by Linda Nagata
He took a deep breath, and his kisheer spread smoothly out across his shoulders. “This is Summer House Corporate Citizen Nikko Jiang-Tibayan,” he said, “back on line.”
(2)
Phousita awoke in darkness interrupted by a thin, vertical wire of muted sunlight. She was upright, cradled and supported by a smooth, solid cocoon precisely fitted to her body. She wriggled her shoulders a little. The wire of light widened. She tasted the air and discovered the heady scents of jungle and natural decay. She called to Sandor over her atrium, once, then again. On the second try he responded, his voice groggy. “Wha—? ’Sita, y’all right?”
“All right,” she reassured him. The strip of sunlight was definitely getting wider. She could get her fingers through the crack now. From far away came the chortling of an unknown bird. Quickly she concocted spells and blew them through the crack (now wide enough to admit her arm) hoping she might learn something of the bird’s nature.
As the gap widened, she forced her shoulder through, then her head. After that the rest of her body slipped out easily, like a baby spilling from a birth canal.
At the touch of sunlight against her face, she burst out laughing. Then she turned to hug the tree that had produced her, this great and ancient machine. For perhaps two hundred years it had given birth only to seeds of itself. Then a tiny meteorite had come to ground here, after evading the watchful eyes of the police. Inside the meteorite, biogenic Makers had carried her quiescent pattern.
The Makers had changed the tree’s biological programming, causing it to produce a new body for her in only three years from the energy collected in its living solar panels. In admiration she turned her eyes upward to gaze into its canopy, then stepped back, aghast. Sunlight burned against her face.
The tree’s canopy had withered. It was a skeleton, worn out, exhausted by the effort of her creation. She was its last fruit. All around her, seedlings of the rainforest sprouted in the sudden glut of light.
Somber now, Phousita called to Sandor once again, and after a few hours of wandering about the forest preserve, they found each other. He’d engineered a dark brown complexion for this latest incarnation. Protection from the sun, he told her. His hair was still blond, his eyes blue. They kissed and made love and Phousita was glad she’d designed herself to be of moderate height.
“We’ll go down to the village tonight,” she said, as twilight fell across the forest. She’d scented the settlement earlier that day. It was over a ridge and down a long slope, very near to the edge of the forest preserve. At the boundary they’d have to pass through a cloud of toxic Makers maintained by the Commonwealth to protect the preserve from humans and human machines. But they were up to it.
“We’ll force no one,” Sandor said.
“Of course.”
They arrived at the village just after midnight, when the moon was full. Dogs ran out and barked at them. Phousita calmed them with a touch. Worried faces peered out past the torn straw mats that served as doors in the moldy plastic shacks. Sandor beckoned to them. He used no spells, but nevertheless they came. Women and children and men, speaking in a dialect Phousita had never heard before. She gave them her thoughts and they listened. She offered them her sight, and ultimately, they accepted. Their poverty made them brave.
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Enjoy These Sample Chapters of
Deception Well
Book 2 of The Nanotech Succession
by Linda Nagata
Over two millennia have passed since the events in “The Bohr Maker," Book 1 of The Nanotech Succession. Advancing technology has allowed human civilization to expand across star systems, establishing settlements divided from one another by vast gulfs of space and time. But humanity was not the first species to travel between the stars. All along the frontier, human settlements are under attack by the ancient and deadly robotic warships of a mysterious alien race known as the Chenzeme.
In Book 2, Deception Well, Lot is a young man haunted by the past. As a boy he came with his father’s fanatic army to the sky city of Silk, perched on the column of a space elevator 200 miles above the planet known as Deception Well. Battle ensued, thousands were killed, and Lot’s father disappeared, while Lot was made a ward—or a prisoner—of the Silken government. Now he wants the truth. The people of Silk claim the wild, unsettled world of Deception Well is a deadly stew of runaway nanotech, the fallout of an ancient, alien war. But Lot’s father once visited the planet’s lush surface and survived. Jupiter Apolinario was a charismatic leader who preached that the Well offered life, not death. He promised his disciples they would find refuge and an ecstatic communion when they followed him to the planet’s surface.
Lot isn’t so sure—and then human “ghosts” are videoed, walking within the ruins of a long-abandoned settlement at the foot of the elevator column. Is it a trick? Or is it redemption? Lot is determined to find out. But he is a charismatic too, with a seductive presence. As the city’s resources run low, conflict ignites around him, and when Silk is rocked by revolt Lot is forced to flee. His only refuge: the haunted world of Deception Well, where he will discover a past deeper than he’d ever imagined, and a razor-thin dividing line between bliss and damnation.
PART I
Chapter 1
Lot wriggled toward the open vent, his slender, eight-year-old body crushing a path through the brittle foam of rotting insulation that coated the interior of the air duct. A light breeze brought the dust forward, where it lingered in a cloud that beguiled his headlamp, getting into his eyes, his nose, his throat, and clinging to the moist, teardrop-shaped surfaces of the sensory glands that shimmered on his cheeks. He could feel a wet cough down in his lungs, itching, burning to get out. His shoulders shook as he fought with it. Captain Aceret had boosted him into the ventilation system with instructions to proceed with full stealth. He couldn’t let himself be discovered. Jupiter’s army was counting on him to get through.
