in!”
“Goddammit, Pats, you’re always killing witnesses.”
“Witnesses are always stupid!”
They spent half an hour trying to fish him out; too long, it turned out. But they got him before the reptiles did. Abijah attempted to revive the boy, but he was gone.
Abijah made Pats carry him, and they made their way back to the derelict. Inside, a squatter’s camp; a communicator with a key matching the one that Popsy had traced there, and – most importantly, to Abijah’s employer – a half-eaten steak on a plate, near the oven-stove.
"What the fuck went on here?" Abijah muttered.
“Good job, Jeezmo!” Pats said, tearing off a piece of steak.
“Leave that be until I record it,” Abijah said, and called Zoya.
Then, she made the call she really didn’t want to make.
She called fucking Katya.
#
“There were definitely at least two more here,” Katya said, hands on her thick hips, surveying the derelict. “We’ll track down the other two. Looks like some kind of terrorist cell. Gonna be hard, no impossible, to find the one giving the orders, with this boy dead, though.” She looked pointedly at Pats.
Pats chewed on the end of a cattail. “Want you to know that I resent being sober for all this.”
“They keep these cells tight,” Katya said. “Boys must have been tracing that fob on your carrier. Maybe others, too. Question is, why him? But we'll figure that out. Guess you’ll get paid for your big job, though, right? While I get more fucking paperwork. What did she have you retrieve, anyway? Family jewels? National treasure? Hope it was worth it.”
“It was a job,” Abijah said. “I do mine. You do yours.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, goodnight.”
One of the garda Abijah knew gave them a ride back to town; small favors, she figured. Abijah kept turning the communicator fob over and over in her fingers, deep in thought. The boy had put out calls three days before the shuttle launch, none duped. But the one he called in the day of the crash… sometime in those three days, they started tracking him. Somebody knew his was coming. Zoya, sure, but investigating her own crime – while not the first time Abijah had been asked to do something like that – seemed like too much effort for someone like Zoya. What was the connection between the boy and the factory? Certainly someone at the factory was getting the terrorists supplies for aerial bursts, to shoot down shuttles. But she had yet to find the threads linking them all.
When they arrived at the apartment, Pats wanted to come in and decompress, but Abijah used Marjani as an excuse.
“She doesn’t like you much,” Abijah explained as she got out of the vehicle.
“Sounds like you’re… projecting. That’s what therapy says, right?”
Abijah left Pats in the cab and walked up the long tail of the stairs to her apartment; it felt strangely like walking up the stairs to a noose. She unlocked the door.
Marjani had something boiling on the stove; hot water? Tea? She wore loose trousers and some blousy pajama top that put Abijah in mind of a burlesque dancer. She could practically hear Popsy telling her how old she was.
“How did the job go?” Marjani asked.
“It’s done.” Abijah hung up her hat. “I just can’t understand, all those folks up there, sending their kids down here to die.”
Marjani sniffed. “Why is it strange,” she said, “them tossing their kids down here? You practically abandoned us, and it was certainly easier for you to visit us than it is for those aliens to visit their kids.”
“After the divorce, your mothers –“
“Before the divorce,” Marjani said, rounding on her. “You were never around. The first time I remember seeing you, I was four years old.”
“I saw you before that, when you were a baby.” Her ankle throbbed.
“My first memory is you pushing in the door, hauling that ugly black rucksack with you.”
“Yeah, well, I was around. Sometimes. Even if you didn’t remember it. It was a long war.”
“You’re so selfish.”
“I’m selfish?” Abijah said, suddenly exhausted, and done with her daughter’s continental, self-centered shit. “Did you ever think I was trying to protect you from my life? From being like me? How would that have gone, with me living on the continent, watching you get indoctrinated by the people I fought for half my fucking life? How would that go, them knowing one of your mothers was an enemy soldier?”
“The treaty –“
“Fuck treaties! You think treaties matter? Open your eyes! Look at how they cleared out the gardai two years ago and put boots on our streets! They were just looking for an excuse, a loophole, to send their own troops in here and replace all of our security forces with theirs. Peace and order? That’s what they bill it as. The war wasn’t that long ago, Maj. I know that. The people on the continent know that. And it’s possible that with me living under that roof with you, my resentment for all that shit around me would have become your resentment, and then who would you be? Another one of the losers, with a heart full hate. And it wouldn’t just be them you hated. You’d hate yourself. And eventually you’d learn to hate me.”
“I see you have it all figured out.”
"Here's how it would go," Abijah said, dropping her voice, going cold. She placed her hands on the counter. Leaned toward her daughter. "Two women would come to your boarding house. Shaved heads. Big boots. Faces so much the same you couldn't pick them out of a recording, after. They'd sit you down and ask about your fucking mother. What do you think of your mother?"
"And I'd say I hated her!"
"And when did you last see your mother?"
Marjani's gaze was flinty. She fairly trembled with rage. Behind her, the boiling water sent clouds of steam into the air. "Today was the last time I ever saw my mother."
"And you know what they'll say? They will say, that's good, kid. That's excellent. We're glad you hate your mother. Now get the fuck out and go your merry way." She swept her arm out, gesturing to the dirty apartment, the empty cans of vodka soda, Pats’s dirty coat – when had she left that there? - the grime-smeared counter. “You don’t need my fucking baggage. You deserved... you deserve a life on the continent without it.
“All I wanted was a mother –“
“You have two!”
“You know what I mean!”
“Sometimes the best thing a shitty mother can do is leave,” Abijah said, and when she said it out loud it, something in her chest seemed to break. She caught her breath, realizing she had missed something obvious, back at the factory. Something she should have seen and understood. She grabbed at the fob in her pocket.
“Well, you’ve been a good shitty mother, then,” Marjani said.
“I have to go,” Abijah said.
“Holy Saint Lucretia, are you fucking serious?”
“Sorry, Maj.”
“Marjani!”
Abijah grabbed her hat, and fled.
