Hiro started to say something, but the wallscreen was already flickering to life. He crossed his arms, staring in silence as Aya's night as a Sly Girl began to unfold.
When it was over, the first thing Hiro said was, "Mom and Dad will kill you."
Aya couldn't argue. Her parents didn't even approve of bungee jumping. She couldn't imagine what Mom was going to say after watching her mag-lev surf.
"Crumblies are the least of your worries," Ren said. "After you kick this, the wardens are going to visit."
"I know." Aya sighed. "That's the bad part about kicking this story. Nobody's ever going to mag-lev surf again."
"That's not what I mean," Ren said softly. "The wardens will forget all about surfing once they spot that mass driver."
Aya glanced at Hiro, but he looked as puzzled as she was.
"What's a mass driver?" she asked.
Ren stood and crossed to the wallscreen, rewinding the images with a twirl of his finger. He froze the shot where Moggle was climbing up the shaft, reached out, and pointed at the glint of metal embedded in the stone. "That's a copper coil, right?"
"I guess," Aya said. "Like in an electric motor?"
"Or a train track," Ren said. "Mag-levs have two kinds of magnets. The ones that levitate the train and the mass drivers."
"Which do what?" Aya asked.
"They move the train. As it glides along, the mass drivers switch from negative to positivepulling from in front, pushing from behind, sending it faster and faster. You can do the same thing straight up."
"So this shaft is like a mag-lev train that goes up and down?" Aya shrugged. "You mean it an is elevator?"
Ren shook his head. "This could accelerate a thousand times faster than any elevator. You saw that airlock, right? If you suck all the air out of the shaft, you're accelerating through a vacuum. No friction at allpure speed. With enough juice, a mass driver could throw you into orbit."
"But what's the point?"
Hiro asked. "Why hide it in a mountain?"
Ren stared at the image of the copper coil. "That depends on what those cylinders are."
Aya shrugged. "They just looked like big hunks of metal."
"What if there's smart matter inside? They could change shape as they fly, make fins and wings to guide themselves to a target. Maybe even whip up a heat shield as they fall."
"No way, Ren." Hiro sat up straight. "The Nameless One is actually rightour thumb-twitch games have made you war-crazy!"
"Very funny, Hiro." Ren moved the image to a close-up of a cylinder. "Let me do some math.
How big are they, Aya?"
"Um maybe a meter across the top? And a little taller than me." Aya frowned. "What are you getting so excited about?"
"He's delusional," Hiro said.
"Let's say two meters tall." Ren's fingers twitched and spun, and numbers began cascading across the wallscreen image of the cylinder. "So the radius squared is a quarter of a meter, times pi is about point seven-five. Times two meters tall is one and a half. Hey, room? How much would one-and-a-half cubic meters of steel weigh?"
"What kind of steel?" the room asked.
"I don't care. Just round it off."
"Almost twelve tons."
"Twelve tons!"
Ren took a step backward and fell into Hire's feed-watching chair, staring wide-eyed at the screen.
"What's the big deal?" Aya asked softly.
Hiro leaned forward, the amused expression fading from his face. "Hey, room? How much energy would twelve tons of steel have if you dropped it from orbit?"
"From how high in orbit?" the room asked.
Hiro glanced at Ren, who shrugged and said, "Two hundred kilometers? Forget about air resistance and round it off."
The room hardly paused. "The object would land at two thousand meters per second, releasing twenty-four gigajoules, equal to six tons of TNT."
"Okay that's not good," Hiro said.
"What's TNT?" Aya asked.
"These days, it's a unit of energy," Ren said. "But a long time ago, it was a chemical that Rusties used to make bombs."
"Bombs?"
She swallowed. "Like when they used to shoot missiles at each other?"
"Wow, Slime Queen," Hiro said. "You catch on quick."
Ren nodded slowly. "This could be some kind of city killer."
"You're not serious." Aya remembered the Rusty weapons that had destroyed whole cities in seconds, burning the sky and leaving the ground poisoned for decades. "But city killers had warheads.
