“We made it out!” Katerina smiled. Timas stood up, the edges of the floor stretched with webbing around it. He could even walk around Katerina a bit if he wanted.
He walked over and leaned against the edge, looking into the murk. “I wonder how long these walls can handle the acid in the clouds.” Acid beaded up on the outside already. The clouds dripped with it, and the beads of acid started congealing into rivulets that dripped off the large balloon.
“We’ll give it fifteen minutes,” Timas said, watching the tiny rivers of acid. “I’ll watch the balloon, you let me know when time’s up.”
She counted down, minute by minute, as he walked the edge of the platform, poking the skin with his finger to figure out if the sections in contact with acid were weakening.
By ten minutes he could tell that there were differences in give.
“Let’s ascend.” Timas poked at one part near the zipped top where acid had sat and weakened the skin enough so that his finger left an indentation when he poked hard enough.
“Timas? I think I see something.”
He turned. Something was moving through the gloom at them, a large shadow.
Timas scrambled for the ripcord. A fast enough ascent to get over it, and maybe whatever it was wouldn’t notice them in this muck.
But he paused at the last second as the shadow became a giant strand-beest, dwarfing their tiny bubble with its slow-moving canvas wings and slow trailing tail.
The giant spiked nose gently turned toward them and bumped them.
Katerina jumped back. “Can it poke through?”
“I hope not.”
“It’s like it’s curious. The acid in the clouds can’t be good for it.”
The mechanical monster tapped the ball like a toy, nudging it along up out of the clouds. A second construction pushed through the clouds and joined it.
Timas grabbed the webbing as they jostled the balloon around.
“What are they doing?” Katerina asked.
“I don’t know,” Timas snapped, scared that they might break the balloon with their giant nudges. “Pull the ripcord for a few seconds, let’s see if we can get higher and left alone.”
Katerina gave the ripcord a long tug and the balloon filled out more. They rose, lifting out of the clouds, and the strandbeests followed.
Timas looked up, and to his dismay saw several more descending on them. He stood up.
“What are you doing?” Katerina asked.
“Trying to see if maybe someone is controlling it.”
“There’s nothing there but gears and arms,” she said. “It’s a giant clockwork toy.”
Another insistent nudge spun the balloon upside down and threw him off the walls. Katerina smacked her nose against his knee. As the balloon righted itself, she clutched it. “It hurts.”
“Quit moving about, lock your arms in the straps,” Timas said. Looking up he could see more strandbeests surrounding them.
The flock of giant machines closed in, completely blocking out the entire world. A creaking, whirring, gigantic mass of strangely articulated parts, airbags, and motion that had decided to take them . . . somewhere.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Heutzin held true to his word. Pepper found an almost knightly suit of armor waiting when he returned to the workshop. He set his crutch up against the door and flopped down on the wheeled chair to scoot his way up to it. They’d even mounted a helmet on it.
Pepper checked it over, and then plugged the visor in to boot it up and run it through diagnostics. And damn if it didn’t keep failing its integrity tests. Leaks. All the different parts and the adjustments to make them fit Pepper, even with him being so thin, and they still didn’t have a proper groundsuit for him.
“These are the best seals we can get?” Pepper looked at Heutzin.
“You took all the spare part suits down yourself. It still isn’t sealing?”
Pepper leaned in close at the suit. The seals could be replaced, but the low-tech crap Yatapek made didn’t self-lubricate, so the suit’s mobility would be nil. He’d break the new seals trying to move around. He needed the nanoscale frictionless seals, but they were letting air in after decades of use.
That wouldn’t work for getting down to the surface.
Another Aeolian city had broadcast images of the Swarm invading. Bloodied corpses stumbling toward people with blind, rabid purpose. In the video Pepper saw that the Aeolians who kept shooting back at them could hardly keep a line in the chaos. The Swarm moved implacably closer now, city by city.
He considered stealing a working suit. But looking at the extensions Heutzin and he had also grafted on to fit his height, he doubted any of them would work. He would have to be thankful for mobility.
“Let’s suit up anyway,” he growled. “See how she moves.”
The assistants moved around him, like squires from the days of old, and started taking the groundsuit apart.
They began with getting his leg in, and then the stump of his other leg. He stood on his own in the heavy device for the first time as they encased his trunk in the next sections. Pepper raised his arm out, and they started strapping the upper section on.
He smiled.
Segmented gauntlets on, and then the familiar prickle of contact via his lower spine as the suit asked permission to meld itself to his body’s own information systems.
Pepper nodded, and he no longer needed the visor. The suit’s diagnostics appeared over his own vision. Boot-up went smoothly with the suit’s designer logo splashing over his entire visual cortex and then fading after some brief pyrotechnics.
As the workshop’s interior faded back into view Pepper gave the command to conform, and the suit snipped and snapped as currents gave the metallo-ceramics commands to shrink, stretch, and flex until the suit felt fitted: a bulky second skin.
“This brings back memories.” Pepper he clenched his good fist, flesh and metal acting as one.
Now for the moment of truth. He clenched his other fist, and the empty metal curled up.
