Something Coming Through

42. Shit Becoming Real

Mangala | 30 July

‘I am happy to keep him locked up here,’ Karl Schweda said. ‘He admits he was at the scene of the shootout and also your partner’s murder. He possesses a firearm which he acquired illegally. He admits to using it…It is more than enough to detain him.’

‘I think he was telling the truth about what happened to my partner,’ Vic said. ‘He had no reason to kill him. If he did, he wouldn’t have come to ask for my help. And if he’s telling the truth about Skip, the rest of his story just might be true, too.’

They were sitting in Karl’s office. Adam Nevers was in one of the cells downstairs, demolishing a burger sent over from a café in town. The local doctor had cleaned and rebandaged his wound, and he’d told his story to Vic and Karl, putting it on the official record.

He’d come out to Idunn’s Valley, he’d said, because he had been following Danny Drury and his associates after they’d kidnapped one of the stowaways from the shipping container. And he’d followed the stowaways to Mangala because they possessed a potent artefact that came from an Elder Culture site excavated by Cal McBride’s company and wanted to find more like it or find something larger and even more potent…Nevers hadn’t been clear on that point. He’d said that Sahar Chauhan, the biochemist who’d cooked meq for the McBride family, had sent the artefact back to Earth, to his son and daughter. A little bead containing some form of eidolon that had affected the children. The son, Fahad, had begun to draw pictures of the same alien landscape, over and over. They had attracted the attention of a research group owned by Ada Morange, a biotech entrepreneur. Her company had sent Fahad and two of her employees to Mangala, inside that shipping container; Nevers and his partner had ridden on the same shuttle on corporate tickets.

‘If you had come to us about this thing instead of pulling this sneaky spy shit,’ Vic said, ‘my partner might still be alive. Yours too.’

Nevers didn’t have anything to say about that.

‘Tell me what happened outside the shuttle terminal,’ Vic said.

‘Ellis and I planned to keep watch on the traffic coming out of the terminal, hoping to intercept the stowaways,’ Nevers said. ‘But we were ambushed as soon as we turned off the main road. Ellis went in one direction; I went in the other. They chased down Ellis, and shot at me when I tried to go to his aid.’

‘Did you see who killed your partner?’

According to Little Dave, Cal McBride owned the ray gun that had killed Ellis Peters, but it would be nice to get confirmation from an eyewitness.

But Nevers was shaking his head. ‘I was too far away. I saw someone stoop over Ellis, saw a flash of blue light…’

‘And then?’

‘And then they came after me, and I got out of there. I didn’t have a gun at the time. There was nothing else I could do.’

‘No one’s blaming you for taking off,’ Vic said.

Nevers said, ‘I was hoping, now that I’ve told you everything I know about the death of your partner, that you would be willing to share any information you have about the death of mine.’

‘I don’t have anything I can take to the prosecutor,’ Vic said.

He wasn’t going to open up his investigation to a man who’d been operating on the dark side. And he didn’t like Nevers’s weak attempt to justify himself. If you do something you know is wrong, you should own it, not try to explain it away.

‘I’m not talking about facts,’ Nevers said.

‘Who do you think did it?’

‘I’m certain that it was either Cal McBride or Danny Drury. The man who used to run the company that took out the licence on Site 326, or the man who runs the company now. Whoever it was knew who we were, why we’d come here. It’s very likely that someone in the force back home has been feeding them information. Old-school criminal families like the McBrides always have an inside man. When I get back, I’m going to make it my first priority to find out who it is, and who they passed the information to.’

Vic thought it likely that the McBride family would have passed any inside information to Danny Drury, and McBride had found out because he had an informant in Drury’s crew. Like, for instance, Little Dave.

He said, ‘Someone killed your partner. You fled the scene. What did you do then?’

‘I found Danny Drury’s house. I found Cal McBride’s construction site, and the hotel where he lived. I was planning to confront McBride first. It was easier to get to him. But then I found where the stowaways were hiding. A place owned by a so-called freelance biologist. She paid for a copy of the excavation licence of that Elder Culture site, and she exports material back to Earth, to Ada Morange’s company. I’d just caught up with them when Drury’s people snatched the boy, Fahad. I followed Drury here, and so did McBride. And that’s where things started to go wrong.’

‘Did you see the shootout?’

Nevers shook his head. ‘I was watching Drury. He got into a speedboat, and took off downriver. By the time I heard about the shootout, it was all over.’

Nevers had been looking for a boat, trying and failing to buy or hire one because everyone was heading upriver, away from the dust storm, when he’d spotted three men Drury had left behind, presumably to look for any of their enemies who had escaped.

‘It wasn’t hard to keep track of what they were doing; there was always at least one of them keeping watch at the docks,’ Nevers said. ‘Sitting in a Range Rover. When all three headed out of town I followed them, saw them kidnap Skip.’

Vic said, ‘They kidnapped him?’

‘He drove out of town, towards the site of the shootout. They ran his car off the road, bundled him into the trunk of his car, took him out to a place behind a big storage shed. Perhaps they wanted to question him, but when they opened the trunk he came at them, they shot him…’

Vic felt something cold and heavy move through him. He said, ‘You didn’t intervene?’

‘Of course I did. That’s how I got shot,’ Nevers said, staring straight at Vic as if daring him to deny it.

Karl stirred and said, ‘How do you know these were Drury’s men?’

