Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  The model that Luka was evaluating this morning was a massive industrial ice auger, but rather than considering the most efficient and parallelized approach to assembling it, he was reflecting on how bold the Coronians had gotten. At least with the conveyers, grinding mills, and various types of drills and power shovels, there was some pretense—some amount of investigation or even interpretation involved in deciding whether the equipment was bound for orbit or not. Before Luka could be certain, he would run the packaging and shipping specifications through a suite of equations Omicron had prepared between excursions to Triple Seven and the Global Seed Vault, research the invoice and manifest details, and finally run everything by both Charlie and Tycho for second and third opinions. In reality, it was pretty easy to just eyeball which shipments were likely to be headed up to the Coronians versus which were staying aboard the San Francisco or intended for other terrestrial destinations, but if they were going to use mining equipment as a way to smuggle Cam up to Equinox, they needed to be as certain as possible.

  But the Coronians seemed increasingly less concerned with covering their tracks, and the commission of a massive industrial ice auger didn’t really leave very much room for interpretation. Luka was pretty certain that there hadn’t been any natural ice formations on Earth in many decades, and even if everything Cadie was planning worked perfectly, it would probably still be centuries before any natural ice formed again. Therefore, the final destination of an autonomous, radiation-shielded, multibit tank driven by six independent snow tracks had to be worlds far more distant and exotic than any Luka knew.

  Omicron’s equations further bolstered Luka’s theory: the components for the ice auger were to be distributed, packaged, and balanced in such a way as to be optimized for transport into orbit. This wasn’t the first opportunity they had to try to sabotage the Coronians’ mining operations, but it was possible that it could be one of their last. Luka already knew that the inquiry into how he and Charlie had obtained the schematics for the next major phase of the San Francisco’s development would almost certainly not conclude in their favor—regardless of what evidence was actually uncovered—and that their only hope was that Two Bulls could find a way to obstruct the investigation. Luka’s fallback position was to claim that he had sculpted the model purely from memory after his meeting with Khang around the vat of ferrofluid (which she would undoubtedly deny ever took place), possibly steering the prosecution more toward misdemeanor charges of vandalism or inciting minor civil unrest rather than high treason or attempted mutiny. Regardless, if it came down to an official arraignment, Luka was pretty certain that he was gone, and the best they could hope for was that Tycho would go undiscovered, and that Charlie—after a little time in the quiet room and a few tearful sessions with her own custom instance of Ellie—would be allowed to stay and finish what they’d started.

  Luka moved the ice auger into his queue, and then forwarded the schematics on to Charlie and Tycho to get their feedback. In his opinion, if they were ever going to make a move against the Coronians, the time was now.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  COMPARISON OPERATOR

  WHEN AYLA REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, she knew immediately where she was. The polymer surgical hood suspended from the ceiling told her that she was back aboard the Hawk, in the medical bay, lying on one of the two foldable cots. The muscles in her right shoulder were sore, and when she saw the jet injector in Omicron’s hand, she understood why.

  “It’s OK,” he told her. He was sitting on the cot opposite hers, and he set the pneumatic syringe down on a stack of crates next to two bulbs of water. The med bay doubled as a storage room for emergency rations, and inside the boxes were cartons of Ayla’s least favorite sources of protein—mostly cured cockroaches and giant water bugs—which is why they were designated for emergency use only, and placed down here where they were well out of sight. “You’re safe now.”

  She tried to judge the passage of time. Her intuition told her she wasn’t out for all that long. Omicron was wearing the same mesh thermal lining he had on under his environment suit when they left, and when she looked down, she saw that she was still wearing her liquid-cooled polymer thermal wear. It had to be hours as opposed to days or weeks.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “How’s your breathing?” Omicron wanted to know.

  She drew in a deep, experimental breath. “Normal, I think,” she said. “God, I’m thirsty.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  “I think so.”

  Ayla gathered herself into a sitting position and swung her legs around. She accepted a bulb of water from Omicron, and as she sucked on the jointed straw and swallowed, she realized that she had a vital band across her chest. There were two empty glass vials on top of the steel drug cabinet in the corner.

  “Headache?” Omicron asked.

  “A little,” Ayla said. “Not bad.”

  “Good. It should be gone in a few minutes. Keep drinking.”

  Ayla sucked again at the straw. “So,” she said through a tone of contrition, “I guess going inside wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

  “You’ve had better,” Omicron admitted.

  “It was a trap, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “Why didn’t it work on you?”

  “The gas was some kind of a synthetic opioid aerosol,” Omicron explained. “It was intended to immobilize rather than be fatal. The dose was much too small for me.”

  Ayla frowned as she sucked the cool, fresh water through the straw and swallowed. “That’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Immobilizing. If they really wanted to keep people out, why not go a step further?”

  “I don’t know,” Omicron said. “Let’s just be thankful they didn’t.”

  “Where are we now?” Ayla asked. She leaned to the side so she could see past Omicron, to an auxiliary terminal in the wall. By default, it showed a summary of the ship’s status. She could see that they were headed east at a full thirty-five knots—close to top speed for the Hawk—and then she saw something else. She leaned forward and squinted to make sure, then looked back at Omicron.

