Star's Reach Read Free

looking at me then with his
frown. “It’s not prentice work to get past one of those. Give me
your pry bar.”
    I stared at him blankly for a moment and then
handed him the tool from my belt. He hefted it, then with a flick
of his wrist caught me with the sharp edge on the bent end just
below one cheekbone, hard enough to draw blood. I managed not to
flinch. Then he was holding the bar out to me, saying, “Take it,
ruinman.”
    I took it, dazed, while the prentices
whooped—three of them had followed Garman down the rope, and a
fourth was on the way. “Well, Mister Trey,” Garman said then with a
faint smile at the formal courtesy, “did you check out the room
back there?” A motion of his head pointed at the door behind me and
the room beyond.
    “Didn’t have a chance, Mister Garman. I was
heading that way when you showed up.”
    “Let’s see what they left for us,” he said,
and motioned for me to take the lead.
    By then my mind was trying to grapple with
what had just happened. Going from prentice to ruinman, said the
guild rules, took some proof of skill that none of the misters
could quarrel with. Some prentices did it by plain hard work, and
some by a chance find they followed up the right way, but you could
also do it by landing yourself in deep trouble in the ruins and
getting out alive. The thought dazzled me: after ten years as
Garman’s prentice, I was a mister and a ruinman myself, and I was
about to be the very first through a door that, beyond the last
shadow of a doubt, nobody had opened since the old world stumbled
to its end.
    Hinges yelled as I shouldered the door open
and raised my lamp. Garman and the others pressed close behind me.
The light showed a metal frame that once held two beds, one atop
the other, against the wall to the right; shreds of a curtain
failed to hide the toilet next to it. Shelves along the far wall
would have held food and water once, and there were two long
things, guns almost certainly. Over to the left, not quite against
the wall, was a table with dusty shapes on it I didn’t recognize at
first.
    We were most of the way to the table before I
realized we weren’t alone in the room. The other person there was a
long way past greeting us, though. He was sitting at the table with
his head and shoulders slumped forward; bits of bone showed through
what was left of the stiff heavy clothing the old world put on its
soldiers. A sheet of cracked and yellowed paper was under the bones
of one of his hands, and right next to that was a box with dials
and buttons, probably a radio. I stared at him for a long moment,
then made the blessing sign, even though he’d been there long
enough that even his ghost must have been dead by then.
    I glanced around the room again. You could
see the last weeks or months of the man’s life written there plain
enough. He must have hidden there in the last years of the old
world, and sat by the radio day by day while the food and water
dwindled, waiting for some message that came too late if it came at
all. There must have been thousands of stories like that, since
ruinmen find such things pretty often.
    “Well,” said Garman. He’d already examined
the guns, and went to the radio. “The guns are in fine condition.
This—” He motioned toward the box on the table. “—won’t work any
more, but we’ll get plenty for it. Conn?”
    Conn was his senior prentice now, and had
been searching the shelves. “A couple of small machines—I’m not
sure what they are—and bullets for the guns.”
    “Good. I know gunsmiths who’d sell their
eyeballs to get those. Now let’s see what this has to say—” He
moved the bones of the dead man’s hand away from the yellow paper,
and I raised the lamp as the others crowded around. This is what it
said.
     
    TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH
    PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV
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