by M. J. Locke
“Are we certain,” the professor asked from his hammock, “that there is no way in?” Geoff looked over, surprised. He hadn’t been aware the older man was listening. “Our lives may ride on the answer,” Professor Xuan said, “so consider carefully.”
Geoff shared a glance with Kam and Amaya.
“We could be missing something,” he said, “but I can’t see any way. Not anytime soon.” The older man looked at the other two, who nodded agreement.
“So,” Kam asked, “what now?”
The professor said, “All right. We have supplies, fuel, and air. Our enemies can’t get in. We have friends and family who will soon miss us. And we are all exhausted. It seems to me our best approach is to rest for a while, and sleep, if we can.”
They settled into the hammocks and tucked blankets around themselves. As distressed as he was, Geoff could not believe he would ever sleep again. But sleep came swiftly.
* * *
As they ran toward the lift, Vivian said, “Commissioner … wait. There is something else you need to know. It’s important!”
Jane quelled her impatience and paused. “What?”
Vivian said, “I think Nathan Glease has commissioned another assassination. We may have time to stop it.”
They both stepped into the lift. The other people there edged away from them, and Jane realized it was because Vivian was a Viridian. She felt a twinge of sympathy for the young woman—man?—and guilt; she had reacted that way herself.
Vivian ignored them. Ze told Jane, “Right before they brought you in, he had another meeting. It was a woman, wearing nurse’s clothes. He gave her a vial of liquid, showed her an image of someone, and told her to destroy the vial when she was done. He gave her a big wad of cash.”
“The hospital. He’s targeted someone at the hospital.” Jane grabbed Vivian’s arm. “Who was he targeting? What else do you remember?”
“I only caught a glimpse. A young man, I think. A big white guy with a spaceburned face. One of his arms was missing.”
Jane remembered Sean telling her about Geoff’s friend—the one whose arm the feral tore out. Ian. Ian Carmichael. He was big, white, and blond, a biker with a spaceburn. And he was still at the hospital. “I know the target.”
The lift doors opened in time for them see a cuffed Glease being hustled into one of the other lifts by the police. He wore a smirk when he spotted her. She knew why.
The hospital was right across the way. Quicker to go herself than to explain. She headed straight for Yamashiro Memorial, trailed by Vivian, clouds of “Stroiders” glamour, and a small army of mites. They barged through the antimote sprays, and went up to an orderly on duty at the information desk. He was talking to a colleague inwave.
“What room is Ian Carmichael in?” Jane demanded. When he did not acknowledge her right away, she reached over the counter, grabbed him, and gave him a shake. “What room?”
The young man stammered the room number. She brought up a map overlay of the hospital, touched “Guide me” inwave, and plugged in the number. Following the golden marquis that appeared, she kicked off down the tube, bounding off walls and people indiscriminately. “Out of my way! Cluster emergency!” She did not bother to check whether Vivian followed. People caromed off the walls and each other to clear a path.
The room was a private suite that smelled of cleaners and chemicals. The lights were dimmed. The young man was snoring, his mouth half open. He was hooked up to a Regrow apparatus. The woman Vivian had described was replacing a vial in the nutrient feed setup by his bed. She looked up at Jane in guilty surprise.
Jane launched herself over the bed, grabbed the bed rail with her foothands and, bracing herself there, pinned the woman against the wall. She took the vial from her. The young man, Ian, startled awake and struggled with his cover. “Hey! What’s going on?”
“Pull the other vial,” Jane told Vivian, pointing at the apparatus. “The one that’s already in there. Now!”
A doctor came into the room. “What is the meaning of this?”
Jane gestured at the woman she had hold of, who was protesting. Jane gave her a look, and she fell silent. “Is this woman one of your staff?”
The doctor looked at the woman, and then glanced at her companion, an elderly man dressed in nurse’s garb, who shook his head. “I’m head nurse for this shift,” he said, “and I don’t know this woman.”
“Test this.” Jane tossed the vial to the doctor, who plucked it out of the air. “And that one there,” she pointed at the one Vivian was holding. “You’ll find that one of them contains a biological toxin. I just stopped this woman from inserting it into the apparatus.”
