“I’m dying to, but we’re still working out the NDA stuff, so it’s still hush-hush.”
“You mean I don’t even get my customary edition of the Mitch Show? Fine. Let’s get back to the business at hand, then.”
“And what business is that?”
“You were feeling bad about forgetting your poor old boyfriend and trying to figure out how to make it up to him.”
“Oh really,” she said, her smirk returning. “Is that what we were doing?”
“Oh yeah. You were beside yourself with guilt and desperate to illustrate your regret.”
“Well then,” she said, taking the takeout box from his hand and slipping into his lap, “let’s try to put our heads together.”
“Put our heads together? Sure, we can start there,” he said, pulling her close for a kiss.
Squee took advantage of the proximity to cover both of their faces with enthusiastic licks.
“Okay, okay,” Lex said, leaning aside to his bag and pulling out her slidepad. “Go play with your toy.”
He tossed it across the room, and the little creature leaped after it, eagerly powering it up and tapping away with her nose.
“Now where were we?” she said.
“Right about here,” he said, giving her a peck on the lips. “And working our way—”
His comment was interrupted by a chirp, then a generic ring from Michella’s slidepad.
“I better get that,” she said.
“Let them leave a message.”
“It might be important.” She leaned back and reached across the bed to fumble for the ringing device.
“Sexy time is important too!”
“Is that all you think about?”
“It’s not all I think about, but it’s usually near the top of the list.”
She snagged the slidepad and looked. “It’s Garotte.”
“He better be on fire.”
Michella accepted the connection. “Michella Modane.”
It was a video connection. The feed showing Garotte was from the point of view of the Declaration’s built-in interior camera. In the background, Silo could be seen using a small wire brush to clean out the barrel of a weapon.
“Ms. Modane,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from the laboratory.”
“Not for a little while. Why?” Her eyes opened. “Are the Luddites making their move?”
“Not to our knowledge. We haven’t had any suspicious ships come through, and we’ve been keeping a close eye on the laboratory from orbit, but something seems a bit off lately.”
“How so?”
“Power fluctuations, communication interruptions, things of that nature. They’ve got some solid security on their data system, so we haven’t been able to tell what communications were being interrupted, but there’s little doubt that something is happening. I’d rather not come down there with guns blazing unless it is truly called for.”
“Understood. I’ve been working with one of the researchers all evening. I can get a call in without drawing any suspicion. I’ll try to feel out if there’s anything going on.”
“That would be quite helpful. I do hope I didn’t get you out of bed for this little errand.”
“You kept us from getting in bed,” Lex remarked.
“What’s that, my boy?”
“You just threw a bucket of cold water on sexy time.”
“My eternal apologies, good sir.”
“I’ll give him a call and let you know what I find out,” Michella said.
She closed the connection, then began to sift through her recent contacts to find Dr. Dreyfus. Lex, meanwhile, got up and fetched his shoes.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting ready to go,” he said.
“You don’t need to do that. It’ll take two seconds and then we can get back to it. This is just a call.”
“Oh, sure. That’s how it starts.”
She glanced down to her slidepad. “It’s taking a while for him to answer.”
“Uh-huh…” He continued lacing his shoes.
“There we… no. It says ‘Device Disconnected From Network.’ That’s not what it usually says when no one answers.”
“Nope. It usually says ‘User Unavailable.’”
“What’s the one when they have no reception?”
“‘User Unreachable.’ And if they refuse the connection it says ‘Connection Refused.’”
“I’m checking the help manual… This error message indicates that a device has ceased responding to status pings without indication of degrading power or signal, indicating damage or destruction of the device… I’m calling a different line.”
She worked her way through the first six public numbers for the lab, and three private numbers she’d been given. Every device, be it a personal slidepad or permanent terminal, gave the same worrying message. She closed the connection and looked to Lex.
“Doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence, does it?” he commented.
“No, it doesn’t. Lex, we’ve got to go out there.”
“Yeah.” He pulled a pack of gum from his bag and slipped it into his pocket. “We do.”
His voice didn’t have a hint of frustration or irritation now. The Sobrietin had wiped away the lingering effects of his time at the bar, and he was left only with the increasingly familiar feeling of having a potentially dangerous job that nonetheless had to be done.
“What kind of vehicle do we have?”
“A hoverbike with a sidecar.”
“The lab is three hundred kilometers away. How long is it going to take us to get there?”
“I can get us there in forty-five minutes, but the bike’s windshield isn’t really made for that, so it is going to be a little windy.” He tossed her a pair of goggles. “You’ll need these.” He strapped on a pair of his own, then pulled out a second pair with an unusual shape and a second strap.
“Who are those for?” she asked.
“Squee.”
“What!? We can’t take Squee with us!”
“It isn’t really going to be avoidable.”
A clicking sound drew their attention to the door. Squee had jumped up to the lever-style door knob and clamped on to it with her teeth. She waggled her dangling body for a moment, and the door clicked open. In a flash she dropped down to the floor, nosed the door open, and darted outside. Michella rushed after her, throwing the door open to find the creature sitting in the sidecar, practically dancing in place.
