But Charlie had never intended to take hold of Tink. As soon as she heard the pitch of the cutter change—the moment the little bot caught, and the spinning momentarily slowed with the stress of cannibalizing another extremely robust and highly pressure-resistant machine—Charlie clenched her eyes and bit down and screamed through her teeth as she pushed so hard on both joysticks that the pain shot all the way up into her shoulders.
When she finally opened her eyes again several seconds later, she had never been so happy to see nothing but darkness.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
INFINITE CAPACITY
THE TRIPLE-AXIS GIMBAL IN WHICH Cam’s seat was mounted didn’t do him much good in zero-g. Since the concept of “up” was entirely arbitrary, the best he could do was maneuver himself into an orientation that positioned the things around him, from his perspective, more or less upright: the tanks of compressed air, the twin redundant CO2 scrubbers, the water lines and tubes, the plasma lantern strapped to the wall, the pockets in which blister packs of protein and medication were stored. And the electromagnetic rifle Luka referred to as a railgun, secured to one wall of the cube by three padded clasps, its trigger guard sawed off and filed down in order to accommodate a thickly gloved finger.
Since he regained consciousness, the pressurized crate had been transported and repositioned several times with an efficiency and precision that Cam knew had to be robotically orchestrated, sending the nucleus within the three concentric rings of the gimbal twirling. The last time it was moved, the maneuver ended with the cubical vessel making contact with something far more massive and solid than it was, and the image that formed in Cam’s mind was that of being stacked, or otherwise secured, inside some sort of zero-g warehouse. Now that he had been stationary for over an hour, he hoped that establishing a frame of reference—even an artificial one—might help him feel less nauseous, though if it was helping, he certainly couldn’t tell. The timing of the launch was such that he was caught right between antinausea treatments: the patch on his arm had worn off, and the pills he swallowed soon after orbital insertion took too long to absorb in zero-g, and therefore came back up before they had a chance to take effect. All he could do now was ride it out.
Prior to today, Cam had only vomited one other time in his life. He and two other boys—Syed and Seth—had filled an aluminum canister with a cloudy white liquid from a complex borosilicate glass still Syed’s father set up in the back of the Code Pod, then proceeded to pass it around until it was half-gone. He remembered thinking that throwing up must be the worst physical feeling that it was possible for a human being to experience, though enough time had passed that the memory of the sensation had mostly dulled. However, now that Cam was experiencing it all over again—the sweating, the quivering, the gagging, and the violent involuntary retching—he realized that, all those years ago, he’d been right.
His helmet was off and meandering about in a leisurely circuit of apparent perpetual motion so that he could safely vomit into a wet-trash sealable pouch (vomiting into a helmet, Cam knew from his experience with environment suits back in V1, could easily be fatal, and doubly so in zero-g). He had already thrown up several times and found now that there wasn’t much left to come up—not even gastric acid. Although Cam was unable to clearly articulate any of Newton’s three laws of motion, he suspected that the spinning that resulted from his heaving was probably evidence of one of at least one of them.
A fresh patch on his shoulder would probably see him through what remained of his bout with space adaptation syndrome, but he was hesitant to get far enough out of his pressure suit that he could peel the old one off and get a new one into position. Although things had been quiet around him for some time, he was worried about the crate being structurally compromised or otherwise suddenly opened in a vacuum. Cam was confident that he could get his helmet back on and sealed in time (it was designed for rapid emergency pressurization), but if the capsule depressurized while he had too much of his suit dismantled—both of his gloves and perhaps even the upper torso assembly—he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to get them back on before either freezing to death, or succumbing to ebullism as all of his bodily fluids began boiling simultaneously.
After a short nap, Cam awoke feeling much better, and even a little hungry. He had rotated while he was asleep, so he reached out and oriented himself again in the direction he’d decided was up, then stowed the unused wet-trash pouch he was holding in an elastic pocket in front of him. His consumables would easily last him several more days, but psychologically, Cam could tell that he was approaching some kind of internal threshold, especially now that his stomach was settling. Protein, water, supplements, and oxygen would not be enough to sustain him for much longer; whether it was danger, fear, or failure, Cam needed stimulation.
There was no way for him to know exactly where he was except by formulating a hypothesis around eliminating the obvious. The fact that he was experiencing weightlessness told him that he was neither on Earth, nor on the inner ring of Equinox which, according to Omicron, was supposed to have close to 90 percent of the gravity of home. And since he wasn’t detecting any centrifugal forces, he couldn’t be accelerating out toward a more distant orbit. Given the interval of time between when he launched and when he regained consciousness, it was possible that he was in a detached but stable low-earth orbit, although that seemed unlikely since his crate had clearly been through some sort of receiving or docking procedure. Cam’s best guess was that he was right where he wanted to be: somewhere on the outer ring of Equinox, very likely in close proximity to the Coronians.