Ian looked at the vials in horror. “Gaaah!” He grabbed the tubes and monitoring devices and yanked them out of his arms and chest, and shoved himself out of bed. Small drops of blood and nutrients dribbled from the tubes and the holes in his arm and chest. He hung there, tumbling slowly, panting and trembling. The doctor came over.
“Careful there! Easy. You’ll be fine.” She guided him back into bed, resettled him, and staunched his bleeding. Vacubots launched from the walls and sucked up the spilled blood and fluids. “Don’t worry, we won’t put the tubes back in until we know they’re safe.”
Ian eyed the woman who had tried to kill him. She turned her face away. The doctor turned to one of the staff who had gathered in the hall outside. “Call the police.”
While they waited for the police to arrive, Vivian asked to see Learned Obyx. Jane accompanied hir.
The Viridian leader was in Intensive Care. Obyx wore a plastic body glove, goggles, and a respirator, and was suspended in a network of Regrow tubing. Vivian alighted next to hir leader. Jane hung back.
“Is ze going to be all right?” Vivian asked.
The nurse said, “He’s doing better.” Vivian winced—Jane was unsure whether it was the gendered pronoun, or the nurse’s deliberate dodge of hir question. “We don’t treat many people with, well, with his genotype. We’d appreciate any information you can give us on his physiology.”
“I’ll contact my colleagues and have them send you hir medical files. We have medical specialists who may be able to help you.” Vivian hesitated, eyeing Obyx with grave concern. “May I talk to hir?”
The nurse eyed the two of them, considering. “For a moment, perhaps. He won’t be able to answer questions, and he won’t really remember anything you say later on.” She moved in front of them as they started toward Obyx, and said, “Keep it brief. And don’t say anything to alarm him. He is gravely injured and needs to remain calm.”
Vivian went over, and spoke softly. “Learned?”
Obyx opened hir eyes and gazed blearily at them. “Waĩthĩra?”
Vivian carefully worked hir hand through the tubing and gave Obyx’s own plastic-gloved, gel-smeared hand a squeeze. “It’s me, Learned. You’re going to be OK. They’ve arrested Glease.”
“James?” Obyx whispered. “Where is ze? Is ze all right?”
Waĩthĩra looked across at Jane. “Everything’s going to be fine, Learned,” ze told hir. “You rest now, and heal.”
Obyx sighed softly, and closed hir eyes. Vivian gave Jane a look. Ze lofted hirself into the hall. Hir face was implacable, but ze dashed away tears. Jane followed.
The hospital staff gave them a nook in the staff lounge. The police commissioner called them. “You two have had an exciting evening.”
“I’m not sure how many details Aaron was able to share with you, Jerry, but this is Vivian Waĩthĩra wa Macharia na Briggs. Ze was also kidnapped by Glease and his cronies. Hir spiritual leader James Harbaugh was killed during the kidnapping, and Obyx has been severely injured.”
“Y-e-e-s. I heard about the fracas in the Badlands. Obyx was already on my list to get a statement from.” Jerry pursed his lips, looking harried. “Ian Carmichael sure is lucky you got here in time. What happened?”
Jane gestured to Vivian, who told the police chief about Glease’s transaction
with the nurse-assassin. Jerry took notes and asked questions. Finally he said, “All right, well, we’ve all had a long night. Go on home, both of you, and get some rest. Come to the main precinct station tomorrow and my detectives will take your statements.”
But this wasn’t over yet, and Jane was not about to rest. After the police commissioner signed off, she leaned toward Vivian and quietly asked, “Can you do one of those stealth bubble things?”
Looking puzzled, the Viridian flicked hir fingers. A faint, glistening bubble settled over them. Outside its walls settled a glittering sphere of fizzing, dying “Stroiders” dust.
“Something is bugging me,” Jane said. “Why would they want to harm some random kid?”
Vivian shrugged. “Spite, perhaps.”
Jane frowned. “I don’t think so. There was more to it.” She remembered that Ian had been helping Sean the other night. Sean might know more. “Vivian, can I make a call through this?” She gestured at the bubble surrounding them. Ze flashed a smile. “Sure … now that you have Arachnid installed. It should penetrate any security barrier. Even ours.”
