“In the city or outside of it?”
“Inside.”
“By the Spiral or the power plant?”
Toran felt his attention focus and his heart speed up. Did she actually know something?
“Three kilometers southeast of the nuke,” he said.
Kali said nothing and turned away. He reached out to grab her wrist. She twisted free of his hand in one motion.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“Nothing. Did you see the body?”
“No—her parents identified it.”
“If it was in one piece, I didn’t have anything to do with it. The cannon on the Vertel is a twenty millimeter DU round. Talk to someone else.”
“Sniper?”
“Not ours. Only head-shots.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know!” Kali stopped suddenly and turned to face him again. “What do you want me to say? That I killed her? Then what? What are you going to do?”
He stared at her but didn’t have an answer.
“We need to be over that hill by dark,” she said, pointing ahead. “I don’t have time for this.”
He watched her go and started to breathe again. It would be too simple an answer—even if a terrible one—for Kali to know who killed Fadia or to be the one who did it. What were the chances? Stray rounds, shrapnel—there were a lot of ways for a civilian to get hit in the middle of a shooting war. Her death didn’t have to be meaningful; there didn’t have to be a reason that mattered. A piece of lead in the air—that was all it took. God cares about the laws of physics, and the good and the innocent aren’t immune.
Toran trudged slowly up the hill. The sun had fallen below the horizon and only the glow of the sky lit the ground ahead; he had to pick his way carefully.
He was prepared to believe Kali had nothing to do with Fadia’s death; at least not personally. But she was part of the force that started the war, and she was hiding something from him.
Dreams
Year 5314
Mission Time: Day Three, 05:30
Toran watched the autonomous bulldozer shovel bodies into the pit. They fell one after the other: A hunched old wife, her walking staff falling beside her. A young fighter—perhaps only a teenager—his scarf still wrapped around his face, his chest torn open by shrapnel and his hands missing. A child in a yellow sunshall, cut in two at the waist by a stray cannon round. A Vertel pilot in a green flight suit and survival jacket, her face hidden in a mass of black hair, the front of her uniform soaked in blood from a chest wound close to her heart. Young and old, Sentan and Northern, civilian and soldier, innocent and guilty—they were all shoveled into the same hole in the ground. Whatever their story or the manner of their death, they all ended here.
Toran stepped to the edge of the pit. Carved out by the auto-dozer at dawn, it measured twenty meters by fifty, and three meters deep. The bodies lay tumbled together—a few, lowered in by men at the west end, side-by-side in rows, but the rest piled on top of each other. The colorful robes and flowing skirts of Sentans mixed with the dark camouflage of Northern uniforms. The severed arms and legs of men and women mixed with the bloodied faces and shattered torsos of children.
God, it would take him years to sort out—to go through all those bones and put them back together, to find out what they said about what happened here. He didn’t have time for that; he couldn’t stay here. He had to find her.
Behind him rose the Spiral Hotel. It drove a corkscrew spike into the sky five times the height of the next tallest building in Bruno, dominating the sprawl of slums circling the town. Toran turned to look up at it. A dark haze, like the fumes from the chimney of a dirty Sentan power-plant, billowed into the air from the roof of the Spiral. They were burning bodies on top, cremating them in the empty swimming pool to save carrying them down two hundred flights of stairs to the pit.
What happened up there? But it didn’t matter—he didn’t have time. He had to find her.
A man stood to his left, one boot on the edge of the pit and his hands on his hips. The sleeves of a red and orange sunshall flowed from his arms in the wind, the cloth whipping around the Type-K rifle slung over his shoulder and down his back. There was a burning, five-spoked Wheel of Syncwar on the front of the man’s sunshall, and he held a tattered manifesto, hand-written on sheets of cellulose. Toran turned toward the man and saw the dark gray of Northern body armor underneath the Sentan robe.
Chon, he thought, Chon Dō. No one else wore both uniforms.
“Why did you take her?” Toran asked.
