Yet, here they were, five teens thinking they were smarter than the adults. Of course, Nick was smarter than most of them, possibly even Jaidev.
Which made this even more dangerous.
He had completed his survey. “Let’s try this one,” he said, indicating a cell toward the back of the Beehive, near the other exit, which had been blocked off by HBs in the past. (On the other side, they said, was vacuum: a tunnel leading to the surface of Keanu.) Its lowest point even with Yahvi’s waist, the cell appeared large enough to hold a human being, which troubled Yahvi—what if this was the cell her grandmother had emerged from? It just seemed wrong, even more wrong than digging up Cowboy in the first place.
“You’re picking that one because you can reach it,” she said to Nick.
Nick shot her a look that, had his eyes been heat weapons, would have burned her to the ground.
But that didn’t stop him. With Rook and Ellen’s help, Nick raised the tarp containing the dog’s remains to the cell, then dumped them inside. The whole process looked crude, as far from scientific as it was possible to get.
Yahvi kept stepping back, her heart pounding. Now was likely to be the time Rachel or Pav or some other adult walked in. What on earth would she say? She had no excuse. She would simply have to stand there and suffer the consequences . . . or possibly run.
Once the remains had been completely placed in the cell, they rolled up the tarp. (Yahvi wondered what Rook was going to do with it . . . she hoped he wouldn’t just try to put it back where he found it.) “And now what do we do?” she said.
“Pray?” That was Dulari, with a typically inane suggestion. Yahvi remembered that Dulari’s family was one of the few openly religious among the HBs.
“Not necessary,” Nick said, regaining his normal confidence. “Jaidev said that the one amazing thing about the Revenant process is how it seemed autonomous, almost like magic. They figured out later that it was all Keanu’s control systems starting and stopping it, after they’d retrieved whatever morphogenetic pattern they needed—”
“But how did they know to find whichever morpho-whatever pattern that was?” Rook asked that question, and it made Yahvi want to kiss him, not because she needed the answer; she just wanted to see Nick flounder.
“They never did figure that out,” Nick said. “But given that their technology is probably ten thousand years more advanced than ours—”
At that instant, a shudder went through the Beehive. Yahvi and the others found themselves outside before they could complete a thought. Nothing magical about it; they were just so terrified they turned and ran.
Yahvi had never been brave enough to return to the Beehive.
But Nick had. The Cowboy-kidnappers had never been a group, but they surely avoided contact after their creepy adventure.
One day, however, several months before the Adventure launch, Yahvi had found Nick lurking around the Temple. She assumed he had just returned from a shift on the Substance K conveyor. “Are they working you too hard?” Yahvi said. She had endured her own first shifts on the conveyor and found the work incredibly tiring. And Nick, pale, even unsteady on his feet, seemed to have had it worse.
But he said, “No.”
Yahvi wasn’t the type to accept an answer that struck her as ridiculous. “You look like death.”
“I guess I can tell you if I can tell anyone.” Then he glanced around, as if afraid of being overheard. “I went back to the Beehive.”
By that time Yahvi had tried to forget about the Beehive. She was angered by the reminder. “You asshole!”
Nick didn’t notice. “It was gone, Yahvi.”
“What?”
“The dog.” Apparently Nick had made his way to the cell where the five of them had left Cowboy’s remains. “The cell was empty!”
“So someone came along and dug him out of there, just like we dug him out of the ground.”
“Maybe,” Nick said. “But that cell looked . . . fresh, like it had worked again.”
“What are you saying? When was this?”
“Two days ago. And what the hell do you think it means? There’s a Revenant Cowboy running around!”
“And that’s what you’re doing? Looking for him?”
Nick nodded.
She had not wanted to hear more. She had not wanted to know anything about this.
She had run from Nick and not looked back . . . and did not talk to him again prior to Adventure’s launch.
She never heard of anyone seeing a dog in the habitat.
It was after the third—or thirtieth—bump that Yahvi said, “I want to go home.”
They had been confined to their seats for more than an hour, ever since the problems in the back of the cabin with Xavier’s machine, and the bad weather. Yahvi wasn’t sure which had come first, though it seemed as though the sudden turbulence had damaged the proteus.
She was in her seat in the second row, on the left side of the cabin. Chang and Colin Edgely were in the first row, right side, hunched over their stupid datapads.
Pav sat to Yahvi’s left, in the window seat. Rachel was across the aisle to her right. She said, “We’ll be home soon enough.”
“When?”
“A few weeks,” her father said, “maybe less.” Which only made Yahvi more angry; she was arguing with her mother.
“That’s bullshit,” she said.
“Don’t swear at your father,” Rachel said.
“Then bullshit to you.”
Yahvi knew that would ignite her father, but Rachel was fast, holding up her hand and silencing Pav. “I’m going to say that that’s fair,” she said to Yahvi. “We brought you along on this. We knew it might be dangerous—”
The plane bumped again. The little bell that Yahvi had grown to loathe rang again, and the Fasten seat belts sign came on.
