by Linda Nagata
It was a few days later and she was dressed again in her electric blue skin suit. She carried a pack on her back, stocked with a few pieces of equipment, and a generous supply of liquid nutrients—enough to fuel both herself and her skin suit for the next few days. She stood on a narrow transit platform deep inside the industrial levels of the inner city. It was an ugly place, hemmed in by gray walls and a low roof. Wide double doors bore the legend “Adovna Lydra House - Entrance by Permission Only.” Ord nervously patted her cheek.
Skye had told Yulyssa she was going to make an evening jump, and then spend the night with Zia. Zia had told her dad she was going to spend the night with Skye.
“Oldest trick in the book,” Devi groaned when he heard about it. “Couldn’t you be more original?” Easy for him to say. He was living on his own in Ado Town and didn’t need to make excuses to anybody.
Buyu had put on a superior look. “I moved out too. Of course, it’s the third time I’ve gotten my own place, so nobody’s too worried about it. My dad says I’ll give up and come home again in a few days.”
They had all laughed as they crammed together in a single transit car, but their mood had turned serious when the transit car’s DI asked them their destination. “Adovna Lydra House,” Zia had said stiffly.
“Adovna Lydra House is a restricted area,” the car replied in a softly troubled feminine voice.
“We have a pass.” From a pocket of her gold skin suit Zia produced a key card she had borrowed from her dad three days before. She had used it to take them on a tour of the lydra house, and then had held on to the key instead of returning it. Her dad asked about it once, but a shipment was going out, and he had a lot on his mind.
Zia slipped the key card into a slot on the transit car’s console.
Skye stared at her gloved hand: it was shaking. “You okay, Zia?”
“Sure.”
The key card was good for five days.
“Your entry is approved,” the car said warmly as it pulled away from the transit station, accelerating smoothly along its track. “We will arrive at Adovna Lydra House in four point two minutes.”
The journey had seemed faster than that. Now they stood on the industrial station fronting the lydra house, watching the car slip smoothly away through the gel membrane that sealed off the airless transit tunnel.
Skye looked around at her friends, determined to try one last time to persuade them to rethink what they were doing. “We don’t all need to go,” she insisted. “In fact it’s silly. If this plan works, then I’m the only one who really needs to reach the lifeboat.”
“Sure,” Zia said. “But you could get into trouble along the way.”
“You could need help working through a problem,” Devi added.
Buyu started striding toward the double doors, his pack swaying on his back. “Face it, Skye,” he called over his shoulder. “We’ll get in just as much trouble for knowing about this little adventure as we will for going along—so we might as well go along, right? We planned it that way.”
“You’re all crazy!” Skye told them—not for the first time. Then she smiled. “But I’m glad you’re with me. Okay. Let’s go.”
It was early evening, though there was no way to tell that in the windowless passages of the industrial levels. The farmers who worked in the lydra house had gone home hours ago, including Zia’s dad.
Now Zia used her key card to open the doors. A gush of cold air washed over them. At first, the interior looked absolutely dark. Skye was surprised. When they’d visited before, the lights had been dim, but it had been easy enough to see. She shuffled in behind Zia, holding onto her shoulder. The doors closed behind them, and for a moment she could see nothing. It reminded her of the lava tube. She listened to the trickle of circulating water. A pungent scent lay thick upon the air.
Ord hissed in her ear. “Nasty things here, Skye. Bad news. Go home?”
“Not yet,” she said, stroking the tentacle that coiled around her arm.
Zia said, “The lights go down after the farmers leave, but it’s not completely dark.”
Indeed. As Skye’s eyes adjusted, she could make out cold points of light overhead, like a projection of the thin starfield visible from Silk. The false starlight glittered faintly against the surface of a rectangular pool nearly as big as a soccer field. Water trickled into it at several points around its edge. This was lydra pond number 1. Something slapped the surface of the water, and Skye jumped.
“Whatever you do,” Zia said, “don’t fall in the water.”
