They looked at each other. Snow was old and good. He was also old and—old school, to put it politely. No overhead was a euphemism. It pretty much meant slave labor.
They asked him some questions, but Chief Snow was done. “Told you what you need. Your job to figure it out.” He stumped off down the hall. They began waking up geologists. One of them slipped out, and woke up Renner himself.
Bonneville, New Utah
Zia stared at the ceiling with red-rimmed eyes. She was too cold, or she was too hot. She couldn’t decide. She threw off the blankets, and shivered in the breeze that soughed gently through the carven shutters. The muezzin lulled her to sleep. The muezzin woke her up. The soothing white noise of the fountain trickling in the courtyard beyond her window was drowned out by the plunk of a faucet dripping two floors above on the opposite side of the compound. Marul was a comfort. Marul was an impossible burden. Her children were dead. Her children were alive. She had grieved passed caring. If she could not find them, she would die.
She grilled Ollie daily for another detail; another sign. She walked Marul through her steps again and again, until she herself walked the path through the early morning frost. She remembered her own role on that morning. She arose. Ollie arose. Hugo arose. The little ones rose. Again and again they sat to table in the last breakfast of her mind.
Hugo left to make morning pickups from the warehouse. In a jocular display of big-brotherly good temper, Deela and the boys went along for the ride. Ollie left to open the market stall that served as office, grocery, and teahouse. Zia left to fight her way through the traffic and trash; dead dogs and severed signposts that pointed to the dreary procurement ledgers at Orcutt Land and Mining.
As dawn broke, exhausted by her nightly march from home to office; warehouse to tea stall; daily routine to the horror on Philosopher’s Way, Zia finally drifted off. Doves cooed in the eaves. Sparrow cheeps and kitchen clanking echoed in the courtyard. The Stirling thrummed with a whisper of vibration that the Lads had been unable to fully banish. Good Lads. Ollie had hired them off the loading docks.
Zia sat up, her head full of echoes and clanking and thrumming and loading docks and all the other sounds and smells of a warehouse. Their warehouse. Number 27-A. Mostly used for security equipment storage. Handy to the market supply bays in Lane 26, and also to the guarded, leased commercial storage on Lane 28, with rear bays that loaded directly onto the SunRail spur. Location was everything, said Ollie. People need to be able to chat with you, anywhere, all the time. Put your office in the market. Store your equipment where you’ll need it most. Save money. Save time.
It suddenly occurred to Zia that she’d lost track of that. Really, she didn’t really know who she’d worked for, at the end when OLaM had changed hands yet another time. Just the general meeting; the announcement of a consortium buyout; but no transfer of property and equipment since they remained registered to the company. Just a minor aside, from her administrative standpoint—the movement of durable goods from TCM Lane 29, on the opposite side of the tracks, into the leased commercial lane. Most of Orcutt’s stores were held on-site, but TCM had warehoused one lot in transit pending movement out to the mines. Months had passed since they’d sold off the claim, and they wanted to clear their warehouse. She’d been on the run, and signed the work order on the fly one morning, in the middle of a mountain of other paperwork. The warehouseman already had the cipher keys.
“Just sign here, please, ma’am,” he’d said, in a bit of a fluster. “An’ me an’ dese pelas get going.” She could see his coveralls. She could see his cap. She could see his calloused hands and his sacks-of-melons muscles and his wraparound shades. She scrubbed at her memory, but she couldn’t see his name, and she couldn’t see his face. Authorization for six loaders, two FLIVRs, two cargo handling teams. To transfer contents TCM Warehouse 29-C to Leased Warehouse 28-A. Lessee: Van Zandt Mining. She’d drawn a stroke through Van Zandt, wrote OLaM, initialed, and signed. It now occurred to her that maybe the clerical error was right the first time.
Zia rose, and dressed, and woke Michael.
Founder’s Retreat, Oquirr foothills, New Utah
It was a gala affair, and Jeri LaGrange was supremely pleased that she’d been invited. It was a working invitation of course. Five hundred years ago, Founder’s Day had begun as a solemn procession from the Tabernacle in Saint George to the Founder’s Retreat in the Oquirr foothills, where the Saints would sing a sunset prayer of thanks for the bounty spread before them in the valley below. Now, the Temple procession kicked off a parade, the singing kicked off a city-wide festival, and the Founder’s Day Ball was the annual event.
Crowd and traffic control always required weeks of preparation. Given current tensions, security coordination had become an absolute nightmare, particularly since the Retreat itself no longer fell directly under Zone administrative control. Finding it increasingly difficult to subsidize the expense of maintaining Retreat properties year-round, the True Church had found an ideal tenant in the person of Lillith Van Zandt, Margravine Batavia, who pledged her household delighted to give over Retreat facilities as needed to continue tradition. To Captain LaGrange’s immense frustration, the Margravine’s security team showed no evidence whatsoever of sharing in that delight.
Four security organs managed the chaos. Saint George civil police were fully occupied with city traffic management and crowd control. LaGrange’s own TCM Zone security company was called out in force to control Zone access, secure the Temple, and patrol installation boundaries. The Maxroy’s Purchase True Church Militant Saints Battalion served a ceremonial role as the leaders and official escort of the processional parade, whence it marched on in orchestrated fanfare to man formal posts on the Retreat’s approaches. It was the highlight of their Mission on New Utah. TCM Contract Security provided backup to everyone, filling gaps, patching holes, and providing rotational relief so that most could nip in for a bit of the festivities. The Margravine’s generosity had extended to bearing the expense of maintaining household security via the offices of her private bodyguards. They were an odd bunch: professional, tough, inflexible, and exceedingly visible. The overbearing presence of their bulging Plate was only slightly mitigated by the Delft blue of the household livery donned for the occasion.
LaGrange’s favorite place was not the airy opulence of the ballroom, nor the lofty sweep of the grand staircase and reception hall. Rather, it was the cramped bustle of the cloak room, rendered fabulous by the bright splashes of satins and sabers; gild and glitter that adorned the outerwear and inner linings of capes and greatcoats; kepis and saucer hats worn once a year, on this day only, by every institution on New Utah. Colonels and Primates; Guild Masters and Police Chiefs; Surgeons and Attorneys General; junior officers, senior community leaders, and the Saint George Mayor himself rubbed arms and twisted shoulders as frantic ladies scanned tags and issued chits in a hopeless effort to stem the tide of fabric slithering across the counter. It would be a long night, most of it spent checking in and out with security posts and security counterparts, but the cloakroom was a magical snapshot of what it was all about.
Colchis had seen the phenomenon before, but never failed to be impressed. Lillith Van Zandt fairly glowed with charm. Whomever she greeted—her hands in a warm clasp, her couture hairstyle betrayed by one floating wisp, her smile jovial as she made a conspiratorial half-bob of favored recognition, her Delft blue sash sparkling in both the icy cluster clipped below her shoulder and the depths of her periwinkle eyes—felt drawn in to a private circle of exquisite friendship, when in reality, each was only one of hundreds plowing past in the receiving line.