Gravewalkers: Dying Time (2 page)

“
Maybe you should go back
to bed,” he answered unenthused for her inchoate ebullience for
fighting infected. “This is official business of the Marshal
Service that I’m doing here. You’ve never done this kind of thing
before.”

“
You know I don’t sleep,”
she complained endearingly as she stepped out into view. Carmen
wore her shuttle hangar technician’s blue flight-suit. With the
soft shoes and a ball cap, she appeared a young lady stuck playing
tomboy after joining the service to become a flight mechanic’s
ensign. Critias had selected her costume with that effect in mind,
not liking it when people glanced at her thinking she was merely
some misappropriated pillowing android he had stolen from a
low-gravity orgy bar. Improperly dressed, that was exactly how
morally corrupting her curves were, so he saw no reason anyone else
should be privy to his personal opulences.

The egghead bioengineer
scientists had tested, quizzed, and studied Critias in great detail
before composing all those observations into a final form with
their Michelangelo’s eyes and Mozart’s ears for collating
four-letter neorganic ontogeny sculptures into living, speaking,
personifications of human perfection, in Carmen’s case a form
gleaned from Critias’ own subconscious mind.

She asked, “How dangerous
can inspecting the interior of the reclamation center be?” Carmen
accompanied her logic with adorably shy desperation to join in on
his adventure, “It should be about as fraught with danger as when
you interview the colonel in his own offices.”

“
Alright,” he submitted,
secretly glad to be able to keep his eye on her. “Put on your
armor, grab a weapon, and follow me. Rule two is you always bring
your weapons to the really stupid place they built a reclamation
operation.”

Carmen had a complete suit
of armor available to her that included an intricate face-shielding
helmet and puncture resistant body covering. The only parts of it
she liked were the high quality boots and the traction gloves that
improved her finger strength and protected her hands from minor
scrapes or scratches. She was entirely immune to carrying or
contracting infection, but Carmen was still lady enough to protect
her fingernails even if Critias refused to allow her to paint
them.

Not liking her decision, he
asked, “You’re not going to wear all of your armor?” Regulations
expected her to be in proper combat uniform when
dirt-side.

“
My eyes are far superior
to this ridiculous helmet,” she answered with obvious distaste.
“The techs made this stuff for Delta ground engineers anyway, not
for Epsilon combat grades like me. Deltas have organic eyes and to
be perfectly honest, ten of them could not get the better of me.”
For armament, she took a TFP9 hip-holstered sidearm and then after
carefully computing the potential value of every weapon, she
selected a martial-arts staff with a distinctive sheepherder’s
crook adorning one end, a weapon known as a bight.

A marshal generally only
used the bightstaff to subdue civilian drunks or for when they bug
hunted lurkers, which meant that they rummaged through ruined
structures, poked inside dark crevices, and upturned junk trying to
expose the hiding places of ghouls. A marshal in his mechsuit could
use the bightstaff to great success if properly skilled with the
deceptively innocuous weapon. All taken into consideration, the
bight remained the most benign object in the whole of the
sadistically well-outfitted arms locker. Carmen could have chosen
the best new model of microwave flamethrower or a teslaflux
antitank rifle that was as tall and elegantly lethal as she was,
but instead, she was more than confident that in her hands, a true
expert, the bightstaff would ideally snap the necks of ghouls with
mathematically provable optimal mission accomplishing
efficiency.

“
Infection always gets
in,” she quoted his rules in order. “Always bring an excellent
weapon. How many rules do I need before I get to see a ghoul? We
should track the infected down into one of their nests where we can
capture a watcher so everyone will know my master is the real
authority who was right all along.”

He glanced at her girly
stick with considerable doubt, which he lent to his rhetorical
question of, “You want to walk into a ghoul nest carrying that?
Then you wonder why I’m not altogether confident about taking you
along with me just yet.”