As her dad had put it, lydras were construction beasts, and they were always looking for something to do.
Zia took the lead. The others followed her single file around the edge of the pool. It felt like a long way. Twice Skye tripped over something that slithered away from her foot. “Zia, I thought lydras were supposed to stay in the water?”
“And we’re supposed to stay in Ado Town,” Zia said.
“You mean they can crawl out?”
“Only the little ones. The big ones weigh too much. They need the buoyancy of the water to hold them up. That’s why they’re raised in ponds.”
Lydras in the Adovna ponds ranged in size from seed stock only a few cells in size, to juvenile specimens two meters across. Earlier today, the juveniles in pond 1 had all been harvested. They’d been sprayed with a chemical solution that sent them into a state of hibernation, and then they’d been packed inside shipping containers. In just over an hour the containers were scheduled to be loaded aboard the next elevator bound for the top of the column.
As they rounded the far end of the pond, Skye made out the shapes of the white shipping containers, lined up in a row beside a warehouse door that would open onto a cargo bay.
Zia reached the first container: a box as tall as her chest and three meters long. She touched the locks on its upper surface. They opened with a smooth click. Skye and Devi crowded in close beside her as the lid slid back.
At first Skye could see nothing. Then Buyu produced a flashlight. The beam fell on a mass of wet tentacles, glistening in a spectrum of colors from red to blue to green and purple. Skye felt her stomach squeeze tight. Ord hissed again and crept around behind her neck.
“Last chance to turn back,” Devi said in a low voice.
Zia giggled. “We’ll be okay. Really. Because they’re dormant. Look.” With her gloved hands she picked up a pink lydra from the top of the heap. It was a bundle of tentacles arranged around a disc-shaped body, with small eyestalks sprouting between the limbs. Zia lifted one tentacle after another, then let it fall. The lydra did not respond. “They’ll stay dormant until they’re hosed down, or until the chemical wash evaporates in hard vacuum. So we’ll be fine. Now let’s make some room in this box before the cargo handlers get here.”
The plan was to dump some of the lydras back into the pond so that the four of them could fit inside the shipping container. Skye wished they could dump all the lydras, but the weight had to be right. They could take out only enough animals to balance their own mass.
She slipped her gloved hands into the box. Ord shivered. “Bad job, Skye.”
She couldn’t argue.
Lydras looked as if they ought to be soft and squishy like Ord, so when Skye touched them, she was surprised to discover they were not. “Hey, they feel hard.”
“That’s because they’re engineered to live in space,” Devi said.
She picked up a green lydra with tentacles the length of her forearm, and held it in the thin beam of Buyu’s flashlight. Peering closely, she could see that its body was armored in thousands of tiny scales. When she ran a hand along one of the tentacles, it felt as if it were encased in a shell, and yet it bent easily. Her skin suit was designed the same way.
It made sense. The pressure of vacuum would destroy the body of any ordinary animal, but the lydra’s scales acted like the hard walls of a space ship, maintaining air pressure inside their bodies. When the lydra needed to move, the scales
slid smoothly past each other, allowing the tentacles to bend. “It feels nice,” Skye said. Like a toy that could be set in any posture.
Zia had disappeared into an equipment alcove. Now she returned, pushing a bin set on wheels. “Fill this up,” she ordered. “It’ll give us the weight of the lydras, then we can dump them in the pond.”
They worked quickly, moving the hibernating lydras from the huge shipping container into the smaller bin. Most had tentacles less than a meter long, but Skye discovered an orange-colored specimen with tentacles almost twice that length, each one as thick as her lower leg. She and Zia worked together to lift it, but it was too heavy. Zia frowned. “I wonder how one this large was overlooked in the last shipment?” Buyu came over to help but Zia shook her head. “Leave it. It’s so big, that it’s probably started to feed on the smaller lydras. If it doesn’t get shipped out tonight, it could cause a lot of problems in the juvenile pond.”
