“It’s OK,” Two Bulls announced. “Lower your weapons. He will go peacefully.”
Luka did not resist as his arms were gathered behind him and he was roughly cuffed. The commander of the unit stepped into the space between Luka and Two Bulls, and looked down at his prisoner. The man was unshaven, but in a way that came across as well groomed, the length of his stubble blending nicely with his receding hairline. He sharpened his look by lowering his heavy brow and squinting his intense, amber-flecked eyes.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said with an accent that Luka identified as British, but not the highborn kind. The man then turned around to face Two Bulls. “But what about you?”
Even with his visor, Luka could see the confusion in Two Bulls’ expression. But before he could respond, the commander struck somewhere down low, and Two Bulls—after a sickening, guttural heave—was silently doubled over.
The commander turned back to Luka, and Luka recoiled.
“The bad news is that there won’t be anyone waiting to rescue you,” the commander said. He turned once again and watched as Two Bulls was forced upright and cuffed. “But the good news is that you won’t die alone.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
FEEDBACK LOOP
CAM DID NOT EXPECT TO HAVE the best meal of his life four hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet.
He wasn’t entirely sure what it was, though he suspected that the firm and fleshy little pink curls were extinct crustacean scavengers once commonly known as shrimp. How the Coronians were able to provide him with a sterile but fresh vacuum-sealed packet of them, he had absolutely no idea, but every time he spun another one in the air, wrapped his mouth around it, and chewed with great relish, he was positive that he was experiencing the very pinnacle of Coronian achievement.
The drone had towed Cam to one of several interconnected hexagonal habitation capsules, each equipped with its own tiny airlock. Even after living inside Aquarius for months, the module felt small, and Cam was astonished to discover that it had once been a dormitory designed to accommodate as many as half a dozen technicians. In the back of the capsule, recessed into each one of the six sides of the hexagon, were individual sleep stations—quilted cubbies with anchored sleeping bags, inoperable terminals, dimmable plasma lighting, and folding doors. Just beyond them was another folding door with a crescent moon drawn in black indelible marker, and inside, a small toilet and urine collection tube with a plastic yellow attachment, both of which produced light suction which Cam quickly learned was critical for ensuring that everything flowed in the correct direction. (On the wall were pockets of paper, wipes, and even latex gloves just in case escape velocity was unexpectedly achieved.) In front of the sleeping pods were shelves of towels, several detachable mirrors, and pouches of toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors, water bags with resealable straws, and various types of no-rinse soap and shampoo. A portion of the capsule’s ceiling was reserved for the galley with racks of vacuum-sealed food pouches (which is where Cam was told to look for the shrimplike meal), a water terminal (which could be used to fill drinking bags, or to rehydrate various forms of ancient nutrients that Cam did not recognize, bearing labels in languages he did not know), and a small table surfaced with woolly loops designed to mate with their hooked counterparts. Folded up into the walls were various forms of exercise equipment: a type of stationary bike with toe clips, but no seat; a treadmill with an elasticized shoulder harness to create downward force against the belt; and a device labeled ARED (and below, in a smaller font, Advanced Resistive Exercise Device), which was a collection of bars, hinges, and pneumatic cylinders probably capable of facilitating a wide variety of strength-training exercises for anyone with proper coaching or sufficient patience. Most of what was intended to be thought of as the floor was treated as stowage and filled with canvas-covered crates and steel canisters secured beneath elastic webbing.
Every other available surface that was more than a few square centimeters served as an anchor point for an assortment of miscellaneous objects visually coalescing into an intricate collage of convenience and utility: powerless terminals mounted on segmented articulated appendages; nontoxic fire suppression canisters; plastic bags marked “Contaminated Cleanup Kit” with masks, eye protection, and heavy, chemical-resistant gloves inside; at least three pairs of scissors, Velcroed and leashed; sockets and outlets designed for unfamiliar configurations of plugs and pins; cameras with extremely long lenses mounted beside the airlock door; a miniature Go mat strewn with magnetic stones; variously angled handgrips, toeholds, and straps; patches, labels, stickers, and a speed limit sign marked “17,500,” probably hung by an American since the units were in miles rather than kilometers. The sound in the capsule was not unlike the environmental systems on Aquarius or in certain sections of V1: static white noise that, when you first heard it, you thought you’d never get used to, but that within minutes you forgot about entirely until the next time you experienced the peculiar sensation of silence.
Cam’s pressure suit was in the airlock, but his chronograph was on his wrist, the excess strap floating rather than hanging. Over the course of nearly twelve hours, he’d managed to re-oxygenate his cramped muscles by getting a little exercise on the stationary bike (which he kept trying to lower himself onto, surprised each time to rediscover that there was no seat), get some sleep (dreaming of free-falling and waking with a violent start several times before finally being able to relax), clean himself up (noticing in a mirror that his face was getting puffy from the fluids in his body becoming more evenly distributed), change his clothes (dressing in what looked like fern-green pajamas and white tube socks that he found sealed in a bag in one of the sleep stations), have his first taste of shrimp (realizing he might now be the only member of his species who could claim to have enjoyed such a delicacy), and in-between it all, drink several liters of water (and as a result, gain a great deal of experience with the urine collection tube).