Those cylinders are just solid steel!"
"Yeah, Aya, and the dinosaurs were wiped out by iron," Ren said. "Iron falling from space.
These things wouldn't come down randomly. The smart matter could split them into slivers, one for every building in a city. How many of those cylinders did you say there were?"
"There were hundreds, Ren," she said softly.
"Thousands of tons?" he said. "With the metal shortage going on?"
Aya shook her head. "But aren't you guys jumping to conclusions? We don't even know if there's any smart matter inside."
"Maybe I can get you something to test them," Ren said.
"Would a matter hacker work?" Aya asked, and they both turned to stare at her. "Because the Sly Girls sort of, um have one."
"Aya," Hiro said slowly. "Don't tell me you've been playing around with matter hackers."
"I never even touched it!"
"Aya! Matter hackers aren't just merit-losing illegal; they're going-to-jail illegal!"
"It's perfect, though," Ren said. "Just send a basic run command to one, and watch what it does."
"Ren!" Hiro shouted. "No way is my little sister spending another second with those Sly Girls. Do you want my mom and dad to kill me?"
Ren turned to her. "If you don't want to go, Aya, I'll try to get in there. But it's your story. " Aya didn't answer at first, staring at the tangle of math on the screen, remembering when she was ten years old. Her entire littlie class had been loaded into hovercars and taken to an ancient ruin from the Rusty's second global war. A burned-out shell of a dome rose up from shattered walls with empty windows, marking where a hundred thousand people had died in one quick flash. She hadn't believed it possible, not even of the Rusties.
But it looked like someone was following in their footsteps.
"Sorry, Hiro, but I have to," she said. "The end of the world isn't something we can kick halfway."
Part II
CITY KILLERS
Lurking behind every chance to be made whole by fame is the axman of further dismemberment.
-Leo Braudy
The Frenzy of Renown
Banned
The Sly Girls were not pleased with Slime Queen.
It turned out that Kai watched the others' face ranks as closely as her own. Aya's sudden jump from obscurity to mild fame hadn't escaped her notice. After several pings back and forth, Kai admitted that maybe it wasn't entirely Aya's fault, but it was still a problem.
No hovercam-magnets allowed.
So Aya was banned from the Sly Girls, at least until her face rank fell back into six figures.
At first Aya thought the delay would drive her crazy. Here she was, a huge story finally in her grasp, and she had to wait for a bunch of nobodies to stop making fun of her about nothing.
On top of that, Aya didn't dare hang out with Frizz until this was all over. If anyone spotted them together, another wave of Slime Queen slamming would erupt, driving her face rank back up.
But as the days passed, waiting turned out not to be so bad.
Aya stayed in her room, avoiding classes by claiming that her underground lake chill had worn her out. She took all her old stories down from her feed for a week, and only answered pings from Hiro, Ren, and Kai. And gradually Aya Fuse (and her alter ego, Slime Queen) began to disappear, her face rank dropping thousands every day.
The strangest part was not having a feed. For the last two years, everything important
to Aya had been stored there: images, stories, class schedules, and grades. Lists of everything she did and thought and wanted, and of all her friends and enemies. Even if hardly anyone ever looked at it, blanking her own feed was like erasing part of herself.
Fortunately Aya had plenty to keep her occupied.
It took a whole week to edit a rough draft, making sure to conceal the awful truth until the end, yet still revealing enough to keep people watching. It was the longest story she'd ever kickedalmost twenty whole minutes. Hiro told her to shorten every version he saw, but Aya wasn't worried about anyone getting bored.
The story had everything: eccentric outsiders, mysterious technology, eye-kicking shots of the wild, even a near miss with a mag-lev train. And of course, good old humanity trying to wreck the planet once againall the promise and danger of the mind-rain wrapped up in one big kick.
