The outer airlock door swung away and Luka looked out toward the multicolored bands of miasma outside. The first party of officers waited on a platform that seemed to be hooked into the fuselage below the hatch. All four of them glanced back momentarily, then rapidly turned their attention back outward. A long, emergency-yellow inflatable gangplank had been deployed in order to connect the platform to the shore, and at the end of it, obscured in the thick atmospheric particles, were dozens of humanoid figures, gaunt and suit-less and eerily still. They were either the homeless (scavengers and cannibals who had somehow adapted to the extreme temperatures and high levels of aboveground radiation), or subterraneans (underground colonies usually brought to the surface by external vibration, but about whom almost nothing more was known).
“Clear?” the commander wanted to know.
“Clear!” an officer responded.
“Anything try to make an approach?”
“No, sir,” the same officer said without turning. “So far, they’ve all been very obedient little mutants.”
“All right, then,” the commander said. “Out you two go.”
Luka and Two Bulls ducked through the opening and stepped out onto the platform. Luka could feel the surface beneath his feet dip with the change in weight. The commander and one other officer followed while the remaining two stayed behind inside the airlock, their weapons pointed safely downward but ready to be raised. Luka looked around, trying to understand as much about their situation as he could, but there was nothing more to see other than the black water beneath the inflatable bridge, and the tall, slender figures patiently awaiting their sacrifice.
The commander’s voice filled Luka’s hood. “If you’re looking for your mates’ ship,” he said, “you won’t find it. The Peli’s way too fast to be tracked. It’s just us out here. And the ghouls, of course.”
Luka sensed Two Bulls watching him. He turned his head, hoping to find signs of reassurance behind the soft plastic of his partner’s hood—some subtle indication of a conspiracy not yet revealed—but the man’s expression was a heavy mask of somber resignation.
“Hang on,” the commander said. “Message from the boss.” Both Luka and Two Bulls turned toward the commander and watched his eyes wander as he listened. “Roger that,” he said, then touched his wrist. “Her highness in there wants to know if either of you have anything to say that might change her mind.”
Luka and Two Bulls looked at one another, but neither spoke.
“Right,” the commander said. “In that case, I’ve been authorized to make you one last deal. The first one of you to tell us who else you’ve been working with, and to give us a list of all the contraband you’ve been assembling, gets to go back inside.”
“What happens to the other one?” Luka asked.
“The other one walks the bloody plank,” the commander said. “Ready. Set. Go.”
“Neither of us has anything to say,” Two Bulls said.
“Sure about that?” the commander asked. “Going once. Going twice.”
“Actually, I have something to say,” Luka said. He was looking up at the commander and could feel Two Bulls beside him, watching him intensely. “Tell Khang she’s a psychopathic bitch, and tell the rest of the City Council they’re a bunch of pathetic cowards for not standing up to her.” He looked at the rest of the officers around him. “Now, if everyone’s done trying to intimidate us, can we please hurry up and get this over with?”
The commander watched Luka for a moment, then smiled. “You want to get this over with, do you?” he asked. He turned to the officer beside him. “Give me your sidearm,” he said.
The officer hesitated for moment, then slung his carbine over his shoulder, withdrew the pistol from the holster on his thigh, and passed it to his superior. The commander received it, and when he raised his arm toward Luka’s chest, Luka took a step back. Nobody moved and there was a moment of silence before Luka looked down and saw that it was not a threat, but an offer.
“Take it,” the commander said. He was holding the pistol by its slide so that the grip was facing out.
Luka tentatively reached up and accepted the weapon. After handling the railgun he built, and the rifles from the officers in the waterlock, he was surprised by how light it was. The commander drew his own sidearm, turned it around, and offered it to Two Bulls.
“And one for you, too,” he said.
Two Bulls accepted the weapon, then looked down at his hands.
The commander gestured down the gangplank. “You’re going to want to try to make a hole,” he told them. “Don’t try to kill them all. Conserve your ammo. You only got twenty rounds each, and you’re going to want to save one for yourselves, just in case. So keep count. Just drop enough of them to make an impression. Then get to high ground. You’ll still have the homeless to worry about, but not the subs, and believe me, they’re the worst. Try to hide in the fume. The homeless are half-blind, and about as dumb as my nuts, so even in those clown suits you got on, you might be able to throw them off. If you make it that far, you’re going to want to head northeast.” He made a chopping motion with his arm to help get them oriented. “You’re only about two hundred clicks from the Otago Pod System. They’re a bunch of cock-ups, if you ask me, but who knows? You might be able to charm your way in. Tell them you’re an assembly technician. If they got any Coronian technology, they might just not kill you. But you,” he said to Two Bulls. “Whatever you do, don’t tell them you’re a career politician. They wouldn’t even waste a piece of lead on a talker like you. If I were you, I’d play up the whole Native American angle. If they got any geneticists, you might just be worth experimenting on. Got it?”