He dropped his face against his arm just as the cough ripped out of his lungs.
And it wasn’t just one small cough. For a few seconds it felt like he was going to hack his lungs right out. The air duct shook. The organic fingers of his headlamp squeezed tighter against his brow. Streams of dust swirled off in the slow breeze. He imagined Silken troopers in the corridor below, listening to him, laughing at his distress. Tears started to run out of his eyes and he didn’t try to stop them.
Jupiter. He grasped at his father’s name in half-formed apology. Jupiter, I want to come to you. I do.
He felt his smallness then. He was nothing more than a tiny spark: flash, burn, die, in the black reaches of the void. It was the same for any of them. They were a border people. Half the troopers in Jupiter’s army had lost their first families to the mechanized assaults of the old murderers. Some had wanted to run away to the Hallowed Vasties. It was said that no weapons of the Chenzeme could wreck the human civilizations there. But the Vasties were achingly far: from their former home in the star cluster known as the Committee, it was over eighty light-years to the nearest cordoned sun. Anyway, Jupiter said they didn’t need the Vasties. He’d found sanctuary for them in the Well.
The coughing fit wound down. Lot listened for any untoward sound from the corridor below, but there was nothing. Maybe he’d gotten lucky . . . if luck was the proper word for it. Every step forward was a s
tep closer to the deadly world of Deception Well. He tried not to think about that as he wriggled toward the vent. He believed in Jupiter Apolinario. Jupiter had survived the Well. He’d found in it the hidden world of the Communion, where self and other might be forever joined into a singular state of nirvana, alien/human/alien, blended in a living matrix that had existed for at least thirty million years, unsullied by the evil of the Chenzeme. Jupiter said they could be part of it too, if they trusted him, believed in him.
I do believe.
He swiped at the sticky droplets of his sensory tears, vainly trying to clear their clogged surfaces. He’d come into the city of Silk with Captain Aceret, as part of the advance mission. They’d arrived here aboard a shuttle under the pretense of friendship, never mentioning Jupiter’s name as the great ship Nesseleth settled into a distant orbit beyond the fifty-five-thousand mile limit of the space elevator that supported Silk. Captain Aceret had launched his commando raid to seize control of the elevator system, just as Nesseleth dropped her cargo slug containing the regular army: fourteen thousand troops, men, women and children, with Jupiter at their head. By the time the slug moored at the upper end of the elevator, Captain Aceret had secured lift control, and Jupiter’s army began to descend.
That should have been the end of it. Jupiter Apolinario had no interest in the city of Silk. It was only an inconvenience that Silk had been built on the elevator column, two hundred miles above the seething green equatorial forests of the Well. The army had no choice but to pass through the city. They would have preferred to go peacefully, dropping straight down through Silk’s unpopulated industrial core. But the Silkens wouldn’t allow it. They were scared of the Communion. They never went down the Well, and they were determined to stop Jupiter’s army from going down too. They’d cut the tracks where the elevator passed through the city, forcing the loaded cars to stop on the upper industrial levels; trapping the army in separate, sealed loading bays.
Captain Aceret couldn’t help them. His tiny force was pinned down inside lift control by the frantic efforts of Silken security. Only Lot had been able to slip out undetected, escaping moments before air locks in the duct system closed, sealing off lift control. There was no going back. But that was okay. Lot knew the moves. Jupiter had kept him in commando training since he was five. He knew how to pack his sense of self away in cold storage, fear and doubt chilled down to a static background hum. He hauled himself forward.
His lungs burned, but soft little coughs helped to ease the pressure. The vent that he’d struggled toward came into view through the swirling dust. He whispered to his headlamp to switch off. Then he peered down through the grating.
The corridor below was dark. Motion sensors controlled the lights, so that meant it was probably empty. Better, the sticky drops of his sensory tears didn’t detect any human presence. He lay still for a moment, concentrating on not getting scared. Then he ordered the headlamp back on. The beam pierced the dust, revealing a dead end to the air duct: a closed air lock just a few feet beyond the vent. It wouldn’t be long before oxygen ran out on the other side.
Reaching to his waist pack, Lot took out the pocket torch Captain Aceret had given him. It made a soft hiss when he turned it on, then spat loudly as the white flame cut the seam that sealed the grating. An acrid smoke made Lot’s eyes water and his lungs itch. Coughing softly, he moved the hot grate aside before it could self-repair.
He still didn’t hear any sounds, or detect any human sense from the corridor. Captain Aceret said the Silkens had only a few security troops. If any one segment of Jupiter’s army broke out, the Silkens would be quickly overwhelmed.
He touched his headlamp. “Hark, release,” he whispered to the Dull Intelligence that controlled the device. The organic fingers loosened their grip, and the lamp came away in his hand. He tucked it into a pocket, then grabbed the vent’s hot rim with his gloved hands and dropped to the floor, landing with practiced quiet.
