Havi put her hand on it anyway. She was sure she’d touched the temple walls before and nothing had happened.
The wall moved beneath her fingers. The stone sucked at her skin, refusing to let her hand move away.
Havi yelped in surprise and yanked her hand back. A faint whorl of blood showed in the water before it was washed away by a suddenly stronger current.
“What’s going on? What does this mean?”
“I was about to tell you this. The wall moves, it makes patterns. All the labyrinths we’ve seen do. I would guess that all of them are doing that. They react to our presence, and even more so to our touch.”
“Are the walls alive?” Havi asked, loath to touch them again.
“I don’t think so, although since they’re alien, who knows. More like automatons, maybe?”
The whirr of a hover boat became audible. The briny sloshed through the room.
“Another visitor?” Furuzan said.
Light brighter than the day strobed through the narrow window slots of the temple. “This is the police. Come out slowly.”
The police? Havi and Furuzan looked at each other. There wasn’t a lot of crime on Knossos, and if there was, it was usually dealt with in-house or in-family.
Havi clambered out first, squinting against the mega lights.
“Did you arrive on hover boat DG211?” the augmented voice asked, although the police hover was no more than twenty feet away.
“Yep, that’s me.”
“You’re under arrest for theft. Turn your back and hold out your wrists.”
Havi was too surprised not to comply. It was her family’s boat. She’d left a note. What the hell?
A person stepped off the hover onto the temple ridge. He clocked handcuffs onto her wrists.
“Turn.”
Havi turned. His voice sounded familiar.
The lights powered down.
The policeman turned out to be Dara.
“Havi?” he said, sounding a lot less surprised than she felt.
“Yes. Why am I under arrest? Who called in the boat as stolen? That’s my family’s boat.”
Dara looked sheepish. “Ivete called. She didn’t say it was you.”
Havi snorted. She believed him about Ivete’s call, but not so much about him not knowing it was her. And how had Ivete managed to pinpoint Dara as the arresting officer, had she called him out of his bed on the neighboring farm or had he just happened to be on duty? But she’d give Dara the benefit of the doubt. Not so much Ivete. “That little idiot. Okay, are you going to take the cuffs off?”
“I can’t do that. I have to take you to the station now. And process this officially.”
“Jeezus.”
* * *
Havi sat on a bench in the floating police station, hands cuffed, in growing annoyance. Dara administrated slower than slow, drinking endless cups of fish tea without offering her any. Processing officially her ass.
The silence was rudely broken by a raucous blare of sound. “What the hell is that? Turn it off!”
“That’s a siren. I think. A warning. Emergency.”
“For what? A storm?”
Dara raked his hands through his hair. “I think we covered this in training. Once. I have to look it up to be sure.”
Havi saw her chance. “If there’s an emergency situation, you can’t guarantee my safety. You have to release me.”
“Just wait, okay? I’m looking it up.”
The siren continued to grate across Havi’s nerves while Dara, increasingly nervous, browsed through his instruction manuals.
Dara gestured her to his terminal. “I found it. Look. It says it’s a warning against Katabiotic invasion!”
News flashes started to scroll across her vision, emergency overrides from her inphone.
“It’s the wormhole hub. It’s under attack. I can’t believe it. That’s millions of people.” Dara was panting, the whites of eyes showing. How had she ever for a moment considered him handsome fifteen years ago?
“Dara, get a grip. Untie me. Tell me what to do.”
Dara unlocked her cuffs with shaking hands. “I’m the officer on duty.”
Havi forced her voice to stay calm. “For this region. Sure. Where is the worldwide headquarters?”
“Here! I told you!”
“That can’t be true. How many of you are there?”
“Seven,” Dara said.
“For the whole planet?”
Dara started calling up his colleagues, his voice horse.
Havi stifled her questions. Dara was a bit slow, but he was doing the job.
After that, Dara showed her the information from the police database. “Katabiotic event. Call up oikotekts. (What is an oikotekt?) While you wait for their help to arrive, remember Katabiotic interference is a quantum event. Observe your surroundings continuously, reinforcing their stability.”
She read the paragraph out loud. “Do you know what this means?”
“There was a training exercise. We were standing in a circle and had to keep looking at each other and the room in a figure eight pattern. Very tiring. I got really dizzy.”
“So how would we do this?”
“Stand in a circle.”
“There’s two of us,” Havi said.
“Um, yes, I guess back-to-back?”
They stood back-to-back. In spite of her annoyance at his slowness and nerves, it was reassuring to feel a warm, living human being against her back. His physical solidness grounded her.
“What’s going on with your colleagues?” she asked.
“They’re organizing Katabiotic resistance. They need to get these instructions out to everyone.”
Seven cops for a whole world. Great. Who else could they call on? Of course. Fish Migration Control!
“Dara, get the same directive to FMC. They have a lot more hovers and warm bodies.”
