Under Dark Sky Law (10 page)

After noodling around she managed to get
access to a network of army communications. The transmissions
weren’t clear, but at least from a lower level, no one seemed to
have any clue why these attacks were happening or who was behind
them. She played around on a few more sites and struck out, either
failing to gain access or to find any new information that shed
additional light onto the situation. After getting frustrated and
realizing that she was in danger of getting caught hacking through
some high level security, she gave up. Damn. Evan would have been
able to cut through the security nets like butter, but she was
nothing but a cheap imitation of his skills. She would have to try
the communicator and hope that she was able to reach someone Grease
Weasels.

After verifying that the scrambler was
installed and working properly she made an attempt to reach Argon’s
communicator. A sick feeling rumbled in her stomach—she’d been
deliberately avoiding thinking about what might have become of him,
but it was impossible not to. From the news and military reports
that she’d gotten access to, it looked like the skeleton riots had
spread to an area that was directly adjacent to their shack in the
flats, and who knew whether or not the skeletons coming to inspect
the dead body they’d found were rogues or not? In retrospect
splitting up seemed like a really foolish idea, but at the time she
hadn’t known that any skeletons were directly involved in the
larger fights.

The communicator crackled and hissed and she
cranked the volume down as low as it could go to avoid any
accidental attention from neighboring suites or soldiers that might
be guarding outside. Nothing. She fiddled with the knobs and tried
adjacent frequencies, but all she ever got in return was more
static. No Argon. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. She was in
one of the worst possible places for reception. His transmitter
could have been lost or damaged in a fight, but he could be just
fine. Still. Shit. Not the result she was hoping for. Resisting the
urge to throw the transmitter against the wall she took a deep
breath and started trying to make contact with some of the Grease
Weasels way back in the pits, starting with Milo. Milo would know
exactly what to do.

For several minutes she got nothing but more
annoying static and screeching, but then she heard a faint
voice.

“Milo, is that you? This is Xero,” she said
quietly but as clearly as she could in a codified version of Tohono
O’odham. Following the code talkers who used the Navajo language
for secret transmissions during WWII, they had adopted a standard
of communicating in a modified form of the Tohono O’odham language.
Native speakers of the language might recognize chunks of the
language, but would still not be able to understand the message.
All of the Grease Weasels were required to speak it, but not even
their periphery and support teams could understand it. That, plus
the scrambled encryption would make decoding the message by anyone
other than another Grease Weasel quite challenging.

“Xero! It’s you, you’re alive!” he said and
whooped.

He got quieter as he yelled in a different
direction from the communicator. “Hey Neptune, it’s the boss!” he
said and Xero wasn’t able to hear what Neptune said in reply, but
knowing that at least the two of them were safe made her breathe an
internal sigh of relief. At least home base was secure still. Not
that she didn’t trust the rest of the Grease Weasels, but with
Trina sick and Argon and her out of the picture it certainly left
room for accidents and attacks.

“You’re alive!” Milo said again into the
transmitter. He cleared his voice and continued, “Um, not that I
expected anything less of you or anything boss, but I don’t know if
you’ve noticed—it’s getting crazy out here.”

Xero laughed. “Don’t worry about it—I have in
fact noticed that shit is going down,” she said and gave him a
quick update of what had happened.

“We’ve had no word from Argon either,” Milo
said, and she could hear the sadness in his voice.

“Any word from Calavera?” she asked.

“I didn’t know about the attacks on you and
Argon, but after seeing news about the skeleton riots popping up
all over the place, we got one solid convo with her, but it was cut
short over the communicator. She said that the riots weren’t her
and that she was looking into the incidences. She sounded majorly
stressed out, so I’m not sure what you want to make of that.
Personally I don’t think she’s behind it,” he said.

“I’m with you on that one—I think we both
know she’s not clever enough to do something like this on her own.
You think someone’s got the screws to her?” she asked. Milo always
had a good sense about these types of things.

