“Why is the control room in vacuum?” he asked.
Than propelled himself off his seat and grabbed a ceiling handhold. “Power constraints. The American team got here fast and are already working on the site; they need all the power they can get so we have to cycle down. No environment controls except for critical areas.” He motioned for Maung to get up. “Come on, it’s time, Pa.”
“Where are we going?”
“Outside.” Than kicked off a table and headed toward the airlock, the doors of which was open. “Nam wants me to keep your mind off the Americans and what happened in the deep—to the American Dream Warriors. Besides: It’s time you did some closeup work with drifters.”
Maung took hold of his shoulder, stopping Than. “Why closeup?”
“It’s OK, Maung. Just don’t get near the ones with yellow helmets. The treatment makes most of them passive but those ones are still aggressive—the worst of the murderers and rapists. If you have to kill one it’s no big deal but try not to because we need the workers; killing one creates a lot of database work.”
“This is wrong,” said Maung. “We can’t do this to people, no matter what they’ve done.”
He and Than watched from above, perched on a platform that overlooked the work area, a narrow alley between two massive structures, each of which was covered with hundreds of prisoners dangling in space. The prisoners’ plasma torches flickered; their work created a random pulsating blue glow across one entire face of the closest building, and it reminded Maung of arc welders in the Yangon shipyards, who worked even at night during the war. Harnesses and safety lines secured the drifters to the walls while tiny droplets fell from their work, hot particles of steel or other material that melted under the assault and which filled the area with orange stars that quickly solidified and went dark while they plummeted.
Maung looked into the faceplate of a man just a few feet below him; streamers of saliva and mucous hung from his nose and thin tubes ran across his bare scalp until they disappeared into a main inlet at the right temple. It made Maung shiver. The man’s eyes were vacant and while he cut the drifter’s arms moved slowly with a tremor.
“How many cut themselves or have accidents?”
Than kicked a piece of debris off the side, watching it float downward into darkness. “Not many. The treatment makes them methodical and we upload their duties before every shift so they can’t deviate from a very specific program—unless they’re a special kind of person.”
“The dangerous ones with yellow helmets?”
“Yep,” said Than. He bounded toward the far side of the overwatch. “Come on. I’ll show you one. Most of the time they can’t override the program, but occasionally their mind gets tweaked—to the point where we lose control and they go off the deep end. Then you have to put them down.”
“Did I already ask what happens when these people are released?” Maung asked, following carefully as he reached the edge. “How they live again? Does the treatment damage their minds?”
Than laughed. He slid down a makeshift construction ladder bolted to the building’s side, and Maung waited a moment before following. The sensation of floating in midair still made him dizzy and he gripped the ladder sides, slowing his descent until he followed Than into an upper floor of their building.
“Drifters don’t get out,” said Than. “If you do something bad enough to wind up here, you’re a lifer, just like us. Only way to leave the dark side is when you die and you oughta know, Maung: Materials are worth more than people.”
Maung was about to say something but stopped. He looked up and turned off the light filter, saw the millions of stars in a narrow band defined by the buildings that now surrounded him and he imagined that Karin was a monster; it had swallowed him whole. Now all he could do was look out from its stomach.
“There’s one you definitely have to see,” said Than. “He’s real special, Pa.”
He pointed downward and Maung leaned outside the window, doing his best not to slip and fall.
“That’s Walther.” Than leaned out from the inside of the structure too, pushing his suit helmet through a shower of sparks that rained from above in orange and pink.
Maung ignored the feeling of vertigo. He reached for a steel girder and clamped his fingers around it, aware that they were at an insanely high level and could almost see across the entire port crater—into the darkness of space. Below him a drifter worked, moving his plasma torch slowly across the wall to his right, cutting through the building’s ceramic sheathing. To Maung, he looked just like the others, maybe a little smaller.
“What’s so special about him?”
“Wait,” said Than. He punched something on his forearm keypad and Walther’s torch extinguished. The drifter then hooked it onto his belt and climbed his line toward them. “Get ready, Pa, here he comes.”
“Ready for what?”
“Walther doesn’t like Burmese, Maung. Or Filipinos or Koreans. Anyone Asian pretty much. He got a life sentence for being a serial killer up in New York, where he used to work the immigrant neighborhoods and use our people for target practice.”
Maung stepped back from the edge. “At least they got him.”
“Yeah. After he wiped out a couple hundred women and children. And now he’s here but the treatment didn’t take so well; Nam said it must be something to do with the fact that he isn’t wired right to begin with.”
When the drifter climbed over the edge, Maung was surprised. He was short. Even in an environment suit, Walther’s helmet was below Maung’s chin and he briefly thought maybe Walther was a child until his internal helmet light flickered on, showing Walther’s face. Other drifters had no facial hair; the treatment was supposed to prevent hair growth so that the prisoners didn’t need grooming, but on Walther it hadn’t worked. A thick beard hid his cheeks and above it the man’s eyes stared with an intensity suggesting he wasn’t a drifter at all. Maung squinted to look more closely; the tubes and wires were there, and dried saliva matted the prisoner’s beard to make it look greasy and tangled. Maung flinched when Walther stepped forward.
