Skye Object 3270a

by Linda Nagata

  “We’ll tap on the floor,” Devi said. “That’ll wake Ord up. It’s smart enough not to show itself if anyone’s around. Right, Skye?”

  Ord was only a DI. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Try it,” Zia said. “No choice.”

  So Devi knocked at the bottom of the container with his booted heel. They waited. Skye tensed, as she heard a scuttling sound, climbing the outside wall of the container. “Listen! Ord’s coming.”

  They waited a full minute, but they heard nothing else.

  “Maybe it sighted someone,” Zia whispered.

  So they sat quietly for most of an hour. In all that time they heard nothing, so finally Devi knocked again on the bottom of the container. They heard the scuttling again, but this time it came from the top of the box, near the locks.

  “Ord’s out there,” Devi said. “Skye, can you rap the wall on that side?”

  She was sitting beneath the locks, on the side of the container that would open first “I’ll try.”

  Forcing a hand up, she pushed through the slippery lydras, trying to reach the top of the box. Her fingers had just touched the lid when a lydra tentacle snapped past her hand, shooting over her palm like a cool, wet, living rope. She yelped. “It moved! One of the lydras is awake.”

  “It can’t be awake,” Zia said. “It was probably just a reflex.” Yet she sounded unsure.

  “Zeme twice,” Skye whispered. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might choke on it. She reached again for the top of the box. Making a fist, she pounded on it, lightly at first, then a little harder.

  “That’s enough,” Devi said. “If Ord’s there, it’ll know we want out. It’ll let us out, if things look safe.”

  They were silent for several seconds. Then Buyu said, quite calmly, “I can feel a lydra moving against my chest.”

  Skye let out a little scream. She couldn’t help herself. Quickly, she closed her eyes and counted to ten, struggling against panic.

  Through her skin suit she felt a tentacle wriggle under her armpit. Another coiled around her ankle. The skin suit was very sensitive. It was designed to reproduce sensation. She could feel the tentacle’s tiny pincers plucking at her leg. “Something’s going very wrong,” she whispered.

  “Sooth,” Zia said. “I think it’s our body heat. It must be wiping out the effect of the hibernation drug. Let’s get out of here now.” She clicked off her radio system, then raised her voice in a shout that Skye could hear easily, even through the hood of her skin suit. “Ord! Key the locks right now, or I am going to melt you when I do get out of here!”

  The tantalizing scuttling started up once again. Then to Skye’s heartfelt relief, she heard the locks click open overhead.

  She waited, but the lid did not slide back. “Ord?” she whispered, forgetting for a moment that Ord could not hear her.

  “What’s going on out there?” Devi demanded. He grunted, and the container rocked a little.

  “Are you trying to push the lid open?” Skye asked.

  “Sooth.”

  She resolved to help him. Reaching for the lid, she forced both her hands past the lydras—until a flash of searing heat across one palm made her cry out. She yanked both hands back against her sides, breathing hard. Her skin suit felt hot. The seared glove was stiff. She could hardly bend that hand.

  “Don’t panic,” Zia said.

  “I’m not panicking! But something’s going on here. My skin suit’s heating up. It’s not flexing.”

  “The lydras are trying to dissolve our suits,” Devi said. “It’s what they do—process raw material into something useful.”

  “I don’t think I like your definition of raw material. Can they get through the suits?”

  Devi didn’t answer. Skye decided that was as good as a yes. Ignoring the stiffness in her palm (it was spreading to her arms), she reached overhead again and found the lid. It was designed to slide open. She ran her hands across it, feeling for some bump or ridge that she could grip, but the surface was absolutely smooth. Reaching back over her head, she found the seam where the lid met the side of the box, but it was a perfect fit. There was no way to get her fingers around the edge. “Devi—”

  “I know, I know. I can’t get a grip either.”

  “Then what are we—” She caught herself. “We are dumb ados,” she growled. “The gloves of our skin suits are hot zones, remember? Zia, they bond to the elevator column when we swing in from our jumps. Why can’t they bond to the lid of this cargo box?”