“I’m not sure, to be honest. The whole
situation is strange. We haven’t gone down to Nogales to rough her
up in person yet—wanted to see if you turned up and had any
thoughts about it first. If she were down in South Tucson we
probably would have already gone to shake her up a bit, but you
know the last time we had to barge into Nogales it wasn’t pretty,”
he said.

“We’re in a compromised position—I would stay
away from there until we really have our shit together, or there’s
some good reason to do so, let’s stay out of Nogales for the time
being. If we go to Nogales, I need to be there,” she said. “I
assume you’ve sent out recon teams?”

“Yeah, soon as we got news that things had
gone south I put out recon teams to figure out what was happening.
I’ve given them all orders to stay undercover and out of any
conflicts until we give them the word. Couldn’t get anything out of
the feds—things are locked down super tight out there in dome town.
No sign of Argon, and all we knew was that you’d been involved in
some incident between the Casa Grande flats and the Phoenix dome,”
he said.

“Damn. At least you didn’t find a body, but
this is not good,” she said. “Good work though—I knew I could count
on you to keep things running Milo.”

“Thanks, you know I got this,” he said
lightly, but she could tell he was happy to hear the praise. It had
probably been one hell of a week trying to keep the system from
falling apart. Southern Arizona was a volatile area even without
active conflict situations going on.

“How’s Trina doing?” she said. One of the
other unintended consequences of this snag was the delay in getting
the Ketocillin for Trina.

He sighed, and she was able to hear it even
over the crackle of the communicator’s static. “Not good. I’m doing
everything I can, but the zaps have her real bad. It’s that bad
drug resistant form from Russia, I know it. If we can’t get her
some Ketocillin soon, I’m going to have to start experimenting with
stuff cooked up in the lab, and we both know that could be even
worse than just letting the zaps take her,” he said, the heavy
sadness coming through his words. They were all used to watching
people die every day, but there were still some people that you
just couldn’t let go.

“I have no idea how things are going to go
down tomorrow, but if at all possible I’m going to push for getting
clearance to complete the Yuma run. That’s the only place we can
really safely get to the antibiotics. That stuff is so precious
that if we just send in a cover team to do recon, things could go
south really fast,” she said. The security of the organization was
worth more than any of their individual lives, and there was a high
chance that any but the most elite teams would get caught trying to
pull off something like that. The right kind of antibiotics were
worth more than diamonds had been in the old world.

“Thank you,” Milo said.

“Look, this channel is scrambled, but we’ve
already said too much. This communicator channel should be open
until at least morning, but after that I can’t guarantee anything.
If I’m lucky they’ll immediately re-issue all of my field gear and
let me keep this stuff too, but I can’t promise anything. Keep
doing what you’re doing, and I’ll be in contact with you again as
soon as possible,” she said.

“Roger that. Thanks boss, stay safe out
there,” he said and they signed off.

Fuck. The fact that the recon team hadn’t
found any sign of Argon’s body, but no one had heard from him yet
was not good. It could have meant several things, including that he
might have illegally snuck into the dome to escape an attack, but
it also meant that he could be gravely injured and in need of help,
or it could mean that he had been taken hostage. Knowledge was
power, and Xero didn’t like blind spots in her information
field.

Her stomach rumbled and a painful cramp
rocked her abdomen. She grabbed at her belly and grunted. She
hadn’t had any solid food the whole time she’d been in the
hospital, so it would follow that she would be starving. Whatever
liquid nutrition they’d pumped her full of while her gut wounds
were healing had worn off, leaving her insides twisted in knots.
She rummaged through the rest of the bag given to her by Avery and
Stone, but there were unfortunately no nutrition bars or gel packs
stashed in there. Couldn’t expect them to have brought her
everything, and they probably figured that she had the whole hotel
at her disposal.