Skye frowned at the orange lydra. She wasn’t eager to share the cargo container with such a monster. Zia saw the look on her face and grinned. “Stop worrying! It’s sedated.”
“Worry?” Skye said. “Me?” She shoved an orange tentacle back over the rim of the box. It hit with a wet slap against the tangle of dormant lydras. “Doubt never enters my mind.”
“Oh sooth. I believe you.”
When the bin was loaded, they noted the weight, then wheeled it to the edge of the pond. Zia ordered the bin to tip. Illuminated in the flashlight beam, the lydras splashed into the water. For several seconds they sank, drifting helplessly toward the shadowed bottom. But just before they passed out of sight, Skye saw a few of them stir. Tentacles snapped, and several young lydras shot off into darkness. “It didn’t take them long to wake up,” she said softly.
Zia threw a companionable arm around her shoulder. “Hey ado, we could ask city authority for permission.”
Skye grimaced. “That’s all right.”
“I thought you’d feel that way.” She ordered the bin back to its storage room. “Okay. It’s time for the next step: Load the humans.”
Skye felt her stomach knot. Jumping off the elevator column was exciting. Getting chased by a viperlion was exciting. Testifying in front of the city council was exciting. But climbing into a box full of tentacled carnivores … that was crazy.
Zia went first. Then Buyu. They nestled down among the dormant lydras, grinning like it was fun or something. “Aren’t you going to put your hoods up?” Skye asked.
Zia shrugged. “Think we should?” She smiled as her hood rolled up over her head and across her face. Buyu also sealed his suit.
Devi turned to Skye. “You okay?”
“Sure.”
He touched her face with his gloved hand and smiled. Then his own hood rolled up and sealed. He climbed into the container.
Skye reached up to stroke Ord. “Remember what to do?”
“Yes good Skye,” the little robot whispered. “Seal the container.”
“Then?”
“Slide like spit down the side” —Skye grimaced as Ord echoed exactly Zia’s stern instructions— “then crawl under the container. Spread thin and stick like gold mold to the container’s underside. No motion and no noise allowed!”
“Okay,” Skye said. She lifted Ord from her shoulder, and set it on the ground. “One more piece of advice: Watch out for crawling lydras.”
She shrugged her hood on. Then she reached around to the bottom of her backpack, checking for the tube that carried liquid nutrients to her suit. It was firmly in place, in a socket above her hip. So she climbed the container, leaving Ord squatting on the floor, its head rotating from side to side as it searched the dark for crawling monsters.
For several seconds, Skye crouched on the container’s rim, gathering her nerve. Devi, Zia, and Buyu had wriggled down into the mass of lydra bodies. They were buried to their chins, and the box appeared nearly full again. Just room enough for me.
Too bad.
Skye let her feet slide in first. She forced her legs down between the stiff, slippery tentacles. Then she lowered her torso, wriggling hard to slip her pack past the dormant lydras, trying not to think about where she was or what she was doing.
Through the visor of his hood she saw Devi’s eyes, watching her. She suspected he was grinning. She wanted to say something nasty but her throat was too dry. So she ignored him, working her way down among the slick tentacles until she’d buried herself to her hooded chin.
Ord had climbed onto the rim of the box. Skye saw its slim, graceful tentacles reach for the switch that would close the cover. Zia’s voice arrived over the skin suit’s radio system. “Okay ados. This is it. All the way under so Ord can close up.”
Buyu chuckled. “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.” Then he wriggled back and forth until he disappeared beneath the lydras. Zia and Devi copied him, vanishing in turn. Skye waited until Ord triggered the closing switch. Then she jiggled and thrashed, driving herself under the surface as the cover slid shut, cutting off the faint, false starlight of the ceiling.
For a moment, she could see nothing. Then she noticed a dim, jewel-like glow in many colors, bleeding through the packed lydra bodies. “Buyu, is your flashlight on?”
“Can you see it?”
“I can see lots of colors.”
“Everybody okay?” Zia asked.
“Sooth.”
“Sooth.”