“Stand down, Walther,” said Than, “Rest,” but either Walther had gone deaf or he ignored the command, instead continuing toward Maung.
Maung backed up. The room was empty, having already been stripped of everything except the ceramic flooring, but a thick layer of dust and rubble made it slippery. “What’s he doing?”
Than punched at his forearm again. Maung saw it out of the corner of his vision, which was focused on Walther, who yanked the plasma torch from his belt again and ignited it with a flick. Plasma flashed so brightly it almost blinded Maung; he tripped over a piece of steel, drifting slowly onto his back.
“Stand down!” Than shouted. He grabbed the carbine off his shoulder but the barrel snagged on his belt and Than struggled to free it. “Kill him, Maung. He’s off the grid and not responding.”
Maung couldn’t reach his carbine. He’d fallen on it and Walther bounded from side to side—to keep from bouncing upward and to maximize speed—closing the distance and gripping his torch with both hands. Maung remembered what Nang taught him on the ship. When Walther leaped, he took advantage of the fact that his opponent couldn’t change direction while in midair, and Maung pushed off the ground, moving to the side so Walther drifted to the ground where he used to be, his torch cutting a black gouge into the floor. Maung reached for his carbine. But before he swung it around Walther leaped again and smashed into his chest so the pair of them slid through the dust and past Than, who raised his weapon and fired, sending a stream of fléchettes through Walther’s chest. The firing cut through the man’s torch. It flickered out before he could use it to burn through Maung’s faceplate but despite being hit, Walther was still awake, swinging the torch with a force great enough ring Maung’s ears when it impacted at the base of his helmet, through a soft section in the suit. The last thing Maung remembered was a sharp pain in his neck.
Maung woke up to fi
nd Walther collapsed on top of him and Than was only beginning to drag the corpse clear. Finally he was free. The drifter’s suit was shredded from where Than’s fléchettes ripped through his chest, leaving behind a kind of perforated pattern marked with hundreds of tiny holes, clotted with frozen blood. He was glad Walther’s faceplate was fogged; a memory of the drifter’s face had already burned into Maung’s brain and the last thing he wanted was an image of Walther’s death expression to accompany it. Maung tried to sit. A sharp pain in the back of his neck made him wince, forcing him to roll over on his stomach and kneel, pulling his arms into his chest in an attempt to control or ride out the agony.
“Are you hit?” Than asked. “Did I hit you by accident?”
Maung waved him off. “No, I’m fine. Something is wrong with my neck.”
“Maybe you sprained it in the fight.”
“I don’t think so.” Maung suspected it was a serious injury and wished he could crank up the semi-aware for a diagnostics run. “Help me up. I think it’s gone now.”
When Than helped him to his feet, the back of Maung’s neck burned with a dull kind of pain that screamed infection. It could be anything, he thought. Maybe the blow delivered by Walther shattered his data ports, or maybe when the data cable’s microbots opened his flesh down in the American super-aware’s chamber, microbes were introduced along with them. Whatever the reason, something was out of place. He barely noticed when Than waved him onward.
“We have to get moving, Pa. When it rains, it pours.”
“What happened now?” asked Maung.
“We have to get back and report this—what happened with Walther—to Nam. But first we’ve got a drifter wandering offsite and need to pull him back.”
“How does this happen?” Maung asked.
“How does what happen?”
Maung pointed to Walther and then the other drifters, who continued cutting off pieces of the building, unaware of anything that just happened above them. “Walther. Them. How do any of them overcome the chip to attack us, or to just randomly wander off? I still don’t get it.”
“Nothing in this hole is normal, Maung. But since you got here, things are getting more abnormal—by the minute. I already sent a preliminary message to Nam and he’s running a trace to see if anyone messed with our drifter codes. There’s also a team coming to inspect the corpse.”
“You think someone set us up?” Maung asked.
Than headed deeper into the building, into a corridor and toward an empty elevator shaft where Maung followed him, doing his best to ignore the searing pain.
“I think it’s possible. We’ve had problems with Walther but nothing like this, and it’s too much of a coincidence: You, then the American and Sunny Siders show up, and then Walther loses it completely? And he targets you—of all people?”
Than stepped off into darkness, one hand loosely gripping the rail of a ladder, and disappeared. Maung hesitated. A thought popped into his head and froze him with a realization: What difference was there between him and the drifters? Neither of us will ever see our families again. For the first time since waking up he remembered his son and mother and their images appeared in his mind for only a second before dissolving into afterthought, memories that refused to surface again. We do what we’re told and wander through a dead city, like automatons with no future—no memories of those who matter.
Maung followed Than, crying on his way down; he had to get off Karin no matter what—had to find his way back to Earth.
“That’s the one,” Than said. He had his coil gun out, aimed at the drifter, but Maung caught his shoulder to pull him back.
“Not yet. Let’s see where he’s going. Have you ever been this far out?”
Than lowered his gun and then slung it over a shoulder. “No. But from the looks of it, this place got hit just as hard as the rest of the port.”
