Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

Aliens meets Under the Dome in this new postapocalyptic novel from New York Times best seller Lilith Saintcrow.

It could have been aliens, it could have been a trans-dimensional rift, nobody knows for sure. What's known is that there was an Event, the Rifts opened up, and everyone caught inside died.

Since the Event certain people have gone into the drift...and come back, bearing priceless technology that's almost magical in its advancement. When Ashe – the best Rifter of her generation – dies, the authorities offer her student, Svinga, a choice: go in and bring out the thing that killed her, or rot in jail.

But Svin, of course, has other plans...

How far would you go, and what would you risk to win the ultimate prize?

A Hachette Audio production.

Release date: June 13, 2017

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 320

Sample

INTERVIEWER: We are here today with Yevgeny Strugovsky, the acclaimed Rift scientist, who has just received a Nobel Prize for his work in unlocking several Rift technologies. His work has proved a foundation for most of what we know about the Rift’s treasures. Thank you so much for joining us today, Doctor.

STRUGOVSKY: Thank you, yes. Yes.

INTERVIEWER: You must be asked this quite a bit, but it’s a good place to start: What do you think caused the Rifts? There are several different theories, including, as it were, aliens. [Laughs]

STRUGOVSKY: We have no way of knowing, of course. It would be irresponsible to conjecture.

INTERVIEWER: And yet—

STRUGOVSKY: All we can say for certain is that one night, eighty-six years ago, there were strange lights in the skies of many countries. Aurora borealis, perhaps. Then, the Event, at a very specific time.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, the famous Minute of Silence. Four thirty-seven in the afternoon, UTC+2. The Kieslowski Recording—

STRUGOVSKY: Yes, yes. The point is, we cannot even begin to know what triggered the Event until we have ascertained what, precisely, the Rifts are. Rift is somewhat of a misnomer. Bubble is also a bad term; Zone would be more precise, but still not quite what we’re looking for.

INTERVIEWER: Rift is the accepted term, though.

STRUGOVSKY: [Coughs] Yes, indeed. The most current theory is that these … places, these Rifts, are actually tears in a fabric we cannot adequately measure. It is not Einstein’s spacetime, it is not Hawking’s and Velikov’s layer cake, it is not the Ptolemaic bubbles of earth and air. When we know what fabric is being so roughly torn, we may begin to reclaim those parts of the Earth’s surface.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe in reclamation, then? The Yarkers protest that it’s against God’s will.

STRUGOVSKY: Their religion does not interest me. The human race is staring directly into the face of the infinite on the surface of our little planet. The frequencies and patterns of the Riftwalls—seemingly random, but we do not have enough data yet—have blinded us to the amazing fact that the energy for them must come from somewhere. The artifacts brought back—

INTERVIEWER: —illegally.

STRUGOVSKY: Legally, illegally, they are there. And they share this same quality, of clean, near-infinite energy. I say near-infinite because we have not yet managed to discern the half-life of these objects.

INTERVIEWER: Can we say “clean” energy, though? The incidences of mutations near Rift borders, the possibility of some radiation we have no means of measuring yet …

STRUGOVSKY: Ah, will there be those dying like Madame Curie, of invisible rays in the service of Science? It is perhaps worth the cost. Imagine a world where this energy is free, and we have reclaimed the cities that lay inside the Rifts. The implications for our lives, for the planet, even for travel to other parts of the solar system, now that we perhaps have the fuel to do so, these are what interest me.

INTERVIEWER: I see. Can you talk for a moment about the presence of rifters? Most of the data we have has come from those who can enter and leave these zones, these tears in the fabric?

STRUGOVSKY: They are mercenaries. It is a sad comment upon humanity that profit is pursued more vigorously than science.

INTERVIEWER: But there are some commonalities among them, as your fellow scientist Targatsky has shown.

STRUGOVSKY: He is a psychologist, not a scientist.