She tested the weight of
the mostly unbreakable-rigid pole. “Yes,” she answered confidently
on the part where they go down into a nest with her thusly
equipped. “Disabling ghouls with this weapon won’t be any
difficulty for me. My primary concern would be protecting you from
your judgmental lapses while I avoid painting all the walls in hot
rivers of their slippery contagious blood. Blood splatter is the
major long-term source of migratory contamination down to tertiary
levels as I’m sure you know.”

Critias brushed through her
softer but stronger than silk neorganic hair. It wasn’t wise of him
to let it be so long since it wasn’t advantageous in battle and
could collect contaminants, but he never needed her for war; her
shoulder length better suited his actual interests. His gauntleted
fingers felt it vividly from more than pleasurable memory, but also
via sensory conduction through his neorganic armor. He told her,
“We’re not going to walk into a nest today, but I know you wouldn’t
flinch if the opportunity came up. Don’t fret yourself, Carmen;
you’ll get your chance to prove yourself. There is always something
going wrong somewhere and I’m the first person they call. Some
badass hunter will have scared a rookie scavenger team down to the
bottom of some hole or a grain transport will have grounded its
field on some old power lines. There’s always exciting trouble
going on, so just relax and walk down like everybody
else.”

He closed the weapons
locker then pulled the lever to open their exit. The door unsealed,
slid aside, and then unfolded down to become their stepped ramp.
Their destination was the heavily reinforced rooftop of one of the
tallest remaining buildings, which construction engineers had
admirably reconstituted. Their landing pad was a clean lofty
platform akin to an island sanctuary surrounded by a great
sargassum sea of rotten geometric fortresses that loomed in waves
of grey-green, all riddled with dark cavities like honeycomb that
might conceal unbound numbers of patiently watching eyes. Hundreds
of years of abandonment, broken windows, and leaky failed rooftops
had led to decapitated girder-bristled summits and strangle-vinery
clothed lower girths that the cruel passage of centuries had raped
of any former constancy. The grandest structures still stood after
so many long abuses simply because their original builders had been
men of wise circumspection and had generously invested in the
over-engineering required for their namesake edifices to hold
strong even when other works of men had long since crumpled to
abject ruin.

A strong breeze made a
twitchy young clerk bow his head against it while he waited to
greet them. “Welcome to the Chicago ERC, Marshal Critias,” the
clerk shouted a bit too loudly.

Carmen clarified the scope
of their mission with Critias, “ERC stands for Embedded Reclamation
Center. That means you are here to inspect the daily operations of
a long-term stationary reclamation project that maintains all
levels of operations at the same location.”

“
Not in Marshal Service
talk,” Critias corrected Carmen on the true nature of ERC strategy.
“We call ERC pure fucking ignorance, better known as shitting your
own bed. What part of not crapping in your lunch-tray still baffles
these scavengers? Normally, a salvage commander would send down
drop rats by recon gunship so they could scout out some new
location that contained real cheddar. Once they scored pay dirt,
they would radio down a dropship dozer or two that would come in
for a fast scoop-and-grab; then everyone flew home. Sitting your
whole circus in one place for too long has this real nasty habit of
attracting those bomber wrecking goblins in that metaphor we talked
about.”

“
Gremlins,” she hastily
rectified him.

“
Yes, I know,” he cut her
off, “and a simile; I was teasing you, Carmen. I do pay attention
to what you say, far too much I can assure you, because believe me
when I tell you that you can really talk up a storm; so from now
on, try and conserve yourself to giving me only one lecture per
topic.”

The wind that distressed
the clerk was no hindrance to Critias in his mechsuit and it was
heavenly to Carmen the android; in total, it made the weak man seem
even more out of place in the fabulously free and natural
environment.

Carmen gushed, “It’s so
incredibly big!” All the many birds that thrived in the dead city
only added to her delight as she gazed out into the everlasting sky
with its global wind that whipped her irregulatory hair like a
reddish-blue candle flame. She said, “The planet is so beautiful,
Critias. I want to be looking up at this sky at night with all the
stars shining down on us.”