The man turned toward him; Toran couldn’t see his eyes, but he could see the profile of his beard and mouth. He could see the man’s teeth, once perfect, were now stained.
“Did I?” Chon asked, his Northern accent as clear as the Sentan handiwork in his robe. “You don’t know that. Did you ask them that question?”
Toran followed Chon’s gesture to the other side of the pit, to see three North Athenian soldiers standing at the edge. The first stared back with has arms crossed, the second chewed and spat to the side, and the third pulled the bolt of his assault rifle and let it snap forward.
Chon grinned. He swept his arms over the pit in a grand gesture.
“Find her yourself,” he said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?” He spun and strode for the Spiral, his robe glowing in the sunlight, the city burning around him.
Toran turned to the pit and stepped to its edge. He bent his knees, swung his arms, and leapt for the pile of corpses below.
He closed his eyes as he fell and opened them again in darkness. He struggled frantically against the black fabric around him, suffocating him, until a fastener popped open and his head stuck out into cold air. The sky was like concrete, and the wind tugged on his hair. He was lying on a flat surface on the top of a basalt ridge above a wide valley.
Keto. He remembered now and sighed. Every day for the rest of his life he would wake up and she would be gone; he needed to accept that.
He looked up to see Kali standing over him. Her jacket hung open over her flight suit and her hair was a tangled mess. She snorted derisively.
“You’re supposed to stick your head out and breathe,” she said. “It’s not a body bag.”
“I was cold.”
The dream was wrong, Toran thought. Civilian casualties and Chon’s fighters went into the pit near the Spiral, but the Northern dead were shipped home on the ekranoplanes. And the Northern Forces hadn’t dug the pit, Chon’s men had. The Provies’ first act of Syncwar after taking Haffay had been to execute every Northerner in Bruno—men, women, and children. The pit had been dug for them; the North only made it bigger.
Kali grinned. “I didn’t tell you about the heat? Pull the tab inside, break the ampule. But it’s for sub-zero—might roast your nuts.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
She dropped a black PPP sani-bag in front of him. “Get with the flight plan, Toran; you’re already behind the curve.” Sitting on her own sleeping bag, she pulled a meal packet out of her backpack.
The night before, just after sunset, Kali had ordered a halt here, on the ridge south of Spirit Valley, and they’d put down their sleeping bags. Using a flashlight, she’d made sure they weren’t too close to the drop-off into the nameless valley to the south. Now he could see it clearly from where he lay. Wider and shallower than the previous three, it ran inland like the gouge a shovel leaves in a pile of sand. To the east, it blended into the base of the mountain in a craggy network of tributaries. The dry river bed down its length was a puzzle of oxbows and gravel deposits; it would take a while with the map to trace its path to the sea through all those dead ends.
“‘Stone Valley,’” he said. “Write that in.” Naming things was the original privilege of exploring.
“I get the next one,” Kali replied.
“On the plateau on the north side—what do you see?” He pointed northeast, at the base of the ridge they were sitting on.
&nb
sp; “A plateau.”
“The line of rocks at the edge…?”
“Rocks.”
“It’s a waste-rock demarcation wall,” he explained. “The seeds build them around the startup facilities—to get rid of the waste and keep their elements from wandering. Or to keep other things out, if there is anything.”
“Just looks like a long pile of rocks.” Kali sorted through the contents of her meal packet. She didn’t seem much impressed by the view down the valley.
“It’s too straight,” he said. “The river didn’t put that there. This is where the seed landed.”
He was sure of it: This was where it had begun. He’d seen the same lines of stone at the first base on Athena in Curie, on the west coast of North Athena—a layer of fill rock held together by concrete now long gone. He’d led a restoration team, walking every square meter of that base, killing weeds and shoveling away the dirt threatening to bury it again.
“Did you figure that out yourself,” Kali asked, “or did your imaginary friends tell you?”
He winced; he’d spent his life listening to these kind of comments. He turned to look at her. She smiled as if to say, I’m pulling that hit.