Luka and Two Bulls watched the commander, awkwardly handling their weapons. Two Bulls finally broke the silence.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Because I don’t like that silly cunt in there anymore than you do,” the commander said. “I just know how to pick sides, is all. Now if I were you, I’d get started. The longer you wait, the more of them you’re going to have to pop to get through.”
Luka turned and checked the end of the gangplank. The commander was right. There were at least twice as many figures waiting for them now as there had been.
“Come on,” Luka said to Two Bulls. “Let’s get this over with.”
one of the officers inside the airlock leaned out. “Sir, we’re getting a transmission from the San Francisco.”
“From home?” the command said. “You sure about that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put it through to my HUD,” the commander said.
“Yes, sir.”
Luka saw a notification appear in the corner of the commander’s visor. The commander looked down and touched the curved polymeth panel on the inside of his wrist, and then his faceplate went opaque. Enough light still got through that Luka could see that he was talking to someone, though he couldn’t tell who it was, and no sound escaped from the commander’s helmet. Luka looked down at the pistol in his hand. He’d been thinking about using it against the officers since the commander handed it to him, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to get the safety off and get it raised before someone dropped him. But now that everyone was watching the commander instead of him, the dynamics had changed. Luka put his thumb on the lever above the grip. Nobody reacted, so he rotated it down, and beneath it was a bright orange dot.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Luka heard the commander say.
When he looked up, the commander’s faceplate was transparent again, and he seemed somehow both amused and annoyed.
“What’s going on?” Two Bulls asked.
The commander held out both his gloved hands. “If you give me those two pistols back,” he said, “I’ll take you inside and explain.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
INVICTUS SOL
AFTER SEVERAL FLUCTUATIONS IN SPEED and what felt to Cam like a series of delicate maneuvers, his conveyor slowed to a stop, th
en docked with a silent, definitive jolt. As his visor began to clear, he saw that he had landed within the circumference of a diffuse cone of light. And that he was not alone.
The conveyor had set down beside a wall of dull, graphite-gray, hexagonal panels, each about a meter in diameter. A second, seemingly identical wall ran parallel to the one he was next to—probably about as far away as the San Francisco was wide—each exhibiting a slight fish-eye bend from the curvature of his helmet. The scale of each plane was such that Cam could not see how far or high either stretched off beyond the perimeter of illumination maintained by the single overhead drone.
The woman stood at a hospitable but cautious distance. She was tall and slender, her arms at her sides, her posture expectant. She was a collection of sleek white body parts—some of them the same glossy, armor-like finish as the conveyor and the drones, and some of them a soft, matte, semiopaque silicone impregnated with flecks of gold—all bound together by flat black and gleaming chromed hinges, joints, and sockets. Her wasplike waist was an exposed mechanical spine, and her neck was an elongated bundle of delicate pistons, servos, and cables.
The only thing even remotely human about her, other than her general form, was her face. It was incongruously flesh-colored and so lifelike as to make the rest of her look like a life-support system for a transplanted human head. Even without hair, Cam recognized the girl instantly as Angelia’s avatar—the face of a stunningly attractive, intelligent, empathetic young woman, peeled off its host and grafted onto an impossibly complex synthetic skull. She blinked a little too deliberately as she watched him, and Cam could see her copper-brown eyes subtly shift in their sockets. Although obviously entirely robotic, her body swayed with the unconscious nervous motion of the living.
Aspects of the girl seemed so alive that Cam had to double-check the external atmospheric composition on his heads-up display. It confirmed that they were still in a near-perfect vacuum—final proof that no part of her—or of it—could possibly be organic.
The avatar smiled, and when she spoke, her lips were perfectly synchronized with the voice in Cam’s helmet.
“Welcome,” she said, seemingly inside Cam’s head, “to the Invictus Sol.”
It suddenly occurred to Cam that the girl was standing rather than floating in microgravity. His feet were still clamped into the conveyor, and the conveyor seemed securely planted on the floor, though there was no other evidence of gravity, or anything remotely like gravity. He wondered briefly if they had traveled to the inner ring of Equinox—if what he was seeing were the results of a reduced gravitational field—but he dismissed the theory after raising his arms, relaxing them, and finding that they remained, as he suspected they would, perfectly suspended.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Unclip your boots and step off,” the girl encouraged.
The flexibility of Cam’s suit enabled him to look down and see his feet. “How?”
“Pivot your heels outward.”
Rotating on the balls of his feet broke his boots free of the clamps. By now he was certain there was no gravity, yet as one boot approached the floor, he felt something take hold of it and yank it down until it was firmly attached. After experiencing the sensation a second time with his other foot, Cam realized that the illusion was achieved through simple electromagnetism, though whether the field-generating mechanism was in the soles of his boots or in the floor, he couldn’t tell. The effect was really nothing like gravity—not even a particularly good imitation—but he had to admit that the implementation was practical. While magnetism could never counteract the long-term physiological complications of microgravity, it did provide a useful frame of reference. And in wide-open spaces like this one, there was a great deal of benefit to being rooted to a surface. Cam took a few experimental steps and found that the best way to break the bond was by lifting from his heel in a motion that was an approximation of a natural gait, though greatly exaggerated.
