The Apocalypse Ocean (4 page)

Tiago nervously stepped into one of Kay’s many lairs. It was at the end of Onyx Street, down a set of stairs cut into the side of the road and in the basement of an old house. The house sat in a chipped-out area of a rock outcropping at the very edge of town, 

He hated being summoned to one of Kay’s constantly moving headquarters. It had only happened a few times before. He preferred anonymity. He just wanted to keep doing what he was doing without trouble.

But he’d gotten ambitious, hadn’t he? He’d pickpocketed a visitor to the island. And she turned out to be more than she had appeared. This was what happened when you reached too far, Tiago thought. You got into trouble.

Amber late-afternoon light pierced the dusty windows inside the basement of the lair and a menagerie of Placa del Fuego’s shadowy denizens milled about. There were more Ox-men, some Runners, and even a few simple-minded Servants. A veritable conference of Kay’s entire criminal enterprise was being held, Tiago thought.

Things were happening. And like a piece of flotsam on the edge of a tide, Tiago was getting picked up and carried along. He’d had this feeling once before, when a riot he wasn’t involved in had happened right around him.

He’d spent five months in the Dekkan Holding Center when the police shoved in and started arresting rioters, even though Tiago had insisted he’d been innocent. He could have told them he was just there to pick pockets and not riot, but that wouldn’t have been a very good defense.

Tiago recognized familiar faces from Elizan’s old crew crowded in here, as well as other shady sorts from all over the rest of the city. Of course, all of them were Kay’s crew, now. She controlled the Waterfront and the Back Ring, and was almost done finishing up controlling the Harbor.

If it was criminal, and happened in Placa del Fuego, Kay wanted to run it.

Most of the other pickpockets had once worked for Elizan (a high-strung old man who would leap at a chance to whip anyone who’d held back the take). A tough life: many of them showed the scars to prove it, but it beat trying to live outside alone. When Elizan disappeared and Kay took over, most of these kids shrugged and got on with it. Because Placa del Fuego had no heart for the unsheltered. It was a literal death sentence.

Bakeem was talking to several of his Ox-men, and they were all heavily armed with pistols in belts, rifles on their backs. “I’m not sure if the Doaq contingency plan is going to be enough,” one of them growled at Bakeem.

Fear stabbed deep into Tiago’s spine.

What the hell all was going on down here? What was Kay up to?

When Kay appeared on the streets in the Back Ring, rain-burned, tired, and hiding in the gutters, she’d been ignored for the first week. The second week she’d figured out the command structure of one of the drug cartels. The story was that she’d killed the commander with a sliver of knapped flint.

And within days the cartel was hers.

Rumors said she came from a Nesaru colony on the planet Okur, where the birdlike alien Nesaru ruled with absolute control under the Bacigalupi Doctrine. With the war for human independence boiling over, the Nesaru had been worrying they would lose their access to fuel. They thought the collapse of interstellar travel would happen as a consequence once the Satrapy, which had ruled the Forty-Eight worlds until then, fell. 

So the Nesaru had bred humans into a variety of forms to serve them, to create a calorie-based slave society instead of a fuel-based one. Like breeds of dogs, the Nesaru rapidly genetically engineered, bred, and reshaped humanity into Ox-men, Runners, Servants, Pickers, Gardeners, Calculors, Luminoids, and many more. Many of those humans had fled Okur to Placa del Fuego after the war, where their services were needed.

So had Kay, Tiago heard.

She was something else, the strange Okur refugees said. Most of them were terrified of her. She was something designed to control the modified human slaves under the Nesaru’s thumb. She could read your thoughts by the slightest change in your posture, a twitch in a facial muscle. She emitted pheromones to calm you, convince you, and used her body to control your personal space.

Everyone was a computer, waiting to be programmed by her. She was the taskmaster. A perfectly bred, engineered, manipulator of humankind.

And here they all were, in the basement with her. All in thrall.

Talking about Doaq contingency plans?

“Tiago.” Kay beckoned him closer. He moved to fall into her orbit. “I have quite a job for you.”

Tiago saw that everyone was looking at him. It unnerved him.

“There will be considerably more money in it for you,” Kay said softly, as if sharing a secret between the two of them. She walked around the wooden table in the basement and put a protective arm around Tiago. A warming gesture of trust, support, and confidence. “I really need your help with this, Tiago.”

He struggled to fight back. Getting involved was bad. He did what he did, couldn’t she just keep him on in that limited, distant role? “I … what do you need?” he stammered.

