‘Is that a Swedish name?’
‘Danish. I know him well. A good man.’
‘He owns this place?’
‘He’s a neighbour. The owner and his wife have eight children, all under the age of ten. They drove upriver three days ago, after they harvested their produce. But they keep a few pigs, and Ove stopped by to feed and water them. He saw the vehicles in the fields, heard gunshots, and called it in.’
‘And he saw the ray gun in action.’
‘He said it was like a flash of intense blue light,’ Karl said.
‘Did he see who fired it?’
Karl shook his head. ‘He was about a kilometre away, and did not care to get any closer.’
‘Sensible man.’
Vic looked all around. A bleak, empty place. Someone had set up here, and someone else had got the jump on them. Drury v. McBride. Or McBride v. Drury.
They drove to Karl’s office and Vic fired up his tablet and brought up the image of the fingerprint card for David Parsons. The right thumbprint scored a ten-point match with the print pulled off the cartridge.
‘So this shooter is some kind of spy?’ Karl Schweda said, after Vic had explained about the two so-called businessmen. ‘He followed your friend down here?’
Vic said, ‘Or he followed the bad guys, then spotted Skip.’
They were sitting in the kitchen of the little apartment above the office and the two-cell jail now, eating Karl’s five-alarm chilli.
‘So where do you want to take this, Investigator?’
Vic forked up some chilli. Man it was hot, but in a good way. ‘It looks like we have two ways to go. There’s the shooter, David Parsons. And there are the people who killed my partner. Either they’re amongst the dead you pulled out of those RVs, or they’re long gone.’
‘You think downriver, to this Site 326.’
‘Possibly. Probably. But Parsons, if he’s hurt, might still be around. And it’s possible a couple of the bad guys are still here, too. Waiting to see who else turns up.’ Vic thought of the two women he’d seen boarding up a house, said, ‘How many empty properties are there, in and around town?’
‘Forty, more or less,’ Karl said. ‘Chris has made a list.’
‘Plenty of hiding places,’ Vic said. ‘Maybe you could print out that list. And a map would be good, too.’
39. Drive-Through McDonald’s
Mangala | 24 July
One by one they stepped out onto the surface of the planet: ordinary poured concrete, a bright yellow feathery weed caught in a crack, shivering in the chill breeze. The shuttle loomed above them, casting a vast shadow across container stacks and low buildings.
Chloe wondered if she should say something, some kind of small step/giant leap shit, but Henry was already leading Fahad to the far end of an aisle between two stacks, and she hurried after them. Her jacket turned red, then blue, then red again as she walked past different containers. A stocky man in a high-vis vest and a hard hat was waiting by a low-slung vehicle. John Cerdan, according to the ID badge clipped to his vest. Fahad hung back, saying he thought the contact was a woman; Cerdan said, ‘You mean the Doc? She waits outside. I take you to her, but you must do everything I tell you. For a start, put on these.’
They donned the vests and hard hats that he handed them, hung visitor badges strung on lanyards around their necks, and climbed into the vehicle. Cerdan drove at a good clip past row after row of containers, past a crane perched on four struts that each terminated in pairs of wheels with tyres taller than a man. Fahad wanted to know if their driver worked for Dr Morange?
‘I’m a friend of the Doc,’ Cerdan said. ‘And I don’t care who you are, or why you’re here. All I do is get you out while everyone enjoys the holiday.’
They drove across an expanse of bare concrete to a pole gate in the perimeter fence. Cerdan slowed the vehicle, raised a hand to a woman sitting in a glass booth, the pole jerked up, and they were outside.
Warehouses on one side of the road and a slope of scrub rising on the other, a distant glitter beyond the edge of the shuttle’s shadow that must be the city. Petra.
The electric cart drew up beside a filthy Subaru Outback parked on the shoulder of the road. A grey-haired woman climbed out and shook hands and exchanged a few words with Cerdan and cast a shrewd gaze over Chloe and Fahad, like a farmer assessing new stock.
‘The very definition of a motley crew,’ she said. She was in her fifties, with a broad face and small dark suspicious eyes, dressed in baggy blue jeans and a moth-eaten roll-neck sweater. ‘I am Hanna. Dr Hanna Babbel. Where is your equipment?’
‘You’re supposed to supply everything we need,’ Henry said.
‘We’ll see about that. I’ve had little warning and even less information. You better get in before someone wonders what we are up to.’
As she drove them away from the terminal, Hanna Babbel told Henry that she knew this was something to do with the Elder Culture sites she’d checked out, no more than that. ‘They tell me, my bosses on Earth, that you will explain.’
‘It’s in the nature of a treasure hunt,’ Henry said. He was riding in the passenger seat; Chloe and Fahad were on the bench seat behind. Fahad leaning forward, saying, ‘Are those fireworks?’
Clusters of coloured stars were flowering and fading in the dark blue sky above the city.
‘Landing Day nonsense,’ Hanna said dismissively. She was driving fast and erratically, square hands clamped on the wheel. Her fingernails were clipped short; the little finger on her left hand was missing. ‘An excuse for people to stop work and get drunk. So you are looking for some type of Elder Culture artefact, no doubt. Or perhaps you search for one of the so-called lost cities.’
‘Something like that,’ Henry said.
‘You need my help but you do not trust me with the truth.’
‘The truth is, we don’t really know what we’ll find,’ Henry said.
‘I see. What it is, I get two phone calls from Earth, first time in many weeks. The first tells me to look for excavation sites licensed by a company called Sky Edge Holdings. The second tells me to expect guests and give them any help they ask for. Even though I have my own work to do, and it is not the kind of work you can stop, just like that.’
Fahad looked at Chloe, eyebrows raised. As if to say, see what we get, instead of what we were promised?
Chloe asked Hanna Babbel about her work.
‘They didn’t tell me about you. So I suppose I should not be surprised they didn’t tell you about me.’
‘They said you are a biologist. They didn’t go into much detail, but I’m sure it must be interesting, working out here,’ Chloe said, trying to find a way to get past this woman’s bristling suspicion.
Hanna said, ‘I have been here for eleven years. I was part of the crew that Karyotech Pharma sent to study the biota. We were preparing an expedition to the southern hemisphere when the funding dries up and the others go home. I still collect plants and animals, samples of soil and rock, and send them back to Earth. What they do with it I do not know because they do not tell. And I have my own work, on biochines. Mangala has more kinds than anywhere else, at least three distinct clades.’
‘You also report on the work of the Prof’s rivals,’ Henry said. ‘You’re well paid for it. And you’ll be well paid for this, too. We need your help to find out where an artefact came from. You’ll help us get equipped, and if it comes to it you’ll ride along with us. So no more sob stories about your work being interrupted. Because this is your work, right now.’
‘I will of course do my best to help,’ Hanna said stiffly.
‘I know you will.’ Henry was pointing again. ‘What’s that? A McDonald’s?’