Under Dark Sky Law (31 page)

“I’m coming, it’s not like you haven’t been
missing in action for weeks or anything,” she said.

She followed the dim outline of the short
woman across a cement patio, past an abandoned observing dome, and
inside an old building. The glass doors were cracked, but still
intact, and she carefully closed them behind her, thinking of the
rushing winds that would follow them inside if she were to finish
punching out the fragile material.

Calavera flipped on a switch and the room
flooded with red light. “Red light keeps your night vision going,
and it’s harder to see from a distance. I learned something up
here,” she said.

The room looked like a small museum or
tourist center, with what looked like the remains of a gift shop, a
lecture area with chairs, and some small educational exhibits. It
was hard to tell how old everything was in the dim red light, but
posters were hanging by corners from the wall, the gift shop had
been ransacked, and there were leaves and debris spread across the
floor. It had been abandoned for some time.

“I didn’t know this place was even still up
here,” she said.

“You have no idea the kind of deals I had to
make to get in here—the Tohono don’t let people onto their lands
for almost any reason, and even us skeletons have never wanted to
bother them. They’ve been on these lands longer than anyone,” she
said, and Xero respected the woman more. The Grease Weasels and
everyone from their territory knew that going onto the Tohono
O’odham lands southwest of Tucson were forbidden. Native American
cultures had survived things over the centuries that few other
groups could comprehend, and in these times of desperation, that
was something to be respected.

In the red light Xero could faintly see shiny
spots where someone had put clear tape over the cracks in the door,
and she was glad for the extra wind protection. Just getting clear
of the wind chill raised the temperature by a good ten or fifteen
degrees. Calavera stripped off her rigid skeleton helmet, revealing
her tattooed face underneath. Most of the recent sugar skull tattoo
designs were clean and filled in with bright solid color that she
could see as solid dark marks in the glow of he red light, but the
older tattoos were faded and barely visible in the diminished
light. She’d been at this for a long time.

She took a second to untangle her curly black
hair and stowed the stiff but foldable headgear into back pocket of
her jacket. “Follow me—the labs are in the back,” she said.

Xero was still wary of being attacked, but
she had the laser ready to go, and relying on her good intuition
about people’s behavior, she was fairly sure that Calavera was
still on her side. At least she hoped that she was right—if she got
jumped by a bunch of skeletons there would be no help coming for
her. She’d left a note for the other Grease Weasels about needing
to attend to some business after receiving the communication from
Calavera. Neptune would be furious when she found out Xero had gone
off on her own rogue mission, but Calavera had been insistent that
only she come. The tribal leaders wouldn’t allow anymore outsiders
onto their land, and asking to let Xero on had already been a
stretch.

The light change was shocking. They opened up
the door to a backroom that looked like it had once been a
planetarium at one point in time, but had been gutted for use as an
extended lab space. The elongated space ran into what had probably
been a fabrication room for telescope construction, and bright
halogen lights flooded the light-sealed room. The red glow of the
outer visitors center stopped once the door slammed behind
them.

Her retinas burned with the influx of light,
and when her eyes finally adjusted she still had to blink a few
times before accepting what she saw.

“You sneaky bastard!” she yelled and ran
forward.

“Sorry about the secrecy,” Argon said around
the muffle of Xero’s arms. They gave each other a long, sincere
hug.

Argon jumped when Calavera snuck around
behind him and spanked his ass hard. “Ay, Papi, stop fooling around
with other women,” she said.

Xero took a step back and eyeballed Argon.
“You’re shacking up with this lezzie chola? I don’t know what to be
more surprised about—the fact that you’re fucking this puta, or the
fact that you’ve been living in a secret mountain lab for the past
month,” she said.

“Oye, watch it there,” Calavera said. “Don’t
be jealous because he likes my sweet ass better than yours.”

Xero made and exaggerated eye roll. “Fine by
me, I’ve got enough man troubles right now as it is,” she said.

Calavera widened her eyes. “You got a
boyfriend? I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said.

Argon was actively blushing. “Look, as much
as I’d love to sit here and girl talk with you both, we have some
serious shit to deal with,” he said.