“You keep a low profile, Tiago. Back of the crowd. You don’t try to cheat me of my cut. You wouldn’t even dare think of it.”

Tiago nodded – don’t get noticed, don’t cross dangerous people like Kay unless you could run and melt into the background. These were his core life principles. He glanced at the silent crowd of varying human shapes and sizes studying him, then retreated back into the intimacy of the personal space between him and Kay.

“What’s wrong, Tiago?” Kay asked. “You’re shaking.” She held his hands in hers.

He wanted to throw up. “I don’t want to die,” he said.

“Tiago, you’re not a soldier. We’re not asking you to pick up arms. We have something else in mind. We need your quick hands and your quick mind. Besides, you are part of the moneymaking arm of this all. It would be stupid of me to risk your life. There’s no profit in it. Trust me,” she insisted, squeezing his hands.

And he did trust her.

He couldn’t help himself, no matter how hard he fought it.

“I need you to do something that will be tough, though,” Kay said.

Here it comes, Tiago thought. In the distant background the sound of rain alarms drifted through the streets. A night storm. The worst kind.

He waited.

“You spent some time in the Dekkan Holding Center. I need you to get on a prison wagon, and possibly go all the way back there.”

Tiago shivered. “You want me to go
back
?” Moist memories of the dark warrens bubbled back up to the front of his mind.

“Hopefully not.” Kay pointed at a kevlar poncho and gas mask hanging by the door. “But I have made a deal with Nashara. You and I are going to help her get something she wants.”

She was getting up to leave, not paying attention to him. A woman was holding out a selection of scarves and necklaces, and Kay smiled and pointed at one, then ducked her head in to have it placed around her neck. But Tiago had backed away. He was thinking of running.

No, he realized. He
was
going to make a run for it.

Where? He had no idea.

“Tiago!” she said, her back still to him.

An Ox-man grabbed him by the upper arm. The grip was furry and yet utterly implacable. The man picked him up and moved him back to the table.

“I can’t go back there,” Tiago said. “I
won’t
.”

Kay waved at the Ox-man. “Let go of him.”

He released Tiago, who rubbed his arm to help the blood rush back. “That place is a nightmare,” Tiago said miserably.

“I know. But I will get you out if it comes to that,” Kay promised. “You believe me?”

Tiago wasn’t so sure. He moved from foot to foot.

Kay moved closer. “Tiago, do you believe me?”

He curled his hands into his chest in a reflexive, protective motion. “I’ve been there. I can’t go back.”

She touched his shoulder. All rapport and confidence. “Tiago, what is the name of that girl you like?”

“Nusdilla,” he replied, before he could stop himself. Damn, damn, triple damn.

Kay moved her hand up to his neck and pulled him in close. 

“If you don’t go, she will suffer far worse than you ever will have in Dekkan.” She let go. “Do you believe me
now
, Tiago?”

He did. Absolutely.

He nodded.

“Good,” Kay said, and handed him a kevlar raincoat and one of the gasmasks from the door. “Then let’s go.”

They walked through the slowly darkening streets, the rain hissing against their protective gear. Ox-men and Runners followed. Their footsteps clicked against cobblestone as Kay led them through side alleys and tiny backstreets so cramped they had to move through them single file.

No one else was out in the dark.

Tiago stopped a tremble in his hands at the thought of being out at night. Some places had bogeyman to frighten the children. Here in Placa del Fuego there was the real life Doaq stalking around at night.

Even in the alien district they shut the doors and hid for the night.

Several times Kay came to a dead end where small locked doors stopped the group’s progress. But a few knocks in a pattern and they would open, and everyone would tromp through someone’s front room, leaving sizzling drops of rain behind.

In a steady sort of way, dodging the streets and moving through the city using Kay’s own geography of passages and doors, they moved through half the Back Circle in two hours.

Kay finally stopped and removed her gas mask in the quiet foyer of a restaurant, eerie in its empty state: the tables were all set and ready, waiting for the morning crowd. 

Tiago burned his fingers on the wet straps of his gas mask as he pulled it free. Kay looked right at him, “There’s a prison wagon on its way to the Dekkan Holding Center. It’ll pass us by. I’ve paid and faked documents to get your name on the list, and bribed the driver to stop and pick you up. Tiago, are you listening?”

He felt numb. He looked outside to where the rain had eased to a drizzle. The gaslight streetlamps flickered as the wind whipped flames this way and that, each drop of rain causing the lamps to spit and flare with increased energy.

Tiago nodded. “I’m listening,” he said. He struggled to get his head back into the moment. “Why do you want me in there? What exactly am I doing?”

