Reamde

Wahaab had stolen.

From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth-wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.

The whole time that she was tending to food, Jones’s crew were spreading out all the gear that they had brought with them, and everything that they had scavenged from the plane and from the mining camp, and making decisions about what to take and how to pack it. Guns and ammunition seemed to get first priority, followed by warm clothing and blankets. Blue tarps and ropes were deemed of inestimable value; perhaps they’d be camping? They seemed to have a passion for shovels, a detail that she could not help but interpret in the most morbid way possible.

The truck was a crew cab model, meaning that it had a second row of seats. They put Zula in the back, sandwiched between Sharif on her left and Mahir on her right. She felt strangely awkward coming between them, as if committing a social faux pas. But perhaps Jones was fed up with their clinginess and wanted them apart. Ershut rode shotgun and Abdul-Wahaab was squeezed into the middle of the front seat. Jones drove. Zula couldn’t help but think that they would be just a little conspicuous rumbling around British Columbia in this contraption with that particular lineup of faces glaring out the windshield.

But that wouldn’t even be an issue until they actually made it down to a road; and this did not look like it was happening any time soon. During whatever escapades that he and Abdul-Wahaab had enjoyed yesterday, Jones had learned how to drive the thing and had satisfied himself that if he shifted it into a sufficiently low gear (and this truck had some extremely low gears), it would go anywhere. Once the truck was packed, they headed up the valley, avoiding its sloped walls and sticking to its bottom, which was flat, but sinuous and multiforked. Jones seemed to be playing a connect-the-dots game on the map. Every few hundred meters was a cleared area, and these were strung together by a road. Or at least by a lane that had been bulldozed through the trees. The road and the cleared sites were marked on a survey map, which Abdul-Wahaab had spread out on his lap, the better for Jones to follow it. Zula caught glimpses of it during their frequent and voluble disputes as to its interpretation. At one point Jones pointed out the windshield into the sky and glared expectantly into the face of Abdul-Wahaab, and Zula understood that he was pointing out the location of the sun, as a trump card.

They fetched up parallel to a mountain stream, mostly buried under ice with snow on it. In some places it was open to the sky, and there it was possible to see that it was running broad and shallow, easily fordable by the truck. They rumbled and juddered across it, crept up its bank for half a mile, then struck out in what seemed to Zula like a random direction, plowing directly into the woods and attacking a steep uphill slope as a way of getting out of this valley. Tree branches were pushed out of the way by the windshield, bending back until they either snapped off or else whipped in through the open driver’s-side window where Jones had to beat them back with his left arm. She wondered why he would not simply roll up the window until she noticed little blue cubes of safety glass that had been sprayed all over the cab, and understood that the glass had been shattered. It seemed obvious enough that this must have happened when they were stealing the truck yesterday. She hoped that they had merely punched out the window so that they could get in and hot-wire it. Then she noted a key chain dangling from its ignition. They must have stolen it from a person who had been driving it. They must have killed that person.

A CB radio was mounted in the dashboard, and after they had got well clear of the camp and reached a decent stopping place—a flat spot in the forest, where they were well sheltered beneath the trees, and the snow wasn’t too deep—Jones turned it on. Then, after a glance back over his shoulder toward Zula, he flicked his knife open, severed its microphone cable, and hurled the mike out through the vacant window frame. It skittered away through the undergrowth like a furtive mammal. He turned the volume up and began to scan through the available channels.

Nothing. They really were out in the middle of nowhere.

It had been set to Channel 4 when turned on. Jones put it back on 4 and left it running. Occasionally it would cough out some noise, but nothing that could be identified as words.

Jones put the truck in gear and attacked another slope. It seemed that they were going up more than down, which didn’t make sense to Zula. But when they crawled over the next ridgeline, open country suddenly stretched out before them, foothills diminishing and descending into lowlands that were no longer covered in snow.

YESTERDAY, MONDAY, HAD been one of those days when Dodge had got to work early with the intention of getting a hell of a lot accomplished, only to arrive at the realization, just after lunch, that nothing was going to happen. Because it was no longer up to him. He had a whole company—a whole structure of vassals—to drag along in his wake, and it just took them a long time to get mobilized.

He’d have thought that $3 million lying there for the taking would have been able to command their attention. But it took them a long time to grasp this. Egdod had to grab a few vice presidents’ characters by the scruffs of their virtual necks and fly them over Torgai and point out the exposed gold caches for them to really get it.

A companywide memo might have gone some ways toward waking people up, but, as his finger was hovering over the Send button, he realized that this would be a terrible mistake. It would be certain to leak beyond the company network and find its way out into the wild, where it would trigger a gold rush. The one thing they had going in their favor was that no one, outside of Corvallis and Richard and a few others, really had any idea how much money was sitting there. Had this knowledge become public, every T’Rain player in the world would have made a beeline, or rather a ley line, for the Torgai, and things would have gone even more completely out of control. The mere Internet rumor that some gold had been seen there had already triggered a fairly well-organized invasion by those three thousand blue-haired K’Shetriae, which was nothing in the big scheme of things and yet still required strenuous work by Richard to beat it back in some way short of dropping a comet on the head of their Liege Lord.

Nothing came in all day from the Isle of Man. But when Richard woke up on Tuesday, he found a lot of company email, subject line “Plot thickens…,” which, when he traced it back to its root, turned out to concern a fifty-thousand-word novella that D-squared had posted on the T’Rain site a few hours ago. This to the evident surprise of his manager/editor here in Seattle, who’d had no idea that the Don was even contemplating any such project. Richard clicked on the link and opened the document. Its opening words were “The Torgai Foothills.” He stopped reading there, closed his laptop, got out of bed, and put on some clothes. He took the elevator down to the parking garage of his condo tower in downtown Seattle, got in his car, and drove straight to Boeing Field. Not until he was ensconced in a comfy seat on the jet, arcing northward over British Columbia on a direct route to the Isle of Man, did he open his laptop again and commence reading in earnest.

Day 8

She remembered being brought home to her adoptive parents’ house for the first time and seeing, among so many other new and amazing things, a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelves in the living room. So many large books, identically bound except for the volume numbers printed on their spines, had naturally drawn her attention. Patricia, Richard’s sister and Zula’s new mom, had explained to her that these contained anything that you could ever possibly want to know, on any topic, and had pulled one down