Core Punch (2 page)

“It will not always be if they die down there,” Joe pointed out, though it felt both obvious and unnecessary. And how did they live if they didn't work?

They live off the land.

“Logic doesn't always trump emotion. Or tradition.” Her lips pursed a bit wryly.

He wondered why the wry.

She's a Baker,
Lurch pointed out, with its own version of wry. It felt much like an internal itch between his shoulders.

Joe considered this, adding up the many—make that very many—Bakers who served in the NONPD, including their Captain.

Do you think she did not wish to be a police officer?

The idea interested him. He had not planned on this law enforcement side trip. But he could not be sorry. His gaze drifted toward her once more. Her shoulders began to twitch. Not quite seat dancing, but heading that way. Since they were in the skimmer, he knew she was listening to music through her gear. Though that was officially discouraged, it wasn't outright banned because this was NON. One might as well ban crawfish or
beignets.

Or letting the good times roll…

Her dance stopped when the scan finished. “Looks like we got four dirt-siders to collect—wait—what the—”

“It is a cold spot.” Joe mentally echoed her surprise.

“Cold spot?” She gave a tiny shake. “Not possible. The heat's been building in for days ahead of the storm. It's so freaking humid, I almost bought diving gear on my way to work today.”

Vi—Baker had made this threat many times since summer arrived. She also claimed he'd grow gills if he stayed long enough. Almost he believed her.

“Malfunction?” She gave him a hopeful look.

Joe considered this and shook his head. If all the spots had rendered cold—but they hadn't. “Unlikely.”

She muttered something that could have been a curse. “Can you get me co-ords? We'll have to check it out.”

“Should we not perform our primary mission first?”

“Our cold spot is in the old city. If the feeder bands keep dumping water like they have been, it's more likely to be under water before we can get back. It fills up fast in a normal rain, now that no one is pumping the water out. And we're assuming our dirt-siders will cooperate with their rescue.”

It made sense to secure the body, if it was a body, that lacked the ability to be uncooperative. “Should I report our course change?” He asked because he was supposed to, not because he believed she'd agree.

“That will take longer than checking it out.”

Vi often stated that forgiveness was easier to receive than permission. She was most skilled at getting forgiven.

She adjusted course and speed, then eased the skimmer lower. The fact that Resources Management hadn't upgraded their regular craft to a more adept emergency transport told him all he needed to know about the priority of this assignment. Or the risk assessment. Vi had seemed annoyed about it, but had shrugged it off pretty fast.

With so many relatives in positions of authority, I suspect the detective has learned to be pragmatic about her assignments,
Lurch noted.

The venerable nanite often hovered between wry and pragmatic, and this thought was no exception. It was, perhaps, a function of living longer than human memory, not to mention its dependence on humans for survival.

We all depend on something for survival.

“Let's buzz the spot first,” she said, “maybe we won't have to stop.”

Joe attempted to activate their lower vid recorder, but it did not cooperate, even with the application of multiple love taps. Vi muttered something unflattering about its progenitors.

“Side vids are working,” he said.

“Okay, I'm going to make a low pass with a high bank angle and see if can get something on those side vids for you to look at.”

It was a move with some risk. The big storm was pushing a strong wind ahead of it. The trees were dense in the area, and the wind created turbulence over the trees. He saw a break and realized it was one of the little cities of the dead. Their cold spot must be in or near it. There was less plant congestion around it, which might help.

“Let's see if this piece of excrement has anything left,” she muttered, adjusting her bank angle. “Let me know if you see it on the vid. I'm only going to try this once.”

He watched the vid as they flashed past. He stopped the recording, zoomed in on the object.

“Well?”

“It is a body,” he said reluctantly. It could not be alive and be that cold, so the conclusion was acceptable, despite lack of confirmation. “Inside the cemetery enclosure.”

