Benexx reached up and tried to hoist zerself up the rope, but after less than a meter zer arms already threatened open revolt. Ze needed rest to recuperate from the exertion of the fight, but every minute down here just increased the odds someone would come to check on zer or relieve Jolk. Benexx planted zer feet on the rope, taking a significant fraction of weight off zer arms and cramping hands. Slowly, ze walked up the rope, using zer arms to guide and stabilize zer centimeter after agonizing centimeter.
With a herculean effort, the lip of the hole finally came within reach. Ze released the rope and got a hand on the cool, damp stone, half afraid the whole thing had been a setup and Sula’s foot was about to crush zer fingers and send zer tumbling back down to the floor for a second time. But no foot came. Gingerly, cautiously, Benexx pulled zerself up enough to get a peek at the area immediately around the hole. It was just as dark as the chamber had been, no torches or chem lights laying around, and only a very faint green glow of bioluminescence from a handful of fungal colonies.
Ze dialed up a little more skinglow to get a better look at zer surroundings. Much to zer relief, Benexx didn’t see another solitary soul. Ze said a thanks to Cuut more out of habit than humility and scrambled zer way onto the floor. Benexx lay there for a while, focused only on moving air in and out of zer chest and soothing zer muscles against the cold rock. Just long enough that they stopped burning beneath zer skin.
After not nearly long enough, Benexx forced zerself to get up and start moving again. Ze paused to give a cursory inspection of the inventory of the area right around the hole. There were some crates off to one side that looked like they’d been used as makeshift chairs, a small pile of food packaging, mushroom stems, that sort of thing. Temporary items for a temporary space. Ze spotted a plastic bottle shoved off to the side as if it had been hastily hidden. It was only a third full of an amber liquid. A quick taste of the lip with zer fingertip confirmed it was bak’ri hooch. Probably the very bottle Jolk had consumed to bolster zer bravery before coming down the rope and ultimately meeting zer fate. If the bottle had been full when ze started, Jolk had been very drunk indeed.
Benexx had no intention of finishing the bottle, but the hooch had uses as a disinfectant much like alcohol, and the bottle itself might come in handy as a water container, so ze tucked it into zer pack. Ze remembered the rope, and after a moment’s reflection decided rope was always a useful thing to have in a cave, so ze found the anchor point, worked the knot loose, then coiled it up and threw it over zer shoulder with the pack.
Ze was as equipped and prepared as ze was going to get. Benexx scanned the passage. It was a rough tunnel that curved at an angle in each direction. One end curved up and to the left, passing out of sight after maybe thirty meters, the other curved down and to the right. There wasn’t much to choose between them, but Benexx reasoned that, being a cave, the exit would generally follow the direction of “up,” so that’s the way ze settled on.
Slowly, deliberately, Benexx made zer way down the tunnel. Careful to keep zer footfalls as silent as possible and zer skinglow just bright enough to keep zer from bashing zer head on a rock overhang or from falling into another hole in the floor. During summer trips to G’tel, Uncle Kexx had tried to teach zer how to shift zer patterns to blend in with zer surroundings, a type of built-in, adaptive optical camouflage. But Benexx had never mastered the technique. Honestly, zer attempts to do so had been half-assed. Ze never envisioned a situation where ze’d need the skill, living as ze did in Shambhala.
Ze resolved to make Kexx teach zer again, provided ze survived long enough to see zer uncle once more.
Here and there, chambers and smaller passages branched off from the main trunk of the tunnel. Benexx paused to search each one, both to see if ze could find anything useful, and to make sure no one caught zer from behind as ze moved deeper into the network. Not that ze knew what to do if ze did run across someone. Shooting them would solve the immediate problem, but create an entirely new and bigger one.
Still, if it came to it, ze would stand and fight. Maybe if ze was really lucky, ze’d make a big enough bang that zer parents would hear about it and know how ze’d chosen to go out. They would be proud of that, at least. Provided zer father was even still alive, that is. Benexx pushed the dark thought to the back of zer mind as ze reached the next chamber. None of the tunnels and passages ze’d seen so far appeared to be excavated, or even expanded. They were roughly oval, likely naturally-occurring lava tubes much like the ones that were common beneath Atlantis. Eddy currents in the lava flow created the roughly spherical chambers at random intervals.
Was it possible they’d transported zer entirely across the ocean? It seemed improbable. All transoceanic transport happened either onboard one of Shambhala’s small fleet of airliners, or one of their remote cargo drone ships. It seemed impossible that they could’ve smuggled zer onto one of the planes without security catching on. It was at least conceivable that ze could’ve been stuffed into a shipping container on one of the drone ships, but an ocean transit aboard one of them took days. The superficial injuries ze’d received from the blast would’ve healed more by the time ze’d woken up.
Benexx shook off the question. Ze was getting too far ahead of zerself. Where ze was wouldn’t matter until ze found the way out of these infernal caverns. One foot in front of the other, ze moved through the caves. Quiet as a ghost in its tomb.
