When Luka woke up the next morning, his father was gone. His mother gave him a tube of soy paste and a bulb of water, and when he offered to share them with her, she told him that she had already eaten and wasn’t hungry. When Luka’s father returned, he explained to Luka that he would be going to live in a giant floating city where he would be taken care of and be safe. Luka remembered realizing that morning that his life up to that point had been a lie—that the security and community he’d felt inside Hammerfest had been nothing more than a facade. In truth, his entire family had always been just one accusation, one misfortune, or one late payment away from losing everything. As long as you were in possession of caps, or supplies, or anything else that others wanted, there was a place for you in the Arkade, but the moment there was even the slightest imbalance—the moment you needed more than you could immediately produce—everything about your past was instantly unwritten. It was as though his family’s misfortune was a highly contagious disease, and the more they needed help, the more grotesque and offensive they became. Luka never forgot the incredible speed with which the faces of those around him went from friendly to contemptuous, and how quickly his family—once valued members of a collective—became condemned outcasts.
At that point in Luka’s life, he had not yet heard the term “unconditional love,” but when he later became aware of it, he recalled savagely rejecting the notion that any such connection could possibly exist between two living things without the existence of criteria and prerequisites. Just as everyone and everything had its price, all forms of love and compassion had their limitations and conditions, most of which couldn’t be known until such time as they were finally breached.
And so began the cycle of disillusionment and cynicism that had become one of the defining themes of Luka’s existence. He recalled the very moment he realized that his instructors at the foundry, who he had once believed to be among some of the smartest people he’d ever known, actually knew next to nothing about the machines with which they worked almost every day of their lives, and worse, really didn’t even seem to care, preferring to devote their time and energy to forming alliances and positioning themselves rather than improving their contributions. Similarly, there was a short period during which Luka was enamored by the collective specter of the City Council, and truly believed that they somehow tapped into a precious and rare vein of knowledge and wisdom that entitled them to lead, though after a long enough period of observation, he began to realize that those who held the lives of the entire city in their hands were undeniably among the population’s most selfish, unscrupulous, and reprehensible. And finally, the first time Luka had allowed himself to be vulnerable enough to reach out to someone other than his mother for comfort—the first time he loved anyone as much as he’d loved her, and as much as he could imagine ever loving anyone—he discovered that their connection was not strong enough to prevent her from taking her own life, just exactly as his connection with his parents hadn’t been nearly enough to keep his family together.
Love, like everything else, was absolutely conditional—a collection of hidden triggers that revealed themselves only after the trap had already been sprung.
CHAPTER THIRTY
AQUARIUS
THE CUBICLE WAS JUST BARELY big enough for four people. Luka and Charlie were squeezed in together on one side, and Cadie and Cam on the other. The table between them was brushed stainless steel, as were most of the surfaces and fixtures in the underwater habitat, and one end of it butted up against the largest of the laboratory’s heavily bolted viewports. In the center of the table was a vertical slab of transparent polymeth that received power and data through its malleable silicone base, and was the means by which Ayla and Omicron remotely participated from the safety of the Accipiter Hawk.
Cadie guessed she probably knew only about two-thirds of the history of Aquarius. From the archives, she learned that it had been commissioned by an organization called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA; designed by a team of submarine builders in Florida and built by industrial machinists in Texas; and operated by the science departments of several universities with a little financial assistance from a wealthy Canadian film director and deep-sea explorer. The habitat spent most of its functional life servicing teams of aquanauts who studied the coral reefs of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary before eventually being decommissioned and promised to a maritime museum in Sydney. However, before it could be transported, it was purchased—and soon thereafter, entirely refurbished and significantly updated—by the vacationing grandson of a frozen food magnate whose third wife briefly expressed interest in marine biology. From there, the vessel’s historical trail went cold until it was resumed by Charlie, who explained that Aquarius had been picked up in trade from brokers in Cape Canaveral, after which it was lashed to the rig’s hull and—while waiting to be sold, retraded, or converted into some kind of submersible mining habitat—essentially forgotten.
Where power and air were once sent down from the surface by the LSB, or Life Support Buoy, it was now provided by an umbilical line connecting it to the San Francisco. Municipal caps had kept Aquarius in functional standby mode for years, but it was now power and illicitly assembled equipment provided by Luka—and several modifications first outlined by Cadie and Omicron, and then implemented by Charlie and Cam—that transformed the underwater habitat back into a fully functional laboratory, though with much more of an emphasis on human biology than marine.