“Damn right. This bitch wouldn’t tell me a
fucking thing about what’s going on, other than it’s something to
do with Xed. Believing that slime ball Xed is up to no good is not
hard to imagine, but I’m going to need some details here guys,”
Xero said.

“You look half frozen. Why don’t I bring you
something hot to warm up with and we’ll go over everything?” Argon
said.

Xero shrugged. Her hands were still feeling
like polar bear tits. “I’m never one to argue against creature
comforts while the world burns down around you.”

“Yeah yeah, sit your ass down while I get you
something to drink. Babe, come help me carry stuff,” he said to
Calavera and Xero had to shake her head at the term of endearment.
That was one relationship she never expected.

They came back with big steaming Styrofoam
mugs full of cheap instant hot cocoa that very well might have been
there since the center closed down. The powder clumped on the
surface of the hot water, and Xero didn’t want to think about how
long ago the place had been shut down, but she was grateful for its
pleasing aroma and the sensation that it brought back to her
fingertips. Argon had them sit down in some of the intact theater
seating in the old planetarium.

“So here’s what happened,” Argon said, but
Calavera interrupted him.

“Espera, let me tell it first,” she said.

“Experience has taught me not to argue with
armed women,” Argon said and Xero laughed. She’d probably beaten on
him a few too many times.

Calavera punched him in the arm anyway and
some of the hot chocolate splashed onto the floor.

“Alright, so you know me and you and just
made a deal, and everything was cool, you know? Well, one day I get
contacted by this guy, this Xed. He wants to make me a deal too. He
says I should join him because he’s planning on taking over the
domes, you know like killing everyone inside of them like they did
in the Australian genocides. Said he’s going to use some rare
poison gas that you can’t defend against, can’t use gas masks with
because it’s absorbed through your skin. He said he wanted me to
join him because I had good soldiers that would help the cause, and
we could be partners in the revolution. Then he gave me some spiel
about oppression and race riots and some other history shit. Guy’s
a real whack job. I tell him to shove it, and of course he tells me
that I’ll be sorry, that he’ll steal my army from him anyway. I
thought he was crazy, but turns out I was wrong. A lot of my crew
were mad about the peace treaty with your territory, and that was
all he needed to steal a bunch of them. When my own turned against
me, I had to go into hiding,” she said.

“Oh shit, so the attacks against me, he was
using the skeletons to make me distrust you, make me more likely to
side with him in defense. I’ll give you this—your skeletons are
tough ass fighters. Almost took me out a few times—annoying as
fuck,” Xero said. She took a sip of gritty hot chocolate, savoring
the warmth and trying to ignore the texture.

She laughed. “Yeah, I train some tough ass
vatos. We don’t fuck around. Not everyone turned against me, of
course, just the real shit bags. Everyone has a price,” she
said.

“Thankfully Xed couldn’t find that price for
everyone. When you left for the domes, some of Calavera’s real crew
along with some of the traitors both showed up. I might have gotten
iced if some of them hadn’t helped save my hide. They knew that we
were allies, so they helped me escape from the flats and back out
to one of Calavera’s safe houses,” Argon said.

“We needed to stay hidden because Xed’s got
eyes and ears everywhere, but I managed to get some information
from a few of my skeletons that went double agent. Picking up dork
boy here was a real great find cuz I figured we needed to decide
out what to do about this chemical attack that supposedly has no
defense. I got a sample of the chemical from one of my double
agents so this guy could try and figure out what it is and how to
beat it,” she said.

Xero pointed her finger at Argon. “I always
knew you were a sharp guy. You’re a lucky bitch—I can’t think of a
better chemist out there,” she said and looked at Calavera.

“We’re all lucky bitches—with a chemical
weapon like that out there, we’re all in danger,” Calavera
said.

“I work much better with Trina as my partner,
but that wasn’t exactly an option,” he said.

“So why has he been messing with me, getting
us to peddle Alphamine to the domes?” Xero said.

“The shit that he cooked up is nasty—toxic
via the lungs and the dermis, but you know the domes all have
decent venting systems in the event of any kind of chemical leak.
He needs something to work as quickly as it can for maximum
carnage,” he said.

“Oh fuck. Alphamine is a bronchodilator,”
Xero said.

