Authors: Gavin Smith
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger tiredly and put the monitor down.
‘Finished your little trip down squaddie memory lane?’ Morag asked testily. I couldn’t quite work out how we’d managed to piss her off this time.
‘Hey!’ I started. That wasn’t fair. We’d discovered that we’d lost some people we knew. Mind you, we were used to that.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said through clenched teeth.
Pagan seemed to be in a world of his own. I think he was running through the information I’d given them from Vicar. Morag picked up the monitor and slender fingers played across the screen.
‘No offence, Morag,’ Mudge said bravely. ‘But what would you know about the special forces community?’
Morag paused to glare at him but then went back to what she was doing. Finally she handed the screen to me. I looked at it.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s actually not a bad idea.’ I started reading the notes. ‘Interesting family background, long line of Philadelphia gunfighters, 1st Infantry, Tunnel Rat on Lalande …’
‘Which would be useful?’ Morag asked sarcastically.
‘Delta,’ I said finally and then put the monitor down. ‘It’s a good idea, but she’s got a good job. Why would she leave it to come and die with us?’ Morag tapped the screen. I looked back and read a little further. ‘Oh, she got fired.’
‘Because of us,’ Morag said.
That made sense. Or rather it would make sense to the sort of idiot who made decisions like that. She’d done a good job and would have continued to do so.
‘So she’ll be pleased to see us. Do we know where she is?’
Morag shook her head. ‘But only because I haven’t asked God yet.’
Pagan looked over at me and tapped his head. ‘That will help. All the Cabal’s files were purged and the NSA have not been very forthcoming.’ I nodded.
‘Who are we talking about?’ a perplexed Mudge asked.
It was a case of killing two birds with one stone. We’d found out where she was and the Arizona Coast was a good enough place to buy the gear we wanted. I think the best thing about it was the coastline was close enough to ride to. Though we’d borrowed a hover truck to carry whatever we bought back with us. It was almost fast enough to keep up with the bikes.
Pagan was driving the truck, much to Mudge’s disappointment. Mudge had been trying to choose just the right driving drug when Pagan nipped into the cab and plugged himself in. Mudge had insisted on finding something called peyote for what he called an authentic desert experience. Pagan had appeared unwilling to subject himself to Mudge’s drug-fuelled driving.
The best thing about the trip was that it had pissed Sharcroft off. I was never going to get tired of that. The best thing about Limbo was that I’d managed to get some decent food and a good night’s sleep. This was after I’d had a disconcerting several hours with both Morag and Pagan plugged into my head trying to find the elusive info that they hoped Nuada had planted somewhere in my systems. They found nothing. It didn’t matter to me: I got to sleep next to Morag.
Pagan had cornered me the following day and insisted that we connect via cable. I felt a little self-conscious as he plugged into me. He was so security-conscious that he didn’t even sub-vocalise. Instead we communicated via text message.
‘Morag has tried but she could not remember what Nuada asked you to remake,’ he texted me. He was trying to keep his face expressionless but I was pretty sure he loved that I’d had a religious experience after some of the discussions we’d had.
‘Pays Padarn something,’ I texted back. This he looked less impressed at. ‘I think it was in a foreign language,’ I added defensively.
‘You should have come to me immediately, while it was still fresh in your mind,’ the next message said. I nodded and tried to look contrite. I still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t all bullshit. Pagan was concentrating. I reckoned he was cross-referencing some internal directory. I hoped he was enjoying himself but I hoped it sarcastically.
Another message appeared in my IVD from our hard-wired link. ‘Do you mean Pais Badarn Beisrydd?’ It sounded right but I wasn’t sure. I decided to make my life a little easier by answering in the affirmative and asking if he knew what it was.
‘Yes, it’s part of British and Arthurian myth. It’s one of the thirteen treasures of Britain. It’s a cloak or a coat that is said to turn the wearer invisible.’