Heutzin grinned as Pepper reached out and tapped his shoulder with the nonexistent arm. “Not bad.” The movement jerked a little. It’d take some practice to get used to it, but it would work.
Pepper took a few tentative steps forward, then back. As each footstep hit the grated floor, tools jumped off the benches.
He hopped into the air. This time he dented the floor when he hit, and knocked boxes of parts onto the floor.
Four hours of freedom.
Pepper walked out of the workshop, then jogged down the catwalk outside toward the edges of the docks. The walkways shivered and shook underneath him, and people going about their business stopped and stared.
He threaded his way out, holding his breath as he broke out into the open areas. The acidic air bit at his face and made his skin crawl. His dreadlocks slapped the collar ring of the suit.
Back inside, he cycled through a set of doors into air. He walked over to an observation window. The giant body of a docked airship wallowed at the end of a twisting tube, and far below, the dreary clouds mocked him.
The surface of Chilo was just as far away from him right now as when he’d started working on the suit.
He bent the rail in front of the window as he clenched his hands. Heutzin and his assistant mechanics burst through into the room, air masks held over their faces.
Heutzin panted. “What now?”
Pepper was still thinking about it, reaching for some plan. He enjoyed the surprised faces as he stormed down the walkways, and then he thudded over to a mechanic. He snatched an air mask from him. “Let’s go say hello to the pipiltin.”
Maybe this time he could shake them into doing what he needed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After the first hour of being shoved along by the machines, Timas and Katerina relaxed. As the strandbeests rose, the lower ones bumped the balloon from below, and Timas or Katerina would yank on the ripcord to add
air and stretch their balloon out further and rise with the flock.
By the second hour the great bumps of the clouds receded into tiny crenulations. They’d discussed triggering the beacon, but it was too early. They didn’t want the pirates getting a strong signal, and the strandbeests hadn’t hurt the balloon.
“This about as high as we can go,” Timas said, looking at the altimeter.
“Look, they’re thinning.” Katerina pointed up above them.
The strandbeests fell away to reveal a great raftlike triangle, festooned with platforms and canvas wings, cranes and antennae and all sorts of junk. Half of a strandbeest hung suspended from the center of the triangle by a web of ropes and pulleys.
A large net dropped out and enveloped them, then pulled them up into the structure next to the desiccated strandbeest. The net fell away, and a thin man in plastic coveralls and an air mask with round goggles scrambled his way across ropes, nets, and walkways toward them.
He pressed his mask against the bubble and looked in at them, then pulled a pair of masks out of a pouch dangling off his waist.
“Take a deep breath, then,” Timas said. He waited until Katerina did, and then he grabbed the zipper at the top and ripped it open.
He closed his eyes as the balloon deflated and fell around them. Their host shoved a mask in his hand, and Timas pulled it on.
Then the man gestured for them to follow him. Timas kept a hand on the various lines that were draped everywhere.
From below, with the strandbeest trapped in its center, the triangular floating platform hadn’t looked too large. But Timas realized the strandbeests were just as big, and the platform could have housed fifty people.
Inside an airlock leading into the nearest pontoon the thin man pulled his mask down. His skin cracked like leather left out to cure too long, with a strong ebony tinge.
“Hello, hello.” He ran a hand over his shaved head, then changed his mind and pulled at a scraggly beard. “Van VerMeer’s me name, and you two, look at you, you just kids. You’re lucky I’m not hiding in the clouds today. They sting. They rot the canvas wings, even with my protective paints, so they don’t like it. But we’ve never liked the big cities.”
Katerina stepped forward and introduced herself and Timas, and explained that they were fleeing pirates as Timas looked around.
There was little rhyme or reason to the chaos. Machined parts, light tubing, rubber, canvas: all the basic elements of the strandbeests cluttered walls, floors, and any available counterspace.
The old man wobbled over to a bench. “I am deeply sorry, I don’t get many visitors.”
“We’re not visitors, we were dragged here, by the machines.” Timas moved over to Van’s side, trying to distract him from the parts he fingered.
Van cocked his head to regard Timas. “Machines? Machines?”
“The strandbeests,” Katerina said.
A big smile. “Strandbeests. They’re good-hearted.” He looked wistful.
Katerina and Timas glanced at each other. “Why did they bring us here?” Katerina took the man’s leathery hands in hers.
“You were spare parts.” Van switched to looking at her. “You were in a bubble. They look for spare parts, they scavenge from whatever they find out there. Bits and pieces off cities, old dead airships, passing through airships. I barter for what I can here. Not a lot of flotsam anymore, they’re all slowly dying from lack of parts. One day soon there won’t be any.”
“Well, thank you for letting us come aboard.” Timas said each word carefully. “Can we use your radio, or whatever you have, to call for help?”
“Help? No . . .” Van shook his head. “No outsiders. Not now, not until that last one is repaired. See the trick is that no one knows I maintain them, and maybe they’ll be able to do it for themselves, some day, but for now, they still need me.”
“And how long will that be before the repairs are done?” Katerina asked.
A shrug. “A month?” Van smiled. “There are new things to put in its brain.” He held up a complicated series of tiny cogs and wheels.
