Feed the Machine (3 page)

They were on the thin edge of nothing. You couldn’t even say every day was the same. It was the same, largely, but incrementally worse. Slightly less pap. One fewer bug. Silver a little sicker. Their mother a little more worn out, a little more bent over. Nola, running ragged day by day, tiredness fighting with youth but youth would soon give way. And him, Ash, walking further away into the Scour every day just to come back with nothing that good. Only enough to knock a few points off the quota.

“You awake?” Raj asked.

“Yeah.”

“Kin, how long till dawn?”

“Ten minutes,” Kin said, his voice coming from somewhere under Ash’s chin. His purr was a low throb in the darkness.

“Is there anything out there? We need to be ready to go.”

“I’m busy, ask your bird,” Kin said.

“Fuck no!” Chirp said.

They lay there for a few minutes, Ash scratching behind his ears until Kin’s claws pricked his skin and he felt a patch of wet as Kin drooled on his chest.

“Okay buddy time to go.”

He pulled Kin off him, still purring and sat up.

“I want some food.”

“As soon as you tell me if there is anything outside waiting for us.”

Kin lowered himself to the floor of the cocoon and put his head down so his whiskers touched the metal.

“Nothing there,” he said after a moment. “Do you have fish?”

“Not today. I have pap.”

“I guess that will do,” Kin said sourly.

Ash and Raj stowed their bedrolls and ate their pap in the gray darkness, sharing their food with Kin and Chirp. Once Kin announced the official sunrise, they took out their cutters and opened the cocoon. As they cut, it creaked around them, the weight of the junk on top of it threatening to collapse it.

“Careful,” Raj breathed, pushing the metal up. Some junk and rubble had collected on the other side during the night. They pushed it away until the hole was big enough for Kin to creep through.

“Safe,” he called back.

They cleared out the hole and Raj climbed out, Chirp fluttering into the sky to keep watch. Ash passed out their packs and crawled out, careful not to cut himself on some of the sharper pieces of metal.

The sun was rising, the night chill swiftly searing away. It was going to be another blistering day, perhaps even hotter than the previous. Ash and Raj went off in separate directions to piss into empty bottles which they then stored in their packs. No scavenger would piss on the ground. Apart from leaving a scent for the hazels or Scabs, there were too many stories of trapped or lost scavengers staying alive thanks to drinking their own piss. In a desperate moment you could instruct your bugs to build a little hasdee to reprocess shit into pap too—provided you knew what you were doing and were carrying the right tempcube to reprogram your hasdee. Ash had one of Silver’s stored in his pack just in case.

They covered their cocoon as best they could—they’d be staying there on the way back—and started their long march. Most of the morning they followed a long winding path heading roughly northwest through the junk.

The temperature rose degree by degree every minute, the sun searing down upon them. They didn’t talk, saving moisture lost from an open mouth. They walked and listened. The chances of a hazel attacking in the day were virtually zero but there were other dangers. The uncollared Scabs were first on the list. They were vicious and violent cannibals who loved nothing more than feasting on scavengers. They allegedly owned hasdees—but preferred fresh meat.

The corridor of junk grew narrower and disappeared into a dead end. Ahead of them was a steep sloping wall of rough concrete and iron rebar sticking out, twisted and rusting. At the base of the pile were broken glass pots and a half-smashed pram, one wheel nearly intact. They both had a quick look—sometimes there were broken tablets stuck in pram pockets—but this one held nothing.

“Fun, fun,” Ash muttered and led the way, climbing the pile of junk, feeling it shift under his feet. Kin climbed next to him, using his sharp metal-tipped claws for traction.

Raj followed after instructing Chirp to fly up to see if anyone was around. He called back fuck no! in his high voice before fluttering back but Ash still wasn’t taking any chances. Scabs often sat out on the tops of hills or other high places, sometimes with binoculars, looking for prey. He reached the top of the pile but stayed low, looking around. No smoke from cooking fires and no movement. Raj climbed next to him and flattened himself to the ground as best he could atop somewhat spiky rubble.