Michella turned to Lex, a look of confusion and disbelief on her face. “Are we sure Ma put her brain back the way it was?”
“Not quite the way it was. But what can I say? Squee hates to be left alone, and you’re usually out on an assignment, so I started taking her with me on the courier job. Now she can’t get enough of it. Why do you think I own a pair of Doggles? Once she sees a pair of goggles, she’s out the door.”
“You and I are going to have to have a chat about the sort of bad influence you’re having on her.”
“After we rush at unsafe speed to a lab that, in the middle of a dangerous investigation, mysteriously lost contact.”
“Well obviously,” she said, grabbing the camera rig.
Lex grabbed a few last-minute items, including a windbreaker for himself, one for Michella, and Squee’s leash. The funk opted for Michella’s lap after she strapped into the sidecar and slipped on her goggles.
“If only Jon were here, this would be just like old times,” Lex said. “Put Squee’s goggles on her, would you? And click on the leash and tie it to the seat so she doesn’t go flying out. You’re going to want to throw that windbreaker on, too.”
“But it’s hot and muggy.”
“It is right now, but in a minute, there’s going to be an awful lot of wind to break.”
“Next time, you’re getting a car,” she said, pulling on the jacket. She attached Squee’s leash and began to fight with both pairs of goggles. “I’d better give G
arotte a call and let him know what’s going on.”
“Do you have your hands-free mic? You’ll probably want to use that. I’ll put mine on, too. Once the wind starts whipping, the bone conduction mics should let us hear each other.”
When all gear was in place and Michella was in the process of giving Garotte an update, Lex powered up the bike and eased it into the air. Within a minute they were over the open marsh between Gloria and the laboratory, whisking toward what was almost certainly very bad news.
Chapter 10
Just as the motorcycles and automobiles of old all operated on the same handful of basic principles, so too did the wave of hovervehicles that eventually replaced them. This meant that every innovation anywhere in the transit world had at least minor implications for every other part. The same hover modules and thrusters that powered massive hovertankers and even the planetary portion of a spacecraft’s travel were present, in a scaled form, in this flimsy little hoverbike. Best of all, at least from Lex’s point of view, was that the power scaled in a very lopsided manner. Whereas getting enough oomph to push around a space station was a tricky design challenge, it was actually cheaper and easier to install an overpowered thruster on a bike than specially design one that was the right size. The result was a craft with the power-to-weight ratio of a hand grenade. All it took to raise the top speed from the intended one hundred kilometers per hour into five hundred was a few software tweaks and the willingness to take one’s life into one’s own hands.
Of course, violating the design parameters didn’t come without some tradeoffs. The key issue was that he’d be using more power than the framework was designed to withstand, so one wrong move could cause the bike to literally tear itself to pieces. Lex wasn’t worried about that. He’d been making a living pushing one of these bikes to the limit. He knew what it could take. The other issue was that the human face wasn’t designed to be slicing through the atmosphere at five hundred kilometers per hour, or even one hundred kilometers per hour. For low speeds there were windshields, and for high speeds there were wind fields, wedge-shaped force fields that routed the air and debris around the bike to improve aerodynamics and keep the pilot’s eyes in his or her sockets. At the intended top speed, he could ride without so much as squinting his eyes, enjoying a light and pleasant breeze. At the speed he’d be coaxing out of it, said breeze was considerably less light and pleasant.
“I feel like I should be wearing a helmet. Should I be wearing a helmet?” Michella asked. With the whipping wind, it indeed turned out to be easier to start a call and communicate via the fancy noise-eliminating earpieces than trying to yell.
“Oh, definitely,” Lex replied.
“Then why didn’t you tell me to put one on?”
“Because half of the fun is the feeling of the wind in your hair. Plus at the speed we’re going, if we crash, a helmet would just be a brightly colored marker for where your head landed.”
Lex took the bike low enough for the bike’s wake to kick up a wave of dirt and mud behind them. Squee, looking suitably adorable in her goggles, stood excitedly on Michella’s lap to watch the dirt fly. It was still the dead of night, but Movi had two bright moons that illuminated the marsh below with a dim rosy light. Mirror-calm pools of water scattered regularly through the marsh glimmered in the moonlight, and the clumps of mud and droplets of water hurled up behind them sparkled and gleamed. It was remarkable how beautiful the primordial little patch of early-stage terraforming could be.
Squee lost interest in the flying muck and pranced forward to lean on the dashboard of the sidecar, ears and tongue flapping in the wind with a look of absolute joy on her face. Michella glanced aside to see that Lex was wearing almost exactly the same expression. She shook her head.
“You two are way too alike sometimes.”
“You’re darn right. So what’s up with Garotte?” Lex asked.
“He said they’re going to cause a sensor blind spot or something so that they can bring their ship down without drawing too much attention.”
“Good. I’m getting that feeling I get when things are about to explode.”
