by M. J. Locke
Carl worked in the warehouses. Don’t let it be him.
He alerted the others. Someone—Amaya—beamed an emergency message to the life support teams. But all Geoff’s attention was on that uneven horizon. The cable station and warehouses crawled back into view, and as his rockets slowed him, he guided his bike in.
His wheels barked on the landing pad next to the Klosti-Alpha cable, but the pad was too short for his speed. The bike swerved wildly across the concrete and bounced off the edge of it, nearly unseating him. Using braking bursts from his rockets he soared, jounced, and dodged rocks to the warehouse, steering one-handed as he wrestled his spare life bag and pony bottle out of the saddlebag. His buddies were at least a dozen seconds behind him. By the time he reached the site of the collapse, the front face of the ice mountain was roiling and gas was billowing away. A thin mist filled the crater. He heard Kamal’s exclamation of dismay as he leaped off his bike. But there wasn’t time to think about that. He bounded over the rocks to where he had seen the figure go down.
He saw then he needn’t have bothered with the powered orbit. The man was blue, ballooned up to twice the size of a normal human, and stiff: a giant corpsicle. And he did not have to see the face. That was his shirt, whose collar showed above the work overalls; Carl had borrowed it that morning. Those were Carl’s shoes.
Geoff knelt next to Carl and rolled him over. His brother’s eyes were whitish due to frost, run through with dark, swollen veins. His tongue had swollen up, too, and was jutting out of his mouth. His black hair was stiff as straw.
By this time Amaya, Kamal, and Ian had reached them. They recognized Carl, too.
“Hidoi…” Amaya gasped. Horrible … She was originally from Japan, and used Japanese slang.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Kam asked.
“Shit, man, look at him! What do you think?” Ian.
“Shut up,” Kam said. “Just shut up. All right?”
Geoff stood up again, and looked down at his brother. He did not notice his friends’ stares or their words. He felt nothing. But his mind was racing. He was thinking, Carl can’t be dead. This is a dream. He was thinking, What if I had paused to let that other biker use the ramp? I’d have been closer to touchdown. Or if I had talked Carl into ditching work and coming out with us. Fat chance. Geoff would not have even asked; Carl would never shirk his duties.
He was trying to remember the last thing he had said to Carl. He couldn’t. He was imagining what the muscles in his parents’ faces would do when they heard the news.
* * *
In the few dozen seconds it took Stores Chief Sean Moriarty and his crew to suit up and force the locks open, the college intern—what was his name? Sean struggled to remember. Carl. Carl Agre; that was it—lay dead amid the ruins of the fallen warehouse. Sean indulged himself with a string of obscenities. Not that he was surprised. But he had hoped.
A small group of rocketbikers stood over the body. Sean shuffled over—damned low gee; it was supposed to make locomotion easier—and bent to examine Carl Agre’s remains. Sean sighed. He was so goddamn sick and tired of burying the dead. He had fought in three wars, Downside; he had seen a lot of young dead. Hell, he thought, I’m a fucking death midwife.
Commissioner Navio had recommended the kid for the job. Sean was not looking forward to that call.
Then he got a look at the young man crouched beside the body. He adjusted his radio settings till he got a ping. “You related? A friend?”
The young man said nothing. One of his companions said, “He’s his brother.”
It just kept getting better. Sean waved the responders forward. “Get him inside.” He moved in front of the young man, Carl’s brother, and laid hands on the shoulders of his pressure suit. The youth would not have felt the touch through the suit. Sean jostled him gently, to get his attention. It was hard to see the boy’s eyes clearly, through the visor’s shielding, but his gaze looked glassy.
“We’re taking your brother inside. We need to notify your parents. Come with us.”
“What…?” The kid seemed to come out of his daze. “Oh.”
As they turned, Sean caught a glimpse of Warehouse 1-H, which stood behind the ruins of this one. It had been hit by disassembler backsplash. Chunks were falling off, and Sean could see movement inside through the gaps. People? Yes. Some survivors were trapped in Warehouse 1-H.
