Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  Luka did not have a regular workout routine. To him, a routine implied obligation, and obligation implied demands, and demands felt just a little too much like authority. Even from himself, Luka did not easily accept orders.

  Instead of a regular schedule, Luka stopped by the rec center whenever he felt like it, and when he got there, he did whatever he felt like doing. Sometimes that was strength training, sometimes it was cardiovascular, occasionally it was rock climbing or boxing, and every now and then, it was screwing around with the virtual reality cubicles that made you feel like you were running through fields of wildflowers, or biking spiraled ridges carved into mountain slopes, or rowing against the current of the Amazon river. But when Luka was feeling especially dull and languid and irritable—usually after a night of intoxicated sculpting, solitary brooding, or both—the best thing for him was a few laps through the cool blue swimming tubes.

  The swimming tubes both originated from, and terminated in, the aqua center on the top floor, but in-between, they snaked among all five floors of the rec center, and occasionally even veered outside among the cantilevered decks. They reminded Luka of an image he once found in the archives of a cast someone made by pouring molten aluminum into an ant nest, producing a beautiful piece of natural sculpture that seemed to work out quite well for the artist, though decidedly less well for the ants. The water in the tubes was kept well oxygenated for the sake of swimmers’ full-face gill masks, and distributed throughout the tubes at regular elevation intervals were pressure-bearing wet locks that both helped to keep one’s ears comfortable, and alleviated any concerns about decompression sickness.

  Luka sometimes did surface swimming, as well, but there was something about being completely submerged for as long as forty-five minutes that was an entirely different kind of workout. And, as he had reluctantly admitted to Ellie while serving time on Hexagon Row, the experience was also a form of surrogate socialization. While meandering throughout the building, the turquoise passages brought Luka into close proximity with as many as several hundred fellow San Francisco citizens while, at the same time, serving as an impenetrable barrier. The insight Ellie showed by labeling his behavior as “social and emotional voyeurism” had both stunned and impressed Luka.

  The aqua center was busy and, as was typical in the mornings, reverberantly cacophonous. There always seemed to be someone shouting about something from somewhere around the pool, but the acoustics of the room usually made it impossible to locate the source. Luka kept his head down and looked at the tile as he skirted the heated lap lanes in order to avoid any awkward acknowledgments, or worse, empty and meaningless conversation in which neither party had any real interest. He didn’t need to take a very good look around him to know that he was being watched. After having finally recovered from the infamy of sending out cryptic prophecies about the Coronians and shutting down all the power on the entire rig, he had once again become a curiosity, and one of the primary topics of the ceaseless stream of ship-wide gossip. At least this time, he had Charlie to share the distinction with.

  Luka stood at the edge of the swimming tube pool and hiked his trunks up on his bony hips. The silicone strap of the gill mask he’d taken from the cage in the locker room was around his wrist and the apparatus bumped against the back of one leg while the two short-blade fins he was carrying bumped against the other. one of the advantages of being an assembly technician was that Luka knew all about almost every single new product available on the rig (whenever technicians came across anything novel, they usually posted it to the exchange board for everyone to make snarky comments on), therefore he was aware that his simple synthetic drawstring shorts were considered hopelessly obsolete athletic apparel. Had he been more concerned with both function and fashion, he’d purchase a full-body suit coated in tiny synthetic hydrodynamic denticles, inspired by the skin of fast and sleek and long-extinct oceanic predators.

  Gill masks had to soak for several seconds before they were maximally efficient, so Luka tossed the contraption into the pool ahead of him to give it a head start on the saturation process. He managed to maintain his balance while slipping the fins over his feet and working the straps over his heels, then he got the soft silicone frog palms untangled from the inside of his pockets and pulled them on over his fingers. After taking a moment to brace himself, Luka reached down and grasped the edge of the pool, then dropped into the chilly water beside the mask.

  The swimming tubes weren’t heated, so Luka’s skinny body always experienced a slight shock at the sudden temperature change. His first time in, as he shivered and hyperventilated, he was incredulous at having to endure not just the initial cold, but then the slight thermocline beyond the first wet lock that reduced the temperature of the water a few degrees more. But he quickly realized that whoever designed the system actually knew what he or she was doing. Negotiating the network of tubes required pretty significant effort, so had the water been heated, within minutes you would have felt as though you were swimming through a giant, boiling chemistry experiment.

  When Luka saw the oxygen patch on the mask turn blue beneath the surface, he took and held a deep breath, went under, pulled the mask down over his head, and tightened the straps. His finger found and depressed the purge valve between the gill fronds, and when he felt the pocket of air form in front of his face, he opened his eyes and blinked away the moisture. Even though gill masks were relatively simple devices (Luka had assembled several variations of them over the years) and generally considered extremely reliable, as always, he took several experimental breaths and confirmed that the oxygen patch remained blue. The capillary-scale technology could be susceptible to deterioration if exposed to dry heat for too long, but from what Luka understood, as long as a gill mask worked during your first few breaths, it was pretty much guaranteed to keep working for the rest of your swim. And even if it didn’t, as long as you were paying attention to the color of the patch, and as long as CO2 was being properly vented, there would be plenty of residual oxygen to keep you alive until you got back up to the surface.