  “What the hell?” she said. “Where’d we get all the power?”

  “It turns out you were right,” Omicron said. “I found full capacitors inside.”

  “Where?” Ayla asked him. She wasn’t sure why that was important, but for some reason, it was. Perhaps it was just a way to get something more out of him about what had become of her home.

  “Just inside on the loading dock.”

  There was something about Omicron’s story—and something about the subtle reluctance with which he seemed to be doling it out—that didn’t feel right to Ayla. “There were just a bunch of completely full, completely unguarded capacitors right inside the airlock for anyone to take?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say they were unguarded,” Omicron countered.

  “Why are we moving so fast?”

  Omicron glanced behind him at the terminal, then looked back at Ayla. “We need to get to the GSV and back as soon as we can.”

  “I understand that,” Ayla said, “but we can’t sustain this kind of speed for long.”

  “I’ll back it down,” Omicron said. “I’m just trying to make up for lost time. You lie back and get some rest.”

  “Omicron,” Ayla said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  The Neo gave her a perplexed look. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s something you’re clearly not telling me. We stumble into a trap meant to knock people out rather than kill them. You just happen to find a bunch of full capacitors right inside the airlock. And now I wake up to find that we’re obviously running away from someone or something. Now I’ll ask you again: what aren’t you telling me?”

  “I’ll slow us down,” Omicron said. “You’re right. We don’t need to be moving this fast.”

  There were still several milliliters
of water left in Ayla’s bulb, and when she threw it against the med bay hatch, it erupted.

  “Damnit!” she screamed. “Stop treating me like a fucking child and tell me what’s going on. This is my ship, and I don’t appreciate you keeping things from me.”

  She stopped and clenched her eyes shut. Her fingertips went up to her temples and pressed.

  “Are you OK?” Omicron asked.

  Ayla took a deep breath through her nose, let it out her mouth, and opened her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said with forced composure. She saw that Omicron was looking at the panel on the wall above the cot, probably evaluating her vital signs. “Now tell me what’s really going on before I turn us around and go find out for myself.”

  Omicron watched her for a moment as though weighing her threat. “OK,” he eventually said. “I’ll tell you, but you need to be prepared. It’s going to upset you.”

  “I’ve been through a lot more than you know,” Ayla said. “I’m a lot tougher than you think.”

  Omicron took the second bulb of water off the stack of crates and handed it to Ayla. “The trap set off a beacon,” he began. “That’s why I’m trying to put some distance between us and Nanortalik.”

  “Why would it set off a beacon?” Ayla asked. She sipped from the second bulb, then held the cool receptacle against her forehead.

  “So whoever set it would know to come back.”

  “Obviously,” Ayla said. “But come back for what?”

  “For collection.”

  “Collection?” Ayla repeated. “Human trafficking?”

  “No,” Omicron said. “Not human trafficking.”

  “Then what?” Ayla pressed.

  “For power.”

  Ayla shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s a great deal of chemical energy stored in the human body,” Omicron said. “Especially when it’s still alive.”

  Ayla’s expression changed from confusion to horror. “Oh my God,” she said. “Tell me what you found in there.”

  Omicron hesitated while he appeared to search for the right word. “Machinery,” he finally said.

  “What specifically did you find, Omicron? What kind of machinery?”

  “Vats,” Omicron said. “Decomposition vats. Full of . . . human remains. Connected to capacitors.”

  Ayla’s eyes flicked away from Omicron to the terminal behind him, then back. “You didn’t,” she said.

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Please tell me that’s not where you got the power, Omicron. Please tell me we’re not running on electricity that came from human remains.”

  “I told you you didn’t want to know.”

  “My God, Omicron,” Ayla said. She shook her head. “How could you do that?”

  “Do what?” Omicron shouted. He stood suddenly and Ayla flinched. She realized at that moment that he wasn’t as indifferent to what he’d just witnessed as he’d been trying to convey. “Take free caps just because of where they came from? It’s done. Those people are dead. I could have left it there for someone else to take and probably use to kill more people, or we could use it to try to change the world. I’m sorry if that doesn’t meet your standards of morality.”

  Ayla was sitting up straight on her cot now, eerily composed. She did not look like a girl who was about to cry, yet when she blinked, tears spilled from both eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Omicron said. He sat back down, closed his eyes, and breathed. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry for what I said, and I’m sorry for what happened to your home. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “I swear to God, Omicron,” Ayla said. “As hard as I try, I just don’t understand this fucking world we live in.”

  “I know,” Omicron said. “I know.”

  “I mean how can places like Triple Seven exist where they’re willing to take us in and protect us just out of respect for Costa, and places like the San Francisco where we were almost drowned as part of a business transaction? How can people like you and Costa and Cadie and Luka and Charlie all exist in the same world as people like Nsonowa, and all the human traffickers and raiders and cannibals out there, and people who use other people as sources of energy?” She paused and gave Omicron a piercing and imploring look. “I don’t know how to make sense if it all, Omicron. I honestly don’t.”