“Get a command center set up right away,” Sean told Shelley Marcellina, his chief engineer. “We’ve got people trapped in the rubble over there.”
But Shelley, facing the opposite direction, gasped. “The ice.” She was pointing over his shoulder.
The ice? Sean turned and looked where she was pointing. His view had been obscured by his visor and the outcropping, but from this vantage point he could see it. Interior areas in the ice mountain were glowing. Jets of steam spewed out. He could feel the heat of reaction on his face, even through the visor. Clouds billowed all around. The ground trembled.
Terror surged in him. Three megatons of methane and water—the air, water, and fuel for over two hundred thousand people—was going up in wafts and jets of superheated gas.
“It’s a runaway. The reaction has outpaced the bugs’ half-life. We’ve got to stop it.” Sean sprang upright. “Let’s move, people! Move!”
Everyone hustled inside, two technicians carrying the body of Carl Agre. His brother, the young rocketbiker, and his friends followed behind.
Before he moved Upside and became Phocaea’s deputy commissioner of stores and warehousing, Sean had spent fifty-five years in the military. And if there was one thing he had learned, it was how to move fast in a crisis. Within minutes he had a command center set up, designated lieutenants, established priorities, and enacted communication protocols. He organized a team to pump neutralizer out to the ice, a team to check the bulkheads and seal off breaches, and a team to rescue those stranded in the other damaged warehouse. People were bringing in the injured; he assigned the medical techs to set up triage and first aid. Everyone scrambled. Then he and his engineers laid down maps and piped in live images of the ice.
Sean swore. The damned thing was nearly seven hundred feet on a side, and in the twelve minutes it had taken to set up command and lay the hoses, the ice was over a third gone. We’re screwed.
“Shelley, the hoses are way too slow. We have to get that bug-killing juice out there now. And the reaction is occurring in the core, where the heat is trapped. Not around the bottom edges.”
His chief engineer frowned at the images. “All our mobile equipment is down in Zekeston. Everything out here is on tracks in the domes.” She shrugged, looking grim. “There’s not much we can do but lay hose and pump.”
“We’re dead, then,” Cal, a disassembler programmer, said. “We can’t stop it. We’re dead.” His voice rose at the end to a shriek. Heads turned.
“Calm down,” Sean snapped, angry that Cal said what he had been thinking. “I need ideas. Not hysteria.”
“We can dive bomb it,” someone said. “Hit it from above.”
Sean did not recognize the voice. He looked around. It was the kid, the one whose brother had just died. He stood at the opening to the triage area, helmet tucked under his arm.
“Who let him in here?” one of the engineers asked, but Sean felt a tingling in his scalp. The rocketbikers and their nets, the kid meant. They could dive-bomb the ice, kill the reaction. “Go on.”
The teen lofted himself over. His friends hung back.
He was tall and gangly, straining his suit at the wrist and ankle joints. He had black hair in a longish cut that looked like an afterthought. He was talking in a monotone. Sean could not believe he was able to form coherent sentences at all. “The gang is all out there right now. Right?” He glanced over at his friends. “Right?”
The young man’s companions moved closer, outside the ring of engineers. The young woman nodded slowly. “It could work, I guess.”
“How many?” Shelley demanded. “H
ow many are there?”
“Fifty,” Carl’s brother said. “Maybe more. We have our own comm frequencies.” Smart kid. He had realized how critical communications were—and how long it took to set them up if you didn’t already have a system in place. “We’re used to moving fast. To get the first ice, you know.”
He leapt up again, and floated above the maps, spread-eagled. Finally he settled onto the table cross-legged, and eyed the map from all angles. “Take a look,” he said to his friends. “What do you think?”
The engineers made room for the other three. “Our ramps are over here, on the other side of the lake,” the bigger boy said. He studied the map and pointed. “If your neutralizer can tolerate the deep cold and you can get the supplies out here next to our launch ramp in packages that fit in our nets, we can throw them at the mountain from low orbit.”
His friends were nodding. “It’ll work,” the young woman said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” someone said, but Shelley got it.