Jane put in a high-priority call to Sean. He materialized in wave.
“Sean, where are you?”
“Still out at the docks. The PM freed the ships, and we’ve got departures happening left and right. Things are crazy out here.”
“Well, I’m at the hospital. Someone just tried to kill your young friend, Ian Carmichael.”
He gaped. “What the fuck?”
“We got here in time. He’s OK. There’s something more important I need to know. Have you heard from Xuan?”
He opened his mouth to answer. Then he looked thoughtful. “Hmm. Good question. Don’t go away.” A moment later, he returned, visuals activated, looking worried. “Xuan’s ship hasn’t returned yet, and no one has heard back from Geoff Agre or his companions.”
“Xuan is in trouble,” she told Sean, “and I think Geoff and his friends are, too. Where did they go?”
Sean started to answer, but Vivian gripped Jane’s arm. “I get it now! Glease had me crack the cluster’s asteroid registry and alter data on a claim. I changed its location coordinates. They were laughing about hiding it in plain sight.”
Which explained why they thought they had Xuan, and why they needed Ian dead. They wanted to obscure Geoff’s asteroid’s location till they could hide or destroy it. Ian was the only one left on Phocaea who knew its actual coordinates. Jane said to Sean, “We need to organize a search. But you’ll have to get the coordinates directly from Ian. The location of Geoff’s stroid has been altered in the registry.”
“You bet. I’ll contact Val and get a Security cruiser prepped to launch. High-gee accel. We can be there in less than an hour. Why don’t you head back to our place and get some rest? I’ll call you.”
“Thanks, Sean.”
Jane hung up. Xuan, she thought. Xuan, don’t you die on me.
* * *
Geoff woke suddenly, heart slamming into his rib cage. A sound had awakened him, from a dream in which he had been playing connect-the-dots with stars in a royal blue sky.
He saw what had awakened him. A skeleton had entered the shadowed chamber. It floated about the low-ceiling chamber, capering and flailing, and bumped against the overhead piping. The impact burst it in midair and sprayed a cloud of assembler grapes. Professor Xuan stirred, but Amaya and Kam slumbered on, and it wasn’t long till the older man settled once more. Irritated, relieved, Geoff relaxed again in the gentle confines of the hammock mesh.
He was certain they were missing something. There had to be a way out. But nothing came to him, and he finally sighed in defeat. He listened to the familiar whispering echoes of the mine and tried to relax, but he couldn’t fall back to sleep.
The thought of dying didn’t frighten him nearly as much as it should. But when he looked over at Amaya, at Kam, at the professor, he felt all the terror for them that he couldn’t feel for himself.
I can’t let anything happen to them, he thought. I have to do something. Then he glanced at the overhead piping that the skeleton had broken itself against.
Holy crap! There was a way in, he realized, and it was right above their heads. How could we not have seen it? But that meant there was also a way out—and he knew how to use it. He threw off the cover.
Back at the map archives, Geoff pulled out the scrips he and Kam had been looking at and traced some lines on a map. The slurry lines went out to the chemical plant. Since Joey Spud had not believed in nanotech, he had built a mechanical system to maintain air and temperature. A small army of bots mined the ice in an evacuated section of the mine. They fed it into a hopper that mixed it with a methanol slurry and pumped it to the chemical plant up on the surface, where it was processed, and fed air, fuel, and water back into the mine.
The slurry pipe was large—easily big enough for Geoff. Maybe even big enough for an army of minerbots. The pipe was filled with methane, ammonia, and methanol, but he could drain it. The real issue was that if he went out, it meant the bad guys could get in and harm his friends.
Truth is, he thought, they could have found this way in all along. Or they could plant a larger set of explosives. They could even tunnel down and plant a really big bomb several kilometers below the surface and turn Ouroboros to rubble. Once those mobsters out there got tired of waiting, Geoff and his buddies would be bug fodder, any way you sliced it.
Fuck it. Geoff was sick of all this. Just do something. Anything!
