When a dozen or more bright radbugs filled the jar, crawling over each other and making a flashing golden-purple lantern out of their prison, the boy bent and dribbled in a few leaves plucked from the bushes, rattled them down, and screwed the lid back on. He then skipped over to their open-sided shed and began loading the few tools stored there into the bag, examining each judiciously.
“There, right there, he’s stealing all our stuff!” said Martya.
They were all cheap tools designed to be used and then abandoned to their contamination in the zone; it was not the thought of the equipment but its potential radioactivity that raised the hairs on the back of Ekaterin’s neck. She didn’t know why the boy spent so much time shopping, because everything went into the bag just the same except the stepladder, which was too big to fit or, evidently, to be carried off. Though he tried it out, setting it up—but apparently not knowing enough to lock the safety catches, eep—and climbing up and down it, jumping off a few times from higher and higher steps. Luckily, it didn’t collapse on him during this game. Tilting it up against one tree, he climbed to take a closer look at one of the little vidcams. He tapped and yanked at it, but couldn’t pull it off its bracket; then, with an air of experiment, licked it. It certainly provided a closeup of his startling pale eyes. And long tongue. The view through it thereafter was somewhat smeary.
“Eew,” said Martya, dismayed.
Eventually tiring of this uncooperative object, the boy climbed back down, shoved the ladder back into the shelter, and turned away.
“But how did he get all the way out there?” asked Enrique. “There are no roads to the plot, not even old ones. Surely he’s too young for a lightflyer or float-bike license.”
“The backcountry people in the district, especially up in the mountains, aren’t too picky about little urban details like licenses and legal ages,” Martya observed, accurately.
Ekaterin studied the vid displays, following the boy-thief from view to view. “If he had a vehicle, I expect he would have taken the ladder. He seemed to like it a lot.” And what a strange thing to choose for a plaything, not that kids didn’t do that—spurning the toys and adopting the boxes they came in—but he’d treated it as a novelty, as if he’d never seen the like before. And why hadn’t he used some of the tools to take down the vidcams, considerably more valuable? “He might have walked.”
“All the way out there? Barefoot? From—wherever?” said Enrique in disbelief.
Ekaterin almost smiled. “People still do walk places in the backcountry. Not just for exercise, but to get where they’re going. Or ride horseback.” She eyed the slight, burdened figure, now stepping over the force barrier, dragging the bag with one hand and holding up the lantern-jar with the other. “Or on a pony,” she allowed judiciously.
“But our bugs, he’s taking them away!” complained Enrique. “What can he want them for? Ransom?” His slightly wild expression suggested that no price would be too much to pay to have them back safely.
“He’s just a child, Enrique,” said Ekaterin, a new and rather horrifying notion of the boy’s motivation growing in her mind. Could anyone on Barrayar, no matter how young or backcountry, not know what those trefoils meant? What if he’d simply thought her deadly radbugs were pretty?
“A mutant child, at that,” said Martya. “Do you suppose someone makes him go into the zone and steal things for them?”
All right, Ekaterin’s vision had not been as horrifying as that. “He looked… rather self-propelled. Cheerful. Active-skinny, not starving-skinny.” No bruises or marks of other abuse had showed on the pale skin, at least not on his arms or head or neck. The few scratches had looked like normal wear-and-tear for anyone crashing through the scrub without heavy clothing. But no one should be crashing through this scrub without protective gear. “I thought it was the District Rangers’ main job to keep people out of the zone. We’d better call Vadim.”
Martya promptly did so, only to discover that it was, apparently, the ranger’s day off; in any case, he was not reachable and did not return a call at her message.
“I didn’t know he had days off,” said Enrique, sounding vaguely puzzled. Naturally enough; Enrique didn’t exactly take breaks either, at least not scheduled ones, his time being divided into days with too many things to do, and days with far too many things to do—much like her own, Ekaterin reflected ruefully. Although he was occasionally dragged out of his lab by his wife Martya as a matter of principle. Ekaterin wondered guiltily if she ought to do that for Miles more often, but vacations with Miles usually ended up being more something you needed a vacation from, afterward. It was easier just to stand out of his way and let him go on till he dropped, which he eventually did. She tried not to let her mind sketch parallels with hyperactive toddlers.
“Did you bring your lightflyer?” Enrique demanded of Ekaterin.
“Well, yes—but even if we flew out there, we couldn’t land it. Or else we’d have to stop at the ranger station on the way back for decontamination,” she added more precisely. Enrique’s pedantic habits of thought were a trifle contagious.
Enrique waved this away as a bagatelle. “The thief evidently came back several times. If he has mechanical transport, we might be able to spot where he hid it. If he came on foot—” Enrique stopped and scowled.
“He couldn’t have come from very far away,” Martya completed the thought.
“Yes, but that would put his start point inside the zone,” objected Ekaterin.
“Then maybe we can spot it,” said Enrique.
“You and Vadim must have over-flown that area quite a few times when you were picking out and setting up the plot. Surely you’d have seen anything visible from the air.”
“Yes, but we weren’t looking for trespassers then!”
It was a valid point. She considered submitting the question to Miles, but first, he would already be head-down in his committee by now, not that he wouldn’t welcome almost any interruption from that, and second, he would likely veto her participation in the scouting expedition on sheer reflex. Try to veto, she corrected this thought a bit mulishly. She glanced at her chrono. It would only take an hour to fly down there and circle the area a few times, and she was already partway. And… she had to admit, the mysterious albino boy had left her both curious and disturbed.
“All right…”
While Ekaterin called Aurie with this altered schedule, Enrique threw their protective gear into the back seat of the flyer, just in case. Ekaterin took the controls. Her flyer was a speedy little thing—a recent anniversary gift from Miles—and in much less time than it had taken the ranger’s lumbering lift van, they came up on the site of the plot once more.
Despite Enrique’s jittering anxiety, there was, as she’d mostly expected, nothing to see, even circling low and slow: no darting or lurking figures in the scrub, no parked vehicles of any kind, not even a pony tied to a tree.
Enrique hauled out the mass scanner.
“Those things can yield false positives,” she noted. “Even if you narrow the mass range. Dogs, goats, whatever.”
“But also true positives.”
“Mm, that’s so…”
A famous criminal gang had once infested the zone, radioactive Robin Hoods who stole from, well, pretty much anyone, and kept it for themselves, but that had been thirty years back. They hadn’t lasted long. They had become instant local legends, though—Miles as a young boy had been just of the age to be impressed. She hoped he identified more with the brave local guardsmen who’d finally rousted them out of their holes than with the repellent robbers. But it was a stretch to imagine such dramatic figures stooping to filching gardening tools.