Even for Cadie, a small girl who grew up within the containment of a clandestine pod system, Aquarius felt cramped. The structure was an eighty-ton cylindrical steel chamber about thirteen meters long and less than three meters in diameter. Despite its compact size, it was divided up into four separate compartments. At one end was a cabin that, even with four of the six bunks removed, could barely accommodate Cam. The main lock consisted of the galley and a condensed eating and gathering area doubling as a workspace. The entry lock housed the main laboratory and the toilet, and at the end opposite the cabin was the wet porch and shower, complete with hot water. Entry to Aquarius was gained through an open moon pool: an airtight chamber with enough atmospheric pressure to keep the water level flush with the hole in the floor. Charlie and Luka were comfortable putting on dry suits and simply holding their breath while swimming between the San Francisco’s much larger pressurized moon pool and the research habitat’s wet porch, but Cadie and Cam—having never learned to swim, and in fact, having never even been submerged in more water than it took to fill a hydromill or a tiny bathtub—used both dry suits and rebreathers, and followed the woven polymer line that Charlie strung for them between the two chambers. When only cargo and supplies needed to be transferred, it was usually easier for Charlie to deploy a remotely operated submersible that Cam and Cadie unloaded on their end, then sent back towing crates packed with waste.
The ocean outside the viewport was a drab olive green and the weak light that filtered down through it cast a subdued glow across the dull abraded surface of the table. While Cam hadn’t had much trouble transitioning from a diet of stemstock, which sustained them in V1, to the assortment of arthropods that were the main source of protein on the San Francisco, Cadie discovered that she was much less gastronomically adventurous, and was therefore making a meal out of a tin of congealed, fermented soy cubes. Luka and Charlie had bulbs of fresh water in front of them and were both wrapped in thermal cloaks after rinsing off back on the wet porch. Luka’s short hair was already dry; Charlie had stopped at the sink in the entry lock and borrowed Cadie’s brush to get the knots out of her artificially flaxen hair before smoothing it back out of her face.
“I’m coming up on a shift,” Luka said, “so I don’t have a lot of time, but I want to finalize our plans.”
The connection and the bandwidth between Aquarius and the Hawk were reasonably good considering they were using underwater, line-of-sight acoustic waves at a distance of nearly ninety kilometers. Above-surface radi
o waves would have been preferable—yielding much higher data rates and better reliability—but they would have also been much easier to detect. Eavesdropping was not so much the concern as the signal could have been adequately encrypted; the real danger was that it might be suspected that the Accipiter Hawk was still in the vicinity, which would not only prompt a relentless pursuit of the four defectors, but probably also a local manhunt for the coconspirators that such close proximity implied.
“Go ahead,” Omicron said. “We read you.”
While they used a digital protocol with flow control and error correction for data transfer, for the sake of simplicity and latency, they used a simple analog signal for communication. Data obviously had to be perfectly reliable, but voice and video glitches could easily be compensated for by the human brain. The multipath interference between the vessels caused phase shifting, which resulted in a quivering ghosting effect in the two faces rendered in fluctuating fidelity inside the polymeth tablet. Coincidentally, Omicron sounded as though he might actually be talking underwater.
“We’ve discussed two different plans,” Luka began. “Sabotaging the Coronians’ ability to mine, and using the data recovered from Cadie to start terraforming. All of us agree that either one would loosen the Coronians’ grip on Earth, right?”
Cadie, Cam, and Charlie nodded. Omicron transmitted his verbal assent.
“In that case,” Luka said, “I propose we do both.”
Cam gazed across the table at Luka with obvious skepticism. “How?” he asked. “We don’t have the resources to be offensive and defensive at the same time.”
“You’re wrong,” Luka said. “I think we do.”
Cadie was still trying to decide whether or not she liked Luka. She found herself frequently put off by his brazenness—by his propensity to say whatever came into his head—and by the fact that he was probably about as close to the opposite of Arik as anyone she’d ever met. But at the same time, there was something about him that prevented her from dismissing him entirely. He was far more unassuming than just about anyone she’d known in V1, and he came across as entirely unapologetic about who and what he was. Although it was difficult for her to admit—even to herself—the things that annoyed her most about Luka were also the things she most admired.
It was Charlie who finally prompted Luka to continue. “How?” she asked.
“First of all, we move forward with the plan to smuggle Cam onto Equinox.”
“No,” Cadie interjected. “I don’t like that idea at all.”
“Hold on,” Cam said. “At least let him finish.”
“I’ve tried every hack and work-around I know to try to assemble explosives,” Luka explained to the group, “but I’m still not getting anywhere. I can assemble pretty much anything we need, but even Tycho can’t get some types of contraband past the assemblers’ DRM.”
“Wait a second,” Charlie said. “We use underwater charges for mining all the time. Why can’t we just send a bunch of those up to Equinox?”
“Those are depth charges,” Luka said. “They’re designed to create massive shock waves in high-pressure environments. They’re not going to be very effective in a vacuum.”
“Can’t you just use whatever technique you use to assemble your—” The girl stopped when Luka’s expression became a cautionary glare. “That you use to assemble other types of contraband?”