“Already did that. Look, Havi. Look at the fish.”
She walked to the window. The police station didn’t float over a farm, but the briny was full of glinting fish backs. Thousands of fish, millions of fish, swimming. And not just randomly. Patterns.
Just like the patterns on the temple wall.
“Call up the FMC satellite feeds.”
Dara complied. “Zoom in.”
It was like looking at a different planet. The fish weren’t swimming around placidly in their local farm labyrinths anymore. They were swarming, circling, spiraling in large-scale patterns. Patterns the size of continents. All the fish must have escaped their farms.
There had to be a connection between the incoming Katabiotic attack and the fish behavior. But what?
Havi remembered Ivete telling her that the fish were conscious beings, about as intelligent as Earth fish had once been. Not very, that meant, but they did have awareness and memory, up to a point.
Not there yet.
She called up the astronomer she’d been about to visit. The woman wasn’t answering. She left an urgent message.
Within a minute the astronomer called back.
“Ms. Skuja, this is a bad time. We’re all observing the skies for signs of the Katabiotics,” the woman said.
“I’m at Police Headquarters, assisting in the defense effort.” Wow, that came out slick. “We need help. Just a few moments of your time. Explain to me in simple terms about quantum events and observation?”
“We learned, centuries ago, that if we managed to observe our surroundings intensively enough, or with the right kind of attention, that the Katabiotic changes can’t take place. It’s like Schrödinger’s Cat, once you look in the box, the cat is either dead or not. As long as you don’t look, its state is uncertain. The Katabiotics can only act in the uncertain state.”
“Is it only human beings who can do this quantum observation?”
The astronomer pulled at her chin. “I have no idea. But I don’t see why. A higher animal, like a mammal, would be able to observe whether a cat was dead or not.”
&nb
sp; “Thanks!” Havi hung up.
The Paal had built the labyrinths, an unknown but long time ago.
Havi had always thought of the labyrinths as ruins, remnants of a dead species that had left the planet for its own incomprehensible reasons. But what if the labyrinth wasn’t a ruin of something else, but fish and labyrinth together were a machine, built for a purpose? And something had triggered that purpose?
“The fish are defending us,” she told Dara, who was still diligently observing his surroundings in a figure eight pattern.
“What?”
“Don’t stop. The fish observe the planet. That’s why this planet is the only one in the whole region that is still intact. It’s the fish. It’s a fish defense system.”
Dara giggled.
Havi slapped him. “Focus. Dara, focus. Zoom out from that satellite feed. We need to check on the fish. If they’re covering everywhere.”
A quick glance at the other four continents showed that the fish patterns seemed intricate and smoothly flowing. It was a different story on Continent Five. In the middle of the continent a large break showed in the pattern. “What is that?”
“Osaka Barrier,” Dara said. “Completed five years ago.”
Havi knew what to do. “It’s the barrier. It’s ruining the fish flow. We have to blow it up. Come on, Dara.”
“What? No. We can’t. It’s against the law. That’s people’s livelihoods.”
“Those people would complain even more if the planet started breaking up because the physical constants of the universe had changed. Remember what happened to Earth? We all watched the video!”
Dara scratched his head. “But . . . ”
“Whatever. Come.”
“No. I’m not destroying an important structure on your say-so. My duty is here, leading the defense efforts.”
Havi wanted to slap him again.
“Give me the keys to Ivete’s boat then. I have to do this.”
She jumped on board the hover boat and set course toward the barrier It had become night and all three of the moons were out. Baby, Blue Moon, and Glarus, also known as the Big Green Cheese. Their rainbow light glinted off the billions of shiny fish backs coursing through the water. The boat hovered not over the briny, but over a solid carpet of glistening fish spines. Beautiful.
She couldn’t do this alone, though. She didn’t know a thing about explosives or how to destroy large man-made structures. Shit. There was only one person she could call.
Her fucking annoying little sister.
“Hey Ivete, it’s me. I need your help.”
“Yeah right. How’s the police station treating you?”
“That was pretty annoying. I admit that. But now there’s an emergency and I need your help. You know how to blow up stuff,” Havi said.
“What? No.”
“Yes you do. You said you and Dad helped build the barrier. Blew up part of the labyrinths there.”
“Okay, that, yes.”
“Gather up your blowing-up stuff and meet me at the dock. I’m on my way.”
A long silence ensued. Havi imagined Ivete wrestling between a desire to blow stuff up and the one to frustrate her big sister. Maybe there was a smidgen of helpfulness in there too, but Havi wasn’t counting on that.
“Okay. I’ll be there. If you promise to stay.”
“No! Are you crazy? I have a career. I can’t just ditch that and go back to fish farming.”
“Okay, fine, then no help with explosives,” Ivete said.
“I will stay a month.”
“Six.”
“Two. Final offer.”
“Three or it’s no deal.”