Skye added her own reluctant agreement. “Should have brought a patch to make me sleep.”
They laughed, then Zia said softly, “We should be quiet now. It won’t be long before the cargo handlers arrive.”
So Skye tried to relax … as if that were possible, packed into a container full of sleeping monsters. In the faint gleam of Buyu’s light she thought she saw one of the tentacles twitch. She stared at it a long time, waiting to see if it would move again.
Chapter 17
The elevator car shot upward along its track at 650 kilometers per hour … but the elevator column was more than 38,000 kilometers long. The journey to the top would last two and a half days.
Skye thought about this as lydras pressed against her on every side. She listened for the cargo handlers, hoping the robotic machines would come soon to load the container aboard the elevator car.
The plan was to spend only a few hours boxed in with the lydras. Once the container was loaded and the elevator car underway, Ord would release them. After that it would be a matter of staying out of sight. That shouldn’t be too hard. According to Zia’s dad, only five to ten human technicians would be aboard the elevator car. And since the car was the size of a small building, there would be plenty of places to hide.
They would have an easy time of it too, because security in Silk was never tight. Usually, it didn’t need to be … though Skye could see how that might soon change. She felt badly about it.
But this isn’t about me!
What they were doing didn’t feel truly right. Still, it was the best choice she could see. Skye had to follow her conscience. If there were other children from her great ship—and she could not doubt there were … maybe she even had brothers and sisters somewhere?—she owed them her best effort. The laws of Silk did not have the moral authority to make her turn away.
A sudden loud thunk! against the side of the container brought her back to the present. She heard a faint mechanical whir, then the box shook. At last! The robotic cargo handlers had begun to move the lydra crates.
Inside the box, everyone (and everything) stayed very quiet. Skye strained her ears, trying to guess what was happening outside, but few noises could get past the triple barrier of her hood, the lydra bodies, and the wall of the cargo container. So it surprised her when the box was set down with a clunk. Were they on the elevator car already? It must be, yet the brief journey from the lydra farm had been so smooth she’d hardly been aware of it.
A louder clunk resounded through the container as something pounded down against the top. Skye cringed,
listening to the walls creak and groan. She half-expected the box to shatter, but nothing happened.
After that she heard only a few distant thuds, followed by a blind silence. She thought about Ord, melted against the bottom of the container. She hoped it was all right … and not just because she was fond of the little robot. There would be no way out of this box if Ord could not trigger the locks.
It should have been impossible to sleep surrounded by lydras, yet sometime later Skye stirred, realizing she’d been dreaming. Now her eyes opened on perfect darkness. She could feel the pressure of lydras all around her and her heart raced. “Time?” she whispered to the DI that controlled her skin suit.
The answer wrote itself across her visor in glowing letters. Four hours had passed since they’d climbed into the lydra box. So the elevator must be underway, rushing along its tracks at 650 kilometers per hour as it left Silk and Deception Well behind.
Was anyone else awake? She activated her suit’s radio, engaging a low power, private link to the others. “Hey, ados.” At first she whispered, but then she said it again in a louder voice. “Hey! Ados.”
“Skye?” That was Zia’s voice, sounding a little confused.
“Sooth, it’s me. Think it’s too early to get out of here?”
“Wha’ time … ? Oh.”
“It’s probably okay,” Devi said, sounding fully awake, and annoyingly alert. “Either this storage room is empty, or it’s never going to be empty. The only way to know is to look.”
“We could radio Ord,” Buyu said. “Let the little ‘bot take a look for us.”
Skye felt stunned at this excellent suggestion. A moment later she started to giggle. “I … I don’t think so.”
“Why?” Buyu demanded.
She knew she was being rude. She tried to stop laughing, but the situation was so ridiculous. She struggled to choke out an answer anyway. “It’s just … I just realized … Buyu, I’ve never called Ord before, and I … I don’t have any idea how to do it.”
“Gutter dogs.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ve called Ord,” Zia said quietly, “but I always went through city library. We can’t do that here.”