“That won’t work,” Luka told her. “Bombs are much more than just explosives. You need binding agents, primers, detonators, fragmentation material. And probably a ton of other stuff I haven’t even figured out yet since most of the information I need is missing from the archives.”
“There has to be a way,” Cadie insisted. “There has to be something you haven’t tried.”
“If we had enough time, we could probably figure out some kind of recomposition technique that might work, but it could take months or even years to learn how to build something effective and reliable enough to send up there. And it’s not exactly easy to experiment with bombs around here without someone noticing.”
“What about buying explosives?” Cadie suggested. She looked at the vertical sheet of polymeth in the center of the table. “You two could find some, couldn’t you?”
Before Ayla or Omicron could respond, Luka intervened. “Forget the problem of obtaining explosives for a second,” he said. “Even if we had all the bombs we wanted—even if we were guaranteed that they’d work, and even if we managed to pack an entire shipment of mining equipment full of them—the chances of us detonating them at the right time and in just the right place are basically zero.”
Cadie watched Luka from across the table. Cam was the last link she had not only to V1, but to her entire former existence—the closest thing to home that she had left—and she therefore had no intention of sending him on what she believed to be a suicide mission.
“Then we just have to get creative,” she told Luka. She guessed at something she hoped would prove they hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities just yet. “We could build a microgravity fuse.”
Luka’s expression was immediately dismissive. “Then we’d just blow up the rocket,” he said.
“We could use a zero-g fuse to trigger a timer, then.”
“That’s not much better,” Luka said. “How would we know we weren’t just blowing up a warehouse? Or how do we know payloads aren’t kept in orbit for a few days before being captured by the station? The reality is that we need to wait until the equipment is in position to do maximum damage, but we have no way of knowing where or when that is, and even if we did, we’d have no way to get a signal to the detonator. We have to assume that we’re only going to get one shot at this—one chance to smuggle something into orbit before the Coronians realize they’re under attack—and that means we have to go with whatever option gives us the most flexibility and best shot at success, no matter how dangerous.”
“We could build the bomb so that it detonates when the equipment is put together,” Cadie tried. “Or the first time it’s used. Or we could even—”
“Cadie,” Cam interrupted. “It’s a moot point. We don’t have a way to assemble the explosives, or test them, or make sure they’re in position, or detonate them. And even if we had all that, there are still way too many unknowns.”
“Like what?” Cadie challenged.
“Like the fact that Haná is up there, which means we probably shouldn’t be indiscriminately blowing things up. And like the fact that we need to destroy the Coronians’ ability to mine, but not their ability to generate and transfer power down to Earth. The only way to sabotage their mining capabilities with any kind of precision whatsoever is to send someone up there who can infiltrate the station.”
“But why does it have to be you?” Cadie asked him.
“Because I have a background in mechanical engineering,” Cam said. “And because everyone else is needed for other things down here. And most importantly, because nobody will notice that I’m missing.”
“He’s right,” Luka said. “We have a much better chance of getting Cam up to Equinox than any kind of a destructive device, and he has the best chance of figuring out what to do once he’s up there.”
Cadie was about to try again, but Cam stopped her. “And,” he said, “I can try to find out what happened to Haná.”
The baby was an element of all this that Cadie had been doing her best not to consider. More than once Cam had tried unsuccessfully to talk to her about her daughter, inviting her to open up, to share with him how she was feeling, to grieve if she felt she needed to. But Cadie would not discuss the subject beyond a brusque acknowledgment that her baby was gone and there was absolutely nothing any of them could do about it. Growing up amid the isolation and protection of V1 had not prepared Cadie—or anyone from her generation, for that matter—for having to deal with any form of significant loss. Therefore, the only way she had to handle being suddenly deprived of not only her unborn daughter, but also her husband, her parents,
and the only home she’d ever known was by simply not dealing with any of it at all. But now the prospect of Cam locating Haná—even just the possibility of him being in close proximity to her, and maybe finding out definitively whether or not she was still alive—instilled in her something she was surprised to discover felt even worse than despair. It gave her hope.
When Cadie did not respond, Luka continued.
“I’ve already started drawing up plans,” he said. “I think I know roughly how to get Cam up there.”
“How?” Charlie asked.
“All I have to do is assemble the next piece of mining equipment they order so that it can be packed in one less container. That gives us an extra crate for Cam and all the necessary life-support systems.”
For the first time, the warped and twisted image of Ayla spoke. “Are we talking about a one-way trip?” she asked. “How is he supposed to get back?”
“She’s right,” Omicron said from his side of the polymeth surface. “I agree there’s a good chance we can get Cam up there, and that he’s our best shot at setting the Coronians back. But I don’t see an obvious way of returning him safely to Earth.”
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