Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  “Hey,” she said with a curious expression. Luka wondered if she’d recognized him from China Basin, but she looked from his eyes to the cube balanced on the hand truck in front of him. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a calibration cube,” Luka told her. “From an assembler.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It’s just trash.”

  “If it was just trash, you wouldn’t be hauling it above deck,” Val said. “What are you planning on doing with it?”

  “I doubt you really want to know,” Luka said.

  “Why wouldn’t I want to know? I asked, didn’t I?”

  “Because it’s a very long story that I don’t think you’d find very interesting.”

  “I have time,” Val countered. “And you might be surprised by the things I find interesting.”

  She told Luka to give her a second while she used a nearby terminal to send a message, then returned and asked where they were going.

  When they reached the Millennium Tower lobby, Luka stopped.

  “If you really want to know what this is for,” Luka said, “you’re going to have to come up to my flat.”

  “Very good line,” Val said with mock admiration. “So is this what you do? Use calibration cubes to lure innocent women up into your transpartment?”

  “Usually hauling trash around has the opposite effect,” Luka said. “I think most people think I’m crazy.”

  “They do,” Val confirmed. “But crazy’s good. Let’s go.”

  While Luka shaped the cube, Val picked at a boxed meal of soy cubes and almonds (she explained, at great length, her theory of how evolution had never intended for humans to become insectivores). Every time she tossed one of the shelled nuts into her mouth, she produced a new almond-related fact: how much vitamin E, vitamin B, fiber, and protein they contained; the various uses of almond milk and oil and flour; how their almond tree was genetically engineered to be incredibly small, but to produce 50 percent more seeds than a tree twice its size. Luka didn’t eat, but he opened a small flask of pear brandy and divided it between two mugs.

  Once he’d finished with the rough cuts on the cube, he turned Val’s stool toward the window so she couldn’t see what he was doing. He told her, while he worked, that she would have recognized what the calibration cube was if she hadn’t gotten herself kicked out of the foundry. Val laughed and wanted to know how Luka knew about that. Luka told her everything he remembered about her from China Basin. He was older than Val and therefore remembered more. He told her about how he used to watch her, and how he’d always wished he’d had something with which to sketch or paint her. And about the family that came in to visit with her, and how they picked her out of all the other kids there, and how one time they took her overnight and never brought her back. He talked about how feisty he remembered her being, but also how generous she was, and how she never minded when the other kids took the new toys that the family brought her. And finally, he described the dingy purple stuffed animal she’d brought on board with her and used to cling to as though it had been a part of herself.

  When he turned her around, he did not look at the sculpture along with her, but rather watched her expression instead. She seemed confused at first and Luka wondered if he was remembering it wrong, or if maybe she didn’t remember it, but then she drew in a breath and covered her mouth and her big dark eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s Moocow!” Val exclaimed.

  “That thing was a cow?” Luka asked. “I always thought it was some kind of mutant bear.”

  Val stood and circled the object, stepping over the scrap material and running her fingertips along the object’s curves.

  “In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be a hippopotamus,” she said, “but my mother always told me it was a purple cow.”

  “What do you think?” Luka asked her. “Did I capture its hippopotamus-ness?”

  Val looked up from the sculpture and bit her lower lip. “I love it,” she said.

  “I herby christen it Moocow,” Luka said, and it became the first sculpture he ever kept.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EXISTENTIAL THREAT

  THE OFFICER LYING IN THE drain was not the first dead body Luka had ever seen. Back in Hammerfest, before his parents brought him to the San Francisco, he and his friends had come across several. He’d even seen a dead body in China Basin once—a kid who, for reasons nobody bothered explaining to the children, died in his cot during the night. In Luka’s experience, there was no mistaking a dead body. While it was possible to wonder for an instant or two if someone unconscious might be dead, it was seldom possible to wonder if a dead body was just unconscious. It was not unearthly peacefulness or tranquility that made death so apparent, but rather an unnatural or peculiar pose, a chilling stare of terror or bewilderment, or an overall affect of profound and utter abandonment.

  Although Luka had never admitted this to anyone, he was thankful that he’d never been confronted with Val’s lifeless body.

  Luka recognized all four of the officers, but he didn’t actually know any of them. The only one he’d met before was the girl. Val had introduced him to her once at the Moscone Theater shortly after they’d started dating. Mandy, her name was. Val never explained how she and Mandy knew one another and Luka never asked. Luka wondered briefly if she recalled meeting him, and if so, what she must think of him now.

  He was surprised by their apparent indifference to their dead colleague. They gawked at his pale and limp body as they entered the waterlock at gunpoint, but nobody knelt to check his vital signs—even if purely for show—or to roll him over into a more dignified or peaceful position. He was lying on his stomach, half in the drain and half out, with his head turned too far to the side and his dislocated shoulder creating the impression that his arm had been popped off like a doll’s and then reattached backward. There was a massive laceration in his scalp parting his ginger hair, through which a sliver of bright white skull was visible, and one of his steel-blue eyes was missing its gold-threaded contact. When Omicron explained the circumstances of the officer’s death to Luka and Charlie—that the other officers had made the decision to sacrifice their commander by flooding the chamber after he had been overpowered—the survivors’ detachment suddenly made more sense.

