Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(91)
The people of Pinto, a settlement of miners and excavators, made a living picking through the remains of this once-great city. Most major cities had similar settlements of scavengers nearby. They filled an important role in humanity’s ecosystem.
The difference between Madrid and most other fallen major metropolises was that it had actually sunk into the ground, as if swallowed by a massive sinkhole. Because of the added challenge of being buried underground, the city’s bones weren’t picked as clean as many other city corpses. New useful raw materials were still being discovered daily and Pinto had prospered as a trade hub. It was here that Levin received his first solid lead regarding James. One that he hoped could take him a step closer to finding where he was hiding.
The agency had been dangling off-planet relocation as a reward for any news of the fugitive chronman’s activities, and an abnormally large number of tips had filtered in from this region. Once the information was deemed viable, Levin and his people had swept in under cover of darkness and blockaded the entire village. Currently, Shizzu and Geneese were questioning the local government and merchants of Pinto while three squads of monitors were performing door-to-door searches of the outlying buildings. Levin and Kuo had set up their base of operations in the center of Pinto and were waiting for their findings.
He highly doubted someone as skilled as James would allow himself to be trapped so easily, but Levin wasn’t going to allow a solid lead to slip by. He looked over at Kuo, who was staring intently out of their makeshift canopy at the giant crater down the hill.
“How deep does it go?” she asked.
He walked up next to her and peered down into the black pit. “They say it’s almost a half a kilometer down. Supposedly, the Machines had giant burrowing worms that ate the earth from underneath. Then when the bombs from the Mountain Hulks began dropping, the entire city fell as one giant piece. Some of the miners say there are entire chunks of the city completely intact down there.”
“And these Earthlings eke a living picking the bones of the city?”
“Not everyone can have all their needs synthesized artificially.”
“Carrion eaters,” she spat.
“ChronoCom picks the bones of our past, do we not?” Levin corrected. “Doesn’t that make us carrion eaters as well? And since the corps depends on the energy we retrieve, what does that make you?”
She ignored him as she spotted Shizzu approaching from up the hill. He stopped directly in front of Kuo and bowed. This wasn’t lost on Levin. “Auditor, Securitate,” he said, “we have received confirmation from two separate manufacturers here that a man matching fugitive Griffin-Mars’s description has led a small group, usually two to four individuals, here multiple times over the past few weeks to barter for goods. They were also able to identify the distinct features of his collie.”
“Several others?” Levin mused. “He has a posse now.”
“What did they trade for?” Kuo asked.
“Solar panels, power generators, lab equipment, and several bottles of distilled alcohol. They traded base goods the first time here: food, clothing, and hemp. The second time they were here, they bartered for fiber fabricators, weapons, fuel, and several more bottles of alcohol.”
“Sounds like James, all right,” said Levin.
That information painted a startling picture of James and that anomaly he was hiding. They were building something and required industrial resources to do it. What could they be up to? Not only that, who were these others with them? Had James linked up with one of the survivalist groups?
“What did those with him look like? Can those merchants tell us anything? Their garb? Skin color? Accents?”
“The merchants did not notice anything out of the ordinary except that they weren’t from the region and didn’t look civilized, Auditor,” Shizzu said. “However, one of them did overhear some of their exchanges and believed it a Northern American dialect of Solar English. The people with him seemed intimidated by the village and looked to him as their leader.”
“Of course he’s their leader,” Kuo said. “A chronman wouldn’t follow a bunch of savages.”
Levin ticked off the items Shizzu mentioned. “He isn’t running. Interesting. All this time, we thought he had gone into hiding to someplace either remote or back in time. Notice he’s actually trading food.”
If he was still in Northern America, then there would still be a lot of ground to cover. The entire continent had taken the brunt of the devastation from the Third World War, and now was one complete wasteland, except for the half-dozen cities that still sparsely dotted the landscape. If James were leading a bunch of primitive savages, he could be hiding anywhere.
Levin corrected himself; they were still people. His eyes wandered over to Kuo. The damn woman was corrupting his thoughts. Over the past few weeks, she had shadowed his every movement as he set up the surveillance net around the planet, chasing every unauthorized jump that could lead to James’s whereabouts.
The severity of James’s defection had climbed all the way up to the Council. Now, there was an ongoing discussion among the administrators about following Valta’s lead and chipping all chronmen to prevent an occurrence like this from happening again. Some went as far as to favor disabling the antidetection systems on the collies. Doing either would endanger the lives of every chronman operation out there. Leave it to the administrators to concoct such terrible ideas. To make matters worse, Valta had offered to carry out the service for the agency. Levin scowled. What back door would the corporatation create for themselves there?