Argon nodded. “The more people he gets doped
up on Alphamine, the more people die before anyone can vent the
domes, and the easier it is to take over the local government. The
intel Calavera gathered says that his initial test targets are
going to be Phoenix, San Antonio, and New Orleans—domes big enough
to make a statement, but smaller than the real hubs like Los
Angeles or New York,” he said.

“I’m assuming Yuma was him too. Why blow up
Yuma then if he wants to take over the domes, not just destroy
them?” she asked.

“I have to say, I was pretty impressed that
my skeletons had the chops to blow up a whole dome. Nothing like
that’s gone down in my lifetime. Anyway, if I had to guess why he
took out Yuma, I’d say because it’s the only real link between
Phoenix and Los Angeles. Without Yuma, those dome enforcers will
have a hell of a time trying to leap frog over that much desert
without some kind of a way to refuel. People are liable to run out
of oxygen in the dead zones and never make it across. Also, like
you were saying earlier, Yuma was the only easy place to get
premade Ketocillin this side of the Mississippi, and with that gone
he had another easy tool for tricking your crew into distributing
the Alphamine,” she said.

“Have you been reading the art of war or
something? You’re getting good at this strategy stuff,” Xero
said.

“Cállate la boca. I didn’t get this far just
by dumb luck, you know,” Calavera said.

Argon put a hand on her shoulder. “I did help
out with putting a lot of this together,” he said like a child
eager to impress his teacher.

“Two halves of a brain do make one, I
suppose,” Xero said, and they both made sour faces.

“Puta,” Calavera said.

“Ladies, let’s not fight. We’ve got bigger
fish to fry,” he said. “It’s taken all this time, but I’ve come up
with an antidote that will actually exploit the same pathways that
Alphamine does—in fact it’s something of an analogous molecule. If
you’ve taken Alphamine with it, the antidote will actually work
better. I’m calling it Betadote for now,” he said.

Xero slowly nodded her head in approval.
“Betadote, clever, I like it. I don’t say it often enough, but you
are actually a genius. At least, at some things,” she said.

Argon sighed. “You can never just give me a
compliment, can you?” he said.

“So, now what’s the next step?” Xero said.
“We’ve got the antidote, so I assume we can give it to everyone we
know to protect themselves. Question is, what about the people in
the domes?”

“You can’t be serious, right? We have to give
it to them. We can’t just let Xed murder everyone and let another
Australia happen. We can take out Xed, but that doesn’t guarantee
that he hasn’t set up provisions in case just such a thing happens.
People need the antidote,” he said.

Calavera and Xero shared a look. “We don’t
have to do anything,” Xero said. “What we should do is consider
what’s in it for us. What do we have to gain?”

“Este marimacha over here is right. We have a
few options,” Calavera said. It was that sense of ruthlessness that
made them able to get along as partners.

She thought of Radar and how he had reacted
to the dying dome citizens when Yuma had gone up like a Roman
candle, and she was glad that he wasn’t here to witness this
discussion. His parents had been dome dwellers. If they decided to
let the dome people die, he’d be a million times more mad than when
he found out that she’d fucked Xed again. Maybe even angry enough
to kill her. Xero liked a man with real convictions.

“I think Argon’s right. There’s a lot for us
to potentially gain from saving the domes. Think of the cash. We
can hit this thing from two directions. We sell the Betadote and
Alphamine cocktail on the black market and we make a ton of cash,”
Xero said.

“What about the rest of the population that
doesn’t buy shit off the black market?” Argon said.

“This is where we make even more cash. We use
Sanchez, a buddy of mine on the government side. I saved his life
in one of the skeleton attacks, and I seem to have built up a
network of trusty sidekicks around that good deed. We tell him to
set up a dummy government program, like an FDA vitamin regimen,
otherwise everyone is going to die. They do shit like that all the
time anyway—I’m sure someone can figure out a way to rig that up
and keep it all on the down low. Trick is, we don’t give the
Betadote away for free. We charge out the ass for it, and they’ll
have to come up with the cash from somewhere. They’ll understand
that making something like this isn’t cheap, and hopefully won’t
mind a nominal fee for something so important. We walk away a lot
richer, they all walk away a lot less dead, everybody wins,” Xero
said.