“Limited in scale…”
“Orbital community about one moon…”
“…solar arrays orbiting the sun.”
As they talked, Sheemi tried to make sense of the telescope feeds on the wall vid. As the scopes tracked and resolution improved, she began to discern structures. Artificial, obviously machines. An orbiting structure with wings of filigree metal wound about a central core of glittering jewels. She tried to guess its function but couldn’t. Other structures dotted the moon’s surface, but without streets or windows, irregular shapes belying their nonhuman origin.
Now that they’d found the chines, what would happen next?
Colonel Go walked into the room and spoke with Gavin in hushed tones. They brought over the astrophysicists. Sheemi edged out of the room as discretely as she could. She didn’t want to distract them from their planning. This was Gavin’s time now, their chine ambassador. All their hopes rested on him.
She went to find Enzo, figuring their scheduled EVA would be postponed, but the tech wasn’t around. She found Jimmy in the fab.
“Haven’t seen him,” he said.
She was tempted to rejoin Bravo and enjoy the celebration, but Enzo’s absence bothered her. She kept looking and had traversed half the ring when she passed the lock off the Life Support mod. She almost kept going, but something pulled her back.
He couldn’t have, she thought, opening Enzo’s locker.
His vac suit was gone.
Sheemi threw open her locker and tried to raise Neecie on the comm as she suited up. Nothing. She tried Ash, Jerrold, and Fu, but no one responded. Probably too busy celebrating. I should tell Ciib. She knew she should, but it would almost be like admitting failure. She’d just earned back their trust. She couldn’t lose it again. She tried Jimmy instead.
“Yes?” He sounded annoyed.
She stepped into the lock and cycled it. “Listen, Jimmy. I’m going EVA to find Enzo. He’s gone solo. Tell Neecie for me, okay?”
She heard metallic clatter as he operated a power tool. “Sure. Will do.”
The comm clicked off, and she waited for the lock’s outer door to open. What are you doing, Enzo? The ship is fine. Why go EVA now?
She wanted to scream at him. How could he disregard safety protocols with the responsibility he held to get them back to Earth alive? To risk everything just as they’d achieved their goal.
The lock light turned green. She stepped outside and pushed away from the ring, dampening her spin with a few quick jets. She scanned along the ring, down to the axle. No sign of Enzo. She moved toward the axle, breathing hard. No one could help her if she got it wrong, missed her target, and disappeared into the void. On Earth, she’d never shied from death. Now it was different. It wouldn’t be just her dying.
Hang on, she said to the baby swimming inside, unaware of her mother’s foolishness. Hang on.
Her jets sent her sailing out over the axle, down its length to the base of the drogue. Most of their maintenance work had taken place here and beyond to the power plant and main engines. She looked up at the drogue sphere rising above her. No time to clip in. She aimed at a power reducer and accelerated to it. No Enzo.
She zigzagged up the sphere from one structure to another, checking any that could hide him from view. Coming over the rise, the far side of the sphere came into view. She’d looked past a shed-sized metallic cylinder when her gaze snapped back to the shadow at its base.
She sighed. Enzo was bent over fiddling with something. What a time for maintenance.
As she came over, her shadow leapt ahead and Enzo jerked. He turned to face her.
“Hi, Enzo,” she said, her voice crisp over the comm, as if there weren’t empty void around them, as if everything were normal their being out there. “Everyone’s celebrating.”
“I had inspections to do,” he said, his breaths slowing as he watched her coming closer.
“Why don’t we go back inside?” she asked. “Everyone’s having fun. We can finish this later.”
“Yes,” he said. “Good idea.”
As she closed the distance between them, she saw what he’d been inspecting, an open panel housing a set of interlocked hexagons. The hexagons turned from black to blue, then they weren’t there at all. She turned her head to see if the sunlight was playing tricks with her visor. Everything seemed normal.
She turned to look at the hexagons again. They continued to flicker in and out of visibility. Two power cables had been spliced to the panel. Whatever it was, they’d never inspected anything like it. She tried to remember the mechanisms Jimmy had run diagnostics for, the schematics she’d seen working with Enzo. She wasn’t familiar with much of the ship, didn’t have the training to begin with. She was no engineer. Enzo was the expert.