He spent some time trying to spot something of interest though the airlock windows, but from his angle, even through the long camera lenses, all he could see was the occasional drone drifting by, gas jets bursting to correct its course. He was pretty sure that the airlock was still pressurized, and he thought about opening the inner door so that he only had one window to look through (thereby widening his visual range), but ultimately Cam decided it was probably best not to tamper with an unfamiliar airlock—especially one built so long ago and probably disused for so many years. Instead, he searched the sleep stations for something he hoped might entertain him while he waited, and behind a sliding panel, he found a small, cobalt-blue, hollow rubber ball that he discovered rocketed nicely—if somewhat perilously—around the capsule.
The first game he played involved identifying surface area devoid enough of clutter to accommodate the ball’s contact patch. The challenge was not just hitting his target, but also recapturing the projectile on its way back. He then noticed that the top of a crate in the floor was almost exactly parallel to the surface of the table on the ceiling, so he played a game with himself to see how many times he could get the ball the bounce between the two surfaces. A perfect round would be one where the friction of the environment stopped the ball before the gradual accumulation of misalignment put an end to the volley, but unfortunately that was not to be.
Cam wasn’t just distracting himself. He was also problem solving in the way one sometimes tried to figure something out by not thinking about it directly, like attempting to detect faint traces of light or movement by intentionally looking away and placing the area of interest in your peripheral vision. There was, of course, an established procedure for capture—a plan they’d all agreed on should the Coronians take Cam prisoner. Sitting around the cubical in Aquarius—Omicron and Ayla participating via line-of-sight acoustic link and a slab of polymeth—the consensus had been that concealing the gliders was top priority. Cam was to tell the Coronians absolutely nothing, look for every opportunity to escape and complete his mis
sion, and above all else, do whatever he had to do to in order to protect their terraforming plans.
But he and Cadie had, privately, come to a very different understanding. The night before he was smuggled up to deck three and sealed inside the modified crate—the night he’d wanted, more than anything else, to share his bunk with Cadie—the two of them had secretly established a new protocol. Cadie believed there was a good chance the Coronians would already know about their attempts to terraform. There was no question that they would have studied her daughter’s DNA carefully, and therefore would have already come across not only the image known as Blue Marble, but all of Arik’s research. Cadie also believed that the Coronians very likely had—or could rapidly develop and assemble—technology to ensure that Cam would not be able to conceal anything from them. That meant any opportunity to make a deal with the Coronians would likely be brief, and that the longer Cam was in custody, the less leverage he would have. The gliders, Cam and Cadie agreed, were not top priority after all, and neither was Cam’s mission to sabotage the Coronians’ ability to mine. Should Cam be captured, he was to use the gliders as a bargaining chip for the things that, to them, mattered most: the lives of Zaire and Haná—and, of course, his own life, as well. There would be other opportunities to terraform, and other opportunities to set the Coronians back, but they would almost certainly never again be in a position to directly affect the lives of the ones they loved.
It was not difficult to imagine a scenario where Cam was able to negotiate safe passage for himself and Zaire, but Haná was not nearly so straightforward. She’d probably already been in zero-g long enough that she would not be able to return to Earth, and the Coronians might consider her enough of a prize—a genetic and possibly even cultural link to their distant past—that before they agreed to terms that might jeopardize that which they’d worked so hard to obtain, they would probably find other ways to take what they wanted from Cam. Therefore, it was not Haná’s release that Cam was to negotiate, but something that, if Cadie was right, could ultimately be of much greater importance.
Cam had just decided that he might take another look at the airlock after all when every terminal in the module suddenly lit up simultaneously. Appearing on each of the capsule’s screens was a young girl who Cam—despite his circumstances—couldn’t deny was stunningly seductive. She had straw-yellow, bed-tousled hair; almost unnaturally wide, sapphire-blue eyes that penetrated through long, heavily made-up lashes; a petite, slightly upturned nose; and very full, flesh-colored lips. She wore a low-cut and fitted white tank top, and she seemed to be leaning against a simple gray-blue gradient backdrop. The girl watched Cam with great interest, but also with a self-awareness that suggested he should be watching her with an interest even greater.
“Good morning, Cam,” she said. Her voice was young, sweet, slightly groggy. All of the display panels in the capsule must have been acoustically resonant as her voice came at him from multiple trajectories. “How are you feeling?”
Cam looked from screen to screen. “Who are you?”
“My name is Angelia,” the girl said. “Do you have everything you need?”
“I don’t mean your name,” Cam said. “I mean who are you? Are you Coronian?”
The girl blinked and dimples formed in her cheeks as she smiled. “Think of me as your personal liaison,” she said.
Cam used a handhold to pull himself closer to the screen in the galley. As convincing as she was—as subtly and perfectly as her expression transitioned from one to another, and as closely as her voice matched the movement of her lips and larynx—the illusion dematerialized as soon as Cam noticed that she was changing. Her flaxen hair was now strawberry blonde and slightly neater, and her eyes were transitioning from blue to hazel.
