There were minuscule bursts of jets as the device closed the remaining gap to the airlock, and Cam held on to either side of the bulkhead as he stepped out and clipped his boots into place. They were, as he expected, a perfectly engineered fit, and the handles he wrapped his gloves around were exactly the right height for him to stand comfortably.
“Are you fully situated?” Angelia asked. Her voice came from inside the helmet coupling and resonated such that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously—almost as though it were inside Cam’s own head.
“I think so,” Cam said. “Go slow, though. I don’t want to see what happens if I fall off this thing.”
“You are already falling around Earth at a rate of almost eight kilometers per second,” the girl said. “Falling off the conveyor would probably be relatively inconsequential.”
Cam wondered if this was an example of Coronian humor. “You know what I mean,” he said.
He reflexively tightened his grip when he felt the inertia of silent acceleration. When he looked down, he saw the surface of the ring below him both speed up and fall away simultaneously—and then, a moment later, he saw nothing at all.
“What the hell just happened?” Cam asked. He spoke as steadily as he could in an attempt—futile as it probably was—to conceal his anxiety. “Why can’t I see anything?”
“I’m sorry,” Angelia said. “There are elements of Equinox that you are not allowed to see. I’ve had to temporarily dim your visor.”
“A little warning would have been nice.”
“Are you comfortable?”
“Not really,” Cam said. “I’m flying blindly through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour wearing nothing but thermal underwear in a vehicle I can’t control and I have no idea where I’m going or what’s about to happen. So no—I wouldn’t describe how I feel right now as particularly comfortable.”
“Please try to relax,” the girl told him. “You are perfectly safe, and your destination is not far.”
“How far, exactly?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how long it takes for us to discuss the gliders.”
“I should have guessed,” Cam said. “Are you sure you can talk and fly this thing at the same time?”
“We are very good at multitasking.”
“You better be,” Cam said. “What do you know about the gliders so far?”
“Very little,” the girl said. “Although it’s only fair to inform you that we are skeptical of your ability to stop them.”
“Why?”
“We haven’t detected any form of unusual or unexpected electromagnetic radiation anywhere close to where they were launched, nor any definitive radar signatures. Therefore, we believe it is unlikely that we will be able to reliably track them.”
“You’re not picking up any signals because they’re not broadcasting any signals,” Cam said. “They’re almost entirely autonomous. And they’re probably too small for you to see with radar from all the way up here. The whole point was to make them as hard for you to stop as possible. That’s why we went with little toy sailboats rather than aircraft.”
“Yes,” the girl agreed. “Yet you claim to know of a way.”
“Not just claim,” Cam said. “I can tell you exactly how to stop them. Whether it’s something you’re willing to do or not is up to you.”
“We are listening.”
“If the gliders aren’t broadcasting anything, and if you’re not picking up any unexpected electromagnetic radiation in the area, then how do you think they’re navigating?”
“The only logical conclusion is that they are able to navigate without the aid of any external guidance.”
“Or . . .”
There was a moment of silence before the girl responded. “Or you have broken our GPS encryption and are using our own navigation signals.”
“Exactly,” Cam said. “Well, not me personally. It was actually one of your Neos.”
“Thank you,” the girl. “I believe that is all we need to know.”
“Is it?” Cam asked doubtfully.
“Is there more?”
“You tell me. Now that you know how the gliders are navigating, how do plan to stop them?”
“All we have to do is increase the complexity of our encryption.”
“And what will that accomplish?”
“That will prevent the gliders from determining their latitude and longitude, which will in turn prevent them from reaching their intended destinations.”
“That will prevent them from knowing their exact latitude and longitude,” Cam corrected, “which will probably prevent some of them from reaching their intended destinations. But they still have plenty of other onboard sensors. Some of them will probably still get close enough to release their payloads.”
There was another moment of silence, and then, “What is your recommendation?”
“You can’t stop the signal,” Cam said. “You have to change it.”
“We don’t understand.”
“Introduce an error,” Cam said. “Alter the signal such that everything using it will end up navigating to the same location, then just send someone out to that spot to destroy them for you.”
“That would be an effective method for both concentrating and capturing the gliders,” Angelia observed. “However, tens of thousands of other vehicles rely on the accuracy of that signal. Causing all of them to malfunction would be an unacceptable loss.”
“Tens of thousands of your vehicles, right?”
“Yes.”
“That you control.”
“That’s correct.”
“That presumably you can transmit software updates to.”
A pause, and then: “We think we understand now.”
“Understand what?” Cam asked. “Explain it to me.”
“Before introducing an error into the navigation signal, we update the software of all the vehicles we wish to remain in normal operation so that they are able to compensate for that one specific error. Therefore, once the signal is altered, the only vehicles that will rendezvous at the designated location are those over which we have no control.”
“There you go,” Cam said. “It’s that easy.”
“Cam,” the girl began, “you have surprised us with your cognitive abilities. You seem to have a gift for reason.”
“That wasn’t reason,” Cam countered. “That was creativity. You guys should look into it.”
