Hunter's Run Page 3

  Ramón shrugged.

  “I got a power drop in my back lift tubes,” he said.

  Griego frowned, put down his hammer, and wiped greasy hands on greasy pants.

  “Put on the diagnostic,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

  Of all the men in Diegotown and Nuevo Janeiro—or possibly on this world—Ramón liked old Griego best, which was to say he only hated him a little. Griego was an expert on all things vehicular, a post-contact Marxist, and, so far as Ramón could make out, totally free of moral judgments. It took them little more than an hour to find where the lift tube’s chipset had lost coherence, replace the card, and start the system’s extensive self-check. As the van stuttered and chuffed to itself, Griego lumbered to one of the gray storage tanks, keyed in a security code, and opened a refrigeration panel to reveal a case of local black beer. He hauled out two bottles, snapping the caps free with a flick of his thick, callused fingers. Ramón took the one that was held out to him, squatted with his back against a drum of spent lubricant, and drank. The beer was thick and yeasty, sediment in the bottom like a spoonful of mud.

  “Pretty good, eh?” Griego said and drank a quarter of his own at a pull.

  “Not bad,” Ramón said.

  “So you’re heading out?”

  “This is going to be the big one,” Ramón said. “This time I’m coming back a rich man. You wait. You’ll see.”

  “You better hope not,” Griego said. “Too much money kills men like you and me. God meant us to be poor, or He wouldn’t have made us so mean.”

  Ramón grinned. “God meant you to be mean, Manuel. He just didn’t want me taking any shit from anybody.” A quick vision of the European, mouth gaping open, blood gushing out over tombstone teeth, came to him, and he frowned.

  Griego was shaking his head. “The same thing again, eh? This time’s the one, just like every other time you been out.” He grinned. “You know how many times I heard you say that?”

  “Yep,” Ramón said. “This time’s different, just like always.”

  “Go with God, then,” Griego said. His grin faded. “Everyone’s been scrambling. Trying to get things finished. Aliens caught everyone with their pants around their knees, coming early like this. Funny, though. I don’t see a whole lot of people heading out right now. Pretty much everyone’s coming in for the ships—except you.”

  Ramón sneered, but he felt the constant fear in his breast tighten a notch.

  “What? They’re going to give half a shit about a prospector like me? What’s there for me if I stay?”

  “Didn’t say you should,” Griego said. “Just said there’s not many people going out right now.”

  I look suspicious, Ramón thought. I look like I’m running from something. He’ll tell the police, and then I’m fucked. He clamped his hand around the bottle so hard his knuckles ached.

  “It’s Elena,” Ramón said, hoping the half lie would be convincing enough.

  “Ah,” Griego said, nodding sagely. “I thought it must be something like that.”

  “She kicked me out again,” Ramón said, trying to sound hangdog despite the relief washing through him. “We had a fight about the parade. It got a little out of hand is all.”

  “She know you’re taking off?”

  “I don’t think she cares,” Ramón said.

  “Right now, maybe she doesn’t. But you fly out of here and three weeks later she decides that all is forgiven, she’s going to come around tearing up my place.”

  Ramón chuckled, remembering the incident that Griego was talking about. He was wrong, though. That hadn’t been about making peace; Elena had convinced herself that Ramón had taken a woman with him when he went out in the field. She hadn’t stopped raging and ranting until she found the girl on whom her paranoia had fixed still in town and involved with one of the magistrates, and even then she still seemed to hold a grudge. Ramón had had to spend almost half the money he’d gotten from his survey work just buying beer and kaafa kyit for all his business contacts whom she’d alienated.

  Griego didn’t laugh with him.

  “You know she’s crazy, don’t you?” he asked instead.

  “She does get pretty wild,” Ramón said with a half smile, trying the expression on like it was a new shirt.

  “No, I know wild girls. Elena is fucking loca. I know you like that girl down at the exchange. What’s her name?”

  “Lianna?” Ramón asked, disbelief in his voice.