  Disarming and sealing the officers in the waterlock was the obvious first step, but now that they all stood together outside the chamber, they weren’t sure what to do next. Luka had immediately identified three of the four outsiders as his fellow Hexagon Row inmates, primarily because of the size of the big one. The young Asian girl in the electrode suit was new to him. She wore a complex expression of hate slightly tempered by determination, and although she was by far the smallest member of the group, there was no question that she was also the one Luka would least like to have a disagreement with right now.

  Both Luka and Charlie had assumed that the purpose of their rescue operation, once accomplished, would become self-evident, but nothing obvious was presenting itself. Even after awkward self-introductions, nobody seemed any closer to understanding why they’d all been brought together—or even precisely how the rendezvous had been orchestrated—and nobody seemed to have any idea whatsoever of how to proceed.

  Luka was about to prompt the four outsiders for their versions of how they’d come to be prisoners on the rig (and specifically, what they’d done to very nearly get themselves summarily executed) when an EMATS notification sounded from a nearby endpoint. The terminal was flashing and the panel beside it showed a countdown—currently at eight seconds—indicating the amount of time remaining before the capsule would be automatically returned to its sender.

  Luka hastened to the beacon, laid the railgun down on the floor, and used the terminal to authenticate. The curved security panel slid to the side and Luka reached in to remove the hexagonal capsule. The delivery required second-level authentication, and after Luka’s personal certificate was transmitted from his contact
s to the miniature craft through his bioelectromagnetic field, the lid dilated open.

  one of the capsule’s six sides was an active display that senders could use to convey short messages to recipients in order to provide some context for the delivery. They were typically used for invoice numbers, simple instructions, salutations, condolences, or expressions of gratitude related to the item within having been borrowed. But rather than clarifying the mysterious dispatch, in this case, the scrolling text only confounded Luka further:

  Set this down on the floor and gather around it.

  His hand went inside the capsule and emerged with an unfamiliar brushed metallic cylindrical device almost the full length of the capsule. The end that appeared to be the top, Luka noticed, had a series of concentric seams. Luka’s companions had assembled around him and he looked around for some sign of recognition, though nobody seemed to have any better idea of what was going on than he did.

  “Well,” Luka began, “unless someone has a better idea, I guess we set this thing down on the floor and gather around it.”

  The group opened up in order to give him space and Luka placed the cylinder down on its base. As soon as he backed away, a slightly narrower cylinder emerged from the first, and then a third emerged from it, extending its full height to just below waist level. The tip of the topmost cylinder was a dark, opaque lens that suddenly erupted with light. Luka was expecting a holographic image to resolve, but instead the light formed a bright white, 360-degree scan grid. The lines were sharp and the matrix spread across their bodies from their knees to their chests.

  “It must be searching for something,” the woman from Hexagon Row said. Her short, black hair was partially dry already, and it was shaggy and uneven in a way that Luka thought somehow worked exceptionally well on her. Ayla, she’d said her name was.

  “It’s looking for our eyes,” her bodyguard said. “It’s a VRD.”

  “A what?” Luka asked.

  “Virtual retina display.”

  The man had introduced himself as Omicron, and something about his articulation had surprised Luka. He’d expected the enormous figure to be little more than a tower of carefully engineered reflexes and muscle, but Luka was gradually getting the impression that he was every bit as intellectually capable as he was physically.

  Charlie was running her hand through the projected grid as though it were tangible—a field of waist-high wildflowers. “What does it do?” she asked.

  “It uses lasers to project an image directly onto the retina,” Omicron explained. “I think we’re supposed to be sitting.”

  The small girl, Cadie, was the first to fully submerge herself into the scan grid. Her companion, Cam, immediately followed. As soon as their heads were within range, the grids constricted around their faces, then further constricted around their eyes, and then finally focused into single rails of light perfectly targeting their pupils. Both their expressions held a look of astonishment as they folded their legs beneath them.

  “It’s a man,” Cadie said. “He seems to be waiting for something.”

  “Or someone,” Cam added.

  “It’s a recording,” Omicron said. He’d lowered himself into the scan grid, as well, and his eyes were similarly connected to the cylindrical lens via dual light rails.

  The beams perfectly tracked their eyes as they attempted to make themselves more comfortable on the metal floor. Charlie and Ayla sat, and once the lasers connected their retinas to the projector in the center, the group reminded Luka of a giant spoked wheel. As Luka sat, the scan grid located his pupils, and when the device focused on the backs of his eyes, he saw the same image as the others: a man standing in the center, looking directly at him.