“Like slingshots. They’ll drizzle right down into the center of the ice, shut down the reaction.” Another of the engineers protested, but Shelley insisted, “It’s our best shot. If they can pull it off.”
Sean gave the boy a searching look. “What’s your name?”
“Geoff.” The kid’s voice cracked, whether from stress, grief, or ordinary hormones, Sean could not say. Maybe all three. “Geoff Agre.”
“All right, Geoff, get off the goddamn table.” The boy obliged. More graceful than he looked. Sean laid a heavy hand on the young man’s shoulder as he touched down. Sean could tell the boy needed contact. He might have great ideas, but his gaze was still glassy, and he looked as if he was about to float off into space. “Here’s how it is, Geoff. We’ve got precious few supplies of neutralizer, and less time. You just saw your brother die. Are you going to fall apart on me up there?”
Anger glinted in the boy’s eyes. Sean liked that better than the blank stare it supplanted. “No way!” He struggled for control. “No. We can help you. If you’ll let us.”
“You’ll have to take orders from Shelley. All of you. Without question or hesitation. Even if you don’t like what she tells you to do.”
The kids surveyed Shelley, who eyed them back, a corner of her mouth quirked up. He looked at his companions, eyebrows raised. One by one, they gave him a nod.
“All right,” he told Sean. As if he could make such a promise. The arrogance of youth. But hell; why not? Maybe the rest of the bikers would listen to him. At this point, the cluster had nothing to lose.
“You’re on, Agre. Shelley, you lead the op.”
* * *
They suited up and went out. Geoff was still shaking. He could not believe he had said what he had out loud. Worse, Moriarty had listened. Now he had to act, fast, when all he wanted to do was curl up somewhere.
He kept seeing how Carl’s face had looked—the swollen body, the frozen eyes, the bulging veins. The world had shrunk, like he was seeing it through a long tunnel. Everything was happening in slow motion.
He remembered the old man’s face as he had challenged him. Geoff had told Moriarty he could do this. If he could not keep his shit together, he should have said so then.
The big blond woman, the one they called Shelley, was talking to him. Near them, the cluster’s ice was boiling away. If that wasn’t a good enough reason to suck it up, he may as well take off his helmet right now.
For you, Carl, he thought. I’ll do this, because you would.
“… to get your friends,” she radioed. “We need them now. Whoever you can muster in the next three minutes. Less, if you can.”
“What do we need to know about the bug neutralizer?” Kamal asked.
“The juice comes in five-hundred-kilo bladders. It’s not damaged by cold, but it needs heat to liquefy. Solid, it’s useless. And you’ll have to break the packaging. The ice is hot—the packaging should melt on impact—but to be on the safe side, you’ll need to hurl them hard. That means low, powered orbits. To shut down the reaction you’ll have to blanket the ice, which means you’ll need to come in from different angles, at high speeds. In other words, it’ll be a death derby up there.”
Amaya asked, “You know biking?”
“I know orbital mechanics. Think you guys can handle it?”
The four of them looked at one another. This time it was Ian who replied. That was fine with Geoff. He had done all the thinking he could handle for now. Now he just needed to go and do. He needed to outrun what he had just seen. “We can handle it. We’ll be at the pickup spot in three.
“All right,” Ian said, as they bounded across the landscape toward their bikes, “Geoff, you take one ten nanometers; Amaya take one sixteen point five; and Kamal, you’re one twenty-two. I’ll take one twenty-seven point five. Let’s start making calls.”
Geoff switched his comm frequency to the first biker channel and leapt onto his bike.
* * *
Sean got notice his boss, Jane Navio, was on the way up. He suited up and stepped out onto the commuter pad as she and a dozen Resource Commission staff poured out of the lifts. She spotted Sean.
“I come with extra hands,” she radioed. “The big equipment is on its way. It’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
“Too late to do much good, ma’am—but the extra hands will help. We need them badly.” He directed the new hands to Cal for assignments. Then they two bounded over to the crater.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Disassembler disaster in Warehouse 2-H. It set off a chain reaction and we have runaway disassembly in the lake. We lost two crew when the warehouse came down.” He hesitated. “One of them was that young man you recommended for the position last fall. Carl Agre.”