There was an old fashioned phone and a
booklet by the bed, and her hopes were realized when she saw that
it was in fact a list of hotel services, including their room
service menu. There was a lot of real food on the menu—actual
vegetables and fruits, and even some real meat. Most of what the
rest of the dome population ate was lab manufactured. Dome space
was too limited to grow uncontaminated plants or raise
uncontaminated animals. Most of the lab grown food still tasted
pretty good, but there was nothing like real food. Out in the pits
they still had fairly decent access to actual foods. Since they
were resistant to the environmental toxins, they could stand to
chow down on vegetables that were soaked in dioxin. After the
climate collapse, things had been hard, but many regions were
slowly but surely building up renewed agriculture using the
modified plant seeds that were showing up. Just like people, some
strains of animals and fish adapted to the contaminants and were
learning to live again. It wasn’t anything like the selection
they’d had in the old world, but you got used to it.

She figured that hotel lobby would know what
her room was allowed to request and what was forbidden. It turned
out that she had been given clearance to order food at her leisure
and without limits. As a smuggler, exotic foods weren’t quite the
treat that they would be for the average person, but it was still
nice to look forward to a really extravagant meal. She ordered
steak and chocolate cake. She also remembered to stash all of the
contraband items back in her luggage in the off chance that hotel
staff or military personnel attempted to enter her room while
delivering the meal. You never could be too careful.

While waiting for the food to arrive, she
took the chance to find a solution for the last thing she was
missing: weapons. Obviously handing over an unauthorized assault
weapon would have gotten them in even more trouble than anything
else in that suitcase, but Xero still wished they’d at least
slipped her a pocket knife or something like that. Be that as it
may, she’d learned from many hard experiences that you could make a
weapon out of anything in the right circumstances. The posh room
was far too clean and modern, leaving her with little in the way of
options for weapons. Even the lights were welded into the wall
sconces, leaving no lamps or other handy projectiles. She had a few
screwdrivers from the toolkit in the bag, but they were mostly
small screwdrivers meant for taking apart delicate computer
hardware. Rats.

In the huge bathroom, she found that the
towel racks felt flimsy enough to be jerked down and might be used
as a potential weapon. Using the little screwdrivers in the
toolkit, she loosened the racks enough that they would be easy to
pull down, but not necessarily noticeable by hotel personnel. There
were some soap containers and other toiletry items that might be
usable as weapons. The shower curtain rod was welded too firmly
into the wall to be taken down inconspicuously, but the shower
curtain itself and the towels might be fashioned into something
usable. The enormous whirlpool tub wouldn’t be useful as a weapon,
but she was absolutely looking forward to using it to soak in
later. Hot water after being in the flats and that cold hospital
for the last week was going to be beyond amazing.

Just as she had finished completing her
makeshift weapons inventory, the food arrived and she ushered in
the food before anyone had too much of a chance to see her decked
out in such casual clothing. She had a feeling that hotel staff
would be disturbed by her wilted Mohawk and unsophisticated
clothes, and the last thing she wanted was trouble with the service
staff. Never piss off service people. It was a guaranteed way to
make sure that something unpleasant happened behind the scenes.
She’d spent enough time counseling disgruntled workers to know some
of the truly heinous things people would do when disrespected at
work.

Taking a long hot bath after eating seemed
like a fabulous idea, but the whirlpool tub was so large it would
take a long time to fill. Fortunately it was electronic and fancy,
so after pushing the automatic start button it would fill itself,
stop before overflowing, and stay hot until she was ready to climb
in. Soft sounds of water filled the suite and she smiled. Water was
always an issue, and a bath like this was another extravagance they
rarely saw in the pits.

She sat down to enjoy the succulent meal—it
was fantastic even when compared with some of the things she got
her hands on during smuggling runs. Perfectly cooked filet mignon
and crisp vegetables with potatoes and a big salad. Unfortunately
the steak knife was basically just a glorified butter knife, but
she made a point to pocket it once she was done cutting the meat.
The salad tasted clean, and it alone was probably worth several
thousand dollars. The agricultural greenhouses were become more and
more rare as resources continued to dwindle to dangerous levels.
Wine would have been perfect with the meal, but she followed her
own rule of remaining clean and sober unless there was appropriate
supervision. They made some powerful hooch out there in the pits,
and she enjoyed a good night of drinking as much as the next
person, but it had been a long time since she felt comfortable
letting herself have so much freedom. The only person she had ever
truly fully trusted in that respect was dead.