‘That’ll be useful,’ I texted back. I was wondering if he would pick up on the irony in a text medium.
‘You’re taking it too literally,’ he replied. Apparently not. ‘I think it’s either part of a program or a program that might help us move unseen in Demiurge-controlled systems,’ he continued. ‘If only Nuada had given it to someone useful.’ Pagan was smiling. I gave him the finger. Then something occurred to me.
‘Maybe her head’s too busy?’ I asked, meaning the presence of the ghost of Ambassador in Morag’s head.
Pagan shrugged.
Then I sent another text. ‘Did she see anyone while I was away?’
Pagan looked pissed off. It felt like I left his reply blinking on my IVD for a long time. Pagan had unplugged us both before I had the guts to open it. It simply said, ‘Did you?’ Pagan was watching for a response. I knew it was written all over my face. Pagan shook his head and walked out of the workspace.
I’d left my bike in an old hangar building on the surface close to the silo. The muscle car and dirt bike we’d stolen were there as well, as was the military surplus hover truck we’d borrowed. A secondary or tertiary reason for owning a bike like the Triumph Argo, loath as I was to admit it, was to impress women. I wasn’t disappointed by Morag’s response. Though she appreciated it as someone who liked riding bikes when she had the chance.
She had on a pair of bike boots, armoured combat trousers, a hoodie and an armoured leather jacket with some complex and possibly Celtic design painted on the back. She looked like a normal street kid as she checked the bike out. I couldn’t help smiling.
‘I like it,’ she said. ‘Let me ride it.’
‘Morag, I very possibly love you, but no.’
I could hear Mudge and Pagan arguing in the background. She gave me a strange look. It lasted for some time. I was starting to wonder what I’d said wrong this time.
‘You can ride pillion if you want,’ I said.
She just sneered at me and climbed onto the dirt bike. The engine started as she texted the code to it. She gunned the motor and was out of the hangar. I had to admit that Morag was getting much better at riding. I remember nervously watching her ride on the Dead Roads. She had obviously far surpassed the skillsofts that she’d used to learn initially.
I sent the codes to my own bike as I watched her dust cloud speeding away from us. The Argo was a much faster bike so it wasn’t going to take long to catch her. I climbed onto my rumbling machine. The hover truck’s armoured skirts were inflating as I headed out of the garage after her across the nearly featureless desert plain. I felt the sun like a physical force as soon as I left the shade of the hangar. This was despite my coat’s cooling system.
The desert surprised me. It had a lot more colour than I thought it would. Admittedly they were mainly reds, browns and yellows with the odd patch of green, but it was still beautiful. The size and blueness of the sky with just the odd scudding cloud took some getting used to, as did the distance to the horizon.
We tried to avoid main roads and towns where we could. It was easier in the Navajo Nation, who took our tolls and then minded their own business. We drove and rode through a number of deserted towns. It felt like an empty land. I liked that.
We camped less than twenty miles from our destination. We could see the glow of New Venice from where we made camp. Started a fire, cooked food and drank sour mash. It wasn’t as good as single malt whisky.
Mudge sang us songs that he assured us were authentic for the situation. He said that it was called country and western music, a pre-FHC style that predated the country and metal that Cyberbillys favoured. It sounded like a dying cat trying to yodel. I was pretty sure that Mudge was running some kind of shitty karaoke program on his IVD.
Later on when we were all quiet, enjoying the stars as the fire burned down, Morag in my arms, Mudge threw me a file. I pushed it into one of the plugs in the back of my neck and downloaded the music. It was by a man called Cash. It wasn’t the sort of thing that I would normally listen to but it fitted.
In retaliation for the destruction of the Brazilian Spoke and the use of air-launched, nuclear-tipped, anti-satellite weapons on several orbital facilities, the Multi Nationals and their backers had destroyed California. It hadn’t slipped into the ocean like some had once thought possible, but the ocean still swamped much of it.