“I’ve never seen this before,” she said. “What is it?”
Sheemi drifted closer for a better look, but he blocked her. Even obscured by his helmet visor, she could see his eyes glaring. He looked nervous or angry, or both. At her—at her being there.
Wrong. Something was wrong, her gut told her.
She brushed past him.
“Don’t touch it,” Enzo said. She thought she heard a note of panic in his voice.
She moved closer to examine the panel.
A shadow in the corner of her eye made her turn. Enzo’s welder cut into her suit, and her body jerked back involuntarily. The pain followed, a bright burst of it radiating all along her right side. She gasped. Her suit’s sensors wailed as precious air escaped before her suit could reseal.
I have to stop it, she thought, not even knowing what it was. Keeping one arm up to ward off Enzo, she reached out blindly behind her and yanked out a cable. He pushed forward with the welder, but she managed to pull out the second cable. The hexagons stopped flickering.
“Too late, you fucking bitch,” Enzo said. “They’re coming.”
He grinned as he did something to her EMU. Too late she saw him push away before she was jerked about, spinning uncontrollably, the jets on her EMU blowing in one direction. The ship, Enzo, the stars, the sun, the ship swirled through her vision. He’d sent her floating off to freeze solid, letting him finish whatever trouble he was bent on.
Anoxia made her dizzy. Focus, she thought. Focus. Breathe.
She did, and her training came back to her. Sheemi reached down and back for the EMU’s safety shut off. She couldn’t find it at first, but then her fingers bumped into something that felt right. She pushed the cover up and to the side, exposing the switch and hitting it. The jets died, but her spin continued unabated. She drifted away from Dauntless with every second. Twenty, thirty meters, she guessed. She reactivated the EMU and triggered jets to counter her spin. The universe began to make sense again. Everything stopped spinning.
She righted herself, oriented toward Dauntless. She’d gone farther than she’d thought. About fifty meters out and half as much downship from where she’d found Enzo. She walked her gaze back up to where she thought he should be and spotted him. He was working on the hexagon thing, trying to reconnect it. But then he seemed to give up and pushed off, drifting toward the main engines.
The pain in her side throbbed. Was she losing blood? She couldn’t tell how bad her burns were. It hurt a lot. Her suit kept flashing red—it hadn’t sealed completely. It was bleeding out oxygen. She had to return to the lock; it was the only way she’d live through this. Wasn’t it? Did it matter? Her baby…the crew…
She ignored her suit’s nonstop warnings and reviewed her EMU readout. After the spinning and correction, she’d lost most of her propellant. She had no idea if it would be enough to catch him, but she could try. Decision made, she triggered her jets.
She couldn’t let him near the engines. She knew what he meant to do. She didn’t know why or how, but she knew. Don’s lifeless face floated through her mind. Maybe he’d known, too.
Enzo moved ahead of her, focused on his destination. The main engines loomed. She adjusted her jets, accelera
ting on what she hoped would be a path to intercept him. She picked up speed before her propellant gauge showed zero. She was out. No going back.
She fumbled at her tool belt for something useful. Gas analyzer, no. Temp gauge, no. Pistol grip tool, yes. She pictured his visor shattering, but their impact-resistant helmets wouldn’t break so easily. Without weapons, there was only one way.
She was a body’s length from Enzo and closing when he changed tack, bouncing off the ship and sailing at an angle towards the more distant engine.
No, no, no. She cursed the universe.
She sailed past the point where Enzo would have been. Had he seen her? She couldn’t tell. He was at the engine now, attaching something that looked familiar.
Limpet. It reminded her of one of the limpet mines from the armory. But Enzo couldn’t have gotten one, could he? Her body went cold and queasy.
She looked ahead and saw a brace beam. If she hit it right, she could push off at a new angle. She thought she could. She hit the metal edge going fast, the mass of her gear and her own body trying to push her on past. But she absorbed the acceleration into her legs, squatting down, then pushing off in the direction Enzo had gone.