He looked down at the chronograph strapped above the threading of his glove, and had just decided that he would wait one more hour before cracking the hatch and taking a look around when he heard something beneath him. Cam immediately reoriented himself into a position that his eyes told him was facedown, but that his inner ears seemed entirely indifferent to. The sound was clearly that of something attaching itself to the crate at multiple points, but this time, it was not followed by the centrifugal sensation of movement. There was a moment of silence, and then the whine of very precise, high-speed machinery—something like the probing of a fine, diamond-tipped drill bit. Cam had managed to bring his level of anxiety down to a manageable baseline so he could focus on getting past the nausea and on making reasonable decisions, but now it appeared that decisions were about to made on his behalf, and his adrenaline once again surged.
The drilling paused, then started again in a slightly different location. Cam could tell from the depth of it that the intention was not to penetrate the capsule, though it wasn’t until the whining came from a third and then a fourth location that he was able to detect the pattern: every one of the points so far seemed to correspond to the locations of the capsule’s pyrotechnic fasteners—the emergency explosive bolts that would, at Cam’s command, violently blow the hatch. Whatever was out there wasn’t probing at all, but rather knew exactly what it was doing, and exactly where to do it. The initiators inside the eight bolts were triggered by pulsed laser diodes, and would probably respond to coordinated bursts of light from fiber-optic strands inserted from outside the crate.
The Coronians were about to blow the hatch.
Instinctively, Cam snatched his helmet from the air, flipped it around, and brought it down over his head. He rocked it until it was properly seated, lifted the two sealing levers, then used the console on his wrist to confirm that he wanted pressurization. When he saw green on his heads-up display, he rotated himself 90 degrees, reached forward, and released the three railgun latches. Nudged by the rotation of the final clasp, the rifle drifted toward him, and Cam grasped it by its stock, pulled it into his lap, then swung himself back toward the hatch. The whining of the drill bit was muted by his helmet, but Cam could still hear it, and for some reason, he reached up and turned the plasma lantern off as though he might be able to hide in the dark from whatever was out there. As he tightened the seat’s webbing ag
ainst his chest, he tried to remember how many more bolts there were, but realized that in his panic, he had lost count. When the whining stopped and did not start back up again, he knew that all eight had been drilled out, and that he probably had only seconds left before the hatch was blown.
Cam had no way of knowing what kind of environment was outside—whether it was pressurized, or whether it was a complete vacuum—but when the moment came, he knew instantly. He heard the eight simultaneous detonations, but only for a tiny fraction of a second before there was no more air to propagate sound, and then all he could hear was himself groan and gasp as he was thrown against his restraints, and then his own rapid breathing. He’d seen the brief flashes and expected the hatch cover to simply be gone, but it wasn’t. Instead, it spun away for a moment, and then something folded over it—a type of elastic netting—cinching itself tight with the momentum of Cam’s violently expelled environment. Although he was terrified, Cam still had the presence of mind to understand that whatever was out there was conscious of high-velocity litter. Or perhaps it never passed up an opportunity to collect any form of matter that could be transformed into viable assembly medium.
Cam did nothing but sit and breathe. His arms were crossed over his chest, pinning the rifle to his torso, and he could feel it rise and fall with his heaving. He was beginning to feel dizzy, and he closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath through his nose, held it, then let it out gradually through his mouth—a conscious attempt to slow his oxygen consumption, and keep himself from hyperventilating. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself gazing out over an infinite black void before him, but embedded in the darkness were hundreds of points of light—clusters of photons that had traveled decades, centuries, and even millennia to reach him. For the very first time in his life, Cam was looking at stars.
The darkness outside the capsule was not the result of a complete absence of light, but rather the absence of anything to reflect it. The hatch and the netting were gone, but now something maneuvered down from the top left-hand corner of Cam’s field of view. It was compact and industrial, and although it was partially concealed in the glare of two spotlights, Cam could see that it had four dull metallic arms. The two major appendages on top were long and complex, comprised of several segments connected by servo-mechanical joints, terminating in what appeared to be as many as eight highly dexterous and surgically precise digits. The two minor appendages below were less well articulated and more crudely prehensile in nature—more like vices or pinchers—and Cam could tell from their gearing and exposed pistons that they were capable of generating immense amounts of crushing torque. Behind the appendages was a thick and thoroughly scored white carapace in which were set three bluish lenses in a triangular pattern. The one on top had an enormous aperture—at least twenty centimeters—and appeared fixed in place. The two below, which Cam had initially mistaken for spotlights, were in fact individually socketed cameras with sturdy protracted housings and ring lights. With the eerie reflexive shifting of human eyeballs, the two lower lenses used their circular illumination to inspect the inside of Cam’s capsule while the wide-diameter lens in the center stared directly through his faceplate.