  “Yeah that’s the one. Lives over on the north side. Used to be you had a thing with her, didn’t you?”

  Ramón remembered those days, when he’d been a younger man, new to the colony. Yes, there had been a woman with coffee-and-milk skin and a laugh that made a man happy just listening to it. Maybe he had even dreamed about her a few times since. But that had carried its own slice of hell with it. Ramón scratched at the scar that striped his belly. Griego raised an eyebrow and Ramón coughed out a laugh.

  “She’s…No. No, she’s not like that. There couldn’t be anything between someone like her and someone like me. And don’t ever let Elena hear you say different.”

  Griego gestured his discretion with a wave of his bottle. Ramón took another pull. The thick, earthy taste of the beer was growing on him. He wondered how much alcohol the brew carried.

  “Lianna was a good woman,” Ramón said. “Elena’s like me, though. We understand each other, you know?” His voice filled with a sudden bitterness that surprised him. “We deserve each other.”

  “If you say so,” Griego said, and the van chimed, its self-test complete. Ramón levered himself up and followed Griego to where the results floated in the air. The power and variance checked at each level, just edging down below optimal on the highest range. Griego waved a crooked finger at the drop.

  “That’s a little weird,” he said. “Maybe we should take another look at—”

  “It’s the cable,” Ramón said. “Salt rats ate through the old one. I had to get gold for the replacement. Couldn’t afford the carbon mesh.”

  “Ah,” Griego said and clicked his tongue in something between sympathy and disapproval. “Yeah, that would do it. Too bad about the rats. That’s the problem with scaring away all the predators, eh? We wind up protecting all the things they used to eat, like salt rats and flatfurs, and then they’re everywhere.”

  “I’ll take a few rats if I don’t have to worry that there’s chupacabras and redjackets in the street every time I go out for a piss,” Ramón said. “Besides, if we didn’t have vermin, how would we know we’d made a real city, right?”

  Griego snapped off the display and shrugged. They settled the account; half from Ramón’s available credit, half into an interest-bearing tab that the salvage yard’s system kept track of automatically. The sun was setting; the sky pink and gold and blue the color of lapis. Stars glimmered shyly from behind daylight’s veil. And Diegotown spread below them, its lights like a permanent fire. Ramón finished the last of his beer, then spat out the sediment. It left grit between his teeth.

  “The last mouthful’s not the best one,” Griego said. “Still. Beats water.”

  “Amen,” Ramón said.

  “How long you going out for?”

  “A month,” Ramón said. “Maybe two.”

  “Miss the whole festival.”

  “That’s the idea,” Ramón agreed.

  “You got enough food for that?”

  “I got hunting gear,” Ramón said. “I could live out there forever if I wanted.” He was surprised at the wistful, even yearning, tone that he could hear in his own voice.

  There was a moment’s silence before Griego spoke again; words that made Ramón’s nerves shrill with sudden fear.

  “You hear about the European that got killed?”

  Ramón looked up, startled, but Griego was sucking at his teeth, his expression placid.

  “What about him?” Ramón asked warily.

  “Governor’s all pissed off about it, from
what I hear.”

  “Too bad for the governor, then.”

  “The police came by. Two constables looking real serious. Asked if anyone had been in, getting a van in shape to head out fast. You know, someone who was maybe trying not to be found.”

  Ramón nodded, staring at the van. His throat felt tight and the thick beer in his belly seemed to have turned to stone.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Told them no,” Griego said with a shrug.

  “There wasn’t anyone?”

  “A couple,” Griego said. “Orlando Wasserman’s kid. And that crazy gringa from Swan’s Neck. But I figured, what the hell, you know? The police don’t pay me, these other people do. So where do my loyalties lie?”

  “Man got killed,” Ramón said.

  “Yeah,” Griego agreed, pleasantly. “A gringo.” He spit sideways, then shrugged, as if the death of a gringo or any other kind of European was of no great consequence. “I’m just saying it because I’m not the only one they’re asking. You taking off, they may take that the wrong way, give you a hard time about it. Just keep that in mind when you supply up.”