“God doesn’t talk to me,” he said. “I know what I’m looking at.”
Kali tossed her spork into the meal wrapper in her hand. “Then pack your shit, and let’s go down and settle it.”
Toran took the lead on the descent, walking a few meters ahead of Kali, his glasses recording. This valley was older than the previous one, and its walls more weathered. He edged sideways down a sequence of harder layers to the talus slope below, then made his own switchbacks across it. The stones tumbled away from his boots, triggering a small avalanche of brown and black gravel in equal and opposite reaction to his feet. At the bottom, he walked across a layer of fine silt leached out of the slope by the rain, leaving his bootprints across it, and followed the dry river bed for a short distance to the eroded edge of the plateau.
Standing on the plateau, what he’d seen as a wall from above was a long mound of stones, loosely heaped together, oxidized brown and dusted with green lichen. The boundary wall could be topped by a fence if the seed machines found the need for it, but he saw no remains of one. Stacked and bound together with cement, the stones in the wall would have been chest high, but centuries of earthquakes, storms, and floods had reduced them to a knee-high pile.
“Rocks, rocks, and more rocks,” Kali said.
“No, this is it. There would have been purifiers, synthesizers, extruders, assemblers—right there.”
He climbed over the wall and walked toward a low, flat pile of rubble covering an area fifty meters on a side. It had once been the floor of the stage one factory, covered by a roof of iron and housing a dense array of manufacturing systems. The seeds brought to each world microscopic machines the designers called microns. It was the job of the microns to construct the macroscale robots called macrons. The factory produced the Mothers, Keepers, and Builders, and the Doctor and Advocate for each base, along with the roof elements and other essential systems of the dome. It also created the wet-incubators for the First generation, and filled them with fluids and ova.
“Not now,” Kali said. She leaned down to pull a stone from the pile.
“The parts are light or corrode easily. They don’t survive on Athena. This facility’s temporary, before the dome is ready.”
There was no doubt in Toran’s mind anymore; he knew the base was here. He felt a new excitement, as if in the presence of something sacred. This was what they had come for.
“I want to see something definitive, something artificial,” Kali said. She bent forward to look further into the pile.
“Dig, and you might find it.”
She looked at him suspiciously, then knelt. Toran wasn’t too worried about disturbing the site—they didn’t have a lot of time, and their glasses would record what they did.
He circled the platform. A hundred meters beyond it, the valley wall was scalloped out. The microns had torn the rock down, processing it for the elements it contained—aluminum, iron, titanium, calcium, and magnesium. Energy wasn’t a problem here; the swarm could collect it from the sun, the wind, the waves, even changes in the air density and the kinetic energy of rain. It could dig down for hot magma, or sift raw basalt for uranium—a kilogram in every million of inert rock—to power larger and more mobile machines.
“Nothing,” Kali shouted to him. She’d laid aside a half dozen stones.
“Keep digging. The metal rusted away and the diacom got ripped off by the storms. You need to find something buried.”
“They had a radio dish.”
“Not here. Further up the valley, maybe. The windmill stanchions—we may be able to find those.”
He looked up the valley, but didn’t see anything in the distance. A few meters away, several sheets of rock lay pushed together on the surface. He crouched where their corners met in the center. There was a hole but nothing visible inside. He pulled out his flashlight, but the beam lit only a few feet of rough-cut stone at the sides. It looked like a well for knee-high people, or a psychoduct—a tunnel to the underworld, wide enough for spirits but not humans. He dropped a small stone in; several seconds passed before he heard it clacking on the rock below.
“Water, or geothermal,” he said. It should have gone a lot further; no doubt it had collapsed partway down.
“You’ve still got nothing,” Kali said, standing beside him. She’d given up on her digging. “You’ve got some piles and a deep hole in the ground, but you don’t have them. Show me the dome. It has to be around here. There’s got to be something left of it.”