“Dead in a dead space. Someone has a sense of humor.” Vi keyed in a query on possible landing sites, while the skimmer made a wide, slow turn to bring them back over the area. “Looks like we don't have a good place to land inside. It's against regs anyway. Only unrestricted access through the walls is on this side here.” She tapped the screen. “Like furthest from frosty that we can get. Great. I'll go for that lawn in front of our gate. At least I hope that's a lawn and not a ship sucking swamp.”

She finished her turn, reducing altitude as she brought the skimmer down as gently as was possible with an aging, in-atmosphere craft descending through a turbulent atmosphere. Which was to say, a most bumpy ride, concluding abruptly when a down draft thumped them against the spongy ground.

“Sorry about that,” she flashed him a wry grin, then looked out the front viewer. “Let's hope it didn't shake loose something that we'll need later.”

It was a legitimate concern. The craft seemed to shed functionality almost daily.

She pulled up weather data and studied it. “WTF is still stalled. That's odd. I don't remember Nash predicting the storm to stall this long.”

Nash Roberts V was a weathercaster with a cult-like following that Joe found inexplicable. He had not been around long enough to verify Roberts' accuracy, but the locals swore he could do more with something called a whiteboard and a marker than all the fancy tech currently available. Joe didn't comment on her comment because he'd learned one didn't. You could mess with many things in NON, but you didn't mess with Nash.

“A stall is good for us. We should be able to what we gotta well before things get dicey here.”

Joe opened the hatch and looked out. The lawn—was that the correct word for the narrow expanse of dense grasses severely outnumbered by weeds?—was very wet. He lowered one booted foot, hoping it would eventually find solid ground down there. His foot sank to the ankle before it did.

This used to be a street or you might have sunk up to your armpits.

He brought his other foot down. When it also encountered support, he stood. From this vantage, he noted water flowing sluggishly through the weeds and grass. According to their weather data, it was too early for the storm surge. Had the rainfall caused this? It was difficult for him to process that much water falling from the sky. On the other hand, NOO was a steadily subsiding bowl, and as Vi had noted, no one tried to drain it anymore. As uncomfortable as their emergency gear was in the dense heat, he was glad for it. The flooding had most likely displaced the predatory animals that existed down here, though some were amphibious in nature, so perhaps they were emboldened more than displaced.

I believe poisonous snakes can swim,
Lurch confirmed with specious innocence.
And the fire ant problem has exploded since humans moved up.

But wouldn't the water disperse the ants?

They form into balls to survive.
It paused.
You do not want to accidentally penetrate one. Even your suit will not provide adequate protection.

Joe look uneasily around, wondering if the nanite was playing with him. Would his Glock 3000 stun them or anger them?

Vi had also clambered out. She tested the ground with her boots. “There's a kind of drop-off here. Watch your step. And for fire ant balls. You do not want to set them loose in the water while we're in it.”

Joe felt a glow of virtue from the nanite. Why did it always have to be right?

She scowled at the chest-high wall of the cemetery. “Looks like that's our access point over there.” She pointed at a breech in the wall. Moving with care, she headed for the rear of the skimmer and pounded the hatch control with her fist. It opened with its customary reluctance.

“Sure hope the body bag has recharged.”

Like the rest of the skimmer, the charging mechanism had an uncertain functionality. He helped her extract the bag and then secured their CSI kit. Vi—he realized he'd forgotten to keep it formal, but gave it up because it was too hot—locked it down and input the cords into the body bag's guidance system. He tossed the CSI kit on top, then she sent it on ahead of them.

“Hope it makes it,” she said, philosophically, watching it rise over the wall, then cut across the top of the crypts. “Can you imagine what a pain it must have been to carry bodies out of, or into, places like this?”

He made a noncommittal sound. He did not have to imagine. He knew. “I hope we do not find out.”

“No kidding.” She bounced on her toes a bit, looking around with a dubious expression. “Who on earth would want to live on dirt? It's so dirty.”

“Not all dirt is so moisture laden,” he pointed out, amused. The upper city was not what he would deem clean, though its clock was about to cleaned—yet another Vi phrase that he found to be obscurely apt.

