The tiles were shot, and even some of the wing’s internal structural members had been exposed. The shuttle wouldn’t be making any trips down to Shambhala until the entire section was replaced. That complicated matters. There was only one way for him to get to the surface now in one piece, and he really dreaded the prospect, but it would have to wait.
Jian shuffled his feet until he was clear of the shuttle’s wing, then took long, arching hops in the three percent gravity. The Helium-3 harvester had moved on long ago, but he could still see the hole where the ceiling leading to the facility had caved in.
It wasn’t nearly as far of a trip as the last time. For all her bravado, Kirkland had always been the cautious, by-the-book sort. She’d suggested the further LZ the first time around because it was as far away from the cave-in and fissure as she could reasonably get before everyone started complaining about the schlep.
In fact, Jian’s LZ was so much closer to the cave-in that he misjudged the distance of his last hop. With only a few meters to spare, he recognized that he was about to overshoot his landing spot at the lip of the crater and was instead about to add the rest of the sinkhole’s depth to his current fall.
His arms pinwheeling impotently against inertia, Jian tried and failed to alter his course. The expedition suits actually had a limited micro-grav thruster capacity in their extremities… which was a fact Jian managed to forget in the moment of panic as he tumbled helplessly over the edge of the cave-in. His flailing managed only to spin his feet out from underneath him as the floor rose up to meet him in slow motion. Varr’s gravity was so weak, and his rate of acceleration under it so lethargic, Jian had time to calm himself and prepare for the inevitable impact. It wouldn’t be fast enough to be lethal, but neither would it be pleasant. The biggest danger would be a suit puncture against one of the jagged rocks in the pile at the middle of the cavern he was about to collide with. The pads on the outsides of his forearms and shins were even more reinforced against tears than the rest of the suit, so he stuck them out and balled up his fists to try and protect the delicate finger joints of his gloves.
Polly, for his part, had the good sense to move from Jian’s shoulder onto the life support pack on the back of his suit. Jian saw where he was going to “land,” and it wasn’t encouraging. A big slab of rock sitting on top of the pile at about forty-five degrees, its jagged edge pointed at him like the teeth of some long-extinct leviathan. Jian struck it unevenly, first with his left forearm, then his right, causing him to bounce off it and tumble down onto the rest of the pile. A sharp pain ran up his left arm, but he had no time to think about that before he landed again, first on his helmet, then his right shoulder, before finally coming to rest on his right side.
Inside his visor, a suit integrity alarm blared. A three-dimensional outline of his suit appeared in his plant’s field of view with a blinking red area showing where the sensor net woven into the fabric of the suit itself detected the tear, just below his right shoulder blade. The tear wasn’t very large, only point zero eight cubic meters per second. But without the rope ladder he’d planned on anchoring to the roof of the cave-in, he had no way to climb back out of the hole to return to the Buran to stitch it up.
Swallowing hard, Jian reached into a pouch on his thigh and pulled out an emergency patch to seal the rupture and stripped the plastic backing off it to expose the adhesive. But with the bulky material of his suit, he could only reach his hand around far enough to get a corner of the patch in place.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Jian strained against the hard plastic shell of the suit’s chest plate, trying to find the extra few centimeters of reach he needed to seal the tear as his air slowly leaked out into the vacuum. He tried to reach around with his other arm, but the shoulder joint limited his range of motion just enough to prevent it. Jian forced himself to measure his breathing. Passing out from hyperventilating wouldn’t do him a lick of good.
Think, think! Jian admonished himself. He cranked up the brightness and width angle of his suit’s built-in lights to get a better look at the walls of the cavern. In the super-low gravity, his vertical jump was super-human, but still shy of the lip of the hole above. But maybe if there were a ledge or other protrusion he could grab onto and push off from again.
Nothing. The walls were almost completely smooth, having been excavated or melted out in the first place. Maybe he could roll his back against one of the rocks enough… to…
Jian felt something skittering up his leg even through the material of the suit, like being poked with a dozen chopsticks. A very old, seldom-used corner of his brain reviled at the sensation. But before he slapped away the monster, Jian’s internal IFF kicked in and he realized it was just Polly. The little AI bug continued up the back of his leg, past his waist, and came to a stop just below where he’d been trying to affix the patch.
The chopsticks started hammering below his shoulder blade in rapid succession like a sewing machine, moving up and around in a rectangular pattern. Inside his plant display, the leak rate slowed, then trailed off until it reached zero. The suit was still registering the tear, but he wasn’t losing any more atmosphere.
Polly appeared on his right forearm, gazing at him expectantly with his three glowing green eyes.
“You sealed the patch?” Jian said incredulously, knowing full well that the automaton couldn’t hear him through the vacuum. Regardless, Polly winked at him.
Jian put his left hand over his heart and bowed, as his father would. “Thank you.”
Polly crossed his left front pincer over his… chest… and mimicked Jian’s bow. Full of surprises, the creepy little insect was.
“Well then,” Jian bent over and retrieved his duffle, “shall we go to work?”