“How much longer before we get there?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“Is there a reason we didn’t take the SOB?”
“Ha, you see? You get a taste and suddenly you can’t get enough.”
“It’s certainly faster.”
“Not when you have to dig it out of a starport hangar first. Plus, take it from me, the authorities get curious when you use an interstellar ship to go a few hundred kilometers. Speaking of the authorities,” he looked around, “it is just now striking me that a sane group would have called the cops by now.”
“For what? We don’t even know for sure that anything is wrong.”
“Do you mean that legitimately, or are you just practicing for when the police ask us why we didn’t call them?”
“Let’s just focus on getting there.”
Lex quietly mulled over the growing rift between his life and a normal one when his slidepad bleeped through his earpiece. Judging from a simultaneous reaction from Michella, she’d been included on the message as well. Their devices negotiated and opened an audio connection.
“How far out are you two?” Garotte said through their earpieces.
“I don’t know. Twenty minutes, a half hour?” Lex said.
“Keep your eyes open, my boy. The lovely Ms. Silo has powered up some of the sensors we liberated from the Neo-Luddites, and if I’m reading them correctly, there is some extreme activity down there on the surface.”
“What kind of activity?”
“When we found that thing they’ve got locked up in that lab, the Neo-Luddites were pointing their sensors at it and treating it like it was a bomb ready to go off. Near as I can tell, that was just a blip on their system. Now the readout is spiking like crazy.”
“What does that mean for us?” Michella asked.
“Unless I’m greatly mistaken, we are about to find out the answer to that very question. Silo and I are tracking what seems to be the center of the sensor activity. It is a fair distance west of the laboratory, near what looks to be a system of mines. There are scattered readings in and around the lab, though, so as I’ve said, eyes open.”
Garotte dropped from the connection.
“Well, there’s a good sign. The special forces soldiers are getting nervous,” Lex said. “You think maybe it’s time to share what exactly you saw in that lab, so I’ll know it when I see it?”
“There really wasn’t much to see. It looked like someone tried to build a lumpy spider out of yak pieces and little hunks of electronics. The thing looked like it could barely move.”
“The scientist didn’t seem worried at all?”
“If anything, he was excited.”
“Great. That’s even worse. The sort of stuff that gets scientists excited tends to have a doomsday scenario attached to it. ‘This will change the world, and there’s only an eleven percent chance that change will be human extinction.’”
“I’m starting the video. Does this thing have lights?” Michella said, with little evidence to suggest she’d heard his concerns.
Lex clicked on the underpowered little headlamp attached to the bike. It wouldn’t have been much good at normal speeds. At their present rate he’d need reaction time in the nanosecond range to steer clear of anything they revealed. They rode on in tense silence. The danger suddenly felt very real, so much so that even Michella had the whisper of apprehension in her expression. Squee, on the other hand, still reveled in the exhilaration of the ride. Lex reached out to give her a reassuring pat.
“Let’s see how good of a watchdog you are, Squee. If you see something, speak up.”
#
Silo and Garotte maneuvered the Declaration toward the mouth of a complex of copper mines. In an earlier era, it would be home to a community of burly men with mining caps and sweat-stained overalls, but that time was long gone. The mine was we
ll outside even the outer fringe of the terraformed portion of the planet, and the entire operation was autonomous. Boring machines detected, excavated, and hauled back ore, leaving behind tunnels just large enough for a single bot. It was a very environmentally friendly way to go about the process, and economical, too. The robots were inexpensive, and a fleet of them could be controlled and maintained by a single operator.
“Give me an electronics sweep. What sort of surveillance are we looking at?” Garotte said, hovering his cloaked ship out of range of any likely cameras just in case the cloak failed. Getting the interest of the locals was best avoided if it could be.
“Checking,” Silo said. She tapped away at one of the screens mounted in the control panel of the ship. “I’m getting nothing.”
“No cameras? No alarms?”
“No power flowing at all. I don’t even pick up a generator.”
“That’s curious.”
He powered up the ship’s forward camera and switched it to night-vision mode. There wasn’t much to suggest this stretch of rocky hillside was any different from the hundreds of square kilometers that surrounded it. He zoomed and panned across the stark grayscale image the infrared camera produced.
“Where does that widget of theirs say we should be looking?” he asked.
“This isn’t my area, hon, so I could be reading it wrong.”
She picked up one of the handheld scanners they had stolen from the Neo-Luddites and booted it up. Aside from the small video screen attached to the top, the device looked more like a stainless-steel vacuum cleaner accessory than a piece of scientific apparatus. It had a molded white plastic handle, a few switches and knobs, and a long chrome tube with a wide flattened end.
“When I point it to the left I get nothing. To the right, nothing. But when I point it straight ahead…” The screen began to scroll numbers overlaid with a wildly fluctuating waveform.
“I’m satisfied. I’ll take us down and take the recon role this time. Keep an eye on me and be ready to shoot anything that doesn’t look right.”
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