  “Skye,” Devi said, “you are a genius.” He whispered to his DI. She whispered to hers, but the news was bad. “My gloves are disabled. The lydras have done something to them—”

  “Mine are working,” Zia said.

  “Mine too,” Buyu added. “I wish I was at the front of this box though. The lid’s going to slide away on this side, and I’ll have to readjust my grip. But let’s try it. Devi, you ready? On three. One, two, three.”

  Skye felt the lid snap back a fraction of a millimeter, but that was all. The radio spat out a chorus of groans and curses.

  Why wasn’t the lid sliding open? It had opened so easily when they were in the warehouse.

  A horrible, scraping noise erupted overhead. A knife of colorful light plunged into her eyes. She ducked her head, blinking hard. Then she looked again.

  Between the packed lydra bodies a crack of light streamed into the box. “It’s opening!” she shouted. Then she shoved the wriggling lydras aside so she could see better. To her disappointment, the gap was only a centimeter wide. “Well, it’s opening a little.”

  The outside light was amber. As she reached for the crack, Ord’s tentacle—stretched to the thinness of a noodle—wriggled into sight. Skye smiled, imagining the worried mutters of the little robot. Skye is stuck. This is not fun …

  Time to get unstuck then. She shoved her fingers into the gap and pushed. The scraping sound grew louder as the lid moved, first two centimeters, then three. Then five. Then ten. But the line of amber light did not widen at all. “Stop!” Skye yelped. “Stop, stop. Something’s wrong. Something’s out there.”

  She could feel a new bloom of heat at her knee. She thrashed, trying to get away from the lydra that wanted to dissolve her. Tentacles were wriggling on all sides now. Her glove had hardened into a cast. The elbow of her skin suit was going stiff too. She jammed her fist through the gap anyway, while Zia demanded, “What? What is it?”

  “Something’s been stacked on the lid.” She pushed against it, as Ord’s tentacle wrapped affectionately around her wrist. “Gutter dogs. It’s really heavy.”

  Zia groaned. “Another container! Zeme dust! They’ve stacked the containers, and now we’re trapped in here.”

  “No,” Devi said. “It’s not that bad. Buyu! Get over to this side of the box if you can.”

  Skye felt herself bounced around as Buyu and Devi stirred waves in the massed lydras. Buyu bashed into her, driving her up against the container’s wall. She grunted and wriggled out of the way, only to run into Devi on her other side.

  “Okay, Dev,” Buyu said. “I’m in place, but there’s no way we can lift this much weight.”

  “It’s not that much weight anymore,” Devi said. “Think about it. We’re four hours out of Silk. That means we’re twenty nine hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet.”

  “So?”

  “Gravity is caused by the planet’s mass, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “The force of gravity drops rapidly the farther we get from its source. When we were on the planet, didn’t you feel a little heavier than in the city?”

  “I thought that was just the humidity.”

  “It wasn’t. And this far from the planet, the pull of gravity might be only half what it is in Silk. We might not be able to move a loaded container in Silk, but I bet we could handle it here, where it weighs only half as much.”

  “Do it quick,” Skye pleaded. “My skin suit’s freezing up.”<
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  “Okay,” Buyu said. “Ready? On three. One, two, three—!”

  Devi roared. Buyu groaned. Skye laid her own stiff hands against the container that imprisoned them and strained, while waking lydras wriggled out from under her feet.

  The massive container began to move. Skye felt it rise slowly, slowly up. Five centimeters. Ten. Amber light blazed through the widening gap while sweat popped out all across her skin. She could feel Buyu beside her, his huge muscles trembling. She pushed harder, and suddenly something snapped. She heard it as a metal twang.

  The reluctant container started to slide. Devi roared again. Buyu howled. His huge arms surged over Skye’s head, tipping the imprisoning container up, up out of her reach. Skye wriggled past the partly opened lid of their own box. She had to slip out of her pack to do it, hauling it out behind her by its strap. She emerged in time to see the defeated cargo container begin a graceful plunge. It slid over the side of their container, falling as if in slow motion. It seemed to take a long time to reach the floor, but when it did, it hit with a horrible crash.