Kay pulled out a packet of photos and spread them with a flourish across a nearby table, like a card dealer. “These seven people are all survivors of the Palentar fire. One of them might be in the wagon, or in the Holding Center.”

Tiago looked at her across the table. “I don’t understand?”

“You don’t need to understand,” Kay said.

“Actually, it would help,” said Nashara. Tiago startled, whirled, and found that she’d been standing in a corner of the room watching all this. A shadow herself, she moved out of the dark and into the lit area.

For a split second, Kay stared at her, and Nashara stared back. It seemed, Tiago thought, that an entire conversation happened in that split second. One he was, and never would be, party to.

Kay moved in closer, creating that bubble of space around them both once more. “You remember the fire on Palentar?”

“Yes.” There had been rumors that a superhuman man of some sort from the Xenowealth fought the Doaq. And lost, of course.

“You heard the rumors?”

“Yes.”

Kay smiled. “Those weren’t rumors. The man who fought the Doaq was Pepper.”

“From New Anegada?” Tiago looked at Nashara.

“My grandfather,” Nashara confirmed. “In a sense. Yes.”

Tiago stepped back from Kay and moved slightly closer to Nashara. “They say he ripped up the road, smashed through houses, and between the Doaq and him, almost burned Palentar to the waterline.”

Nashara folded her arms. “The League has been hyper-focused on building a new navy for the last ten years. The bulk of it stationed just upstream of the Trumball wormhole. Satellite photos caught signs of what might be a carrier slipping out and heading for the Polar Regions.”

Kay snorted. “I believe the League has submarines sneaking around here, just like you probably do. But an entire carrier is too aggressive. And hard to hide. Why violate Placa del Fuego’s neutrality?”

“Because this planet Octavia is important. Placa del Fuego might be the only actual piece of land on it, but Octavia is the last stop before the wormhole network branches out toward the worlds of Harpin and Fairfax.” Nashara stepped over and looked down at the photos. “Both of which are critical junction points in the branches of the wormhole network. The League doesn’t want to lose ten world’s worth of citizenry and trade and resources just because one of the junctures in the wormhole network decided to go over to the Xenowealth. A carrier is actually a smart move from their point of view. Still, it’s the sort of thing that gets wars started.”

“So there might be a war over a carrier?” Tiago asked. “On our planet? The League hasn’t even done anything really!”

“Maybe,” Nashara said. “Someone certainly used an electromagnetic pulse to disable all our satellites in orbit around Octavia. We have no eyes and ears here anymore. That’s why Pepper came …”

“And fought the Doaq,” Tiago interrupted. A stupid move, because both Nashara and Kay looked closely at him. He stumbled on. “Because it’s the Doaq you really want. Your satellites were dead zoned. You and Kay both want to fight the Doaq.” And he was going to get caught between it all.

“Maybe.” Nashara shrugged. As she did so, Tiago saw the insides of her leather coat. It was an arsenal. A rifle on either side. Pistols. Grenades. Other things he didn’t recognize. “Or maybe it was convenient for the League to use the dead zone as a cover.”

She also had a short sword on a scabbard at her hip, Tiago realized. “But what does all this have to do with some guy from Palentar?” he asked.

“When Pepper realized he was about to lose to the Doaq,” Nashara tapped the table of pictures, “he ran. And he passed through each of these people’s homes.”

“And?” Tiago wasn’t getting it.

“He didn’t leave anything behind, I’ve searched the houses,” Nashara said. “He didn’t have time to talk to the survivors I’ve already interviewed. But these survivors are from closer to the docks, where he had more of a lead and some time to possibly talk to them.”

Now Kay interrupted. She was curious, and wasn’t bothering to hide it, which Tiago found surprising. “And what would Pepper have had time to say in the two or so seconds of a lead he had on the Doaq?”

“Well, that’s what I’d like to find out,” Nashara said. “And you’re going to help me. Kay framed and got many of these survivors arrested in order to keep them here in Placa del Fuego, as assets. The one who lived in a home that was closest to the docks should be in that wagon tonight, a boy named June. He’s our best bet. He’s the one I’m interested in.”

“Why don’t the two of you just bust into the wagon and drag him out,” Tiago asked. “You have enough guns and things.”

Nashara smiled. “If he’s not on that wagon, we let everyone know we might be interested in him. Maybe the Doaq gets wind; maybe some of Kay’s enemies figure it out. There are League agents here in Placa del Fuego.”

“Give him the tracker,” Kay suggested.