The only thing she left out was the trio of inhuman figures she and Miki had seen. There weren't any shots of them, after all. And surely city-killing weapons were enough, without adding implausible aliens to the mix. She didn't even mention them to Hiro and Ren, who would probably just say she was believing in unicorns again.
She left a blank space at the end for the truth about the cylinders, once she'd proved Ren's theory about smart matter. But Aya was already convinced: The math all checked out, and she'd found out that the Rusties had also hollowed out mountains, places for their leaders to survive while the rest of the world crumbled. This was all an awful flashback to the ancient wars that had killed millions.
Maybe once they saw the truth, the Sly Girls would forgive her for kicking the story. Even Kai could understand that the safety of the world was more important than keeping a few tricks secret.
So Aya waited patiently, editing and reediting, putting up with Hiro's annoying comments, and giving Ren a whole minute to fill with the math of orbital mechanics and kinetic energy. That part was boring at first, but it ended with explosionsthe perverse eye-kicks of buildings tumbling after their hoverstruts were ripped apart by slivers of half-molten metal.
And finally, after a long week, her face rank slipped back across a hundred thousand. Slime Queen was no more, and Aya Fuse became a Sly Girl one last time.
Testing
"You're sure nothing followed you?" Kai called.
"Very," Aya said, skidding her hoverboard to a halt. Just to be certain, Moggle had stalked her all the way from Akira Hall, watching for any hovercams left over from Slime Queen's short reign. And to make doubly sure, Ren had sewn six spy-cams into her dorm jacket, facing in all directions, and none had spotted a thing.
"Where's everyone else?" asked Aya. Eden and Kai were the only Sly Girls waiting here at the edge of town.
"Taking the night off," Eden said. "It's a little windy for surfing. But we thought you'd be game, since you've been on parole."
"Really?" Aya frowned. She'd noticed the wind on the way out, but it hadn't seemed that strong.
"Thanks, I guess. I was getting pretty bored of my dorm room."
"That's what you get for hanging out with big faces." Kai laughed. "Maybe if you got that nose trimmed down, you wouldn't attract so many pretty boys."
Aya rolled her eyes. Her nose was too pretty now? "Whatever, Kai. I just want to get inside the mountain again. I've been doing some research, and I've got a theory about those cylinders."
"Can't wait to hear it," Eden said. "But I'm afraid you're a little behind."
"You mean you already know about them?" Aya asked softly.
Eden grinned and shook her head. "No, I just mean that Kai is Lai these days."
"It's a never-ending battle, staying obscure," Lai said. "But you know all about that now, don't you, Slime Queen?"
"Sure, Lai." Aya hid her relief with a glance over her shoulder. The rumble of the train was just beginning to build beneath her feet.
"Don't worry about being out of practice, Nosey," Lai said, smiling. "Mag-lev surfing's just like riding a hoverboard. You never forget."
The slipstream was worse than ever.
The wind grew stronger as the train neared the city's edge, and lying flat against her board, Aya could feel every tug and shudder in the air. The breeze was blowing straight across the arc of the turn, its energy blending with the turbulence of the train's passage, like two swift rivers merging into boiling rapids.
Her first contact with the slipstream knocked Aya into a barrel roll, spinning earth and sky around her. Only Eden's souped-up crash bracelets kept her hanging on, her fingers white-knuckled around the board's front end.
She struggled for control, wrestling the board level again. But every time she edged it toward the train, the tumult knocked her into another spin.
No wonder Lai and Eden had told the other Girls to stay home!
The train began to humit was straightening again, speeding upand Aya gritted her teeth. No way was she spending another day locked in her dorm room, sitting on the biggest story since the mind-rain She leaned hard to the left, yanking her hoverboard toward the train, willing it through the slipstream's barrier.
The board spun into another set of barrel rolls, but this time Aya didn't fight the spins. She let the world twist around her a dozen times, until the pattern of the track lights steadied. Then, letting the board's gyrations carry her, she rolled across the tumult.
In the calmer air, Aya wrestled her board back to level flight. Her head was still spinning, but the train stretched out beside her, as steady as a house.