Less than five minutes later, Jian emerged on the other side of the gooey airlock. The corridor leading deeper into the facility’s interior was drastically changed from his last visit only a few days ago. Instead of the ramshackle mess of dents, ice incursions, and millennia of accumulated dust, the tunnel was immaculate, as if it had just been commissioned that morning.
Jian consulted his plant recording of the prior visit and found a section of wall he remembered being breached by an enormous dagger of water ice frozen hard as granite. The ice wedge was gone entirely, replaced by a nearly flawless section of tunnel wall. Jian leered at the section, and after considerable inspection he was just barely able to perceive the seams where the breech had been closed off and welded shut again.
“Your friends have been busy,” Jian said in the general direction of Polly, who’d wandered off further down the tunnel of his own volition. Jian followed after his diminutive companion, wondering where the rest of the drones, or whatever the best word to describe them might be, had gone. Perhaps they’d completed their repair work and had simply returned to hibernation until they were called upon again.
Curious, Jian pulled up a menu in his plant’s suit interface. The life support pack had a small suite of sensors that monitored atmospheric conditions. Being a space suit, these conditions usually registered a series of big fat goose eggs. But now, just as Jian had hoped, the atmosphere in the corridor sat at a breathable seventy-eight percent nitrogen, nineteen percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide, and another point of trace gasses. A little out of balance by Earth measure, but exactly on the nose by Gaia standards. Not only was it breathable, it sat at an ambient temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius. The exact average temperature across the surface of Gaia.
Someone or something had taken great pains to make the facility accommodating for a native of Gaia. Jian wasn’t of Gaia, exactly, but he’d spent most of his life there, and figured that was good enough. With no poisonous gasses in the air or other chemical hazards his suit’s sensor suite could detect, Jian’s only real concern was airborne microbes, which, given the circumstances and his desolate surroundings, seemed like a fairly remote risk.
“No time like the present,” Jian said as he amped himself up to crack the seals o
n his helmet. Hesitantly, he reached for the two paddles on either side that would release the visor. They had to be pushed down and pressed in simultaneously to prevent them from being unlocked accidentally. The locks clicked, and with a small hiss of pressure equalization, Jian slid the visor up and into the crow of the helmet, still holding his breath.
Just as his lungs started to burn for fresh oxygen, Jian exhaled fully, then took a shallow breath and held it for a second, his hands in place above his head to snap his visor shut again at the first signs of trouble. The air was surprisingly fresh on Jian’s tongue. He’d expected it to be stale and musty like a cave. Instead, it had the crisp, slightly metallic taste of mechanically processed air. Which it was, of course. Jian rather strongly doubted there was an aeroponics farm deeper down supplying the oxygen. More likely it had been freed up from the ice of Varr itself through electrolysis.
He stood there for a full minute, breathing deeply and monitoring himself for dizziness, tingling in his extremities, stars in his vision, or any other signs of trouble with the air, but none materialized.
“OK then.” Jian adjusted the strap of his duffle, shuffle-hopped his way down the tunnel, and took the fork to the right leading to the map room. Just as it had before, as soon as Jian sat down in the chair at the center of the spherical chamber, the walls came to life with a dance of light and color. Gaia stretched out all around him from its strange perspective from inside the globe, quickly joined by the spiraling symbols hovering over areas of interest on Atlantis and Shambhala.
Jian leaned over to retrieve a bottle of water to sooth his parched throat. The air in the facility was crisp, but bone dry. He’d have to keep an eye on his hydration as long as he was down here.
By the time he looked up again, the display had changed. The spiraling symbols had once again unrolled, slowed, and enlarged, exactly as it had been when Jian left. It was as if the room recognized its latest student and restarted the lesson. Not that it helped much; the iconography was just as indecipherable to Jian’s eyes as it had been the first time, and he didn’t have months to learn a new language from scratch. There had to be a way to speed things up, or at least pick up the basics.
Jian opened a menu on his plant and enabled his translation software, set its parameters for both audio and visual feed access, then opened a clean file for “New Language.” The translation matrix was good at cataloging symbols, pattern-recognition, and detecting syntax, but without either two way conversations to work from, and limited only to the processing power and data files held in his own unit, Jian didn’t expect it would be able to expedite things a great deal.
There was really nothing for it, Jian realized. He reached down into his pack again, retrieved an apple cobbler and a fork, and settled in for the lesson.
Twenty-Four
It took the rest of that day and a good portion of the next to fully disassemble the bomb, run all of its components, and scrub them for fingerprints, skin cells, strands of hair, blood, sweat, dried saliva, anything.
It was clean. Almost impossibly so. Theresa quipped at one point that it was clean enough to pass planetary protection protocols. And while that was an exaggeration, Benson sympathized with the frustration behind the sentiment. It reminded him of the Laraby case, actually, with his ridiculously clean love nest which, of all places, should have had an ample amount of DNA samples to collect. Somebody in the Ark’s underworld had figured out how to thoroughly sterilize large volumes and spread that little trick around.
However, while the exact identity of the bombmaker still eluded them, they hadn’t completely dead-ended. Theresa had put out an order for an explosives inventory check on the walk back to the station house. The results came back the following evening. One of the seven mining operations on the continent had filed a reorder request after reporting receiving only twenty kilograms of an expected two-hundred kilogram resupply. Just one problem; two hundred kilos had been tracked coming down from the Ark, signed for coming off the elevator car, and scanned onto the delivery drone.