Nashara pressed a small sliver of metal into Tiago’s palm. “Click it once to turn it on. It glows. Then jam that under the target’s skin, it’ll tag him for me. Turning it on lets me know you identified the target, but I can still track it when off. Try it.”

Tiago pressed the sliver between his thumb and forefinger. It clicked, and softly glowed. He clicked it again and the bluish glow faded.

“If June isn’t in the prison van, you’ll go the center. Meal times are open. Tag him then.”

Kay cocked her head. “I think it’s time for me to go meet the van.” She walked away and grabbed her poncho and gas mask.

“All this, just to talk to a boy,” Tiago muttered.

“The fate of empires has sometimes depended on less,” Nashara said. She slipped into the space that Kay left vacant.

Tiago waited for Kay to close the door behind her. She was outside now. Out of earshot. “Poor bastard,” Tiago said, looking down. June was a clean-cut boy, not much older than Tiago. There were no rain scars on his cheeks, his hair was carefully tailored, and he wore off-world clothes. Machine-made. “Can you imagine that face walking into Dekkan?”

“Hopefully it doesn’t get that far,” Nashara said. “I would prefer you not end up there either.”

She sounded genuine. Which meant nothing, really, if she had the same capabilities as Kay, Tiago realized.

“You know you’re in danger, too,” Tiago said. “You know she wants something from you. And she’ll do anything to get it.”

“She already has what she truly, deeply wanted. As a down payment. Now I’m giving her extras,” Nashara said. “It’s a risk, but she knows where she stands with me.”

Maybe, thought Tiago. Nashara was super-human. Who was he to question her judgment?

Still. It was Kay.

“I did bring a great deal of backup with me,” Nashara said, noticing Tiago’s dubiousness. “I came with a gunboat modified for the area, crew, very expensive shielded equipment, and lots of toys. Pepper didn’t come with support, that’s his style, not mine. If you ever want to visit, we’re aboard the
Streuner
. Dock seventeen, the furthest slip on the end.”

A strange vision of sitting on the back of a gunboat with Nashara, enjoying tea and little sandwiches flashed into Tiago’s mind. He snorted.

Nashara shrugged. “We’ll take June back aboard, see what he knows, and then get him back to where he belongs.”

Tiago looked at her. “You’re not leaving him with Kay afterwards?”

“That wouldn’t be good for June, would it?” Nashara said. “And as you said, June seems … a bit removed from this sort of world. No, after we acquire him and chat, we’ll cut him loose somewhere nice.”

Acquire him. There was a strange turn of a word, Tiago thought. She really was a kindred soul to Kay. Someone who wove the fate of everyone around them. People were things to ‘acquire’ and direct. Kay got people jailed falsely just so she could keep them around as ‘assets.’

They were both scary.

“Are you going to help Kay take over Placa del Fuego?” Tiago asked. “Help her run the entire island?”

“Now you’re being over dramatic,” Nashara said, as if talking to a child. “No. I won’t. Besides, she’s not yet capable of it.”

Not yet? “What do you mean?”

“She needs to stop depending on all those Nesaru genetic modifications in her,” Nashara said softly.

“You know about that?”

“There are Ox-men here, and Runners, and more. What the Nesaru did in just three or so generations was dramatic. Reshaping human bodies for all the niches they needed to run their world. It was beyond anything we’d even realized was happening. It stood to reason that some Overseers survived. Though Kay’s the first we’ve known of.”

“She can control your mind,” Tiago said earnestly.

“Not quite. It’s more like you’re an open book to her. She can hold your strings in some ways, but not as much as you might think. More of a mind reader than a mind controller, Tiago. And only when she’s standing right in front of you. That’s why she’s not going to own Placa del Fuego anytime soon. She still has to learn other ways to get people to do her bidding, and her teachers have been the underbelly of Harbortown. To be a great leader requires more than intimidation and direct control, it requires people to trust you just as much when you’re not standing right in front of them. That takes something else. Besides, what she has: it’s not that special a talent.”

“Do you have it?”

“Yes. Different technology, not biological, but same result. Free will’s a bitch. Kay can only manipulate you. Underneath, we still move our own lives forward. You understand? We fought the entire war over that, back when the alien Satrapy ruled everything in the Forty-Eight worlds. Before human independence.”

Only someone as powerful as she was, Tiago thought, could believe that about free will.

He chose not to say that.

But then, she could probably see him thinking that anyway.

Nashara reached into her coat and pulled out a fat looking gun. She pointed it at Tiago. “Kay’s coming back inside. It’s time to put you inside that prison wagon.”

She waved the gun in the direction of the door.

Back to business.