  “Holy shit,” Luka said.

  “It’s Two Bulls,” Charlie said from beside him.

  “Who’s Two Bulls?” Cam asked.

  “He’s on the City Council,” Luka said, then decided to leave it at that. He did not mention that Matthew Two Bulls was also the Chair of the Judicial Committee, and the one who had so passionately advocated for Luka’s incarceration during his hearing. The man was big—not Omicron big, but certainly big by San Francisco standards—his portliness clearly concealing a sturdy frame and probably substantial strength. The skin on his face was both the color and texture of sandstone, and while the sides of his head were shaved, the rest of his glossy, black hair was pulled back into a tight braid that Luka could not currently see, but that he knew sprouted from the back of his head and fell almost to his waist. He wore a long, dark gray shirt that bulged as it hung over his paunch, and his typical darkened visor was clipped to his face. Two Bulls notoriously disliked the quality of the artificial lighting aboard the San Francisco and almost always wore some manner of filter.

  “Hello, Luka,” Two Bulls said. His subdued tone and demeanor were clearly incongruous with the current state of affairs, bolstering the bodyguard’s theory that everything they were about to hear was prerecorded. “I know you must have a lot of questions for me. I’ve tried to anticipate as many of them as possible, but before we begin, there a few things you need to know. First, the moment the projector no longer detects your presence, the entire quantum storage block inside this device will be randomized, and this recording will be irreversibly destroyed. Second of all, you are never to approach me, attempt to contact me directly, or mention me outside of this circle under any circumstances whatsoever.” He paused as though giving Luka a moment to consider his terms. “We can start whenever you’re ready.”

  There was a subtle combination jump cut and a crossfade, and Two Bulls now appeared to be waiting patiently.

  “I’ll start,” Charlie said. “What the hell gives you the right to involve Luka in whatever all this is?”

  There was another jump cut and crossfade as the device accessed the right time code in the video sequence for the appropriate response.

  “I can only answer questions from Luka,” Two Bulls said. “From now on, all other voice patterns will be ignored.”

  “Who is Tycho?” Luka asked.

  The response was both preceded and punctuated by the visual transition as the device’s playhead changed locations.

  “I am Tycho,” Two Bulls said. “The account is completely anonymous and untraceable, and after tonight, it is the only way the two of us will ever communicate.”

  “Why did you want me in the brig so badly?”

  “I apologize for the speech I gave during your inquiry, but I needed you to be imprisoned for as long as possible to make sure I had a chance to contact you in total isolation. And I needed to create the appearance of us being adversaries.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that question. Try being more specific.”

  “Why did you need to create the impression of us being adversaries?”

  “To help conceal the fact that we will be working together, and to make sure that I can’t be connected to what you and your associates do.”

  “What are me and my associates going to do?”

  “That will be up to you.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “Surely the people around you can speak for themselves.”

  “What’s all this about?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that question. Try being more specific.”

  Luka heaved an exasperated sigh. “What should we do next?”

  “I will tell you what to do next, but there are other questions you must ask first.”

  Luka shook his head and the dual light rails tracked his motion. “This thing is obnoxious,” he said. “Why were the outsiders brought here?”

  “The outsiders were brought here for two reasons,” Two Bulls said. “First, the Coronians wanted something they had. And second, the Coronians wanted them dead.”

  “Why do the Coronians want them dead?”

  “The Coronians want the outsiders dead because they are considered an existential threat.”

  “Hold on,” Cam sa
id. “What’s he talking about? Who are the Coronians?”

  Charlie and Luka looked at one another. There was a period of uncomfortable silence as glances were exchanged among the group.

  “They’ve been in isolation their entire lives,” Ayla said. “This is all new to them.”

  Charlie leaned to the side so she could see past the projection of Two Bulls. “Almost all of Earth’s power comes from a space station called Equinox,” she explained. “The Coronians built and control it, which means the Coronians basically control Earth.”

  “Not our power,” Cam countered. He looked at Cadie, then back at Charlie. “We had our own fusion reactors.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Maybe that’s why the Coronians considered you a threat.”

  “No,” Omicron said. “It’s much more than that. It has something to do with the baby. Something about its genetic code.”

  “Wait a second,” Cam said. He paused while he seemed to be playing something out in his head.

  Cadie gave him a perplexed look. “What?”

  “It’s Arik’s research they’re after.”

  “What research?” Cadie asked. “His work on artificial photosynthesis?”

  “Arik wasn’t just working on AP,” Cam said. “He was also working on terraforming, and apparently he cracked it. He knew his research would be destroyed if anyone found out about it, so he hid it inside your ODSTAR project.”

  Cadie was silent for a moment, and then her hand went down to her abdomen. “Oh my God,” she said. “His research was encoded inside the baby’s DNA.”

  “What’s ODSTAR?” Omicron asked.

  Cam reached over and took Cadie’s hand. “It was a research project she and Arik worked on together.”