Yahvi could feel the plane descending. It went so fast that for a moment she could have believed she was back in Adventure! From Yahvi’s aisle seat, it was difficult to see much through the windows, but it was all dark clouds. God! What were these people doing to her?
She turned to look at Rachel.
And what Yahvi saw on her mother’s face made her anger vanish, to be replaced by total fear.
Rachel was afraid they could die!
And if her mother felt that way—
Yahvi did not want to die in this plane, in this stupid seat.
She began to undo her buckle.
Across the aisle, Rachel said, “Pav!”
A seat removed from Yahvi, her father grabbed her arm. “Stay where you are!”
But she was not going to stay here! She jerked her arm away from her father and lurched out of the seat, heading toward the rear of the plane. Surely that would be safer if they hit something . . . and maybe they would crash-land—
There was considerable noise behind her, Rachel speaking forcefully to Pav, Tea offering to help, none of them moving very quickly as Yahvi reached the middle of the cabin, where she had a clear view of Xavier in his seat, still struggling with his stupid proteus. It was no longer making smoke, thank goodness, but it was still in pieces, and with the plane bumping and diving, Xavier was doing very little good.
But he was at the back of the plane—
Yahvi felt herself lifted off her feet and pulled backward. For a frightening moment she thought it was the plane doing something awful.
Then she realized it was Zeds! The Sentry had grabbed her and pulled her into the seatless space where he had been strapped. Yahvi struggled but only long enough to establish that Zeds was going to hold on to her, and there was nothing she could do about it. He was, after all, forty percent taller and a hundred percent heavier.
And had twice as many arms.
None of this kept her from saying, “Let me go!”
“You shouldn�
��t be out of your seat,” he said.
“I’ll go back.”
“It’s too dangerous to be moving.”
She struggled again; nothing doing. Zeds was still in his e-suit, though he had shed his gloves. She felt as though she had been abducted by a humanoid machine of some kind . . . a child’s toy. It hurt being pressed up against the straps and tools on the front of the suit.
Yahvi said as much.
“You won’t be damaged,” Zeds said. “Just inconvenienced.”
“Mom!” she called. “Make him let me go!”
But Rachel didn’t answer. It was probably because the plane started shuddering worse than at any previous time. Whether it was because she was not strapped down, or because circumstances were different, she had a sense of real forward motion now, mixed with a stomach-clenching rocking motion and even a bit of side-to-side.
She had heard Pav talk about roller coasters and seen imagery . . . This must be what it’s like, she thought. Only you don’t die on a roller coaster.
She must have made a noise—probably a whimper—because Zeds spoke again. “This is difficult, but not impossible. We are probably descending out of the storm.”
“You don’t know that.”
With one of his free upper hands, Zeds pointed toward the window behind Yahvi. “I have been seeing more clear sky and fewer clouds.”
But he still wouldn’t let her go. So she tried another tack. “Aren’t you afraid?” she said. “This is really not your world.”
“My world is not my world,” he said. Zeds often made joking comments; Yahvi realized, after a moment of confusion, that this was one of them.
It took her so long, in fact, that by the time she realized it, the airplane had stopped bumping and the seat belt sign was off.
And Xavier Toutant was saying, “I think I’ve got it now.”
Day Six
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2040
NYC REPORTS PROGRESS ON LOWER MANHATTAN LEVEE
PRES GERRY TO VISIT MEXICO CITY RE BORDER ISSUES
SEC DEF: U.S. CONSIDERING MISSION TO KEANU
LILY MEDINA SEPARATED AFTER ONE WEEK! NEW PERSONAL RECORD
PACIFIC STORMS DO NOT THREATEN CALIFORNIA
HEADLINES, NATIONAL TIMES,
7 P.M., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2040
CARBON-143
SITUATION: Midway through a standard workday, Aggregate Carbon-143 and her units were summarily ordered off the line and instructed to form up on the exit platform. The orders came from the highest branch of the information tree.
As one, each disengaged from her workstation, moved back, then rotated to the right before marching out.
Carbon-143 was curious about the value of the maneuver. According to the countdown to First Light, the program was running behind. Surely no information or somatic improvement session was more important than catching up!
As she and her sisters—to perpetuate the human usage—left the assembly and operations building, Carbon-143 noted that other Aggregates were leaving, too, as if the assembly were being abandoned. She scanned up and down her trees and across their branches for information on a possible mechanical malfunction or possible human attack, these being the only two causes that would seem to require such a drastic, formation-wide movement.
Then they received orders to proceed to the storage and staging area, the collection of newly arrived and outfitted vehicles that seemed to stretch to the far horizon.
NARRATIVE: As other formations joined up as they proceeded out of the assembly area, the number of Aggregates grew from 144 to 1,728. Carbon-143 realized that as a unit she was not authorized or programmed for emotions such as pride, but she found an obscure moment of satisfaction in being part of such an impressive team . . . marching in the bright sun with her sisters, if she were careless enough to use human-centric terms.