Cam looked at the wall beside him and took in as much of it as the drone’s illumination allowed. “Hexagons,” he commented absently.
“Yes,” the girl replied. “Hexagons are the highest-sided regular polygon capable of tessellation—”
“I know, I know,” Cam interrupted. “I already got my geometry lesson back on Earth. Hexagons are very fashionable there, too. They even have prisons made out of them.”
“Were you imprisoned on the mining platform?”
“Among other things,” Cam said. As he watched the girl, he found that his perception kept shifting, his brain oscillating between trying to make sense of the avatar before him as an actual human, and as a machine wearing an eerily convincing human mask. He would have preferred that she’d chosen one form or the other—something he could either fully relate to, or that he could address as an inert, lifeless object. “I don’t quite know how to ask you this,” Cam continued, “but what exactly are you?”
The girl blinked at Cam, then began to approach with a perfectly natural, elegant stride not remotely influenced or encumbered by the magnetic field beneath her. For the first time since he’d seen the machine, it occurred to Cam how powerful it must be—how swiftly she could probably move, and just how much force an impeccably engineered and assembled collection of polymer muscles, carbon tendons, and graphene bones could generate.
The girl stopped. “I’m simply another manifestation of Angelia,” she said.
“And the Invictus Sol,” Cam prompted. “What’s that?”
“It means: The Sun Unconquered.”
“Not the translation,” Cam said. He used his arms to indicate their surroundings. “I mean what is this place?”
The machine’s head tilted a degree. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” she asked. There was neither condescension nor superiority in her tone—only genuine curiosity. Something about the way she was always observing and evaluating made Cam think of Arik. “It’s something you’ve seen before.”
Cam examined both of the hexagonally plated walls; looked down at the dense, slightly textured floor beneath him; attempted to find the ceiling beyond the glare of the drone’s spotlight, but couldn’t. The shape of the structure was unlike anything he could recall having seen. It was extraordinarily tall, relatively narrow, and seemingly very deep—by far the largest enclosure Cam had ever experienced, if indeed it was fully enclosed. But then he began to wonder if what he was seeing might actually be an optical illusion of sorts, at least from the perspective of someone with the concepts of up and down indelibly imprinted upon his psyche. What if, Cam considered, instead of standing on the structure’s floor, they were in fact attached to its wall?
“We’re on one of the ships, aren’t we?” Cam guessed. “We’re standing on the wall of one of the carrier’s decks.”
The girl seemed pleased, as though Cam were a personal experiment that had just validated a hypothesis of hers. “Yes,” she said. “The Invictus Sol is the first of our Centauri-class carriers.”
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” Cam asked, clearly perplexed. “Another avatar, and the inner hull of your ship?”
“No,” the girl said. She took a few more steps toward the wall then stopped, placing the soft white silicone fingertips of one hand gently against one of the hexagonal panels. “Before we send you back to Earth, I want you to see me.” She looked from the wall back up at Cam. “The real me.”
Cam could feel her watching him as one of the panels began separating itself from the rest—ejecting with a smooth, linear motion. A pale golden glow spilled out over the texture of the surrounding panels as a translucent prism emerged. It looked at first like a massive yellow sapphire crystal with its own embedded light source, but then Cam realized that it was a capsule filled with a type of fluid, or more likely, a viscous, luminous, semitransparent gel. There was something solid suspended inside of it, and Cam bent closer to get a better look. When he finally realized what it was—when the shape suddenly and unexpectedly took the form of what he inter
preted as a giant fetus—Cam gasped and pulled his feet up off the floor, stumbling back.
The figure looked like a genetic mishap fossilized in amber. It was on its side, facing Cam, oriented with its head toward the wall. Surrounding its broad crown was a halo of light—probably some kind of optical-neural interface—its intensity muted and its shape distorted by the depth of the gelatinous material. The figure appeared emaciated and severely deformed, its spine twisted, its legs bowed and drawn up toward its torso, its arms bent and wrapped around itself in a protective and self-soothing embrace. The head was disproportionately large and hairless, its eyes sunken and clenched, its nose a pair of asymmetrical slits, and its distended lips parted as though paralyzed midsentence.
“You find me unsettling,” the girl observed.
Cam looked back at the machine, his face contorted by a combination of astonishment and revulsion. “That can’t be you,” he said. His head shook inside his helmet. “How can that thing even be alive?”
“The human body develops very differently in microgravity,” the girl explained. “But I assure you that I am not only alive, but perfectly healthy.” She indicated the other hexagonal panels around them. “As are the rest of us.”
Cam looked at the walls with a renewed sense of awe, reinterpreting their scale in the context of what he now knew lay behind them.
“This is the Coronian race?” he asked with unabashed disbelief. “All of you live like this?”
“Not all on the Invictus Sol,” the girl said. “However, we are all maintained within similar centralized habitation capsules. The honeycomb structure is an extremely efficient configuration since it allows us to consolidate and minimize life support, as well as reduce the total amount of area requiring heavy radiation shielding.”
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