“Before we return you to Earth,” the girl said, “we would like to do some higher resolution neurological scans. With your consent, of course.”
“one thing at a time,” Cam said. “First, I want to know what you’re about to show me.”
“Of course,” the girl said. “I am about to show you my own personal biological manifestation.”
“What does that mean?” Cam asked. “You mean I’m about to see you?”
“Yes,” Angelia confirmed. “For the first time in history—and perhaps for the last—our species are about to meet.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
GROUND EFFECT
LUKA AND TWO BULLS WERE strapped into side-by-side jump seats bolted to the bulkhead that divided the forward airlock from the main cabin. They were both in full, sapphire-blue emergency membrane suits, their hoods hanging limp down their backs. In addition to harnesses across their chests, their wrists and ankles were bound with a material called recoil cord: a type of polymer that, past a certain threshold, released energy at a rate faster than it was generated or absorbed, meaning that it not only arrested any sudden movement, but violently reversed it. Recoil cord let you walk, but not run; lift something, but not strike with it; fully comply, but never catch your captors off guard. Luka felt like he was in a dream where all of his movements were impeded by some kind of invisible viscosity, while those who were after him moved with infuriating fluidity.
About midway down the long, narrow fuselage, a to
tal of eight officers, including the commander, were divided between two rows of four seats. They wore proper environment suits, fully powered and armored, minus their helmets, and they held carbines across their laps. Beyond the unit of officers, among what appeared to have once been the vehicle’s aft cargo hold, were the seven remaining members of the City Council, facing one another across an expanded folding surface. Above them, angled downward, was a massive sheet of polymeth bearing the rising phoenix of the San Francisco interpreted in steely grays against a vignetted graphite background.
The inside of the Pelikan was much more industrial than Luka imagined it would be. Old recessed LEDs provided harsh cones of slightly bluish light, leaving wide wedges of shadow in-between. There were long stretches of exposed, neatly bound cabling along the ceiling, and the metal floor—obviously designed to accommodate modular seating and various cargo configurations—was crisscrossed with patterns of pill-shaped grip tape. The walls were lined with quilted, soot-colored padding, and black hash marks just below the ceiling counted off meters from the rear of the fuselage forward, probably to help make the loading of vehicles more efficient.
Luka wished he were experiencing the inside of the Pelikan under different circumstances. He’d seen the GEV, or Ground Effect Vehicle, several times while hauling cargo from the foundry to the hangar, and had been intrigued enough by the eccentric machine that he’d spent several hours researching it and its predecessors in the archives.
GEVs looked like planes, but they didn’t fly. Most of them floated, but they weren’t boats. Resolutely defying classification as aircraft, watercraft, hovercraft, seaplane, or hydrofoil, ground effect vehicles were truly their own unique, and somewhat mysterious, mode of transportation.
As their name implied, GEVs leveraged a principle known as “ground effect.” Ground effect was caused by airfoils generating lift in very close proximity to a parallel horizontal surface, causing an air ram to form between the ground and the wings, and consequently providing a nice, low-friction cushion on top of which the vehicle could comfortably travel. As altitude was gained, the ground effect rapidly dissipated, requiring true aircraft to employ much longer wings in order to continue generating sufficient lift, and to counteract drag. But by staying close to the ground, GEVs could preserve the precious and fleeting phenomenon, floating on a high-pressure buffer that allowed them to travel much faster than ships, and much more efficiently than planes.
The downside of GEVs was that they required long swaths of uniform and predictable topography, which is why, for most of their existence, they’d seldom moved beyond the curiosity, novelty, and research phases. But now that there were entire human populations whose energy-constrained worlds were surrounded by thousands of kilometers of just such uniform and predicable topography (oceans, seas, and massive freshwater lakes), ground effect vehicles had finally found their place in history. It also didn’t hurt that the GEVs’ relatively short wingspan made them much easier to store in confined spaces than high-altitude airplanes or gliders whose wings usually had to be folded, retracted, or disassembled.
The Pelikan’s lines were reminiscent of an old aesthetic Luka knew as Art Deco. It had a long, rounded snout, and beneath it, a strong, sloping chin riveted with curved hydrodynamic waves to help it channel water before it had generated enough thrust to lift it up off the ocean surface. Behind the cockpit were two beams, each supporting four wire-caged engines, and behind them—about halfway back along the fuselage—were the two straight and stubby wings. The tail rose dramatically and proudly, and was topped with a massive, boomerang-shaped horizontal stabilizer. To Luka, it was one of those rare technologies (not unlike pneumatic tubes) that was simultaneously futuristic and obsolete—a captivating symbol of what the future once was.
The Pelikan was many things, but quiet was not among them. Before lifting itself up above the water and forming an air ram, the GEV was both thunderous and turbulent. But now that it was floating, the ride was much smoother, and the noise from the electric engines, while still a harmonized roar, was at least consistent enough that Luka and Two Bulls could effectively communicate above it, yet still loud enough that there was no way their voices would carry all the way down to where the officers sat.