INTERVIEWER: Still—

STRUGOVSKY: It is the scientists who will solve the Rifts. They must be protected from the mercenaries and the crowds of … [Burst of static]

First came the screaming, drowning out blatting alarms and the ear-shattering repetition of the recorded containment protocol. The long piercing shriek cut right through concrete, glass, stone, buffers, and skulls. Most of the on-duty rifters instinctively hit the ground, one or two ended up with nosebleeds, and one—Legs Martell, absolutely sober for once—going through containment passed out and almost drowned in the showers. A couple of scientists got a headache, but whether it was from the noise or the rest of the afternoon, nobody could say.

The wedge-shaped leav* should have come over the border and inched slowly to a graceful halt right inside the white detox lines, hovering at the regulation three feet above pavement. It should have then been dusted with chemicals, nootslime,† and high UV to make sure any Rift radiation or poisonous goo was neutralized. Instead, it zagged drunkenly over the blur,* spewing multicolored flame and spinning as two live undercells tried to cope with one gyro melted and the third cell pouring toxic smoke. The dumb fucks on tower duty even unloaded their rifles at it, probably thinking it was the Return,† the aliens who left the Rift-bubbles all over the surface deciding to revisit and pick up their dropped toys, with the tower guards first in line to be grabbed for experimentation or whatever. The terrified fusillade popped the leav’s canopy and gave the fire inside a breath of fresh air.

The resultant explosion shattered every window facing the containment bay. Klaxons were added to alarms and recorded exhortations to wash twice, dust down, wash again. Someone got the yahoos in the towers to quit shooting, but by then it was too late. Any evidence of what had happened inside the blur-wall was well and truly shot to shit, and burned for good measure.

Wreckage that had once been a good solid piece of antigrav equipment drifted on its two remaining cells, turning in majestic, lazy circles and burning merrily. The emergency response team had been playing Three High‡ instead of suiting up as soon as something rippled in the blur and the watching rifters hit the alert, so it took them a good ten minutes to get their lazy asses out there. They foamed the whole thing, and someone got the bright idea of setting out a triangle of dampers. When they were switched on, their flat surfaces coruscating with peculiar static-popping blue stutterlight, the leav thudded down, cracking concrete. It was too heavy, as if it had dragged a squeezer*—what the scientists called a localized gravitational anomaly, isn’t that a mouthful—out on its back.

There are squeezers and shimmers,† and the pointy-headed wonders call them the same damn thing, when any idiot could guess you’d need to know which was too much and which was too little. Didn’t matter. They kill you just the same. Except there are stories of a rifter surviving a shimmer. You never know.

Anyway, once the foam dripped away, the entire warped chassis of the leav was there, and three shapes glimmered through the smoke. One of them had to be Bosch from the physics department, because one of that corpse’s legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. Another one’s pelvis was horribly mangled, but it could have been a woman’s.

The obvious conclusion was that it was Ashe and the two scientists, with their accompanying sardies‡—who would have been in the secondary, much smaller leav—dead somewhere in QR-715. The gleaming inside the shattered leav was skeletons, turned into some sort of alloy. It took two weeks of patient work by teams in magsuits to free them from the tangle, and they were carted away to the depths of the Institute. Someone did a hush-hush paper on them—the bones were alloy, where the ligaments were all high-carbon flex with an odd crystalline pattern all over. That was the heaviness—the alloy was impervious to diamond or laserik, and incredibly dense. Whatever had crushed the pelvis of the third skeleton had to have been massive, unless it had been done before the transformation.

By then, though, the rifters had already held a wake at the Tumbledown. Anyone who wasn’t a rifter got thrown out after the first round, and the next morning saw not a few still-unconscious freaks on the tables or under them, and even more reeling home. Sabby the Pooka got carted to the butcherblock* for alcohol poisoning. Might as well have medicated him for grief, too, since he and Cabra’d been running with the Rat ever since she rolled into town. There was nothing to bury, science had eaten the bodies, and besides, it’s what she would have wanted.

That’s how Ashe Rajtnik, Ashe the Rat, who held herself to be the best rifter in the world and was certainly one of the luckiest, died. After that, the higher-ups sent a commission. They discharged all the on-duty rifters, and more orders came down: Nothing went into the Rift, anything that came out was to be shot and contained. Afterward, Kopelund once told Morov he’d almost been canned, too, since he’d played loose with the regs to send in even a small research team, not to mention one with a couple leavs.