They’d been following the drifter for over an hour, sometimes losing its signal only to find that it moved incredibly fast, the dot appearing hundreds of meters away as if the thing was sprinting from them. Maung almost laughed. Where was there to run on this rock? Even if the drifter managed to evade the signal detection hardware, and even if it found extra oxygen cannisters, there was no way to escape Karin and no place to get food except from the prison itself. It was possible, Maung figured, that some drifters broke control like Walther did, and some went insane like this one: running to nowhere because to die running was better than to die as a drifter.
The area was a part of the port that Maung hadn’t bothered to examine on the maps, and the buildings yielded no clues to their function, but now that he was close to them he reached out and touched one; they were soft. The towering structures had been coated with a layer of a kind of rubber that also looked metallic, with trillions of gold and silver fibers running up and across the face in an infinite web. The view almost dizzied him. They were on the far side of the port, halfway up the other side of the crater, where these buildings had been constructed into the side of a cliff so that even though he and Than were between buildings, the alley entrance behind them looked as though it dropped into space.
“He’s gone inside,” said Than, pointing. “That one.”
“How is your oxygen?” Maung asked.
“I’m on my last reserve, but it’s three quarters full. You?”
“The same,” said Maung. They were close to the portal through which the drifter had passed, and the darkness beyond made him nervous; he unslung his coil gun and flicked the safety off. “May as well get this done.”
Maung motioned for Than to hide. The corridor was long and identical to the white ones they’d seen in their initial exploration when Maung first arrived, and the dead covered every inch of it. These ones died from microbots, he realized. Most of their flesh was gone so that partially eaten corpses lay frozen in poses of agony, their hands clawing at themselves in attempts to scrape the bots away. But this wasn’t what frightened Maung. Ahead of them, at least a hundred meters away, the corridor’s lighting system was active, casting a brilliant blue glow that reflected off the white walls. He and Than squeezed into doorways on opposite sides of the corridor.
“This section is active,” Maung said.
“It can’t be,” said Than, “none of the port is active, none of it except where we’re conducting demolition. We would notice a power drain coming from this area, and there’s nothing on my screens; check for yourself.”
Maung punched on his forearm computer and waited for the fine web of green data to appear on his faceplate. It took a minute for him to figure out the patterns but Than was right; the dark side’s power distribution grid didn’t run to this area. He cursed himself for not being able to think clearly and wished he could numb the pain in his neck. It throbbed with each heartbeat, making him dizzy.
“Then it must have its own power.”
“Yeah,” said Than, “but why? Who is stationed here and what are they doing?”
Maung was about to answer when Nam cut into their frequency. “Get the hell out of that area, you two. Now.”
“But what do we know about this area?” Than asked. “We tracked one of our drifters here.”
“I told you to get out. It’s none of your business what that place is and I don’t care about another drifter; we’ll hit our quota somehow. Return to your section, now.”
Maung cut Nam’s frequency off and switched to another to ping Than. “I’m not going until I find out what this place is.”
“You’re crazy. Nam will have us ejected—back to Earth—and what happens to you then, Pa? Think about it.”
“I have thought about it; we’re already drifters. There’s no difference between us and them except that we get to carry a gun.”
Than was silent for a moment, but then Maung heard him sigh. “Screw it,” he said, waving his barrel down the corridor. “After you, Pa. But be careful; I’m surprised we haven’t been caught yet by motion or shape sensors, given that this place has to be some
kind of secret site. Nam’s message said it all.”
“You think he knows what this place is?” Maung asked. He moved into the corridor cautiously, trying to keep his footing among the frozen bodies.
“I think he knows that it’s off limits and that it exists; someone told him as much. But I doubt he knows why it’s off limits.”
A red light flashed on Maung’s heads-up and he knew it was Nam—signaling on the frequency they’d just cut. He ignored it. Ahead was the lit section of corridor and Maung shouldered his coil gun then lowered himself to his stomach, close to the dead so he could pull himself along slowly. It took him at least a minute to remember his training and he wanted to pummel his brain, to punish it for having given up so many memories: If they moved slowly enough, motion sensors couldn’t trip. And, he hoped, if they stayed close enough to the bodies, the jumble would defeat shape detection. Maung said a quick prayer, just in case.
Since it was not safe for radio, he turned off his transmitter and motioned for Than to stay behind; Maung pointed to one of the side rooms, assuming Than got the message and hid.
Maung was exposed. These were not the LEDs of the prison, but were fully lit halogens so bright that he had to dim his visor to see. And the silence made his skin crawl; it left only his own thoughts and the sound of his breathing for company. Without air there would be no warning. He couldn’t hear anyone approaching and there was little doubt that someone passing would notice a brand new, white prison suit amidst all the half-eaten dead.
He hesitated at the sight of a door. The corridor curved so that Maung hadn’t seen it until now, when he was less than ten meters away. Think. His heart beat faster and Maung had no idea what to do except go forward, no other ideas except that what was the point of taking this risk in the first place if he turned back now? Everything in his body told him not to go on. He barely noticed the suit against his skin and his systems registered the increased heart rate and breathing, warning him of potential hyperventilation.
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