‘I staked out Drury’s house after he snatched Fahad,’ Nevers said. ‘I recognised two of them.’

‘He kept this kid in his house?’ Vic felt a little chill, wondering if the kid could have been there when he and Skip had visited the place.

‘I didn’t see Fahad,’ Nevers said. ‘But when I saw Drury and half a dozen of his crew leave in a little convoy, I followed them. And that’s how I ended up here.’

Karl said, ‘And before that, you followed these stowaways all the way from Earth. This artefact must be very valuable.’

‘It’s very dangerous,’ Nevers said. ‘I saw what it can do. We caught up with Fahad and his little sister at one point, and the thing reared up…’

The man had a stricken, haunted look.

‘Eidolons can definitely fuck with your head,’ Vic said, thinking of the man who’d killed his partner in that Junktown bar.

‘I’m certain that it influenced Fahad and the others. That it made them want to come here,’ Alan Nevers said. ‘Why, I don’t know. But not for anything good. And right now the boy is heading downriver with Drury and his crew. Heading towards that site to do God knows what.’

The man was clearly anxious to prevent that happening. Genuinely believed that this artefact, the eidolon it contained, was dangerous and had warped the minds of everyone who had come into contact with it.

Now, up in the office, Vic told Karl, ‘Everyone thinks there’s something valuable to be found at this site, but it all comes down to this eidolon. It got inside this kid’s head, and maybe it did a number on his friends, and on Nevers. I don’t think he chased these stowaways here just because they broke a couple of laws back on Earth.’

Karl agreed. ‘I have some experience of prospectors deranged by their finds. They believe that they have found the secret at the heart of the universe, or that they have acquired superpowers, and so on. Most of them are harmless, but a few can be actively dangerous. One woman, over at Hwyel’s Crossing, was possessed by an eidolon from a tomb she uncovered on her farm. She kidnapped people and sewed machinery into their living bodies. To make them like the creatures she saw in dreams. Nevers is not that crazy, of course, but it is quite possible that what he and the others are chasing is nothing but a fever dream.’

‘Drury and McBride clearly have inside information,’ Vic said. ‘That part of Nevers’s story definitely rings true. Three years ago, Cal McBride’s company took out a licence to excavate a site south of here. Then McBride went to jail, and Drury took over. And when Skip and I interviewed Drury about the murder of Nevers’s partner, he had a ton of camping gear in his house.’

‘So he was getting ready to come here.’

‘His people back on Earth tell him about this haunted bead Sahar Chauhan sent his kids. They tell him the son is coming here. So he snatches the kid and this bead, and heads off to the site. Cal McBride wants that bead too, and gives chase. If Nevers was telling the truth, that’s what the shootout was about.’

‘And McBride lost.’

‘We don’t know yet that he was killed. He might still be in the game,’ Vic said, ‘but Drury is definitely on his way to the prize.’

‘If you are thinking of going after him, I cannot go with you,’ Karl said. ‘I have too many responsibilities here.’

‘I understand. This one is on me,’ Vic said.

There was a brief silence as Skip’s death hung between them.

Karl said, ‘You could wait here. Whatever happens downriver, Drury has to come back this way.’

‘And he could head on past this town to some place further upriver. And when I catch up with him he’ll have an explanation about why he couldn’t possibly have been here, backed up with alibis and a swarm of lawyers. No, I have to catch him in the one place I know he’ll be.’

‘You will walk into the middle of his camp and ask him and his man to give themselves up?’

‘Only in my dreams. I’m going to lay back with a camera and a humungous telescopic lens I happen to have brought along. I have a little drone, too.’

‘You came prepared.’

‘Well, I was a Boy Scout, even if it was a long time ago on another planet. Drury killed Skip and kidnapped these stowaways. I’m going to put him square in the frame, get probable cause to go through all his shit. And if McBride is still after the artefact too, I want to see what happens. So if you know someone who has a boat I can hire, or even buy…’

Karl said, ‘Chris and I go fishing, on occasion. Strange fish you cannot eat, but Chris mounts them as trophies or sells them to agents for bioscience companies. I could perhaps lend you our skiff, small though it is. But even better, I know someone who might be able to fly you out there. Get you close enough to walk in, and pick you up again afterwards.’

Vic felt a wire twist in his stomach. Shit was becoming real. He said, ‘That sounds dangerously like a plan.’

‘Also, you will need camping equipment, in case the dust storm arrives early and you have to wait it out. I will give Able Ngomi a call. He owns the local dry-goods store. He can sort out what you need, and I will make sure he doesn’t charge you too much.’

‘Karl, my man, I’ll be paying you back for the rest of my life.’

‘I hope you will.’

‘I came up on the second shuttle. I was here for the Big Blow. Planet hasn’t killed me yet, and some little dust storm won’t do the job either. And I have no intention of getting in a spot where Drury or anyone else can take a pop at me. This is strictly a reconnaissance mission,’ Vic said, knowing it wasn’t, knowing that if it came down to it he was going to have to step up to Danny Drury. Man kills your partner, you don’t walk away from that.

Karl said, ‘What about Nevers?’

‘If you want to formally charge him, it’s fine by me. But before you do, I’d like to talk to him again. Man’s sitting there so quietly, it’s like my grandmother used to say, dog don’t howl if he has a bone. He knows more than he’s told us. I want to find out what that is.’