Twenty
The transfer tube from the engineering module to the shuttle wasn’t very long in physical terms, only six or seven meters. But to Jian, in that moment, it might as well have been a kilometer.
Although no one in the maintenance and flight ops divisions knew it yet, the shuttle Buran was only minutes away from making an unscheduled departure. Or Jian was only minutes away from getting dragged out of the command chair by his snatch handle and thrown under house arrest until the court-martial finished deliberating which lock to throw him out of.
One of the two.
As he floated down the short airlock, Jian gripped the “tablet” in his right hand even tighter. It took a conscious effort to keep his breathing measured. The sweat beading up on his palms and forehead however, he had no control over.
In relation to the shuttle, Jian was falling headfirst towards the floor. This was because nestled inside their docking cradles, the immense craft faced inward, making it both easier for maintenance crews to tend to them, and to keep the ablative ceramic tile reentry shields facing outwards to space as an extra layer of protection against micrometeorite impacts. So when he reached the “bottom” of the tunnel, he spun around his own vertical axis one hundred and eighty degrees and faced the hatch that led into the command deck from the cargo bay.
Even docked to the Ark, all of the lock doors remained buttoned tight until they were needed. Jian was glad for the precaution, as he wore merely his cloth flight suit, not the vacuum-rated skinsuit that would keep him alive long enough for recovery ops to snatch him back aboard in the case of a violent decompression.
Being outside the Ark’s protective shell in just his longjohns made him uneasy, but there were appearances to maintain. He wasn’t here to steal the Buran, after all. What a crazy suggestion. He was just doing a completely routine pre-flight inspection to make sure everything was shipshape before heading back up the tube to get sealed in and squared away for the actual flight.
The pressure equalized with a small hiss as the light above the hatch turned green. Jian hit the release and the hatch swung inward. For just an instant, Jian could’ve sworn he felt the tablet in his hand shiver.
“Oh, hello, commander,” came a voice from the other end of the flight deck. Jian froze in place as he drifted through the lock. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else aboard. His timeline was too tight to deal with interlopers. If he couldn’t come up with something to shake off the tech in the next ninety seconds, he’d have to–
“Sir?”
The question snapped Jian back into the moment.
“Hmm? Sorry, what did you say, technician?”
“I just said hello.” The young tech gave him a concerned glance. “Are you feeling all right? You look a little pale.”
Jian’s heart raced. She suspected something. He needed to brush her off fast, or else… He put on an awkward smirk. “It’s just nerves. I’ve never flown with a nuke before.”
The tech answered with a knowing nod. “I hear you. I helped wire that thing up, and just between you, me, and the bulkhead, it gives me the creeps.”
Jian smiled with genuine relief. “I won’t say anything if you won’t.”
“Thanks for that, sir.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Working on the nuke?”
“Yes, I’m just finishing up final network integrity tests. Make sure it actually goes boom when you press the button.”
“From many tens of kilometers away in orbit,” Jian said. “Preferably.”
“Ha, you’re brave. I’d be halfway back to the Ark before even thinking about setting it off, signal strength be damned.”
“It’s that powerful?”
“No, not really. Its yield is only in the five-kiloton range, and most of the yield will be pointed straight down into the rock. Without any atmosphere to transfer the blast energy, you could probably be standing on Varr’s surface only six or seven klicks away without getting your suit dusty. I’d just feel better with a three-kilometer-wide ablative shield between me and it, you know?”
Jian nodded. “I do indeed. Hey, I just realized I left my test kit back up the tunnel, and I really need to get started on my preflights. If you’re done, could you pop up and grab it for me? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Sure thing. I’m just running out the clock down here anyway. Gotta look busy for the boss, you know?”
Jian chuckled. “I do indeed. Thanks, Miss…?”
“Claiborne,” she said as they floated past each other. “I’ll just be a minute up there, sir.”
“No worries, take your time,” Jian said. She smiled at him as she moved into the lock. Jian thought he saw a flicker of attraction in her gaze, but it was fleeting. The hatch bolted shut behind her. “You’re about to have the rest of the day off.”
There was no time to spare, he’d already wasted over a minute with Claiborne that he’d have to make up somewhere in the countdown. Jian kicked off hard for the command chair, pushed down with his arms, and landed squarely in the seat hard enough that he had to grab the armrests to prevent himself from bouncing back out again. Five seconds later and he was not only strapped into his chair, but linked into the Buran’s network through his plant. He could see all of the ship’s systems sitting in standby. Fully prepped and green for launch.
A launch that wasn’t supposed to be coming for another two hours.
The moment Jian started toggling over the shuttle’s system icons from Standby to Ready status, someone was going to know something very wrong was happening and try to shut him down. Which was why he waited for twelve, eleven, ten…
Several hours before, Jian had uploaded what on the surface looked like a harmless software update into the Flight Operations Center. But, instead of fixing bugs in the fleet’s onboard navigation systems interface with the GPS network, it had a more nefarious purpose. The malware was a rush job that wouldn’t have survived any level of scrutiny if Jian hadn’t uploaded it by hand directly into the engineering module’s network, using his credentials to bypass at least a half-dozen layers of security.