The machine appeared to bristle with the vapor of dozens of tiny gas jets silently adjusting its pitch, yaw, and roll. Cam couldn’t tell if it was explicitly weaponized, or whether its potential for destruction was implied by its appendages, but he decided he didn’t want it thinking that he was entirely defenseless. Far clumsier than he would have liked, Cam raised the railgun and placed the stock against his shoulder. He powered up the device with his thumb, though since he did not know how sensitive the trigger was—nor how steady his hands were at the moment—he kept his finger along the outer housing of the device’s electromagnetic track rather than down on top of the trigger.
The machine had no discernible reaction to Cam’s threat. When the inside of the crate had been thoroughly scanned, the movement of the two smaller lenses locked in binocular synchronicity, illuminating Cam and holding steady except for an occasional, oddly muscular tic. Cam heard the transducers in his helmet crackle, and then there was a male voice, speaking to him in what he believed was probably a dialect of Chinese. There was a pause and Cam wondered if he’d been asked a question. The next sentence was in Spanish, or possibly Portuguese, and then another pause. Cam couldn’t tell whether the voice was synthesized or organic until it finally spoke to him in English, and then he knew without a doubt. While it was a seemingly perfect reproduction, the vocalization lacked any trace of emotion appropriate to the situation: no threat, hatred, curiosity, and certainly no empathy.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” Cam said as calmly and steadily as he could manage. He assumed the Coronians would be listening on the same frequency on which they’d discovered he was able to receive. “Yes. I speak English.”
“Do you require medical assistance?”
Cam hesitated. He thought about the danger of him vomiting in his helmet in zero-g, and the headache he was getting from dehydration since he hadn’t been able to keep any water down. But ultimately he decided that he was not yet ready to appear in any way weak or vulnerable.
“No,” he told the drone. “I’m fine.”
“Please lower your weapon,” the machine said. “You are in no danger.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because if we wanted to kill you, you would already be dead. And if we decide to kill you in the future, you will not be able to stop us. The unintended consequences of discharging that weapon currently pose far more danger to you than we do.”
Cam knew that this might be his only opportunity to stage any kind of resistance, so he took a moment to consider his options. He felt confident that he could destroy or disable the machine in front of him, but he suspected that it wouldn’t do him very much good. There were likely hundreds if not thousands more just like it, and the reality was that it was probably far more effort on the part of the Coronians to keep him alive than to kill him, or to simply isolate him and let him die on his own. And finally, the drone was probably right: As far as Cam knew, the railgun had never been fired, so there was no telling what might happen in an extremely confined space where his life depended on the integrity of his pressure suit. With visible resignation, Cam cut the power to the railgun and took it down off his shoulder.
one of the machine’s upper arms extended and rotated, wrapping its fingers delicately around the railgun’s barrel. Cam released the weapon as it was gently withdrawn, and he watched as it was deftly passed down to one of the lower arms where it was securely clamped. He waited for the machine to crush it, or snap it in two, or otherwise render the weapon inoperable, but it did not. Perhaps they would take a few moments to make sure they understood how it worked before disabling it, and then probably reducing it to assembly medium and eventually turning it into something entirely different.
“Please come with me,” the machine transmitted. “Your quarters are fully pressurized.”
“My quarters?” Cam repeated. He did not move. “Wait a second. You mean you knew I was coming?”
“Yes,” the machine said. “Your capsule was isolated from the remainder of the shipment until we were prepared for you.”
“How did you know?”
“Your people alerted us.”
Cam shook his head incredulously. “What do you mean alerted?”
“What we mean,” the machine explained, “is that you were betrayed.”
Cam was about to challenge the allegation, but something stopped him. First of all, he realized that there was no point in trying to convince the Coronians that his team would never give him up. And second, he wasn’t even entirely convinced of that fact himself. He hadn’t known Luka and Charlie long enough to have a good feel for whether or not they might trade his life for whatever rewards there were to be had aboard the San Francisco, and Tycho or Two Bulls or whoever he was was an even bigger unknown. The only per
son left in the entire world he was certain would never betray him was Cadie.
“What do I do?” Cam asked.
A complex pattern of gas jets fired as the machine rotated in place a full 180 degrees, then backed toward Cam so that it was just outside the capsule. On the rear of the machine was a thick bar with enough clearance for gloves, and below it, a retractable tether.
“Please secure yourself and let me know when you are ready.”
Cam released his restraints and pushed the webbing aside. He moved tentatively forward in his seat toward the machine and reached for the tether. As he pulled it toward him, jets in the rear of the drone fired to compensate.
Cam knelt in the narrow space between the chair and the hatch. It took him a few tries to get the safeties on the carabiner open and to connect it to the ring anchored to the waist of the torso assembly, but when he released it, the spring-loaded mechanisms clamped tightly and securely shut. He gave the tether several yanks until he was satisfied with its integrity, then inched closer to the rear of the machine, the black and yellow belt retracting to take up the slack. Cam wrapped both gloved hands around the handle in opposing grips, then breathed deeply as he looked out into the blackness.
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