“Shit,” she said through gritted teeth as her body spun about on a new, unintended axis. She saw Enzo, closer, then he was out of sight, then she saw him again. He was arming the detonator. She closed fast, spinning out of control. She was wheezing now, her breaths coming hard. Her suit meters flashed red, screaming at her to resupply.
Low oxygen! her gauges screamed. Low oxygen!
Never give up, Brin said.
Kill, she thought. Kill.
She couldn’t believe her luck as she crashed into Enzo’s back. She’d actually caught him. She wrapped her arms around his helmet and twisted.
“Shit!” he yelled.
“Suck this, Enzo!” she screamed, turning his helmet farther so his body had to follow. He spun about, his eyes unbelieving as he tried to pull her off. While he grabbed for her, she reached for the attachment rings of his helmet. The suit gloves made it difficult, but she grasped the mechanism and unfastened it. It hadn’t been designed to thwart an attacker.
Enzo must have realized her intent. He frantically batted at her hands. She held on and yanked his helmet up as much as she could away from his suit collar. Enzo flailed about but couldn’t dislodge her. She hung on as he thrashed. One one thousand, two one thousand, three. Enzo went limp before she reached twenty; it was over—she’d won. Adrenaline-fueled elation pumped through her veins. Screaming war cries filled her head, but victory was short-lived.
No time, she thought furiously as she found an anchor point and clipped in. She wrapped her legs about Enzo’s corpse and ripped apart his EMU. Jubilation succumbed to the primitive, sucking terror of imminent asphyxiation.
For a moment her fingers in the thick gloves fumbled, but then she found the connections and managed to pull one oxygen tank free. She grabbed the tank leads and disconnected them. One more step. Just one more step.
She disconnected her own tank leads and began to connect the new tank, but she could barely feel her fingers.
Her numb hands wouldn’t do what she wanted of them. She moaned, pulling the connecting hose to her side, but her hands were already wooden. Gauges screamed the last of her oxygen had gone. She sucked vacuum.
Chapter 13 – Citizen
Standing on the lip of the pipe, Kellen looked up at towers rising so high overhead the tops seemed to converge. Buildings warped into improbable curves. Shapes of metal, glass, and materials he didn’t recognize. Structural members undulated like ribbons connecting clusters of hanging dwellings that reminded him of swallows’ nests. Everything was riddled with openings, as if some mad engineer had gone on a crusade of deconstruction, removing panels, routing spans into the sides of buildings, weaving structures together like an abstract artist.
Motion drew his eyes downwards. They’d come out above a street, but unlike any street he’d ever seen. Tubes, cables, and spans connected everywhere, looping, twisting, and turning overhead, lined with chine tracks.
Through it moved creatures at once familiar to Kellen and yet beyond his strangest imaginings. Spheres with gear-like teeth spun down chine tracks. Walkers on four legs, six, eight or more strode by. One walker towered over the street, standing at least two stories tall. It marched off and disappeared behind a building. Flying creatures, fast and small like insects or birds, or huge hovering shapes. A flier, big as a tank, slid by overhead like a stately dirigible. Wheels, tracks, wings. Jumping, sliding, walking, running, rolling. All manner of creatures moved through the city like one of those ocean currents he’d read about, full of fish and whales and plankton, except here the wildlife was made of metal and plastic.
“Was this what happened to them?” Kellen whispered, thinking of all the Four who’d been taken by the government when their ravings grew too frenetic to ignore, their grasp on reality irreparably broken. Had he finally become one of them? “Do you see them?”
“I see them,” Abby said, her face unreadable.
“Don’t you understand?” Izmit said. “Those are chines! Chines! We made it. We’re where the chines went. We’re no longer on Earth.” He gave a whoop, hugged Abby, and slapped Kellen on the back.