Grinding her teeth, Havi promised three. Why did Ivete even want this if she was so angry at Havi?
Havi turned the hover to swing by the family farm.
Ivete was actually there, with several crates and bulging bags. And a girl Havi didn’t know, who was briefly introduced as Ari, the girlfriend.
The supplies were loaded and Havi raced off again, toward the barrier.
“What are we blowing up?” Ivete asked.
Havi grinned at her. “You’re only asking that now? Who are you?”
“Nobody you know anymore.”
That stung. But maybe she was right.
“I’m sorry I stayed away so long, little sis.”
Ivete didn’t react. Too little, too late?
“Okay, it’s Osaka Barrier. It’s obstructing the Paal defense system.” Havi said.
Ari cursed.
Ivete said nothing for a while. “Will it help against the Katabiotics?”
“Yeah.”
“Malala hub is breaking up as well, did you read that?” Ari said. “Who’s gonna buy our fish now? If there’s no hub . . . ”
“We’ll worry about that later.”
The boat skipped over the swarming fish backs in a straight line, illuminated only by the three moons. The fish weren’t swimming in patterns here but teeming and churning chaotically. Havi tried to ride faster, but she was at maximum speed already.
She swung the boat into a neat halt at one the barrier’s floating connectors. “We have to hurry. The Katabiotics’ effect could be here any moment. Do you know the weak points of the barrier?”
The girls shook their heads. Of course not. Why would they?
Havi cracked her knuckles. She was information girl. “You girls get the charges set up while I find out where to put them.”
Apparently, lots of people wanted to blow up stuff. Or no. All the dates on the articles were like hundreds of years old. But it should be relatively easy to blow up the support structure to the deep but lightweight barriers that blocked off Continent Five’s farm outlets.
Havi walked up to where Ivete and her girlfriend were connecting detonators to packs of explosives. Ivete looked suspiciously adept at this. She probably had had a lot more practice than on the construction. Who was Ivete? Did Havi even know her? Why had Ivete blackmailed Havi into staying at the farm? Baffling.
A tremor rocked the structure.
“What was that? Did you start already?”
Ivete looked spooked. “No. That was something else. Is it the aliens?”
What else could it be? Instinctively, Havi looked up at the moon. There was a black stripe across Green Cheese. What the hell? Suddenly it clicked. Not a stripe, but a chasm. Green Cheese was breaking up. Havi was no physicist, but she imagined a chunk of moon falling down would wreak immense havoc. Earthquakes. Tidal waves.
“We have to hurry. This is the vulnerable spot. Even if the rest of the planet is safe, if this part breaks down, we’re all doomed. We have to get those fish in here!”
“You’re talking gibberish. I trusted you so far, but this is weird. What have fish got to do with alien attacks?”
“A lot more than you’d think. I’ll explain later. Let’s get out of here.”
“If we blow up the barriers, won’t we kill a lot of fish?” Ivete asked.
Havi gestured to the millions of shiny fish backs swirling against the barriers. “Maybe some, but these will rush in to take their place.”
The hover took off at speed.
“How far?” Ivete cried.
“I don’t know! A couple of kilometers? Hurry.”
Ivete touched a secret button under the dash and the hover’s speed tripled. Havi was pushed back against the seat, “Far enough?”
The crack in the moon grew wider. Havi didn’t dare wait any longer.
“Go! Set them off! Explode the stuff!” she cried.
Ari pressed the detonator with a big grin on her face.
A series of bright sparks set off. An ear-shattering boom sounded. Seconds later, a big wave slammed them all against the hover’s deck.
“Jeezus,” Havi groaned. “Everybody all right?” Everything hurt. Especially her ribs.
Two separate groans answered her. At least they were alive. She managed to crack open an eye and found herself draped over the hover’s
steering wheel. Hadn’t Ivete been driving?
Once she’d unpeeled herself from the dashboard, many of the pains lessened, but not the one in her ribs. She groaned. That made the pain worse.
Had it worked? Had they set the fish free? She crawled to the hover’s side and peered over the railing. Yes! The moonlight, strangely flat for this time of night, glinted off fish scales, orderly swimming in a micro version of the patterns that were only visible from orbit.
Did this mean the planet was safe now? Havi could do nothing about Malala wormhole hub, but down here she’d done all she could. She carefully rolled over on her back, landing on someone’s belly or thigh, and checked out Glarus Moon. The crack was still there, but it hadn’t grown any bigger. Maybe its internal gravity would pull it back together now that the outside influence was neutralized? She’d hate to have her late nights without Green Cheese to complete the rainbow.
She didn’t know what to do about a moon that might still be falling apart. But she bet someone else would, now that it was plainly visible in the sky. No need for investigative reporting anymore.
She moved her sore head to a softer spot on the other person’s body.
“Watch it, sis. I’m bruised there.”
Havi smiled. Sisters.
Bo Balder Page 3