  Ramón nodded.

  “They gonna catch him, you think?” Ramón asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Griego said. “They’ll have to. Bust a gut to do it, if they got to. Show the Enye that we’re a justice-loving people. Not that they care. Shit, fucking Enye lick each other hello. Probably lick the governor and get pissed off if he doesn’t lick them back. Anyway, he’ll make a big show out of the trial, do everything to prove how they got the right guy, then put him down like a fucking dog. You know, whoever it is they decide did it. No one else, there’s always Johnny Joe Cardenas. They’ve been looking for something to hang on him for years.”

  “Maybe it’ll be good that I get out of the city for a while, then,” Ramón said. He tried a weak smile that felt as obvious as a confession. “You know. Just to avoid misunderstandings.”

  “Yeah,” Griego said. “Besides, this is the big one, right?”

  “Lucky strike,” Ramón agreed.

  When he started up the van, he could feel the difference. The lift tubes seemed to chime as he lifted up into the sky, all of Diegotown, with its unplanned maze of narrow streets and red-roofed buildings, below him. Elena was down there somewhere. The police too. The body of the European. Mikel Ibrahim and the gravity knife Ramón had handed to him, just handed to him. The murder weapon! And slumped in a bar or a basement opium den—or maybe breaking into someone’s house—Johnny Joe Cardenas, just waiting to hang.

  And Lianna, maybe, somewhere in the good section by the port, who didn’t think of Ramón anymore and probably never would.

  Ramón’s thoughts were interrupted by the pulsing hum of a shuttle rising up into the thin and distant air. Another load of metal or plastic or fuel or chitin for the welcoming platform. Ramón spun the van north, set it for proximity avoidance, and headed out alone, leaving all the hell and shit and sorrow of Diegotown behind.

  Chapter 3

  It was a warm day in the Second June. He flew his beat-up old van north across the Fingerlands, the Greenglass country, the river marshes, the Océano Tétrico, heading deep into unknown territory. North of Fiddler’s Jump, the northernmost outpost of the metastasizing human presence on the planet, were thousands of hectares that no one had ever explored, or even thought of exploring, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.

  The human colony on the planet of São Paulo was only a little more than forty years old, and the majority of its towns were situated in the subtropic zone of the snaky eastern continent that stretched almost from pole to pole. The colonists were mostly from Brazil and Mexico, with a smattering from Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean nations, and their natural inclination was to expand south, into the steamy lands near the equator—they were not effete norteamericanos, after all; they were used to such climates, they knew how to live with the heat, they knew how to farm the jungles, their skins did not sear in the sun. So they looked to the south, and tended to ignore the cold northern territories, perhaps because of an unvocalized common conviction—one anticipated centuries before by the first Spanish settlers in the New World of the Americas—that life was not worth living any place where there was even a remote possibility of snow.

  Ramón, however, was part Yaqui, and had grown up in the rugged plateau country of northern Mexico. He liked the hills and white water, and he didn’t mind the cold. He also knew that the Sierra Hueso mountain chain in the northern hemisphere of São Paulo was a more likely place to find rich ore than the flatter country around the Hand or Nuevo Janeiro or Little Dog. The peaks around the Sierra Hueso had been piled up many millions of years before by a collision between continental plates squeezing an ocean out of existence between them; the former sea-bottom would have been pinched and pushed high into the air along the collision line, and it would be rich in copper and other metals.

  Few if any of the mule-back prospectors like himself had as yet bothered with the northern lands; pickings were still rich enough down south that the travel time seemed unnecessary to most people. The Sierra Hueso had been mapped from orbit, but no one Ramón knew had ever actually been there, and the territory was still so unexplored that the peaks of the range had not even been individually named. That meant that there were no human settlements within hundreds of miles, and no satellite to relay his network signals this far north; if he got into trouble he would be on his own. He would be one of the first to prospect there, but years would pass, the economic pressure in the south would get higher, and more people would come north, following the charts Ramón had made and sold, interpreting the data he rented out to the corporations and governing bodies. They would follow him like the native scorpion ants—first one, and then a handful, and then countless thousands of small insectoid bodies in the consuming river. Ramón was that first ant, the one driven to risk, to explore. He was a leader not because he chose to be, but because it was his nature to seek distance.