First he gathered three dozen minerbots. He passed out disposable medical gloves to one squad and had them start filling the gloves with a gaseous methane-oxygen mix from the mine exhaust tanks. A second squad he had adjust their signal broadcast settings to blast a powerful distress signal. A third squad he programmed to set charges along the slurry pipe. As they did so, he moved alongside, marking the scrip to show where the charges were placed. Then he sent the bots to wait for him outside the evacuated section of the mine, the longwall where the currently active seam of methane ice was exposed.
He didn’t want his friends to try to stop him, but once he opened up the pipe, if he failed to defeat the mobsters, it would only be a matter of time before they would find the pipe opening. He had to make sure his friends were prepared to deal with that.
He returned to where his companions slept and set an alarm to wake them in fifteen minutes. Then he wrote a note on the utility drawing.
I’VE GONE OUT THROUGH THE SLURRY PIPE TO STOP THEM BEFORE ANYONE ELSE GETS HURT. I SET CHARGES ON THE PIPE, SO IF THEY TRY TO GET IN THAT WAY YOU CAN STOP THEM. I MARKED THE PLACES ON THE MAP, AND THE BOTS CAN SET THEM OFF IN WHATEVER SEQUENCE YOU WANT.
He stared at the note for a long time, feeling as if he should put something else down, but no other words came. So he just signed it “Geoff.” After another moment, he squeezed, “Love to friends and family—” above his name, then wished he hadn’t, and wanted to cross it out. But that would look even stupider. So he left it as it was. Cheeks burning, stomach achurn, he rolled it up and put it in his hammock with the detonator and an alarm clock.
The bots were awaiting him at the longwall antechamber. They had laid his equipment on the mine floor: a bag of tools and netted clusters of oxygenated methane bladders they had made with disposable medical gloves. Geoff hoped they would fit through the pipe. He donned his suit and did the checks: air, ponies, radio. Then he stepped into the lock. The bots crawled after him, bringing the equipment and methane bladders.
He shut the lock door and pressed the controls to purge the air. The air pressure levels tumbled downward. He listened to the faint hiss of gases as the airlock purged. The methane bladders swelled to several times their original size. One burst, causing his explosimeter reading to spike. He itched, as usual when he couldn’t take off his suit to scratch. His pulse pounded dully in his throat where the helmet seal met the suit collar. He wondered if he was doing the right thing. But how could it be wrong to protect his friends from ha
rm?
In a short while, air pressure dropped to zero millibars; he lofted out into the longwall area and the bots followed.
The methane longwall stood before him: a translucent blue green wave, frozen in place, streaked with veins of orange and darker blue. Along its base ran a mechanized conveyor. Robotic arms gouged crescents of ice from the wall and placed them in lidded metal baskets that opened to accept the ice, then closed and crept along the conveyor. At the end of the longwall, the baskets pushed their contents into a bladed hopper at the slurry mixing chambers.
Geoff launched himself alongside the longwall with bots trailing him. At the slurry mixing station, he shut the mining operation down. Behind him, the conveyor and mining arms grew still and the slurry mixing blades stopped.
The slurry lines were normally emptied by removing the maintenance cover out at the chem plant, and blowing exhaust through the lines. Not exactly subtle, though, and the goal was not to call attention to himself until absolutely necessary. But there was no reason he couldn’t suck the material in, instead. It’d be messy. But doable.
Here goes.
He overrode the failsafes and pulled the series of levers that would reverse the flow of the mixing blades. Then he commanded all the minerbots to get up onto the conveyor, broke the pressure seal between the mixing chamber and the pipe, and bounded up onto the conveyor himself.
Giant globs of slush squirted and wiggled out of the hopper like toothpaste. He tried to stay out of its way, but the glop went everywhere. A big wobbly chunk bumped him, throwing him into a slow tumble. It smeared up his faceplate and filled the creases in his joints. Geoff caught hold of the conveyor, and tried to wipe away the spatters and shake loose the chunks of ice from his suit. Finally the flow ebbed and settled. While waiting for the sloshing to die down, he attached a cable lead to the nearest minerbot, plugged the other end into his suit, and fixed the coil of cable to his suit. He shoved off, settled into the hopper, and commanded the bots to wait for his signal. Then he flipped on his light and passed through the hopper and mixing chamber into the pipe.