Kellen stood there, mouth agape, eyes wide, almost forgetting to breathe—he never thought they’d see chines in real life, but Izmit was right. All the details were there. He’d drawn the likenesses of chines throughout his life. He’d even captured some similarities, but these somes were far different from what he’d imagined. Not anthropomorphic at all. Not biological, other than in an analogous sense. Similar solutions to movement, sensory detection, but on a completely different evolutionary path. Wondrous designs. Real somes used by real chines.
Kellen tried to process, but couldn’t. How had they arrived here?
Sayuri was dead, he remembered.
“They’re watching us,” Abby said, keeping her voice low.
Kellen thought so, too. Most of the chines had recognizable sensor arrays, and many of those seemed to be oriented toward them. Some had even stopped and were pointing with various appendages.
“What do we do?” he asked.
“Act normal,” Izmit said. “This is what we wanted, after all. What we’ve always dreamed of.”
“What you dreamed of.” Abby looked stricken. “I want to go back.”
Izmit held up his hands placatingly. “Let’s find somewhere out of the way. Someplace we can think.”
They climbed down to street level, drawing even more attention. Abby sank down against a wall, her head on her knees, keening softly.
“Are you all right?” Kellen asked.
“We’re gone. I don’t know where or how, but we are so far gone. I don’t think I’ll ever see my folks again, Kel,” she said between ragged gasps, “and Aunt Rachel, and Miller, and my nephew Parker. Parker has to hold my hand. He’s afraid of the dark.” Her cries came out in convulsed waves of anguish.
Kellen looked at Izmit, who shrugged.
“Come on, Abby.” Kellen pulled her up. “Time to go.”
Abby stood still.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She sniffled, looked up at him. He thought she might come apart at any moment. “Will I ever see them again?” she asked, her voice breaking.
Izmit looked ill at ease.
Kellen had never experienced the closeness of a family like hers. He pulled her into a hug and held her as she shook. It was all he could think of to do.
“You’ll see them again,” he said, putting as much confidence into his voice as he could. “You will, Abby, I know it.”
For his part, Kellen didn’t feel threatened by the chines surrounding them. He had to admit he even felt a sense of relief, as if he’d finally come home. Even though it wasn’t. At all. It made no sense. But there it was before his eyes. Unless his mind had finally broken, and he was sedated in a hospital somewhere, never to
return. He preferred reality. He pinched himself but felt nothing. He was just numb, he guessed.
“This way,” Izmit called, already on the street, joining the crowd.
Kellen followed, pulling Abby along with him.
The chines who’d stopped turned toward them as they went by. Kellen tried to make out faces, although he knew that made no sense. Why did he expect them to have faces? Why would they need them?
They walked faster until the crowd became a blur of moving objects he couldn’t process. Izmit led them down a side street, then into what seemed to be an alley. The crowd lessened, then petered out completely. They turned another corner and entered a semi-enclosed space forming a sheltered courtyard. A chine symbol illuminated briefly as they passed, but Kellen didn’t recognize it. The gray concrete-like material beneath their feet transitioned into a metallic surface interspersed with yellow squares a meter on a side. Kellen counted at least ten. As he stepped over one, a feeling of wellness surged up his legs and into his midsection. He backed away, surprised.
“Did you feel that?” Izmit asked.
Kellen nodded.
Two chines entered the courtyard, one a long-legged walker like a neckless giraffe, the other a three-wheeled, upside-down trapezoid. Neither seemed to pay any attention to Kellen or the others. They looked dirtier than the other chines he’d glimpsed so far. Their somes were stained. Some of their components didn’t match. The wheeled chine tracked to one side and corrected with jerks in the opposite direction. It uttered strange, guttural harmonics as it passed. Each of the newcomers came to rest on a yellow square, where they seemed to sink in on themselves.
Another chine appeared. This one was wheeled, but upright, about human height. A torso perched on four wheels, the back wheels larger. It had several multi-jointed appendages ending with what looked like hands. Amber eyes glowed in what Kellen took for a face. The more he looked at it, the more hints of human facial features he thought he saw. A metal ridge that might be a nose, cheekbones, and a vertical grating he wanted to see as a mouth. Like abstract paintings he’d studied, it conveyed the impression of humanity without being human.
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