“See anything?”

“Still checking.”

Ash squinted across the mounds that stretched out for kilometers around them. In the far distance, the piles grew higher until they were like mountains. One was surrounding a toppled skyscraper that sat on a forty-five degree angle, split open, revealing its naked iron bones to the sky. He knew beyond that was an area marked on all maps as Death. The Scabs lived on the periphery of it, a deep canyon that split the earth. There were a thousand stories about it. Giant bugs lived there that would eat you. The ghost of every criminal ever hung on a rope was waiting to pull the living down to join them. There was treasure but it was cursed. Sometimes bastardos bragged they’d sneaked through the Scab camps and pissed over the edge of the canyon. No one believed them even as they laughed at the story. The plain fact was anyone who went too close died.

Everything around them was in shades of brown, black and gray.

Ash looked south at the white glow over the horizon. Even in the day it was bright, as though competing with the sun itself. No one knew what it was. Perhaps a city surrounded by fences and lights. Perhaps something else. From their vantage point, he could see the Gap and the sharp edge where the junk cut off abruptly. The line of the edge curved until it crossed the horizon, implying a circle of enormous size.

He glanced to the southeast, back at Cago. It was hidden from view by a wall of junk but it was still comforting to know it was there.

“Anyone?”

Ash shook his head.

“Not that I can see.”

“C’mon Chirp,” Raj said. Chirp fluttered down to sit on his pack.

Ash climbed over the pile and down the other side, Raj closely behind him but offset so if he fell he wouldn’t take Ash down too. Kin leapt from place to place, avoiding any sharp edges, landing lightly. It was slow going—the threat of avalanche or collapse was very real.

They continued on, climbing up and down hills, getting closer to where Chirp had marked the crash site. As they did, the quality of the garbage under their feet changed. It was as though someone had dumped a few tons of nuts and bolts around the area. In some places it was ankle deep. Most were rusted, corroded away and useless but some were still pristine, made by some ancient process that kept the rust away. Mixed in with the nuts and bolts were shards of wood weathered by rain and sun, some still shiny with varnish. Wood was always a good sign. It meant no bugs had been there recently or perhaps the junk dune had turned over, bringing treasures from the deep.

Ash glanced at Raj and he nodded back in unspoken agreement. They could be walking over a fortune. Every time the junk moved under his feet, Ash has to resist the urge to dig down just a little to see if anything good was hidden under the surface.

They had to get to the crash site as soon as possible before the hole it made collapsed in on itself, the missile exploded or worse than that, the Scabs came and took everything.

They stopped for all of two minutes for lunch, gobbling down pap, Kin lapping water from Ash’s cupped hand before they moved on. The sun beat down above them, a stinging heat Ash could feel trying to suck the moisture out of his body. If it became any hotter they might be in serious trouble.

Ash resisted gulping down all his water, instead taking small sips to ensure he didn’t slip into dehydration without noticing.

They kept marching until Chirp started jumping around on Raj’s pack.

“Fuck yes! Fuck yes! Fuck yes!”

He fluttered in the air and looped a circle.

“Get the fuck down here,” Raj told him.

“We must be there, look.”

They were standing at the base of another hill of junk. Most of it was rusted and covered in a fine layer of dust but here and there were shiny pieces of metal. Halfway up the hill a piece of yellowed paper fluttered, trapped under a rock.

“I love paper,” Ash said.

The climbed the hill which soon revealed itself to be the outer rim of a deep depression with a wide dark hole at the bottom.

“There’s the fucking missile hole!” Raj said.

“Shh. Over there,” Ash said, waving his hand at Raj to keep down.

In the distance a curl of smoke drifted from behind a hill before being smudged away in the upper air.

“Six, seven, eight hills. Fuck that’s close,” Ash said.