  It was better that way, to be the first ant. Although he was reluctant to admit it, he’d finally come to realize that it was better if he worked someplace away from other prospectors. Away from other people. The bigger prospecting cooperatives might have better contracts, better equipment, but they also had more rum and more women. And between those two, Ramón knew, more fighting. He couldn’t trust his own volatile temper, never had been able to. It had held him back for years, the fighting, and the trouble it got him into. Now it had gotten him into trouble that might cost him his life, if they caught him. No, it was better this way—mule-back prospecting, just himself and his van.

  Besides, he was finding that he liked to be out on his own like this, on a clear day with São Paulo’s big, soft sun blinking dimly back at him from rivers and lakes and leaves. He found that he was whistling tunelessly as the endless forests beneath the van slowly changed from blackwort and devilwood to the local conifer-equivalents: iceroot, creeping willow, hierba. At last, there was no one around to bother him. For the first time that day, his stomach had almost stopped aching.

  Almost.

  With every hour that passed, every forest and lake that appeared, drew near, and slipped away, the thought of the European he’d killed grew in Ramón’s mind, his presence sharpening pixel by pixel, becoming more real, until he could almost, almost, see him sitting in the copilot’s seat, that stupid look of dumb surprise at his own mortality still stamped on his big, pale face—and the more real his ghostly presence became, the deeper Ramón’s hatred for him grew.

  He hadn’t hated him back at the El Rey; the man had just been another bastard looking for trouble and finding Ramón. It had happened before more times than he could recall. It was part of how things worked. He came to town, he drank, he and some rabid asshole found each other, and one of them walked away. Maybe it was Ramón, maybe it was the other guy. Rage, yes, rage had something to do with it, but not hatred. Hatred meant you knew a
man, you cared about him. Rage lifted you up above everything—morality, fear, yourself. Hatred meant that someone had control over you.

  This was the place that usually brought him peace, the outback, the remote territory, the unpeopled places. The tension that came with being around people loosened. In the city—Diegotown or Nuevo Janeiro or any place where too many people came together—Ramón had always felt the press of people against him. The voices just out of earshot, the laughter that might or might not have been directed at him, the impersonal stares of men and women, Elena’s lush body and her uncertain mind; they were why Ramón drank when he was in the city and stayed sober in the field. In the field there was no reason to drink.

  But here, where that peace should have been, the European was with him. Ramón would look out into the limitless bowl of the sky, and his mind would turn back to that night at the El Rey, the sudden awed silence of the crowd. The blood pouring from the European’s mouth. His heels drumming against the ground. He checked his maps, and instead of letting his mind run freely across the fissures and plates of the planetary surface, he thought of where the police might go to search for him. He could not let go of what had happened, and the frustration of that was almost as enraging as the guilt itself.

  But guilt was for weaklings and fools. Everything would be all right. He would spend his time in the field, communing with the stone and the sky, and when he returned to the city, the European would be last season’s news. Something half remembered and retold in a thousand different versions, none of them true. It was one little death among all the hundreds of millions—natural and otherwise—that happened every year throughout the known universe. The dead man’s absence would be like taking a finger out of water; it wouldn’t leave a hole.

  Mountains made a line across the world before him: ice and iron, iron and ice.

  Those would be the Sawtooths, which meant that he’d already overflown Fiddler’s Jump. When he checked the navigation transponders, there was no signal. He was gone, out of human contact, off the incomplete communication network of the colony. On his own. He made the adjustments he’d planned, altering his flight path to throw off any human hounds that the law might set after him, but even as he did so, the gesture seemed pointless. He wouldn’t be followed. No one would care.