She found that having even a few seconds off the assembly line was a pleasant diversion—and there was another use of “emotion.” She entertained the idea of informing number eleven in her line, or even the unit above them. But only for a few seconds. She did not believe there was any objective basis to suspect that her productivity had suffered. Indeed, in the daily tag-ups she was never ranked below the middle of her twelve.
She also wondered, even more briefly, how number eleven would react if she shared either of these ideas. So far their information exchanges had been purely factual. Eleven was, in fact, identical with Ten or another of the others in the element.
Carbon-143’s third inappropriate thought was to wonder this: Suppose Eleven or Ten or Three had these same thoughts! It made sense. The Aggregates were identical at assembly. And while it was true that being a Twelve in a unit meant a slightly different range of experiences from a One, they were so minute as to be lost in the noise of other data.
Or so Carbon-143 had been taught. Perhaps this was untrue.
She was not prepared to test this theory, however.
ACTION: They arrived at a corner of the storage lot. As directed, Carbon-143 moved toward the twelfth vehicle in the first row and initiated contact. A schematic of the vehicle appeared in her internal screen.
DATA: The vehicle was known as an 11F732, which to Carbon-143 implied that there might be 731 other 11Fs. This particular model massed five thousand, two hundred kilograms. It was largely made of a titanium-based composite shell for durability. Its complement of weapons consisted of a 155-millimeter howitzer (the 732, the data showed, was based on an existing Free Nation U.S. Army model for simplicity and speed of design) as well as a device Carbon-143 only knew by name: a Model 3 Field Disruptor, which appeared to be a narrow rigid coil wrapped around a coppery rail mounted atop the cannon.
The interior of the 732 consisted of an electric engine with a generator for the Field Disruptor weapon as well as ammunition storage for the cannon.
There was room for a single Aggregate, with the appropriate navigational, communications, and weapons control interfaces.
The units were ordered inside the 732s for “fit checks,” which Carbon-143 was happy to perform. If nothing else, this procedure was another stimulating diversion from her usual duties.
She wriggled through the topside hatch into the 732. It was not an easy fit, but Aggregates were flexible. Carbon-143 rearranged her left side limbs, flattening herself to asymmetry and improving the interfaces.
There was a delay. Some of the units and formations had to travel farther to reach their assigned vehicles. Carbon-143’s data Net showed that some of those vehicles were either massively larger or substantially smaller than the 732, which required appropriate adjustments: several units bonding temporarily to control the larger vehicle, and some Aggregates forced to nearly disassemble themselves so they could make the proper interfaces.
The delay allowed Carbon-143 several minutes in which she could freely access the larger weapon system grid. Most of the information was purely logistical: numbers of vehicles (currently 2,011, with more arriving), plans for their movement to and through the Ring. She was fascinated to see how long it would take to transfer more than two thousand tracked vehicles through the Ring itself: ten hours optimum, twelve to fifteen likely.
There was still no easily accessible information on the ultimate destination for this army. Until this moment, Carbon-143 had not even thought of the vehicles as weapons aimed at targets. These tanks and tracked weapons carriers seemed well suited to attacks on a human armored force.
But looking at the vehicle data, she was no longer certain; some of the vehicles were amphibious or even capable of operating underwater. Others were capable of flight, or at least hopping maneuvers. Still others seemed designed to operate in a vacuum; they carried their own internal atmosphere supplies for weapons and operators. (Even though the Aggregates had machine origins, they still required oxygen and water.)
And the largest vehicles were act
ually intended to operate in space! They had propulsion and reaction control systems to go with weapons packages that replaced cannon with missiles in addition to the coiled disruptors.
She was forced to one obvious conclusion: This army might not be invading Earth, but some other world.
Carbon-143 wanted to download all of this but had insufficient memory space—or official access. So she continued to flick through different fields.
And somehow wound up down the tree that dealt with the Ring and its operations, specifically the section on First Light. Since that was her immediate mission, she dug into it.
The first thing that struck her was the mention of radiation to be released during First Light and the subsequent Fire Light—the actual launch of the army.
The figures were astonishing: The longer the Ring operated, putting out energy, the steeper the increase in horrific side effects. The units of measurement were Aggregate standards and scaled through a variety of different dimensions, but Carbon-143 performed several quick conversions and came to this conclusion:
If the Ring operated for the optimum twelve hours, it might indeed successfully launch its two-thousand-plus vehicles at its target . . . while subjecting Free Nation U.S. to a level of thermal and ionizing radiation equal to ten thousand standard nuclear weapons.
The rest of the world would not be spared; even on the opposite side of the planet, the radiation would be sufficiently high to end all human life and most animal life.
Ignition of the Ring for Fire Light was the equivalent of crashing an asteroid into planet Earth.
Carbon-143 had noted the lack of rigor and substandard materials used in the construction of the Site A buildings, and now she knew why: The Ring was not meant to be used repeatedly, it was designed to be used once . . . like a nuclear bomb.
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