She slipped up against its metal flank and climbed aboard.
A few meters ahead Lai and Eden were already standing, watching with amusement.
"Not bad," Lai called. "Maybe you're ready to learn some new tricks!"
The train was still speeding up, and Aya didn't answer, scrambling to shift a crash bracelet to her ankle. She stood just as the train hit cruising speed, and the three of them rode in silence together, ducking decapitation hazards, the wild shooting past on either side.
Soon the mountains rose into view, their dark bulk a hundred times more ominous now that Aya knew what was inside.
Ren had sent her more math today: Only a mountain could hide a mass driver large enough to hurl a projectile into orbit. Conveniently, the atmosphere was thinner up around mountaintopsless air resistance for the cylinders once they left the shaft. Whoever had built this had thought long and hard about how to destroy the world.
As the dark peaks grew before her, Aya wondered for the first time if mind-rain slammers like the Nameless One were right. Maybe humanity really was too dangerous to be free. It was only three years since the cure, and already someone had built a weapon that would have made the Rusties proud.
At least the discovery made one thing easier: Once they realized what the mass driver was for, the Sly Girls would have to understand that they couldn't keep it secret anymore.
"So what's this theory of yours?" Lai asked.
"Well, it has to do with that stuff." Aya pointed her flashlight at the hidden door.
Eden Maru was kneeling beside it, the matter hacker in her hands, her fingers jumping across the controls. The tunnel was pitch-black except for Aya's flashlightthe other two had infraredand the darkness around them came to life as the door began to hum.
"You mean smart matter?" Lai asked.
"Exactly" Aya swept her light across the surface, watching it ripple and undulate, smelling the scent of ram. "What if those cylinders are laced with it?"
Eden glanced over her shoulder at Lai, but neither said anything.
"That shaft Eden found looks like a mass driver to me," Aya continued. "And if the cylinders can change shape, they must be missiles of some kind."
For a moment there was no sound except the hum of smart matter, then Lai said, "You mean this whole mountain is a weapon?"
"Exactly. An old-fashioned, Rusty sort of weapon."
"Interesting theory." Eden watched the last layers of the door slip aside, revealing the orangey glow of
the tunnel. "How sure are you about this?"
"Almost positive. I can prove it when we get to the cylinders."
They stepped inside, and Eden turned to close the hidden door again. As expected, Moggle would be trapped on the other side tonight. At least Aya had her spy-cams.
"Clever," Lai said. "But you're not the only one who's been clever this week."
Aya frowned. The two of them didn't even seem surprised. "This is serious, Lai. Those cylinders could take out a whole city. They're much deadlier than anything used in the Diego War."
"Maybe so, Nosey. But wait till you see what we've cooked up."
"But this could mean" "Aya, I said wait!"
The door rippled closed, and Aya fell silent. She'd forgotten that Eden Maru was also a tech-head, a much more famous one than Ren. What had she and the Sly Girls been up to for the last week?
The three of them made their way down the stone hallways, through clutter and equipment. When they reached the cylinder room, Aya paused at the top of the stairs, letting her spy-cams take in the ranks of metal missiles.
"What's the matter, Nosey?" Eden said.
"If I can borrow the hacker for a minute, I'll show you something."
"It's not a toy," Eden warned.
"I know that. Just let me try something."
"Let her," Lai said. "This could be interesting."
Eden sighed, then handed Aya the device. It was heavier than it looked, its topside thick with controls and readouts. Ren had warned that it was one of the few machines deliberately designed to be tricky to useno voice help, no handy instruction screen, as opaque and interface-missing as the Rusty gadgets in the city museum.
Aya made her way down the stairs and chose a cylinder at random. She pulled Ren's memory strip from her pocket and slid it into the hacker's reader.
"You wrote code for a matter hacker?" Eden snorted. "You're full of hidden talents, aren't you?"
Aya shrugged. She was tired of lying.
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