  Omicron looked down at the floor for moment, then leaned back against the wall. “Do you remember how the UNVs work?”

  It took Ayla a moment to grasp the non sequitur. “The sailboats?” she asked him. “Why?”

  “Do you remember how I explained that the sail generates lift in one direction, and the keel generates lift in another direction, creating a resultant vector of momentum? A sort of balance of forces that moves the boat forward?”

  “I guess,” Ayla said. She wiped her cheeks with her palms and sniffed. “So?”

  “That’s how I make sense of humanity,” Omicron said. “There are millions of individual dynamics out there moving in all different directions. Some of them compound, and some of them cancel each other out, but in the end, you’re left with a resultant vector—a balance of forces that moves us all forward, no matter how slowly and how painfully.”

  “But is it really forward?” Ayla asked. “Sometimes I can’t tell which direction we’re moving. one day I think things are getting better, and the next day I honestly think it would be better if something finally just wiped us all out and the world started over again without us.”

  “I don’t know,” Omicron said. “I think all you can do is contribute your own force in whatever way you can and just hope that it helps to move things in the right direction.”

  Ayla stared at a spot on the floor for a moment, then looked up. “Omicron,” she said. “We have to go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “To Nanortalik,” she said. “We can’t leave it like that. We can’t let more people die.”

  Omicron watched her for a moment, and Ayla could tell he was trying to decide how much of something else to reveal. “Don’t worry,” he finally said. “I took care of it.”

  Ayla’s eyebrows went up. “What does that mean?” she asked. “What did you do?”

  Omicron turned to check the status of the ship, then turned back to Ayla. “The device they used to hack the airlock,” he said. “It was right inside. It was just an old sixty-four-bit microcontroller. No encryption, no security. They were obviously assuming nobody would ever make it through.”

  “And . . .” Ayla prompted. “What did you do?”

  “I inverted a comparison operator.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Whoever did this injected a condition into the decontamination and air exchange algorithms,” Omicron began. “It compares the biometric signatures of the people in the airlock to a set of hard-coded signatures. If any of them match, nothing but nitrogen and oxygen are exchanged. But if there are no matches, in addition to nitrogen and oxygen, they introduce just a few parts per million of a colorless and odorless synthetic opioid from a tank they spliced into the ducts.”

  “What are you saying?” Ayla asked. “You mean the people who set the trap can’t spring it?”

  “That’s what it used to mean,” Omicron said. “But after inverting the comparison operator in the condition—just by adding one little exclamation mark to the code—it means the exact opposite. Now the people who set the trap are the only people in the world who can spring it.”

  Ayla’s eyes widened. “Holy shit,” she said. “Omicron, that’s brilliant. But won’t it just knock them out? Won’t they just change it back after they wake up?”

  “Well,” Omicron said, “I also redefined the atmospheric ratios. I guarantee whoever set that trap will never wake up again.”

  Amusement suddenly broke through Ayla’s somber mood, and she surprised herself by laughing. But just as quickly, she covered her mouth.

  “I guess that’s not funny,” she said. “I mean we�
�re talking about people’s lives.”

  Omicron shrugged and allowed a subtle and mischievous grin to spread across his heavy features. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it might be just a little bit funny.”

  Ayla hadn’t realized how much she needed the endorphins until she started laughing again, and despite the pounding in her head, found that she could not stop.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  PSYCHOLOGICAL TRIAGE

  THE NOE VALLEY REC CENTER was the newest building on the San Francisco, and probably also the boldest and the most advanced. It was built diagonally opposite the quantum battery bank, which was neither by coincidence nor by accident. Every flywheel and resistive mechanism housed within the orderly formations of eclectic exercise contraptions drove a compact generator connected to a superconductive cable that ran down through the floor panels to a series of junctions eventually terminating on the other side of Sunset and Market, feeding what amounted to mostly symbolic quantities of wattage into the mining rig’s power grid—enough to fuel plenty of political bluster, but not nearly enough to offend the Coronians.

  When the arrangement was initially proposed, so too were citywide minimum exercise quotas that supporters touted as a way to both improve general health and wellbeing, and boost the per-citizen municipal power allocation (which, at the time, was far too low for anyone to live off of, and was now only modestly less inadequate). While construction of the new rec center and its quantum battery bank umbilical were both approved, the exercise mandates were not. A nutritionist at the Pacific Medical Center showed that forcing everyone to be regularly active would inevitably result in them consuming more calories, which, in turn, would increase pressure on Yerba Buena and ultimately end up costing more energy through expanded food production than it could possibly hope to generate. Of course the study was commissioned by a self-assembled panel of council members who, if their physiques were any indication, could easily be counted among the most sedentary of the entire crew. No serious objections were raised, though, since those with physically demanding occupations usually didn’t have the energy to exercise regularly anyway, and many of those with less active careers lacked the volition, positioning both parties squarely in the unfamiliar territory of consensus.