And yet, a year later, the motherfucker in charge of the complex perched at the edge of the biggest Rift in the world was looking for someone else to go in after the Cormorant.

This is Juliet-Oscar niner-three-oh, coming in easterly, requesting permission to land.”

With Svinga’s cheek mashed against the bubble the world underneath was a green smear, broken by concrete and smokestacks belching, scrubbed but still foul greasy-white. The town had moved up the river once the Event hit, factories thrown up slapdash now sporting the swellings of carbon filters retrofitted on the stacks, haphazard main arteries branching like the footpaths and small surface roads they were built on, the railroad tracks suddenly curving to cross the river here instead of downstream at the better bend.

Some cities had died during the Event. Others, like this one, just leaned away on the second-most-favorable bit of terrain. The slums that had housed refugees were now higher-grade residential districts, unless you counted the fringe along the riverbank itself. Buildings crawled upstream, figuring it was safer than Rift-filtered water. Even if some assholes bottled and sold the latter—or marketed rusty fluid from ancient taps as Riftwater, good for you, capable of curing cancer or impotence.

The city stopped as if sliced. The deadzone was wider than the mandated mile minimum, clipped down to waste grass, any bushes or bramble ruthlessly shorn, tree stumps taken down to the dirt, all under a threadbare scrim of snow and freeze. The old railroad, now simply a rusted spur, dove through on its way to the better river crossing, the one stuck behind shimmering curtains of randomized energy. A straight shot, right for the heart of the Rift. Any patrol in the ’zone would have the same orders: Shoot to kill.

Whether or not they were relaxed about it was something you could only tell when you got near them. Svin spotted two three-leav groups moving there, bristling with scanners and long penile bankguns.

The leav banked and came in low over the military complex, a reply burbling through the pilot’s helmet. Shackles bit Svin’s wrists, one of them rubbing against her left ankle, too, and the cut on the bridge of her nose, crack-glazed with dried blood, throbbed.

The beefy Regulation 70* next to her in flexphase perma-plas armor settled her knee more firmly in Svin’s back. Just a routine transfer, they’d said.

Only for routine transfers you were chained to a benchseat in a malodorous transport hevvy, with a bunch of assholes yelling all around you and flicking snot at each other.

Even criminals never got over school.

Svin took a deep breath, but slowly, filling her lungs in increments. There, at the very edge of her vision, a shimmering. Light bouncing in weird ways, and the space inside her empty-aching like a pulled tooth.

Were the fuckers really planning on putting her down near a Rift? She didn’t shut her grainy, insomnia-hot eyes, didn’t even blink, her tongue creeping out to touch the slick, almost-gritty clear plas of the bubble. The cells whined as stabilizers kicked in against a sudden airdrift, and the Reg70* behind her exhaled a breath of onions, fear, and petty dominance. Transport dicks were generally a little more easygoing, but this one had a crucisplice† on her cheek and was probably praying as they glided. Goddamn Yarkers.‡ Satan works inside the Rift, they said, and the only thing they hated more than the tech dragged out past the blur was the rifters themselves. Consorting with the devil and all that.

Of course, the greedy fucks used the tech, just like everyone else. Leavs, sleds, poppers,§ Mata equations,¶ halone,** triphase plasma—the list went on and on, and they used it all.

This Reg70 had generous hips and wide soft shoulders with hard muscle underneath. She might have even been attractive, except for the fear-stink. And the fact that her hand-cannon was stuck in Svinga’s back; no doubt a gloved finger was caressing the trigger. Of course, letting a bolt off in here was likely to plunge all three of them groundward in flames, but there wasn’t a 70 anywhere without something to prove.

Who wouldn’t be keyed up this close to a Rift? Even the assholes who’d been predicting Intelligent Life Somewhere Else had been floored by the Event, and all the kooks suddenly “proven” right about UFOs had a field day until the true extent of the casualties sank in. Not the civilians vanished when the Event happened, but the ones who went into the Rifts right after, thinking they were going to be pioneers or some shit. In the end, all the emergency planning in every municipality, county, province, state, country, and continent had only managed sticking-plasters over bleeding gunshot wounds. Excising whole cities from the map was a messy business.