They had targeted the San Andreas Fault, another fault area called the Eastern California Shear Zone, as well as offshore fault lines. The kinetic strikes were much more extensive than the Birmingham bombardment and had pierced the faults down through the Earth’s crust. The damage from the resultant earthquakes was appalling, but it was the successive tidal waves from the bombardment as well as the subsequent underwater quakes and volcanic activity that had caused the most deaths. It was the greatest loss of human life as a result of a single incident in human history.
It redrew the Californian coastline and turned much of the previously dry state into a muddy salt swamp. More flooding took place as a result of the global rise in water levels. All coastal cities had been destroyed, as had many of the cities further inland. The state’s as well as the country’s economy lay in ruins. It was a blow that America had not really recovered from in the intervening two hundred and fifty plus years.
California had become a ghost state, a waterlogged equivalent of the Dead Roads inhabited by few but the truly degenerate and insane. Large swathes of it were a shallow sea, the water broken only by the rubble of pre-FHC civilisation.
Mudge told us the story around the campfire. Growing up, we’d all heard versions of it but he had the education to know it properly, I guess. Pagan probably knew it too but he remained quiet and looked solemn, even sad. I tried to imagine what that night had been like. It must have felt like the end of the world. I wondered if they’d had time to realise something was wrong. Would they have been able to understand the magnitude of the disaster that was killing them? I could only think of it in the most abstract terms. I hoped that they had died quickly, but I knew many of them would not have.
The same night the corporations hit the faults they had also hit every single dam on the Colorado River. This, along with the general rise in the water table, led to partial flooding of the Grand Canyon and surrounding areas. While it paled in significance compared to the destruction of California, it was another blow against America’s infrastructure. The lights went out in Vegas just before the aftershocks hit it. It also led to the Grand Canyon and environs becoming euphemistically known as the Arizona or Nevada – depending on what side you were on – Coast.
Vicious, often artificially augmented, tidal bore waves forced down narrow canyons gave birth to the dangerous sport of canyon surfing and turned the Arizona/Nevada Coast into a the number-one surf spot in North America. Though the truly hard core sometimes risked the dangers of California to surf the ruins of its destroyed cities. The area had been developed by an alliance of mob money and the local Hulapai Native Americans, who had ensured that the land was not further abused too much. Fortunately, as the target market was surfers, not too much development was needed. They liked to rough it. The development alliance used surf tribes to police the coast. Some of the tribes were borderline feral people from the ruins of California.
The free and easy approach to law enforcement coupled with a love of cash meant a burgeoning grey market. We were hoping to find what we’d need in the arms and tech markets of New Venice.
I felt overdressed in my raincoat. Everyone else looked much more at home, particularly Pagan with his staff and ritual accoutrements back on show, although our pale and soon-to-be-red skin marked us out as Europeans.
Much of New Venice clung to the canyon walls or made use of caves in the side of the canyons, though the Hulapai council had forbidden any excavation. The streets were often rope bridges out over the water, or platforms linking buildings that clung to the cliff. Most of the people were tanned, muscular and heavily tattooed. There was a lot of scar tissue on show, some of it ritual, most of it the result of meeting a canyon wall at speed. Many were heavily pierced and/or had their hair cut, braided or deadlocked into elaborate patterns. They wore shorts, cut-offs or wetsuits. The women wore bikini tops and the men were mainly stripped to the waist. Most carried knives but only the tribal police seemed to wear guns.
After we’d found people who seemed trustworthy enough to bribe to look after our vehicles, we asked God where she was, knowing that she would have asked God to alert her if anyone made enquiries about her. Then we made our way through New Venice down into the main canyon. As we took the bridges over the smaller canyons we began to see the surfing. The surfers would watch one of the tidal bores approaching and jump off bridges into deep-water rapids. Then they had to sort themselves out and get ready to catch the wave. If/when they caught the wave it shot them down the canyon like a bullet. The canyon walls were smeared with sun-baked blood.