Ruby In Jeopardy
The Riven — Day 1 minus 1
The road into Jeopardy begins with a sharp jog off an old, unconverted highway.
Unmarked and unimproved, partially obscured by vegetation, you could easily miss the turnoff. The first couple hundred yards around the first bend might seem a little rough too, but from there, the way is almost always passable regardless the weather.
The gatekeeper knows you’re coming. By the time you negotiate that last, long canyonside curve, the gate is right smack dab down in front of you. Sturdy sonofabitch. Might take a tank or a Schwarzkopf battle suit to break through it. You’d better stop. Or you could drive off the hillside.
What’s that you say? Gate’s fine if you’re in a roller, but a floater will just go right over top of it. Right?
Well, yes and no.
Driver-side window scrolls all the way down and a round woman leans out to offer the gatekeeper a chubby-cheeked grin.
“Gus sent me,” she says.
The gatekeeper steps closer. “I’m gonna need more than that.”
“Gus Grabowski.”
“Never heard of ‘im.”
“He’s been the caretaker out at the End of the Road there ten, eleven years. Where’ve you been?”
The gatekeeper lifts a handheld from one of his pockets and enters something. He wipes its screen with a sleeve and lifts it to frame the woman’s face. She’s not grinning anymore.
He holds it close again, reading something, makes an entry, and waits. He looks up at her with a frown.
“Sorry. Nobody by that name. Or that location, for that matter. You sure you’re at the right place? Lots of rafas like this one all over.”
“I been here before.”
“Recent-like?”
“Been a few. Why?”
“Well, I’m sorry to tell you you’re not going to be here today. I can’t let you in on that name and story. You got another?”
“Maybe I should call ‘im first.”
“You can try.”
Her hand-held provides a useful signal indicator. Its indication is unencouraging.
He points back the way she’s come. “Go ahead, turn ‘round, back to the highway. Good luck to ya.”
“Just like that?”
“Fraid so.”
“I remember this place used to be a lot friendlier back then.”
A new and different face leans in, framed in the window beside Chubby-cheeks. It too is a woman’s face, this one cast in flesh as black as raven feathers. Her hair is a tight cap of bristle and her eyes are disturbing in the light.
“Open the way and allow us to pass,” she says. It doesn’t have the ring of a command; it just sounds like the reasonable thing to do.
Transfixed for a moment, then not, the gatekeeper looks down and taps a sequence into his handheld. He squints into the device, and looks up into those rainbow eyes.
“Do you have a passcode?” he says.
The raven woman shifts her gaze to the round woman. The round woman shakes her head and the raven woman says, “We don’t need one.” Her voice is like a caress. “Allow us to pass.”
The gatekeeper stands motionless for a long count, gazing at her. One hand raises and gestures at arm’s length the way they had come. The other rests on the mob gun slung from his shoulder.
“Turn around,” he says slowly, enunciating. “Go back to the highway. Drive away. Do not come back.” He gives what appears a friendly wave of his hand. “And, once again, good day t…”
The driver-side cargo door grinds open to a hard stop and a giant pours out of it.
The gatekeeper backpeddles, unclasping the keeper on his weapon. Okay, maybe it’s not a giant, but it is too big, too fast, too close, and he swings the streetsweeper up.
And it’s gone. Slapped into outer space along with his trigger finger at the second knuckle.
He sees his gun tumbling over the embankment, fifty meters or so away.
A fist almost the size of his own head bunches up the front of his jacket, shirt, and a good wad of chest hair. His feet leave the ground.
A squared face black as a starless winter night scowls at him, growling low in its throat. Its skin, lips, all black, just like the second woman at the cab’s window. This one’s eyes are either the work of a skilled cosmetic optician, or similarly inhuman.
“Could ya let ‘im down for a minute, Festus?” a new voice calls out.
Some guy in a beat-up cowboy hat is climbing out of the van, coming close.
The gatekeeper’s feet touch the ground and the vice clamped on his chest hair releases. A fierce discomfort at the raw end of his right index finger is attempting to command his attention.
Cowboy Hat says, “Here, put this on your hand,” removing a faded bandana from around his neck, extending it to him. It might have been blue once.
Grimacing, the gatekeeper wads it tight around the hot coal where part of his finger used to be.
Chubby-cheeks approaches with a chattering staff in her hand. She plants it between them and stares up into his eyes without the least deference, offering, in her other hand, a bit of something oddly shaped, a twisted piece of… some kind of root, maybe.
“Chew it up,” she says. “It don’t taste too bad and it’ll help with the pain.”
He takes it, eyeing it with skepticism.
“And put more pressure on that. You got a name?” she says.
“Robert.”
“There’s people here know me, Robert. I’m not in the wrong place and I think you know it. I got a right to be here. Who says different besides you?”
“Well, the mayor…” Robert winces at the fury in his hand, steeling himself. “Mayor Shrever’s got new rules. They ain’t mine; I’m just a gatekeep.”
“Larry?” the round woman says. She’s grinning again. “Larry Shrever’s the mayor?” Chuckling, she shuffles back to the vehicle’s cab.
Cowboy Hat gives him a brotherly pat on the shoulder. “Let’s go get that hand looked at. Have a little pow wow with Mayor Larry while we’re doin’ it. C’mon.”