Lights flashed on, revealing white walls tinged brown with mildew or perhaps with age. The smart fibers in his camouflage suit instantly shifted in color and reflectivity to mimic the dirty white walls. The camo paint on his face shifted too.
He could see for maybe a hundred yards in both directions, before the corridor curved out of sight. A heavy door was set against the inside curve. Jupiter would be waiting just beyond it, trapped in a loading bay along with a small section of his army.
The Silkens had disabled the electronic system that controlled the pressure door, and there were no manual overrides on the interior. The army had tried using assault Makers to dissolve the door and the surrounding walls, but the molecular-scale machines had inexplicably failed. So it was up to Lot to open the bay door by hand.
Captain Aceret had thoroughly drilled him. First thing, find the control pad. It was set high in the wall, and Lot had to stretch to reach it. He slapped the reset button, then turned to the manual lever.
The door had been designed to protect against accidental decompression; it wasn’t a security device. So long as the sensors registered equal pressure on both sides, it could be opened manually. In a minute, Jupiter would be free. The army would move out again, this time on foot, winding down through the spiral corridor of the city’s industrial core, down and down to the lower elevator terminus, for the final descent to Deception Well.
Lot hesitated. He kept thinking of the Communion as a gigantic slime creature wrapped around the surface of the planet, disguising itself with a hide of forests or oceans or deserts, but really, under the skin, it ate anybody who came close. Soon, it would eat them. Jupiter had said so. And it would change them. Lot wasn’t really clear on how. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.
I do believe.
Seizing the large handle, he shoved it down with both hands, then slammed it to the side. The satisfying thunk of a heavy steel mechanism inside the door rewarded his efforts. He waited a moment, then pushed again. The door slid on smooth tracks back into the wall.
Yet the entrance remained blocked. Lot found himself staring up at a barrier made of overlapping combat shields. The shields scintillated with a dark, distracting iridescence that was hard to focus on. Amid the slippery surface were hard knots: Lot started as he recognized the muzzles of grenade launchers protruding through sealed cuffs in the shields, and the glassy stare of video eyes.
“Wait!” he squeaked, and jumped back, pressing himself against the wall, so that his camouflage blended almost perfectly with the musty white.
“Corridor clear,” a gruff voice announced. There was a sharp crack! and the finger-sized body of a scout remote shot down the corridor, its wings beginning to vibrate with an angry buzz as it rounded the curve and disappeared. Another took off in the opposite direction.
The combat shields opened as a unit, turning sideways like baffles on an air vent, admitting a humid burst of tension into the corridor. Then troops in gray armor darted out the channels, their faces grim behind the clear visors of their helmets. The first unit carried incendiary grenade launchers. The second wave was armed with slender missile launchers, their buzz-winged ammunition—like the scout remotes—guided by an onboard Dull Intelligence. Half turned up the corridor, half turned down. Two more waves armed with bead rifles followed, and finally, a tactical unit, their helmets opaque as they operated on the data supplied by the layered realities evolving on their internal screens.
Then the combat shields fell back on either side of the opening. A patch of light from the corridor spilled a few yards into the loading bay. Beyond that, the bay was dark and silent, though Lot could scent the readiness of hundreds of huddled troops in the cavernous space. He’d started to straighten up, thinking he should report to somebody, when Jupiter Apolinario strode forward into the light.
Lot caught his breath, staring up in awe at his father’s tall, imposing figure. Like the advance troops, Jupiter wore gray body armor, but without the helmet. His long blond hair lay neatly across his shoulders, framing a st
ern though handsome face. High on his cheeks shimmered the silvery droplets of his own sensory tears. Only Jupiter and Lot had them; Lot wasn’t sure why.
Jupiter seemed more youthful than most of his officers, though Lot knew that was only appearance. He watched as Jupiter’s gaze searched the empty passage, lingering on the open ceiling vent. Captain Antigua and Captain Hu stepped up on either side of him. They conferred beneath the arch that divided the corridor from the loading bay.
“They’ve found us,” Captain Hu reported. “Resistance downhill at less than three hundred yards.”
The deep whump! of a grenade launcher slammed up the corridor, followed immediately by a flash of superheated air. There was a brief silence, swiftly broken by the harsh buzz of DI slugs peeling off after their targets.
Jupiter gazed in the direction of the firefight, as if he could see the action taking place around the bend. “Phase two,” he ordered softly. He fell back to the side of the passage. Captain Hu did the same. Lot had to scramble to get out of their way.
“Squads two through twelve!” Captain Antigua barked. “You have your assigned targets. Get those other loading bays open and get our troops out now.”
“And remember,” Jupiter added, the tone of his voice seeming soft, though it rose in volume over that of Captain Antigua, soothing and reverberant at once. “The main body of the army is depending on you: the children, the wives who are with child, the noncombat members of our family who rely on your arms and your alertness for their own survival. Remember them. Believe in them. Believe in me.”
That last word hung in the air for a moment, and then Captain Antigua stepped in again. “Go, go, go!” she shouted, and the troops hauled off like a river of stone, churning and raging as they deployed throughout the narrow passage.