  Suddenly, lydras were bouncing everywhere. “Oh no!” Skye screamed. “The lid must have broken!”

  She shrugged her pack back on, then heaved herself onto the rim of their container. She balanced on top of it, one foot on the rim, one on the lid while she took in their surroundings.

  They were in a huge warehouse, fully the size of one floor of the elevator car. Narrow aisles divided stacks upon stacks of containers of all shapes and sizes. Their own cargo container had been placed alongside an aisle. Skye gazed down three meters to the floor. The fallen container blocked the walkway. The concussion had cracked it open, sending hundreds of lydras careening into the air—blue ones, red ones, green and orange—flying wildly in the low gravity, crashing into the ceiling, and into other containers, before finally falling back down. Skye ducked, to avoid being hit by a circle of plummeting tentacles. Below her, the aisle writhed with lydras that had crawled or spilled from the overturned box.

  It took only that quick glance to realize just how lucky they were.

  Their container was in the middle of what had been a stack of three. If they had been on the bottom of the stack, they never would have been able to push two cargo containers over. If they had been placed anywhere but along an aisle, they never would have gotten the top container to tip. So they would have been stuck with the waking lydras for three days. It made her stomach clench, to think about it.

  “Watch it, Skye,” Buyu warned. “I can’t fit through this crack.”

  He didn’t give her any time to respond. He just shoved the lid open.

  “Hey!” Skye yelped as she lost her footing. She teetered for a second on the edge of the cargo container. Then she felt herself falling. “Buyuu!” she howled, as she plunged back into the box from which she had just escaped.

  Chapter 18

  “Come on, Skye,” Buyu complained as he stood on the rim of the box looking down at her. “Stop fooling around.”

  Fooling around?

  Skye’s gloves were so stiff she could not bend her fingers. She was covered in wriggling tentacles, her skin suit felt like it was on fire, she couldn’t reach anything solid with either hands or feet, and Buyu was accusing her of fooling around?

  “Help me get out of here!” she screamed at him. “Buyu! Or you are a dead man.”

  Someone caught the half-curled fingers of her rigid hand. She twisted around and saw that it was Devi. He had a wicked gleam in his eyes as he hauled her across the writhing lydras. “That was a beautiful dive, Skye! Wish I’d caught it on record. Have you ever thought about working with lydras professionally … ?”

  She glared at him, silently vowing to get even. It didn’t take long. As she reached the rim of the cargo container, she kicked the last of the clinging tentacles away. Then she hooked her stiff fingers around the rim and launched herself headfirst out of the box, driving her shoulder into Devi’s gut as she did it.

  Devi was so surprised that he was still holding her hand as they flopped together over the side.

  Too late, Skye remembered it was a full three meter plunge to the floor. She got her forearms in front of her to take the brunt of the fall. At least the gravity was half normal! So she didn’t hit as hard as she would have in Silk, but it was hard enough. The air was knocked out of her lungs, so it took her a few seconds to realize she had landed on a writhing cushion of lydras. After that she was on her feet in an instant, scurrying back up the stack of containers to get away from the beasts while Devi lay on the floor laughing uproariously.

  Skye ignored him. She had a new worry. Among all the tentacles, she did not see any slender gold ones. What had happened to Ord?

  “Unseal my hood!” she shouted at her suit’s DI. The hood unfurled. She looked wildly around. “Ord? Ord where are you?”

  “You dumb ados!” Zia shouted, glaring at them from atop the stack of containers. “Stop fooling around and get out of sight! That crash must have been heard through the whole elevator car. The crew is going to be checking out everything through the security cameras. Buyu, help me get this container closed. Hurry!”

  Hurry? Skye had a sudden hollow feeling in her chest. It was over, wasn’t it? “Zia, when they see this mess, they’ll know we’re here.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Zia snapped. Working together, she and Buyu slammed shut the container’s lid. Buyu punched the locks. “Maybe they’ll think the containers were stacked wrong,” Zia said. “Now hide.”

  “I have to find Ord. Ord!”