Because he lived in orbit,
Critias understood something of Carmen’s fascination with her first
discovery of Earthly climate when coming down from space. It was an
impression akin to something architectural, that the world was
really a planetary-sized orbital habitat, which it was, from a
certain point of view.

Critias asked the clerk,
“Is this supposed to be bad weather for these parts? I don’t see
any snow.” It was his way of ridiculing the man for being so timid
without sufficient cause.

The man shook his head,
“No, sir, this is the nice season here, but still a lot of nature
for someone used to better living in space.” He gestured the way,
“You should follow me, sir. We should get inside.” The clerk led
them to a metal fire door that he opened onto an interior
stairwell. As he waited for them to enter, he warned, “You never
know when some bird with filth on it might flap into
you.”

Carmen shouted, “Wind!” as
she spread her arms like wings into the very thing as if she
pretended to be one of the many soaring birds. “It rushes about
without fans as far as the horizons.” She called to Critias, “Can’t
we look over the side? I want to see a ghoul.”

“
Go look,” Critias
answered without sharing her exuberance. “You don’t get infected by
the wildlife.” On a related note, he asked the clerk why he was not
carrying any weapons, “You don’t go about armed?”

“
No, sir, not usually,”
the clerk replied with that kind of nervousness about him that he
should self-medicate with more caffeine and tobacco rather than
less of it. “You’ll find everything in order here, marshal. We’re
perfectly safe inside the defense perimeter.”

“
Sure,” Critias commented
doubtful of that assessment.

“
Infection always gets
in,” Carmen offered to be helpful as she peered off the top of the
skyscraper to gaze down at the vegetation-shrouded streets below.
She took a good measure of the epic ruins with her excellent
telescopic vision that was like a soaring eagle that targeted
rabbits, and with it, Carmen saw ghoulish humanoid figures as they
scurried and skulked amongst the vegetated ruin.

Critias was curious to know
what she could see, “What do you think now?”

She answered with a quote
from Lord Byron, “He who ascends to the mountain-tops shall find
the loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow. He who
surpasses or subdues mankind must look down on the hate of those
below.”

“
That will learn me for
bothering to ask,” Critias callously dismissed her answer; he was
ready to follow the clerk.

“
I will show you the way
to Colonel Walker,” the clerk said anxiously as he held the door,
eager to get back inside and then soon after be away from them. The
way down the inner stairwell went several floors then they parted
company upon arrival at the main control center. After the clerk
opened the door for them, he stood aside, “Colonel Walker is
expecting you.”

Critias walked into the
control room with Carmen quick on his heels, like man’s old best
friend she had replaced. The windowless chamber had the usual banks
of projected video displays with some technical staff to monitor
them and six guards with rifles holding posts all around. Colonel
Walker stood in the middle of his people where he kept his
unwavering eye on his scavenger operation.

Colonel Walker came about
to greet Critias with his offered hand, “Welcome to Chicago,
Captain Critias.” He was pleasant enough considering he didn’t
appreciate the Marshal Service intruding on the affairs of his
Reclamation General’s department. As a former marshal himself, the
colonel didn’t desire advice from another, especially a younger man
of lower rank, even if Critias did have field service decorations
more prestigious than his own.

Critias opened his visor in
a retrograde gesture that had birthed the military salute then he
shook the colonel’s hand, “I’ll try to keep this inspection as
brief as possible, colonel.” In an effort to ease tensions he
added, “Grand Marshal Wayne sends his respects.” Only after he said
it did Critias realize it would have been better not to mention
Wayne at all. Colonel Walker had never been any admirer of the man,
especially after Wayne had attained the great seat. Their old
rivalry had slammed to an abrupt end when the Council of Governors
tapped Wayne to be the next Grand Marshal. Colonel Walker had
chosen early retirement rather than take orders from so disdained a
personal enemy. Wayne went up to host the Captains’ Table where all
things Forager feasted while Walker went down to the Scavenger
General to beg for a new job, and he sure did find himself a big
one, with dropships, excavators, and his own personal army of
laborers.