Permission to land was granted with a burst and a crackle of transmission code and the transport leav began to sink gently, gyros whining and its cells glowing with Mata curve differentials. Svin didn’t shut her eyes until the slugwall slid out of sight behind a bulky concrete-and-sealed-glass building. A few moments after that, the bump of landing jolted all the way through Svin’s bones, and since she wasn’t shot in the back she decided the Reg70 behind her had either some trigger discipline or a couple dry nerves left. Or maybe she had to finish praying before she shot one of Satan’s minions.

Once the bubble lifted, the 70 holstered her gun but kept her knee in Svin’s kidneys.

It would, Svin thought, be easy. Pitch forward, getting her legs up behind her, use the 70 to push off against, hope not to chip a tooth or dislocate her shoulder on concrete, but if she did pop her shoulder out, the restraints would be easier to wriggle. Once her hands were in front of her, they might get her from the towers but at least she could get this particular 70’s neck snapped before the rounds went through Svin’s body. It would depend on how drunk the tower watch was.

Staring at the slugwall’s slow, opalescent sheen for hours at a time did bad things to the inside of your head. It was axiomatic that the only way to keep the guards doing it was an alcohol ration, and with the mounted guns, you didn’t need accuracy. Just the willingness to shoot even at shadows.

Svin let the moment pass. Let the 70 haul her from the leav, let her entire body go slack. Landed in a heap on pavement blast-cleaned by leavcells and containment chemicals, getting a good look around as she fell and closing her eyes again to fix it all in memory. A standard horseshoe of an Institute, the walls lead-webbed concrete sandwiches, its open end full of U-shaped levvy slots—just lines of white paint on the concrete, nothing fancy, a total of three sleds resting on blocks for moving heavy shit. The actual levvy bays would probably be on the south side, and—

The 70 hauled her up again by the back of her paper-thin prison jumpsuit. “You little shit. Stand up!” The black helmet was fogged on the inside—someone was doing some heavy breathing. Another shake, Svinga’s head bobbling on her neck, as if she were only partly conscious.

Whoever was watching might get the idea this particular 70 had beaten the crap out of her prisoner in transport. And the bobbling gave Svin a chance to observe more of the layout.

One of the cargo doors on the northern face was opening, and a flurry of movement started. Scientists? Other rifters? A flash of light—someone wearing glasses, maybe? Had to be vanity, anyone who could afford it got ocular nowadays. Svin let herself stay nice and limp, making the 70 work for every step.

There. The bottom of the U—the eastern wall, facing the k-zone* and the blur—opened up a couple of black gaps as well, and security forces came spilling through. The uniforms were black, but the red piping at the shoulders showed they were sardies, frontline troops instead of jumped-up faux-polizei.

Red-eye stripe, yo’ ass is wiped, the saying ran. Right after the Event sardies were hurried into uniform in case it was the prelude to an attack. During the Crash, they were government mercenaries—distinguished from private mercenary armies only in the matter of paymaster and the quality of their rations, and sometimes not even the latter.

If they had this many sardies just sitting around, it must be a bigger Rift. Which narrowed the list.

Always look, Ashe said, years ago. Look. Think. Then and only then do you move even a finger. Even an eyelash.

Svinga sensed the 70’s intent to drop her a split second before it happened and went down again, rolling violently sideways as if the guard had kicked her. Yeah, it was a standard Institute, built a few years after the Event but before the Crash, when funding was sloshing around and everyone was terrified. Another piece of evidence saying a bigger Rift. She’d been hooded for the first few legs of transport, so she had very little idea of where she was. Across the ocean from Guan, that was for sure.

Which was great. The further away, the better.

Now she had the general layout, she could guess at the rest. Know your ground, Ashe always said. So Svinga lay on the cold hard landing pad, curled around herself as if it hurt to move. It did, a little, but that was life. If you didn’t expect it and hold yourself in readiness, your expiration date would amble up and bite you before you were even close to ready.

That was when she caught sight of the scorch. A looping, blackened path from the blur in, and just like everything to do with the Rift, it looked … different. Wrong. A normal person wouldn’t be able to tell just how, and would look quickly away, maybe with their stomach clenching a bit and a cold bead of sweat forming right at the base of their spine.