  At last she heard its whispery voice from across the aisle: “Skye, this is not fun.”

  “Ord.” As she watched, it emerged from a narrow gap between two shipping containers. At first she could only see its head. Then a delicate tentacle slipped into sight. Skye held out a hand. “Swing over here. I’ll catch you.”

  The tentacle stretched across the aisle to wrap around Skye’s wrist. As Ord oozed out of the crack its body was as flat as a sheet of heavy gold cloth. It started to regain its shape as it swung over the gap, but it still looked partly crushed as Skye boosted it to her shoulder.

  “Now hide!” Zia commanded.

  Devi had climbed back up. So together they scurried over the closely packed cargo containers, dropping one by one into holes or gaps between the boxes. Skye was the last to find a hiding place. She jumped down into another aisle, then squirmed feet first into the gap beneath an angled container.

  “Go home now, Skye?” Ord whispered.

  “Shh! Don’t talk.”

  It was quite likely they had already been seen through a security camera.

  Maybe not, though.

  She lay in silence, listening to the squirm and thump of the lydras loose in the next aisle. It sounded as if they were climbing the crates, only to fall back with wet thumps.

  Time crawled past. She counted her breaths, but got bored before she reached fifty. She decided to take a look at her glove. Her palm was encrusted with a layer of smooth, white pseudoceramic, like the stuff most of the containers were made of. The lydras must have excreted it, obeying some programmed construction instinct. She picked at the layer, and it flaked off, bit by bit. Her skin suit was discolored beneath it, but the suit was self-repairing. Given a few minutes, it should be able to fix itself, just as her own body could quickly heal an injury.

  The sound of footsteps shattered these idle thoughts. She held her breath, listening. The footsteps came from the other side of the warehouse. A woman said something Skye could not understand. Another woman spoke more clearly, “Zeme dust. What a mess!”

  In a deep voice, a man demanded to know, “How could this happen? The containers were strapped together.”

  The first woman answered, “If the load’s unbalanced, it will fall. Damn! We’ll have to run some checks on the cargo handler that stacked this shipment. The program may be decaying.”

  Skye listened to them talk, relieved to hear them blame the loading equipment for the
accident. Not once did anyone suggest a trespasser might be aboard the elevator car. And after all, why should they suspect such a thing? People in Silk did not sneak aboard restricted elevator cars, or take off to investigate the forbidden communion mounds. Of course Skye wasn’t really from Silk. What had Yulyssa said? Strangers bring new ways, and new challenges.

  The chatter went on for most of an hour as the elevator crew sprayed the escaped lydras with more of the chemical solution that sent them into dormancy. Then they gathered them up and repacked them. Jammed into her little hidey-hole, Skye was stiff and cramped by the time the voices retreated to the far end of the warehouse, and faded away.

  She waited ten more minutes. Then she crawled out and stretched, working some blood back into her limbs. Ord crept out behind her. “Not a good house for you,” it observed.

  Skye nodded somberly. “I agree.”

  She climbed the stacks, to find Devi and Zia emerging from separate holes. Buyu appeared a moment later. “Hi,” Skye said. Then she added brightly, “What now?”

  Buyu slipped his pack off. “That’s obvious. We eat.”

  It was a suggestion that appealed to everyone. They dropped into an aisle to make it harder for security cameras to pick them up. Then they ate a quick meal of ready bars, while crouched against the cargo containers.

  As usual, Devi was full of ideas. “I’ve been thinking. We planned to stay in the elevator all the way to the end of the cable, but what if we’re seen by a camera? We’ll be safer if we go outside.”

  Skye glanced at Zia, then at Buyu. They both looked as confused as she felt.

  “Outside?” Buyu asked. “We’re not halfway to the top yet.”

  “Sooth. But we can ride up on the outside of the elevator car as easily as we can on the inside. There might be cameras outside, but nobody’s going to check them.” He looked around expectantly, but no one said a word. Devi frowned. “What’s wrong? We’ve all got skin suits.” He tapped his backpack. “We’ve all got nutrient packs to keep our suits supplied.”