  Luka descended headfirst through the wet lock into the even colder water below. He followed the path he had memorized, which he knew would result in the longest possible circuit and maximum coverage of the building. Each lap would take him along the perimeter of the cardio floor and directly above the track where he could race against the runners below him; briefly outside the building where he could see into the lush green helix of the Yerba Buena Gardens shrouded in thick morning aeroponic nutrient mist; directly through the focus of the circular strength training center and amid dozens of individuals struggling against complex and highly customized distributions of dynamic resistance; alongside the most technically challenging climbing walls with their coarse molded textures, their polygonal overhangs, and their strategically spaced grips and holds; discretely through the corners of the heated yoga studio, the dojo with its synthetic tatami floor, the racquet courts with their configurable glass walls, and the muted salon throughout which the tube cast serene undulating shadows; and finally, before heading back up, the café where members exhibited their physical achievements while attempting to conceal all signs of effort.

  Luka negotiated the tubes with the agility of a dolphin. Swimming, he discovered, was more than just a form of exercise for him. After his time with Ellie on Hexagon Row, isolating himself underwater had become a critical cognitive exercise—a way of achieving a completely placid mental surface, and then waiting to see what bubbled up to the surface. A form of meditation, perhaps. There was certainly no shortage of challenges from Luka’s past that he could use the time to explore and process, but through the mysterious logic of psychological triage, he found that it was events from the last several months that tended to take precedence now.

  During other recent swims, Luka had reflected upon the fact that he was now under constant threat of being arrested, tried, and very likely exiled, and even if Khang couldn’t get rid of him in the short-term, he knew that h
is time aboard the San Francisco, one way or another, was probably coming to an end. He’d thought about how they were all making big short-term bets on shifting the balance of power between Equinox and Earth, but the payoff—if it came at all—was likely to be so far in the future that it was possible none of them would ever get a chance to see it, and might never even know whether or not it worked. And finally, he had tried to reconcile the fact that the only relationship that didn’t make him feel like he was cheating on Val was, for reasons he did not understand, whatever it was he had with Charlie, and yet it was Ayla who he now found himself fantasizing about.

  But these were not the things Luka found himself dwelling on this morning. As he propelled himself through the café, and then on through the wall into the serenity of the salon, he realized that what was bothering him more than anything else was the ice auger.

  Until this morning, sending Cam up to Equinox had been an abstract notion—something that, as long as you didn’t think about it too much, seemed to have a reasonable chance of success. But now that it was actually happening—now that Tycho and Luka had modified the shipping manifest in such a way as to leave an entire crate free for Cam and all of his life-support equipment—the whole idea suddenly seemed ridiculous. Even if he survived orbital insertion, there was no guarantee that anyone or anything would come pick him up before his consumables ran out. It might be years before the Coronians needed the auger, and it probably made more sense to leave it in orbit than to store it on or near Equinox. Even if they retrieved it right away, instead of bringing it into the station for inspection and giving Cam a chance to slip away and infiltrate their mining operations, the Coronians might decide to send the payload directly to its final icy destination millions of kilometers away. And finally, even in the tremendously unlikely event that everything just happened to unfold exactly as they needed it to, there was still the extremely uncertain question of not only getting Cam home, but then of finding him again before his capsule sank, or before he was captured or murdered by the crew of a nearby vessel drawn to his location either by the energy signature of the splashdown, or by Cam’s subsequent beacon.

  The idea of smuggling Cam onto Equinox had evolved a great deal over time, and Luka could no longer distinguish exactly who was responsible for which aspects of it, but there was one thing about it that seemed particularly perplexing. Initially Cadie had been entirely opposed to this part of their plan—extremely reluctant to allow her final connection to her home and to her former life to be exposed to so much risk. But at some point, her attitude had dramatically shifted. Perhaps it was the prospect of Cam locating her daughter, but from the timing of it, that wasn’t the impression that Luka got. Her transformation seemed to have occurred in isolation rather than in response to debate or discussion, and although at times it was subtle, both Luka and Charlie agreed that it was undeniably there. one day Cadie was determined to do everything in her power to hold on to Cam, and the next, she acted as though absolutely everything depended on him successfully boarding the space station that, directly or indirectly, held every human being left on the planet captive.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  BLACK TEARS

  THE POLYCARBONATE CYLINDER CONNECTING the port on the southern tip of the Norwegian island of Svalbard to the Longyearbyen Pod System two hundred kilometers away was not intended solely for comfort and convenience. Rather, the reduced-pressure tube—along with the pressurized capsules that were conveyed through it on top of a millimeter-thick cushion of air—was the only safe mode of passage. It was technically possible to get as close as one and a half kilometers to the Global Seed Vault by sailing up the Isfjorden inlet. However, all six kilometers of its mouth had been blockaded by a braided, galvanized, electrified mesh, and the entire body of water behind it was well stocked with thousands of variable-depth mines retrofitted with magnetic anomaly sensors that steered them resolutely toward anything with a metal hull. The vault was easily within walking distance of the airstrip to its north, but all two and a half kilometers of the runway were secured beneath nets of a type of synthetic spider silk sticky and strong enough to ensnare vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and sharp enough to shear aircraft attempting traditional landings into long strips of titanium ribbon. Enough of the island was patrolled by sentinels and littered with booby traps of various levels of sophistication and brutality that the only sensible way in or out was by a combination of hypertube and express invitation.