Svinga stared. The mark was too black, too thick, and she gapped her mouth, quick sipping breaths. You had to taste things.

There was no hint of anything but exhaust and cold weather. Just a faintly obscene streak burned into pavement, heat-rings rippling at its edges.

“Stand down!” someone was yelling, probably at the 70 behind her. The transport goon began shouting something muffled, and there was a crackle of live stimsticks.* She was probably still trying to explain when the first one smacked against her flexphase armor.

Flexphase didn’t have anti-stim padding, which made it lighter. An advantage for a transport dick, until it wasn’t.

Svin lay very still, ears and eyes open, as if she had just gone over the blur and hit the ground, waiting to see which direction danger would come from. Her fingers curled whiteknuckle-tight over the cableplug that fastened into the 70’s belt. It was the channel output jack, and without it, the onion-reeking Yarker bitch was shouting into the wind. The sardies would think she was dustsick,* or crazed by being too close to a rifter, and if there was one thing about frontline troops, it was their tendency to beat the shit out of a target first and find out why it wasn’t responding later.

It was, Svinga decided, not a bad way to start her first real day out of prison.

The one-way mirror was filthy with dust and flyspotting, which distorted the view of a sweating concrete room lit by a buzzing fluorescent tube. Thin, nasty light played over a thin woman slumped in a metal chair bolted to the floor. Shackled, deadfish-pale hands rested on the interrogation table; her maroon prisoner’s jumpsuit was just this side of threadbare and the flextag with her number and barcode at her left breast lay flat and almost frayed out of legibility. Her pointed chin dropped slightly while ropes of dirt-matted hair swayed forward, then jerked upward, regaining lost ground. Either she was trying to stay awake or she was bobbing to atonal, rhythmless, wholly internal music. Grime lodged under her bitten-down fingernails and along the cuticles, and every once in a while, when her head jerked back up, the tip of her nose showed just as fish-belly as her wrists.

Prison pallor. You saw the sun for an hour a day in max, rain or shine, but not at all in solitary.

“That’s it?” Kope’s nose wrinkled as he arranged his uniform cuffs. It was a big, generous nose, and its twitches signaled his feelings—or what he wanted you to think his feelings were—at every possible opportunity. “Shit.”

“You asked for a good rifter.” Zlofter pulled irritably at the cuffs of his shiny new suit, too, perhaps not realizing he was mirroring the larger man. His slick black pompadour almost glowed in the dimness, and his silver earpiece was the latest little gift from the Rift’s depths, a high-range Aurovox. Probably a thank-you present from his corporate masters, a shiny collar making sure they could buzz him at any moment with marching orders. A glorified leash.

Kope’s disgusted snort echoed in the concrete corners. “And your little knob-polishing buddies send us a washed-out felon? We could have gone into town and picked up a few dozen of those by ourselves.” He had to be careful to sound just irritated enough. DynaKrom had no shortage of people or funding to throw at whatever their rifters brought out, and government agencies couldn’t hope to compete. Especially when standing orders were NINO—nothing in, nothing out. They wanted to “map” the smaller Rifts first.

That fucking decision had probably come out of a committee. It had idiot written all over it.

He should have gone into private security instead of the sardie-hole. He’d been telling himself that for years, but his contract was signed and fucking set, and there was nothing to be done but make the best of a bad pile of fertilizer, as his grandfather would have said.

So it was begging for scraps under the guise of “cooperation,” and if there was one part of his job that made Kope want to set the entire fucking building on fire and piss on the flames, it was the sucking up necessary to get even this halfass kind of quasi-legal support. Of course, if they suspected exactly what he was after, they would probably take over his whole installation, and even though he could cheerfully gut the place, it was still his. And he was still capable of oiling the levers right to get what he wanted. The proof of that was sitting in the room on the other side of the mirror.

When this place was built, there was still hope some civilians had survived inside the Rifts and were waiting for rescue. So, thoughtfully, the design had included a couple of debriefing rooms. There was an ancient commjack in the wall in front of them, at knee height. He could have scavenged some equally ancient came. . .