Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [82]
Tower Hill dwindled behind them. Gray clouds had slid down from the Piedmont, drawn by the pressure fall fronting Ocean, and they flew low over forests purple as a bruise. Behemoths were astir below, digging themselves out from the mud. Driven from their burrows by forces they did not understand and swollen with young whose birth they would not live to see, they crashed through the trees, savage, restless, and doomed.
The bureaucrat had patched his briefcase into the flight controls, bypassing the autonomous functions. Every now and then he muttered a course adjustment, and it relayed the message to the flier. There was a layer of vacuum sandwiched within the canopy’s glass to suppress outside noise, and the only sounds within the cockpit were the drowsy hum and rumble of vibrations generated by the flier itself.
* * *
They were coming up on a river settlement when Chu shook herself out of her passive torpor, slammed a hand on the dash and snapped, “What’s that below?”
“Gedunk,” the flier replied. “Population one hundred twenty-three, river landing, eastmost designated regional evacuation center for—”
“I know all about Gedunk! What are we doing over it? We’ve gotten turned around somehow.” She craned about. “We’re headed north! How did that happen? We’re back over the river.” From this height, the cattleboat on the water looked a toy, the evac workers scurrying dots. To the south of town the ragged remains of the relocation camp stood forlorn. A tent that had torn loose from its pegs flapped weakly on the ground like a dying creature. The massed evacuees were crammed into side-by-side rectangular pens by the pier. A steady trickle were being one by one checked off and fed into the boat.
“Take us down,” the bureaucrat instructed the flier. “That melon field just west of town will do.”
The flier reshaped itself, spreading and flattening its wings, throwing out cheaters to help it dump speed. They descended.
As the flier landed, half the white melons scattered across the field suddenly unrolled and scurried away on tiny feet, sharp-nosed creatures, gone before the eye could fix on them. Fish would graze these meadows soon. Ramshackle sheds and a broken-spined barn stood open-doored in the distance, ready for new tenants, undersea farmers, or submarine mice, whichever the lords of the tide would provide. The canopy withdrew into the flier.
Puffs of wind pushed here, there, from every point of the compass. The air was everywhere in motion, as restless as a puppy. “Well?” Chu said.
The bureaucrat reached into his briefcase, and extracted a slim metal tube. He pointed it at Chu. “Get out.”
“What?”
“I assume you’ve seen these before. You wouldn’t want me to use it. Get out.”
She looked down at the gleaming tube, the tiny hole in its tip aimed right at her heart, then up at the bureaucrat’s dead expression. A rap of her knuckles and the flier unfolded its side. She climbed out. “I don’t suppose you’re going to bother telling me what this is all about.”
“I’m going on to Ararat without you.”
The wind stirred Chu’s coarse hair stiffly. She squinted against it, face hard and plain, looking not so much hurt as puzzled. “I thought we were buddies.”
“Buddies,” the bureaucrat said. “You’ve been taking Gregorian’s money, running his dirty little errands, reporting every move I made to him, and you … It takes a lot of nerve to say that.”
Chu froze, an island of stone in the rustling grasses. At last she said, “How long have you known?”
“Ever since Mintouchian stole my briefcase.”
She looked at him.
“It had to be one of the two of you who drugged me in Clay Bank. Mintouchian was the more obvious suspect. But he was only a petty criminal, one of the gang that was counterfeiting haunt artifacts. His job was running crates to Port Richmond in the New Born King. He stole my briefcase so he could start the operation up again. But Gregorian’s goons had already tried stealing it, and knew it could escape. Which meant he didn’t work for Gregorian. Which