Someone had tricked the receiving end software out of a decimal point and made off with one hundred and eighty kilos of high explosives and used it to kill dozens of people and kidnap Benexx. Benson was going to find out who. Theresa had to stay behind to handle the back end of the investigation, as well as keep an eye on the increasingly restless Native Quarter, but she’d given her blessing to let Korolev come along on his little field trip.
Benson’s only concern with the expedition was neither of them would be very convincing playing the “good cop” during the questioning. Korolev was almost as ruthlessly protective of his, er, niece as zer parents were.
Kexx and Sakiko offered to tag along as well, despite the fact Kexx was even more uneasy about flying than Benson was.
They took a pod down to the airfield to commandeer one of the quadcopters for the trip. Which ended up taking quite a bit of cajoling from Benson before the air master would approve the battery charge expenditure for “non-essential business.” Benson had to keep himself from throttling the man at that statement, but electricity rationing had begun to hit everyone pretty hard while the Ark raced to repair the beanstalk and restore the flow of power.
With the weight of the four of them and their gear, the little quadcopter only managed around a hundred minutes of flight time. And that was provided they weren’t in a huge hurry. But it was more than enough endurance to give them a round trip to any of the satellite farms, mines, or quarries that defined the outer reaches of human infrastructure on the continent. For now, at least.
“How you doing back there, partner?” Benson glanced over his shoulder at Kexx. “You’re looking a little pale.”
“I’m looking forward to standing on the ground with great anticipation,” Kexx answered.
“C’mon. It’s not every day you get to enjoy an injri’s eye view.”
“It’s not any day I enjoy that view.”
Benson laughed. “I know what you mean, buddy. Believe me. We’re only twenty minutes out. Just close your eyes and imagine you’re swimming in the ocean.”
“There’s so many wildcat homesteads,” Sakiko said as she peered out the bulbous canopy glass. The quadcopter’s rotors sat above the cockpit at a slight dihedral, both for stability, and to afford its passengers as unobstructed a view as possible.
“Just north of four hundred at last count,” Korolev replied. “About eleven hundred people in total. A new one pops up almost every week.”
“Humans, or…”
“Mostly humans. The Atlantians I think define themselves as village builders. They grew up being told they were better than the nomads because they were building roads and civilization, while our people were cooped up in that fishbowl being fed stories about taming a wild frontier, getting their own patch of land to settle instead of living in an apartment tower with a thousand other people.” Korolev shrugged. “Honestly, I’m surprised there aren’t more of them.”
“That sound about right to you, Kexx?” Benson asked.
“A little generalized, but yes. My people are very proud of what we’ve built, and we know the benefits of working together.”
“The biggest cities started out as a single home,” Korolev said. “These wildcat plots will add a home for the kids when they grow up. Then they’ll put down real roads so they don’t have to hack through the forest to bring in their crops. Then they’ll start building stores so they can trade with each other instead of going all the way into the city. We’re looking at Shambhala’s future suburbs.”
“Yes indeed,” Benson concurred.
Two more of the little prefabs streaked by underneath. Everyone who had come down from the Ark was entitled to a house, but it was only free inside the city limits of Shambhala. The wildcatters had to either pay up to transport the 3D construction printers out here, or build their own shelter. From Benson’s quick and dirty survey, the ratio ran about four to one in favor of prefabs. And some enterprising dissident could be h
iding Benexx in any one of them.
“It must be difficult to patrol such a large area,” Kexx mused.
“Not really, there’s almost nothing to patrol,” Korolev said. “These people pretty well keep to themselves. That’s why they’re out here in the first place. And when things do crop up, they tend to hash out conflicts among themselves. We only get sent out here a couple times a month. Usually on anonymous tips.”
“Tips for what?” Kexx asked.
“Drugs, mostly. Somebody cooks up amphetamines in the barn and their neighbor’s kid gets hooked on them. Or, you know, the barn blows up. Hard to do if you’re just storing yulka beans.”
“I don’t know. Yulka beans made me explode once,” Benson said.
“Yeah, I was there,” Korolev said.
Almost every homestead had a small field where they grew crops, or kept a handful of animals. Most were either right on the river, or within easy walking distance of the ready water source. The city’s large fields were further inland, irrigated using diversionary channels and grids of belowground pipes. A few of the wildcatters further from the river had dug their own diversionary channels off the mains, which was technically illegal, but obviously wasn’t high on the enforcement priority list. Honestly, the leadership back in Shambhala was probably happy for anyone who willingly left the city taking pressure off the city’s growing pains.
“What did Theresa want us to talk about?” Kexx asked, probably trying to distract zerself from the flight.
“Hmm?” Benson said.
“Back in the tunnel you said Theresa wanted us to talk about something.”
“Oh, right. Well, it’ll seem a little petty at this point, but before the attacks and Benexx going missing, we were having a lot of trouble connecting like we used to. Ze’s been irritable, combative, and short-tempered. Especially with me.”
Children of the Divide Page 29