“What’s going on?” Cam asked.
“You’re changing me,” the girl said, less flirtatiously and more as a simple statement of fact. “Please keep watching.”
She continued to morph, more rapidly now, but still fluidly. Her hair lengthened until it finally stopped—full and slightly wavy, and in a simple off-center part—just above her breasts, a shade somewhere between brown and black. Her face was rounder and her eyes—lashes shorter and makeup gone—were narrower and a dark copper brown. Her lips were pink, but naturally so, and her nose a tad broader. Her shirt was now a charcoal-gray V-neck that was still suggestive, though more modest than the tank top had been, and her posture was straighter—more attentive than evocative. Once her new form appeared finalized, she reached up with both hands and tucked her hair behind her ears, and Cam realized that she had gone from classically alluring to everything that matched his own personal and highly specific definition of pure, breathtaking beauty.
“My God,” he breathed as he unabashedly leered. “How did you do that?”
“Feature randomization combined with a physiological reaction feedback loop,” the girl said. Her voice was still feminine, but more mature now—confident rather than coquettish. “We want you to feel as comfortable as possible.”
“Who exactly is we?” Cam asked.
“All of us,” the girl said elusively. “How are you feeling?”
“You tell me,” Cam said with a hint of resentment. “You probably know better than I do.”
“Yes,” the girl said plainly, “but we are attempting to convey empathy in order to establish trust.”
Cam’s eyebrows went up at the girl’s candidness. “At least you’re honest.”
“We will not attempt to deceive you,” the girl said. “And attempting to deceive us will be ineffective.”
Cam shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“Did you enjoy your meal?” the girl asked. “Please describe how you are feeling.”
Having already tried to make sense of his seclusion in various ways, a new possibility suddenly occurred to Cam. He wondered if the habitation module—rather than temporary accommodations or a prison—was in fact a laboratory. Perhaps for the very first time, the Coronians had among them a mature specimen of the species from which they arose. Maybe they’d never considered Cam a threat so much as a research opportunity.
“What was it?” Cam asked. “Where did it come from?”
“Pandalus borealis, previously known less formally as the northern prawn, pink shrimp, deepwater prawn, deep-sea prawn, great northern prawn, and the northern shrimp. They are a relatively primitive decapod crustacean that—”
“Where did they come from?” Cam interrupted. “They’re extinct, aren’t they?”
“Pandalus borealis no longer occur naturally, if that’s what you mean by extinct. But we have successfully reconstructed more than two hundred extinct multicellular species using genetic biological assemblers.”
Cam’s eyes left the screen as he thought about what the girl had just told him. When he looked back, it was with an expression that combined horror and intrigue. “Are you telling me you assembled them? You can assemble life?”
“We can assemble organic matter,” the girl clarified. “The samples you consumed were exact clones of the specimen from which the DNA was originally extracted several decades ago. But none of them was ever actually alive.”
“Why not?” Cam asked. “I mean, what’s the difference? If you can assemble an exact biological duplicate, what is it that make them live?”
The girl smiled in a way that, for the first time, seemed a genuine expression of emotion. “Unfortunately we have not yet figured that out,” she admitted, “but we will.”
“Is that why you brought me here?” Cam asked. “To experiment on me?”
“No,” the girl said. “Determining whether you are able to derive nutrients from a genetically assembled life-form was purely opportunistic. That is not the primary reason you are here.”
Although he was was relieved by the girl’s response—glad to dismiss the images of experimentation and invasive examination that had involuntarily started forming in his head—he was also back to being confused. “Then why am I her
e?”
“We know that you came here to attempt to sabotage our mining capabilities,” the girl explained. “And we know about the devices you refer to as gliders. We recovered Arik Ockley’s terraforming research from his daughter’s DNA, and we have determined that it is not only viable, but that it constitutes a genuine and imminent threat to us.”
“Why?” Cam asked. “Why do you feel like you have to maintain such tight control over Earth?”
“Coronians cannot survive Earth’s gravity,” the girl said. “We must ensure that we continue to receive resources until we are able to obtain sufficient quantities ourselves.”
“But why do you assume that we’ll abandon you?”
“Because abandonment was the very genesis of our species. We will never forget the Lessons of Genevieve. The First Coronian Law states that independence and self-sufficiency are to be valued above all else.”
Cam found the girl’s response unsettling in a way he hadn’t expected. Having been raised in the godless and engineered environment of V1, he’d never really been exposed to religion, but there was clearly a cultlike fanaticism to what he’d just heard. He wondered if the portion of the human brain that somehow enabled faith to coexist with logic and empirical observation had been retained by the Coronians—perhaps even amplified or enhanced—and he wondered what horrors a culture of internalized martyrdom combined with an obvious emotional detachment and such advanced technological and scientific achievement might ultimately give rise to. Suddenly the girl’s name—Angelia, she’d said it was—took on an entirely new significance, as did the Coronians’ apparent obsession with assembling life. Even the massive carriers Cam had seen on his way to the habitation module took on a new meaning for him, evoking perhaps the only biblical story he knew other than Adam and Eve: the building of an enormous ark designed to escape an imminent existential threat.
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