It had cost Jian most of the credits in his savings. By the time it had been routed through a dozen fake accounts, ghost routing numbers, and shady middlemen, the programmer who actually wrote it would end up with less than sixty percent of the total. And after a few days of digital forensic investigation, it would almost certainly mean they would be spending quite a long time in a dirtside jail cell.
Just the cost of doing business on the black market.
…three, two, one. EXECUTE.
Throughout the rest of the shuttle fleet, the first stage of the three-part worm sprang to life. Avionics and navigation computers booted up, and immediately set about tearing themselves apart. Every file, every program, every byte of data stored in memory was relentlessly purged, until all that remained was the foundational operating systems themselves, which on instructions from the worm, deleted themselves before shutting off the lights.
With that, the Ark’s entire shuttle fleet was dead in space. Their computer banks empty, barren, inoperable. No physical damage had occurred, of course, and the data as well as the operating systems were thoroughly backed-up inside the Ark’s own memory core. But the process of restoring them to flight-ready status would take hours, perhaps an entire day. By then, the intercept window with Varr before the moon’s motion took it out of range for the rest of the orbit would have closed.
For every shuttle except the Buran, that is.
Jian furiously flipped the shuttle’s system icons over to Ready status as the blood pounded in his ears. Clicks and whirrs sounded through the flight deck as the sleeping bird began to wake and stretch its wings. Warning alarms were doubtlessly blaring across Flight Ops as well as up in the Command Module, but Jian was confident they’d be lost among the alarms for all the other shuttles that were doubtlessly flashing angrily across displays and plant interfaces throughout the ship. At least Jian hoped they were.
But in case they weren’t, Jian needed to cut the data uplink between the Buran and Flight, or else they would take remote control as soon as someone spotted him. That would end his little grand theft shuttle adventure before he’d even gone a kilometer. But first, he needed to release the external clamps which kept the shuttle locked into the cradle.
Normally, the release command came from Flight, not from the command deck of the shuttle, but Jian had planned for that as well. With a flicker of his eyes, he toggled his plant interface to a new screen, only a few hours old. It was the second part of his package from the hacker that had already knocked out the rest of the shuttle fleet. Jian said a little prayer in hopes this patch was just as effective as the first one, then pressed the icon that would open the backdoor into Flight’s operating system.
There were supposed to be at least three firewalls preventing him from doing this. Jian had no idea what vulnerability his anonymous hacker had found to exploit, but in less than a second, a new virtual console appeared within the augmented reality environment overlaid on his field of vision by his plant.
For clarity’s sake, it exactly matched the physical console sitting less than a hundred meters away in the Flight Ops Center. Jian knew it well, having spent several weeks of his pilot training sitting strapped into a chair learning all of Flight Op’s systems so he knew what their capabilities and limitations were while he was out in the black, sometimes separated by light minutes.
So he knew exactly where the Buran’s cradle release was. He clicked it, breath frozen in his lungs.
A thundering heartbeat passed, then another. But just as Jian was about to hit the icon again, the shuttle shook with the familiar vibration of clamps popping free. The cabin lights flickered as the umbilicals followed a moment later and the Buran switched over to internal power.
Relieved and exhilarated, Jian grabbed the shuttle’s controls and opened up the taps on the dorsal thrusters. Instantly, dozens of liters of water flash-boiled into superheated steam and came screaming out of the shuttle’s nose, tail, and wingtips at almost a thousand kilometers per hour.
With a mighty heave, the beast pushed away from its lair on pillars of clouds.
Jian didn’t wait around to savor the small victory. The moment the Buran cleared the cradle gantries, he was already out of his seat and floating for the com station. With practiced familiarity, Jian popped open the panels protecting the sensitive electronics suite that made up the shuttle’s communication’s system. With little fanfare, Jian tore out the trio of modules that formed the triple redundancy of Flight’s data uplink.
&nbs
p; All he had left was the shuttle’s whisker laser. And only he controlled where it was pointed and who it talked to.
System warning alarms flashed across his vision as well as the shuttle’s command consoles. Jian disarmed them and settled back into his seat to warm up the Buran’s mains. He needed to burn hard and fast for Varr if he was going to hit his window.
As the bank of a half-dozen rocket motors spooled through their start-up sequence, an incoming call icon blinked at the upper left corner of Jian’s plant overlay. His father. The plant link was short range without the data links, and couldn’t directly interface with the shuttle’s systems. Still, Jian wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. He dropped the call and returned his attention to the task at hand.
His father’s call came through again, except this time he didn’t bother with the courtesy of ringing.
Jian almost cut the connection again, but the tone in his father’s voice had shifted from authoritarianism to desperation. He couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for the old man.
Children of the Divide Page 25