She was looking out at the vanishing lake. She did not say anything for a second. He watched her struggle with it.
“All right,” she said softly. “All right. We’ll deal with that later. What’s happening out there?” She gestured at the bikers dive-bombing the dwindling ice pile.
“They’re helping. Trying to stop the reaction.”
Jane eyed the scene. “We’re down at least seventy percent. More. Damn.” The look on her face said all it needed to, even beneath the radiation shielding. Then Sean’s words registered. “So we’ve recruited bikers? Ah, to dive-bomb the ice with neutralizer. Clever! My God.” She eyed Sean. “Is it working?”
He squinted down at the ice: what with the mist and the boiling and splashing, it was hard to tell. “It’s better. Don’t know if it’s enough.”
She turned, taking information in. She pointed toward the ruined warehouses. The woman was like a fucking computer.
“What happened to 1-H, over there? Oh—I see. Partial collapse due to bug backsplash from 2-H. Jesus. That must have been a violent reaction. We need to know what caused that. All our simulations said the bugs should have frozen first. I see activity inside. There’s a crew in there?”
“Several are trapped in the rubble,” he replied. “They got to the emergency lockers in time, but they’re buried under debris and they only have pony bottles and rescue bubbles, so they only have a few more minutes of air. We have to hurry.”
She scanned further. “And that team?” She pointed to the workers guiding the neutralizer packets from the warehouse air locks. “They’re taking the neutralizer to the bikers?”
“That’s correct.”
It was a long way from the warehouse locks, across the commuter pads, past the hangars to the rocketbike launch pad. It took four people to push-pull each neutralizer bladder. The supply chain inched along. Jane gestured at the biker ramps. “There are bikers backed up and waiting for the neutralizer, Sean.”
“So?”
“So,” she said, “you’ve got a resource bottleneck. Even with the new hands helping, it’s going much too slowly. We need every gram of ice we can rescue. The last thing we can afford right now is a bottleneck.”
Her mea
ning became clear. Sean glared. “If I reassign the rescue team to the neutralizer brigade, the crew trapped in the warehouse will die.” My people will die.
“Sean. I can tell by looking—we’re losing about a day’s worth of ice every minute. I checked the shipping ledgers on the way up from Zekeston. There’s not another ice shipment coming Down anytime soon. I don’t know how I can keep everyone alive till we get another shipment, even if the runaway were stopped this very instant. Hundreds of thousands of lives depend on how much ice we can save. We don’t need your team for long. Maybe another fifteen minutes. Then you reassign them to the warehouse.”
Sean shook his head. “Fifteen minutes is too long for those people trapped in there. We’ll lose them.”
She looked at him. “The cluster has to come first, Sean. There’s no time to argue. Get someone to throw them some more pony bottles and then get your team out to the juice brigade.”
“There’s no way to get them ponies or air lines, or we already would have. You’re telling me to abandon them.”
The commissioner said, “Then you’re right. I am.”
Sean stared. He had been here before. After a long and honorable career, he had been dishonorably discharged, during the Gene Purges, for disobeying orders. But those had been stupid orders. Evil ones. These weren’t. Jane Navio was a chrome-assed bitch, damn her. But she was right.
“Reassign the warehouse team to the neutralizer brigade,” she repeated. “Now.” And he did.
* * *
Geoff remembered the biker chatter in his headset. He recalled dodging other riders, dragging nets filled with neutralization bladders, dropping them, watching them crash onto the shrinking mound of ice, while Moriarty’s engineer Shelley gave targeting and pickup instructions—then landing, waiting while technicians loaded up their nets, and taking off again. But everything blurred together in a jumble of events.
He did remember one pass in detail. He and Amaya went in low enough that the net dragged the top of the ice. They dodged ice crags and sudden spurts of superheated gas to drop the packet into a crevice deep in the ice’s center. He caught a glimpse: the boiling ice looked like lava in a cauldron. Then they veered upward amid towering gas columns.