There doesn’t seem much reason to argue. It’s curious the fire inside the faded bandana hasn’t ignited it yet, but it is beginning to take on a crimson color.
Cowboy Hat guides him toward the van and, with his good hand clamping the other, he guides the root to his mouth and bites into it. It’s not bad.
Rainbow Eyes has vacated the passenger seat and it is presented as the only available seating option. He hoists himself up and in and the door is pressed firmly closed from without.
Chubby-cheeks is watching him from the driver’s seat. She hands him a pair of heavy socks from the console stashbox. “Put one over top for now and the other in your pocket for later. And keep pressure on it.”
Robert turns to see the giant and Rainbow Eyes in the cluttered cargo area with two enormous dogs, both of them bigger than he. They are all watching him as Cowboy Hat clambers back inside, dragging the door closed with a metallic scrape and whollop.
Robert opens the gate.
“Everybody sit tight and hold on to your lunch,” Chubby-cheeks says and the riven enter into Jeopardy.
The gate closes behind.
Many who have never been introduced to the sensations of null-field penetration describe crossing the field perimeter for the first time as a near-death experience. Most who say this have never actually had a near-death experience, but one could easily imagine how it might be so.
The sensation is brief, over before you know it, some like to say, but it’s visceral and bone-deep. You know it.
The evening sky is heavy with clouds and rain has begun to fall.
The duly elected mayor of the Commonwealth of Jeopardy, Laurence Myron Shrever, is at streetside as the conveyance rolls to a stop more or less in a designated parking slot in front of an unattractive, official-looking, block building.
Ruby steps out, stretching her back in the doorframe before reaching inside to retrieve her staff. Her hitching approach is slow.
The mayor is not alone. Two individuals in uniform flank him, a square-jawed, heavy-set woman to his right and an unusually large fellow on his left. This one is not so much tall, though tall enough, but nearly as wide as he is high and his features are unsettling to look at.
Both wear a formal, dour expression appropriate to whatever office they represent—something related to law enforcement, no doubt.
“Well, hello, Larry,” Ruby says from curbside with a smile. She sounds cheerful. “I imagine we’re both kind of surprised at how this day’s going. Congratulations on your new job, by the way.”
The mayor clears his throat and begins to speak. Ruby turns away from him to indicate Robert clambering out of the passenger door. The gatekeeper rounds the high fender cradling his hand in what appears a bloody rag.
The woman at the mayor’s shoulder stiffens. Her counterpart begins to step forward. She speaks a quiet word and he halts, like a dog on a tether.
Ruby returns her attention to the mayor.
“As surprised and oddly relieved as I am to see you, Larry, I didn’t stop here to chat with you and your new friends. Robert obviously needs medical attention. He’s with you now and I’m going to go see Gus.”
“No, you’re not,” says the woman. “You’re under arrest for unlawful entry and injury to my deputy.”
“That’s a really bad idea,” Robert says, approaching. “I’m not pressing charges, anyway.”
“Don’t be a butt plug, Larry,” Ruby says to the mayor. “I have credentials here, same as you do. Robert got hurt because you gave him a stupid order and he did his best to follow it.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” the mayor says after a brief consideration. “Another is that you’ve invited yourself into the clave without authorization. You were told to turn back and away. You overcame our gatekeeper, forced your way in, and pose an uninvited and demonstrably hostile threat to the community.”
“Seriously,” Robert says, “let it go. Why do you have to be such an asshole all the time?”
The big woman steps forward to take Robert’s arm.
“Shut up, you idiot,” she says, jerking him forward, away from the vehicle.
“Hey! Watch it!” He’s stumbling, but upright. “You know what? You’re an asshole too.”
Ruby follows the woman’s movements as she gives Robert the legendary “bum’s rush” into the building. A slow scan of the nearby surroundings brings her gaze back to Mayor Larry and the imposing tree stump beside him.
“First of all,” she says, “I want you to know I gave Robert something organic for the pain. It’s already helped. You can see he’s still able to talk. Also, it’s had the unintended side effect of loosening his tongue quite a bit as well. He can’t help it. Try not to hold it against him; he was just saying what we were probably all thinking anyway.
“Other thing is this. If you arrest me, Larry,” she hooks a thumb over her shoulder, “you’ll have to arrest us all, and I expect that’s going to be a tall order, even for Officer Roadblock there. Tell you what. I promise not to leave without checking in with you first. If you still want to arrest us, that’ll give you time to retrain your deputies and reenforce your holding cells. Okay?”
The mayor stares at her with a scowl, but says nothing.
She is close enough for him to see her eyes and she returns his gaze from an interstellar distance. “Will you tell me where I can find Gus now?”
He says at last, “I don’t keep track of him personally.” He sounds petulant. “He’s an habitual person, though, and often, at this time of day, he’s likely on his usual stool at the Station having coffee and pie.”
Ruby’s cheeks scrunch into a grin once more. “From ‘never-heard-of-him’ to familiar local color in less than ten minutes. I think the day’s starting to look up again. What do you think, Larry?”
The mayor begins to answer, perhaps, as Ruby pivots with her staff and her shuffle carries her toward the van’s open door. The officer beside the mayor begins to move forward. Larry raises a hand and the man halts.
A pair of personal runabouts pass on the street. The van backs out of the space and follows at a distance. The road bends left and the van traces its curve out of sight.