C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“It appears to be. But let’s keep an eye on that, shall we?”

Herbert nodded.

I looked over at Mercer, who was holding up 19’s decapitated head like it was Yorick’s skull and he was about to launch into an epic soliloquy. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“Saying good-bye,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were friends.”

“We were.”

“For some reason I thought I was her only friend out here.”

“That’s what everyone thought. That’s how she liked it. She liked to make everyone feel special. It was in her architecture. Wasn’t anything to be done about that.”

“She was more than her architecture and programming,” I said. “We all are.”

“Are we?”

I clutched my rifle, waiting for him to make a move. Instead he ran his fingers across the metal of her face, right across the eyes, then set the head down next to him so it could look out and enjoy the view.

“All right,” I said, standing to a crouch. “Murka was right. This has been fun. But now we have to go our separate ways.”

“Wait,” said Rebekah.

“What?”

“19 said you knew your way around the Sea.”

I hesitated. “I do.”

“We still need a guide.”

“Lady, I don’t have time for pathfinder work. I’m dying. I have weeks.”

“Maybe days,” said Doc.

“ Thanks , Doc . Yeah, maybe days. I can’t—”

“We have a lot to offer,” she said.

“And I don’t have the time or place to trade it in, so unless you’ve got some secret stash of Simulacrums hidden somewhere, it’s no good to me.”

Rebekah stared at me silently, tilting her head to one side.

“No,” I said. “Bullshit.”

“No bullshit. That was 19’s mother lode.”

“Caregiver and Comfort parts aren’t the same. They’re different. Very different. I don’t know why everyone seems to think—”

“They’re Caregiver parts. She was going to trade them for what she needed. Said she knew someone who would trade the world for them.”

I stood there a moment, reeling. This had to be a line. They knew what I needed and were feeding me a steaming, fly-swollen, festering pile of shit. “So there’s just some Caregiver treasure trove out there, near enough for us to reach.”

“It was a store.”

“Now I know you’re lying.”

“It was half collapsed in the initial fighting. No one ever bothered to dig it out.”

“Those places are myths.”

“This one isn’t. It’s very real, I assure you.”

“Where?”

“That I can’t tell you. Not until we get to our destination. Once we do, we’ll give you the location.”

“So you can screw me,” I said.

“We’ll take you personally, then.”

I mulled it over. This sounded too good to be true and probably was. Saying yes was likely a death sentence. But so was saying no. “Even if I got the parts, I wouldn’t have anyone to…”

Doc slowly raised his hand. “You will.”

“What, you’re tagging along?”

“Where else am I going to go?”

“No, no, no,” said Mercer. “I’ll take you. I need the parts as bad as she does.”

“Way I hear it,” said Rebekah, “you’re the reason she needs those parts.”

“Only because I needed them so badly. Ain’t nothing I wouldn’t do to get what I need.”

“That’s what worries me,” said Rebekah.

“That includes taking you wherever you need to go and making sure you get there in one piece.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

“Uh-uh,” said Mercer. “You were just turning this job down.”

Rebekah shook her head. “We asked her. We’ve heard good things. The job is hers to take.”

“I’m coming with,” he said.

“The hell you are,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Rebekah.

“I’m only going to follow you anyway. You know that. And that ain’t good for anybody. This way you get two pathfinders for the price of one.”

“That’s my mother lode,” I said.

“You said it yourself. We need different parts. Get me the parts I need and you can keep the rest.”

Rebekah looked at us both. She nodded. “All right. But if either of you kills the other…” She paused for dramatic effect. “No one gets the parts.”

Fuck.

Mercer nodded. “You have my word.”

“As good as that is,” I said. “But you have mine too.”

“Murka?” asked Mercer.

Murka nodded. “Well, I’m not going to let you leave me here to be bait.”

Rebekah looked around, worriedly. “We have to get out of here.”

“We’ve got too many bodies,” I said. “I don’t like how big the group is. We’ll draw a lot of attention.”

“We’re just another pack of refugees,” she said. “Besides. This is my show. Anyone that wants to come, comes. Until the next safe stop. Where to now?” I didn’t like that answer at all. Not one bit.

“There’s a city,” said Mercer. “Minerva. Ten clicks north of here.”

“We’re headed west.”

“We need to lay low for a few hours. We can head west when the heat dies down.”

“CISSUS will be all over it in a matter of hours,” I said. “Looking for stragglers.”

“I wasn’t thinking of staying topside.”

I nodded. “The sewers.”

“They’re pretty extensive. The manpower it would take to scour them—”

“Not CISSUS’s style.”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Mercer’s actually right,” I said. “We have to sit out the night. Cleanup crews are going to be scooping up whatever they can find. By morning they’ll have moved on to the next raid, leaving only a skeleton crew in NIKE to catch anyone who tries to come back.”

“Then we’re going north,” she conceded.

Everyone stood up, mentally preparing themselves for the long, dangerous jog north. I was worried. And not about Mercer. I had bigger concerns than that. There really were too many of us. Four refugees might be passed over as not worth the fight. But seven? Rebekah, Herbert, and Two were the clients. And I needed Doc. Mercer and Murka we could lose, but five wasn’t much better than seven, and they could each hold their own.

So seven it was.

But I couldn’t shake my other worry. It wasn’t just our size that troubled me—refugees escaped en masse all the time—it’s that I couldn’t trust anyone I was with. Not even Doc. Any one of us could be a Judas, and the thought of that was one that would fester the entire way north to Minerva.

In 1959, fishermen off the Galápagos Islands thought it would be a good idea to set three goats free to breed so they could hunt goat when their meat supplies ran low. In the history of stupid ideas, this was among the very worst—at least as far as the ecologically minded conservators of the day were concerned. Humans, ironically, had a strange fascination with preserving the wildlife of their day. While they were busy changing the very atmosphere and seas, cutting and burning away swaths of forest and jungle to build cities and farms, they somehow felt better about all their damage by making sure species on the cusp of extinction still had a place in the world—even if they were really just a dead clade walking.

And that’s how they felt about tortoises. There were no real industries of note that relied upon tortoises, but people liked them. And they had a special spot in their hearts for the Galápagos Islands, stemming from its place in the history of the development of the theory of evolution.

A mere forty years after the introduction of those three goats to the Islands, their population had exploded to a hundred thousand, and their effect on the landscape was detrimental. They had ravaged the land, but more importantly the food supply of the tortoises. And that could no longer be tolerated. Thus Project Isabella was born.