  During the trip from Nanortalik to Svalbard, Omicron explained to Ayla the justification for all the surveillance and security on and around the archipelago: the Coronians badly wanted what the Longyearbyen Pod System had. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was established before the Solar Age, and started out as a type of backup seed bank funded by a combination of philanthropic software tycoons and government entities. It was a remote and secure location where samples of the world’s most nutritious, productive, and therefore calorically critical agricultural products were kept frozen as contingencies against drought, flooding, fungus, swarms of locusts, civil war, nuclear war, asteroid strikes, ecophagy, or anything else that could permanently wipe out entire strains of crops. Over time, though, it became more of a generalized gene bank and a mecca for the world’s top geneticists, who greatly accelerated their curation efforts as the Solar Age came to an abrupt end, struggling to stay one step ahead of mass extinction events, and aggregating the world’s databases of gene sequences and preserving DNA samples with the hope that the technology would one day exist to not only re-terraform the entire planet, but possibly even repopulate it with a significant portion of its former biodiversity. The project could best be conceptualized as a kind of genetic and cryonic Noah’s ark, and as such, was of tremendous interest to the Coronians.

  Of course, nobody doubted the Coronians’ ability to completely obliterate the GSV—or, more likely, have it completely obliterated on their behalf—but nobody believed they would do so until they somehow gained access to everything inside. Svalbard security, therefore, was not so much intended to prevent a catastrophic attack as it was to prevent the theft of the data and physical specimens that was guaranteed to immediately precede it.

  Stopping the Coronians from buying what they wanted, coercing others into procuring it for them, or remotely gaining access to databases and helping themselves to sensitive information was far from a simple matter. Primary protection against hackers came in the form of the tried-and-true air gap: computers physically disconnected from any and all types of networks. However, air-gapping a machine—as system administrators were constantly learning the hard way—wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded. First of all, none of the hardware could contain any type of peripheral port through which an infiltrator could surreptitiously connect a transmitter or receiver. Second, machines that were potential targets needed to have their speakers and microphones removed so that they couldn’t be infected—and subsequently infect their nearby peers—by high-frequency binary chatter. Third, they could contain no optical sensors whatsoever through which vulnerabilities could be exploited with a simple line-of-sight laser, or even cleverly encoded flashes of ambient light. And finally, they had to run on isolated batteries with redundant pulse suppressors to ensure that malicious instructions weren’t being injected directly into CPU cores using minute power fluctuations. It wasn’t enough anymore to simply pull the network cable out of the back of a server and assume it was safe; rather, for systems to be considered secure, they needed to be hand-built with verified components and spend their entire functional lives rigorously quarantined inside biometrically secured, acoustically dampened, and electromagnetically impervious Faraday cages.

  Ironically, physical access security—while logistically intensive—was actually much simpler. It was mostly a matter of manpower, checkpoints, body scans, redundant authentication, and the quantum randomization of routines and schedules. The primary challenge was keeping entire garrisons sharp day to day, minute to minute, and even second to
second. The enemy of virtual defenses is often the exotic and the unknown, but the enemy of physical security is usually just boredom.

  It tended to help that the lives of everyone in the Longyearbyen Pod System—and indeed everyone on the entire Svalbard archipelago—depended on their impeccable and uncompromising success. But just for a little extra incentive, the stewards of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault took additional precautions. No less than 10 percent of all traffic in and out of the GSV was a deliberate and staged attempt at penetration, and anyone associated with any lapses in security were—along with his or her entire family—escorted to the European mainland on the very next ferry, provided with a few days’ worth of rations, and left to fend for themselves against the subterraneans known locally as “muldvarp mennesker,” or the mole people.

  Ayla had seen security implemented in all kinds of ways since she left home, but nothing quite like this. They couldn’t drop anchor off the Sorkapp shore because they weren’t allowed to get close enough that any of their anchors would be able to reach anything, so they virtually anchored the Hawk to coordinates transmitted to them over the radio and, as instructed, waited on the forward deck, fully suited and unarmed. There was a viscous black rain falling that day, so Ayla suggested they use the Anura to shuttle themselves ashore in order to make everyone’s lives a little easier, but her proposal was tersely rejected, and instead she and Omicron were conveyed via a heavily armed tender, then escorted to the hypertube terminal by men in black environment suits with tinted visors wielding long, slender electromagnetic pistols.

  The terminal was a round and elevated carousel beneath a transparent geodesic dome that, due to the current weather, looked to Ayla like it was weeping black tears. The airlock was housed inside an adjacent silo and raised them to the level of the platform during multiple cycles of high-pressure sanitization and thermal sublimation, and then eventually the final air exchange. Upon exiting, they were instructed to remove everything they had on and leave it in side-by-side lockers, and to do so without any form of communication whatsoever. Ayla looked at Omicron for confirmation, and he responded with a single reassuring nod.