The two of them agreed that the only explanation for staging such a spectacle was that Khang was still hoping to extract information from them. The only reason to prolong the inevitable—to bring the entire council along on the excursion; to let Luka and Two Bulls conspire in relative privacy; to not just shoot and/or waterlock them back on the San Francisco—was to continue to build foreboding and fear until one or both of them were willing to bargain for their lives. But they also agreed that nothing they could possibly tell Khang would make any difference at this point. If she was willing to have Charlie killed just for planning a labor strike, there were obviously no circumstances whatsoever under which Luka and Two Bulls would ever be allowed to return to the rig. The longer they kept quiet—the longer they kept the City Council guessing—the longer they probably had to live. Their best and only chance at survival was to force the Judicial Committee and City Council to follow through with the banishment. The faster they could get away from the Pelikan, the more breath they would likely draw.
Having agreed to remain silent—and, at their first opportunity, to run in a zigzag pattern intended to make targeting them as difficult as possible—they fell into a grim and meditative silence for the duration of the voyage. Luka was surprised by how numb he felt toward the whole experience, and he wondered if perhaps it was a good thing that he was more preoccupied with curious yellow than the fact that, at this time tomorrow, one way or another, he and Two Bulls would almost certainly be dead. He wondered vaguely how much of his state of mind was the result of addiction and withdrawal, and how much of it was a defensive response to the trauma of facing his own mortality. Or maybe his apathy was genuine. Maybe now that both Val and Charlie were gone, he truly didn’t care anymore whether he lived or died.
But even in his desensitized state, Luka realized that there was more to the acceptance he was experiencing than just pure defeat. As young as he was, he had managed to accumulate a disproportionately large portfolio of regrets—the kinds of regrets that could not be undone or made up for—and he knew that living a long life only meant spending more time trying to endure his past with no way of reconnecting with the people he loved. Some part of him was also very aware of the fact that, no matter how much longer he lived, he’d probably already done the most important things he would ever have the opportunity to do: save the lives of Cadie, Cam, Ayla, and Omicron; orchestrate a campaign to sabotage the Coronians’ mining capabilities; help launch an effort to terraform the planet that, if successful, could change the entire course of human history. Luka wondered whether if, in a way, he was lucky to have been given opportunities to participate in events much larger than himself, and to have the clarity to recognize that he probably wasn’t of much use to humanity anymore. Before his thirtieth birthday—or at least the day that had been randomly chosen as his birthday by the Immigration Committee—Luka’s legacy was already complete.
Setting the Pelikan back down on the water was something of a controlled crash and Luka felt himself get pressed hard against the back of the jump seat while he watched the officers in front of him pitch forward against their harnesses. The GEV taxied for about another minute, and when the engines abruptly stopped, the cabin was filled with a sudden and almost insufferable silence. The speed and efficiency with which the operation subsequently unfolded told Luka that every detail had not only been premeditated, but probably also rehearsed.
All eight officers unclipped and retracted their harnesses, then rose to their feet, legs shoulder-length apart to help them absorb the vehicle’s swaying. Half of them moved past Luka and Two Bulls into the airlock while the remaining four—including the commander—stood guard. Luka leaned to the side to try to see what Khang and the rest of the council were doing. They continued to t
alk among themselves, deliberately oblivious to what was happening around them.
Luka heard and felt the airlock cycle behind him. Although he had no intention of telling Khang or anyone else what they wanted to know, he wished somebody would say something. Any kind of communication—even threats or intimidation or coercion—would have been better than silence. Of course, the City Council was well aware of this, which, Luka knew, was precisely why they insisted on feigning disinterest.
The commander’s wrist pad illuminated, and he took one hand off his carbine long enough to check its status. He used the same hand to make a gesture, and two officers immediately stepped forward, releasing Luka and Two Bulls from their harnesses.
“Let’s go,” the commander said, lifting his unshaven cleft chin.
Luka and Two Bulls stood. one of the officers opened the inner door of the airlock and stepped aside, waiting for the prisoners to pass. There was a moment of hesitation while both Luka and Two Bulls cast one last look toward the back of the cabin, and once again were met with nothing but calculated detachment.
The recoil cords imposed an especially painstaking mode of shuffling. As soon as they were finally both inside the airlock and surrounded by the remaining four officers, the inner door was closed, the prisoners’ hoods were brought up over their heads and sealed, and their membrane suits were activated. one of the officers knelt to remove Luka’s and Two Bulls’ restraints, which he then gathered and tossed into the bottom of an equipment locker. The officers took turns detaching their helmets from the rack on the wall and getting them seated and latched into their collar rings while the other three guarded the prisoners. Once everyone was fully suited up, the commander initiated a comm check, and Luka was surprised that he—and presumably Two Bulls, as well—were on the same channel. Even though nothing about their circumstances had changed, the fact that the City Council was still leaving open the possibility of communication gave Luka unexpected—if illogical and baseless—comfort.
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