It was definitely Scabs. No way would a scavenger be so stupid to light a cooking fire.

They looked at the hole cut into the junk. The sides were smooth, as though the missile had been hot when it sliced into the pile. It was a good three meters across. Piled around the outside were thick heavy concrete beams with twisted rebar sticking out of them. Plenty of places to connect a rope.

“Let’s hurry the fuck up and get rich,” Raj said.

He lifted Chirp off his shoulder and held him close.

“Chirp, listen to me. Sit on the hole to keep watch. Don’t fly too high unless you see movement. Do you understand?”

Chirp turned his head to the side, blinking his black eyes.

“Fuck yes!” he said and fluttered off Raj’s hand to land on the junk. Then he started hopping around the rim of the depression, moving to the far side.

“Careful, careful,” Ash said as they clambered closer to the hole. It wasn’t too steep but there were plenty of tiny pieces of metal and concrete rubble under their feet. Some bits came loose and slid down the slope to fall into the hole. Every time a piece dropped over the edge, Ash prayed the unexploded missile at the bottom would stay that way.

They climbed as close to the hole as they dared, planting their feet and taking off their packs, removing ropes and pinions.

Ash ran his rope through his hand as he unwound it, feeling the fraying. It was getting weaker day by day, just like his pack and his clothes. Like everything. This was the rope’s last trip unless they found something amazing today. He threaded it through the electric winch on the harness and strapped himself in. Raj was already a step ahead of him, welding metal pinions to rebar with his cutter, ensuring three points of contact.

Once his gear was set up, Ash welded pinions into a different piece of rebar growing out of a long concrete beam that disappeared into the pile. It was wide and thick and if it did happen to slip, Ash hoped it was big enough to jam across the hole rather than falling down it. Going down holes was always a risk. You needed to tie yourself to something heavy so you didn’t fall. But if it slipped, it might pull you down into the depths. If the hole crushed in on you at least there was a rope tied to your dead body. Someone could dig down and recover your collar, getting a bounty from your family and sparing them seven years of quota debt.

Kin came close to the edge of the hole and peered down into it. Then he knocked a white stone off the edge and watched it drop into the darkness.

“Are you ready yet? There might be mice down there,” he said impatiently, waving his tail from side to side.

“Nearly there,” Ash said, taking two bugs out of the bag on his hip. He had his pack on the front so he could fill it, his cutter on his belt, water and food and enough rope to drop down a good two hundred meters.

Ash held the bugs close to his mouth.

“Light up in the dark. Keep pace with us. Stop when we stop,” he instructed them. He heard Raj whispering the same to his bugs too. They scurried over the edge, their shells glowing.

Ash turned his back to hole, gave his ropes one last check and then walked himself backwards, letting the rope take his weight. He could feel the hole behind him, a deep pool of cool air. It smelled faintly of burned electrical wiring, something destroyed no doubt by the missile’s passage. Once he was at an angle over the hole with his feet planted against the wall, Kin stepped off the edge, walked up his leg and settled on his chest, hooking his claws into the pack and peering out over his shoulder into the darkness below. Behind him, Ash heard Raj lowering himself into the hole.

Raj had better gear—his winch carrying enough power to lower and pull him back up easily. Ash’s winch was fairly weak and so he had to rely on the strength of his arm to lower him down. Behind him he heard the faint hum of Raj’s electric winch as he began to descend.

“Keep count Kin. Ground is zero. Scan for anything good,” Ash said.

Then he let some rope out and abseiled down into the cool dark, his black cat counting out the depth as they descended.

Chapter 5

The first fifty meters was concrete and iron, the outer layers of the skyscraper that had stood on this spot. As they descended, the temperature dropped. At first it was a relief from the blistering day but soon the sweat on his clothes chilled and stuck to him. Gradually the junk composition changed. Bits of broken circuitry and electronics appeared. He passed a tablet snapped clean in half and embedded in the wall.