“A month!” Timas looked at Katerina, but she was moving through the benches, eyes narrowed, taking everything in. “We need to call for help sooner.”
“Maybe more!” Van pulled in close. “You know how to program in analog-varient-viscous?”
“Viscous?” Timas shook his head.
“V.I.S.C.O.U.S.” Van sighed. “A lost art. Used to be a popular hobby among academic artificial intelligence researchers. Using gears to model more precise neural decisions, not just ones and zeros, right? Babbage machines. The most complex behaviors can be modeled by a series of simple sets. Oh, what do you care, you’re a regular, outsider, boring.”
He meandered back through his bits and pieces, and Timas walked down toward Katerina. “He’s been on the platform by himself too long.”
“Yeah, longer than you think.” She pulled a small paper brochure off the wall and waved it at him. “This shows him building similar things in orbital habitats. A hundred years ago. He’s one of those spacers with alien technology in him. He’s probably hundreds of years old.”
Timas looked back at the doddering, odd man with a bit of awe. “And he’s been building these things all that time?”
“I have.” Van looked sideways at them with a grin. “The machines, they were first built by Theo Jansen.”
Katerina walked forward. “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of the man.”
Van grinned. He looked sharp now, not so dreamy and focused on the work. “He lived on Earth, a very long time ago. Before Earth shut itself away and hid, destroying the wormhole there. Bit of a drag that. It stranded me. I was a traveling performance artist, resurrecting the greatest of the old Earth peculiarities for my alien owners.”
“He built these things?” Timas asked.
“Machines that took the wind and converted it. They would walk across the beaches. Beach machines. Strandbeests. He did those. The Satraps kept me in an artist’s zoo, had me build them strandbeests for their beaches. When the Raga freed the habitat I was in, I flew here. Now I build them around floaters, let the wind hit their wings and power their coils inside, and release the energy when they need it. They float and fly around, seeking spare parts. You see: I freed them.” His eyes got wet and shiny.
“You did free them.” Katerina folded her arms. “Congratulations.”
Van gathered up an armful of parts, still teared up. “Thank you, sister.” He passed them both on his way deeper into the pontoon.
“He’s lost it,” Timas whispered to her.
“Come on.” Katerina grabbed his sleeve and whispered back, “I know he’s a bit out of it, but he has moments of clarity, and he’s harmless.”
“I wonder if it’s just because of so much time and his being alone for so long?” They followed the old man, hanging back to continue their hushed exchange without him hearing. The old man flipped on lights as he went along.
“Maybe, but if aliens held him for a long time, and gave him life-extension technology, I can’t imagine his life was too great before he came to Chilo. The Satraps were wicked.”
Timas nodded. He didn’t have much schooling, but one thing almost all humanity knew, it was that. And then it hit him. “That’s how we get him to let us use his radio.”
“What?”
“Tell him aliens are attacking.”
“Good idea.” Katerina grabbed him as Van ran back at them, spilling nuts, bolts, and slender shafts to the ground. They clattered about at their feet.
“Aliens? Where?” His eyes bugged out.
Timas stood still, nervous. “The cities. There’s an infection, it’s . . .”
Van grabbed his shirt and pulled him close. “An alien infection?”
Timas nodded. Katerina had her hand on a pipe. “It turns people into something else. It’s called the Swarm. And now they’re attacking. Haven’t you been listening in on the airwaves?”
“I’m a hermit,�
�� Van said. “I don’t listen to people. I don’t care what they’re doing. I’m my own empire, my own thing. I’m not even supposed to be paying attention to you. You’re wasting my time and making it longer to do this. I can’t even think the programming straight. How can I concentrate with all this crap going on around me?”
He let go of Timas, and Timas took the opportunity. “We want to get out of your way so you can continue. The best way is for us to get off the platform. Can we use your radio to call for help?”
“You don’t need to call for help.” Van shook his head. “Come, we’ll get you the hell out. You’ll go with the miners. They’ll know what to do with you. Yes.”
Timas looked at Katerina, but she was just as mystified as he was.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It turned out that even an eccentric hermit like Van needed contact. Food, parts, medicine. He refused to allow people to venture aboard his domain, but he did venture out. In a disguise. “You have to understand”—he slapped the side of his head—“it’s sideways up there, after the aliens were done crawling around in it. Don’t want them around again.”
He donned an air mask with silvered lenses, grabbed a wig of frizzy hemp, and shrugged on a giant, heavy leather coat that dropped to his ankles. He looked like a tiny child, lost in the coat’s weight.
Railings, mounted haphazardly all over the place, let him hang on as he walked. Timas followed suit. The platform occasionally leaned when a very strong gust hit it.
Maybe that explained the messiness.
“Hey.” Van popped his mask up off his mouth to speak. “Get masks, let’s go. What are you waiting for? We have a schedule to keep.”
Right. Timas fumbled about for the masks he’d given them when they boarded.
Back outside, with acrid Chilo air forcing itself around the edges of the mask, Timas followed the old man across the surface of the pontoons to a tiny hangar.
Inside, revealed by the doors Van swung aside, hung a small airship. It was just large enough for the three of them to cram into.
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