The dome had to be nearby, within a kilometer of the initial facilities. On most planets, it was an advantage to be near the sea; the majority of human civilization is. The domes were nearly indestructible, and there wasn’t a reason to draw out the supply lines. Kali was right—the dome had to be within a short walk, and it had large structural components that wouldn’t blow away or decay. Its remains would still be there.
Toran pictured macrons rising from the platform, one by one, to walk to the site of the new dome—a Builder carrying its toolkit, a Keeper with seeds for the garden, and a Mother holding an incubator already filled with a gestating human, a member of the First Generation.
Hemmed in by the valley walls and the sea, they could only go in one direction.
∞
“Three fifty…” Kali said, reading back the information from Galia, “at fifty varying to one-eighty?… No, I don’t suppose it matters…”
Kali sat on the edge of the rubble of the old platform, holding the long-range radio to her ear for the morning comm pass with The Child. Toran stood a few meters away, holding a piece of paper and watching an orbital image of the clouds download. As the image unrolled on the paper in stripes, it revealed the white spiral of a cyclone southwest of the island. He tapped the paper to bring up the distance scale and windspeed indicators, but he couldn’t remember what scale Galia had used at the landing site. It didn’t look that close, but, still, he had a sinking feeling.
“Setona, I was allowing two days to walk—” Kali said to the radio. “Okay. Tomorrow morning—I get it.” She stared at the ground in front of her, avoiding Toran’s eyes. “See you in orbit. Trust me. G’day.”
She dropped the radio in her pack and ran her fingers through her hair before looking up at him. “Alpha’s going to hit the island. It changed direction last night. Bands will touch tonight, and windspeed will go up in a big way tomorrow afternoon. We need to leave now—we have to be at the lander in the morning.”
Toran looked up the valley to what he’d recently dubbed Fin Mountain. “No time to waste, then,” he said, picking up his pack and walking toward the mountain.
“Wait!” Kali shouted. “You’re going the wrong way.”
She reached into her pack and pulled out a large, black gun. Toran caught his breath for a moment before he realized it wa
s only the thread-gun. She pointed it at the ridge to the south.
“We’re going that way.”
“You’re crazy. That’s not a safe climb. There’s a direct path up the valley. Around the top, over the plain to the lander—nothing technical.”
“We’ve got one day to make a two day hike. Up valley is fifteen kilometers more. We don’t have another three hours.”
“The entire science value of this mission is in this valley. The dome is that way.”
“You don’t understand,” Kali said. “The wind will go over the seventy-five kilometer an hour crosswind limit on the lander early tomorrow afternoon. If we’re there at dawn, that gives us two hours to preflight and three to hop to Heli Valley and re-cycle. That’s noon—that’s all the time we have.”
“We can do better than five kilometers an hour.”
“On the plain? Toran, if we launch over the wind limit, the lander will either topple downwind at ignition or weathervane upwind after it comes off the ground. Either way, the thrust vectoring can’t compensate and it’ll go down sideways, all engines up. The explosion will light up this whole island.”
“We can wait it out here, in this valley.” There had to be a way. The First had weathered the storms, at least for a few years. But they’d had the dome, and it hadn’t survived to the present intact. There might still be underground structures beyond the flood level of the valley—a basement or some utility tunnel that could serve as a shelter.
“Where exactly?” Kali asked. “You’re not going to fit in that micron duct.” She held the thread-gun out to him. “Look, I’m not big enough to wrap you up and haul you along if you don’t want to come with me. But you’re going to end up at the other end of this valley or on the plain looking for somewhere to hide from a three hundred kilometer an hour wind. What are your chances?”
“I’m willing to risk it. You know we’re not coming back down here; no one’s ever going to come here again.”
“We were never going to be here that long—that wasn’t the plan. If it wasn’t this storm, it would be the next one. If you go that way, you better get to the lander before I do, because I’m not waiting for seventy-four klicks an hour; I can’t take that chance. I’ll leave you here, if I have to. The lander can’t be on the surface; it’ll almost certainly blow over before the wind hits three hundred. I’m not staying here to hold your hand—I’m going with it.”
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