“I suppose not.” She turned back to the hatch and extracted two dark bags with loose straps attached to them. He arched an inquiring brow. “Our 72'r kits,” she said, showing him how to slide the straps over his shoulders so that it rested uncomfortably on his back.

“What is a 72'r kit?”

“No clue,” she said, “but we have to carry them when we are not in official transport and are at emergency status. Regs.”

Regs was the end to any and all arguments, he'd learned. It trumped understanding and logic.

According to historical records,
Lurch told him,
it contains emergency supplies designed to sustain a single human for seventy-two hours. It also has additional emergency materials. I can provide a list of what is supposed to be contained in them….

Unnecessary.
Joe tried shifting it to a less uncomfortable position. And failed.

“Has anyone opened one?” Joe asked. “Looked inside?”

“Not in my memory.”

Since she was well into her 20s, possibly closing on her 30s, this was a bit disturbing. How sustainable would the supplies actually be? On the positive side, if they hadn't been opened or used in her memory, they were unlikely to require them.

Vi made a disgusted sound, tugged at the neck of her emergency rig. “Could it get any hotter?”

The first time she'd asked this he'd attempted to answer it. Now he knew better. Though in his experience so far, the answer was always yes.

“If Captain Uncle thinks this is going to freak me out, he can think again.”

“You suspect this is what you call a prank?”

“With my relatives, I always assume it's a possibility.” She checked her portable unit, gave it a love tap. “We'd better get moving or our body bag will
crapeau
out without us.”

Getting moving, they quickly learned, was easier said than accomplished. A couple of feet from the skimmer, the hard surface ended. Each step was a journey down into knee high water, then a tug-of-war with the sucking mud created by that water to extract their boots. Even the heavy grasses did not assist their progress as much as they should have. Their bulky storm gear added to their navigation difficulties, though he was not ungrateful for the protection it afforded as Lurch indicated plant forms that stung and others that caused painful itching and skin disruptions. He conceded that Vi had a point. Dirt side, while attractive, was unappealing as a place to live. Amazing that humans had endured it as long as they had.

Ahead of them, the cemetery looked even more like a miniature city. Stone walls made a sort of beachhead against a sea of glistening green. When the gate was reached, they found more hard surface beneath the grass, though it was not even in its disposition, lending itself to the additional concern of face-planting.

Old sidewalks, I would postulate. Even when they were widely used, they were somewhat inconsistent to navigate.

Inconsistent?

The city tended to sink in an uneven manner. It was built on a swamp
and continues to sink even now.

Oh.
What was it about this spot that had attracted their attention in the first instance?

The river. The water was their transit.

This dead city, in its way, was as interesting as the floating one. The cemetery had once been surrounded by something somewhat similar to the city above, so it would have had pedestrian paths, these uneven sidewalks.

“Are there vids of when the city was here?” he asked, surprised to realize he'd voiced the question aloud.

“Yeah” She half frowned. “My Paw Paw likes watching old vids, prefers something called spaghetti westerns, but he also likes seeing the city how it used to be, too. I can ask him for a list, if you'd like.”

“I would like,” he said, surprised that he meant it. It would have made this trip more interesting if he could imagine how it had been, had been able to “see” that old city here as they moved around.

Once through the narrow gate, the height of the grass diminished some, Joe noticed, and the ratio of grass to weeds modified to a ratio better for the grasses.

“The Catholic Church tries to maintain the cemeteries,” Vi said, as if he'd asked. “They still own them, you know. Looks like they mow the grass every now and again.”

Lurch could have provided much information on the NOO cemeteries, but it did not seem necessary to the circumstances, and Joe found info dumps distracting when not need-to-know. In any case, Vi provide more than sufficient distraction. He noticed she looked from right to left as she walked along the narrow row between the crypts, her walk lacking its usual determined grace, though that was the fault of the mud and heavy boots. He would not have minded the distraction she provided if she did not also boost the heat factor. He tugged at the neck of his gear. The intense humidity compounded his discomfort, and their gear provided no way for natural cooling to occur.