Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  She might have read his mind. Her smile widened. “Don’t look so somber, Lot,” she teased. “We’re finally going home.”

  He felt the raw edge of her enthusiasm as it played against his returning doubts. “Do you really think we’ll find him?”

  A radiant smile graced her face: that was all the answer she would give to such a factitious question. She pulled her hood up over her head. “Seal up,” she advised him. “The core isn’t pressurized anymore.”

  Lot nodded, feeling his own eagerness rekindle. He imitated her, winding his hair up into a loop at the back of his neck before pulling on his hood. He press-sealed a seam at the neck. The hood fitted itself to his face, molding into an arched, translucent bar over his eyes. At first he couldn’t get a breath. “Activating respiratory function,” the suit informed him in a patient, feminine voice. The language was Silken, but the accent … it reminded him of Jupiter.

  The respirator kicked on, and air started to flow from a muzzle fixed over his nose and mouth. Gent’s voice spoke to him through the suit’s audio pickup: “Put on your backpack.” He did it. “Now plug in.”

  Twisting around, Lot spotted another flexible tube dangling from the bottom of the pack. He caught it in his hand. It wriggled across his palm, seeking a socket in the suit just over his hip. As it burrowed into the orifice, golden liquid appeared in the tube. Gent checked the connection, pronounced it satisfactory, then turned to do the same for Urban.

  Alta already had her backpack on. Her eyes crinkled over the muzzle of her suit in what must have been a smile. Then she slipped through the gel membrane. As Lot started to follow, Ord dropped down from the ceiling, landing on his shoulder. Its face was tweaked in a plaintive expression and its little mouth moved. Lot could just hear its soft voice through the muffling barrier of the hood, though he couldn’t make out the words. He shrugged, then pushed through the membrane.

  No lights came on as he emerged on the other side. A soft illumination filtered through the membrane, but that would be lost in a few steps. Alta waited for him, her suit glowing a dim gray in the shadows.

  “Fifteen millibars positive pressure,” the suit commented casually. Lot hissed. Fifteen millibars was a ghostly thin atmosphere; hardly better than vacuum. A sense of anxiety moved in on him. He tried to turn it away, knowing that inside the suit he could get no input from anyone else; it would be so easy to sink into his own emotional pit.

  One of Ord’s tentacles snapped past his face in weird, jerky motion. Lot reared back, expecting to see the haze of a trank expelled against his helmet … but Ord only spun its tentacle into a whip-thin cord that wrapped around Lot’s back, snaking beneath his pack. Its gold body lay stretched on his shoulder.

  “What’s it doing?” Alta asked, more curious than wary.

  Lot tried to turn his head far enough to see. “Securing itself for a ride, I guess.”

  “It’s not moving.”

  Lot nudged the still form, but got no response. Ord’s face lay pressed against his neck so he couldn’t see if it was speaking or not. “Guess it’s not going to make trouble.”

  Alta just shrugged. Then she turned and started trotting down the tunnel, her backpack bobbing up and down. Within a few steps she’d become almost invisible in the darkness.

  “Hey, wait!” Lot called.

  She slowed briefly. Her taunting voice reached him over the suit radio. “Hey no, fury. You catch me.” Then she took off, darting around a junction in the corridor and out of sight.

  His brows rose in surprise. What could he do but take the challenge? He sprang after her, running hard, his own pack strapped tight against his back. Around the junction, he plunged into almost total darkness. Instinctively, he blinked his vision down to IR, but the walls were cold and barely visible. Alta was a gray flame, far ahead of him. He sprinted after her.

  At the same time he felt himself running away from his own foul feelings. Layers of emotional sediment that had accumulated on his brain over the years began to dissolve under the rush of his blood. His sweat pushed a ruined straitjacket of dirty feelings out through his pores. His lungs grabbed at recycled air, scrubbing it clean of antique emotion. And gradually, he felt himself shed the weight of fear that had held him down since he was a kid. Free. Exhilaration rang through him. He’d waited so long for this. Belief and doubt didn’t matter anymore. All good lay in the doing, and he pushed that as hard as he could.

  Ahead, Alta darted from one corridor to another. Lot tracked her, plunging through the dividing gel membranes, drawing always closer to the core until finally he sprang after her into the spiral corridor that wound around the stacked loading bays. Here the angle of descent was as familiar as the feel of his own body. His boots skimmed the rough gray floor. He plunged headlong, tracking the remembered curve and slowly gaining on Alta until they broke together into the lower chamber. He pulled up then, though his momentum still carried him halfway across the broad, empty floor.

  Empty. He looked around with detached curiosity. All the bodies were long gone and the foul air too, with its ugly stench of fear. Still, the past pressed hard against the present. He saw them again in shadowy proximity: an ocean of dead, dried up, gone away. The floor beneath his feet was a playa smoothed by their blood and the spillage therein of frantic, disintegrating Makers striving to heal wounds that were no longer within the reach of microscopic hands.

  He stepped up to the transparent wall that sealed the pit and looked down the shaft, but it was night outside, and he could see nothing.

  “I never got this far,” Alta said, her voice soft, seeming to speak from just behind his head. He smiled, and nudged the transparent wall with the toe of his boot. One last barrier. He felt Alta’s hands tugging at his waist. “Come away. We’re going to blow it open.”

  “Huh?” His head swiveled in surprise. “No Makers?”

  “Can’t trust them to work,” Gent growled.

  He’d come silently from behind, and was squatting at the base of the transparent wall, carefully spraying a chemical across its face in a three-by-six-foot rectangle that glowed incandescent in the infrared. “Go find something to hold on to. The pressure here is still higher than outside.”

  They retreated a few feet, and took a grip on the railing that ran around the pit wall. Urban stepped up close to Lot and seized hold of the railing too. He wouldn’t meet Lot’s eye. Gent joined them, trailing a wire linked to the painted rectangle. A moment later the explosive coating burst in a blinding infrared flash. The rail shuddered, and incandescent dust was sucked into the pit, where it swirled in thin, glittering vortices that curled off the pit walls. Across the bay, the pressure doors sealed with a palpable thud. Lot clung to the rail while the mild pressure blew itself out.

  Gent moved first. “Come on,” he said. “Not much time now.”

  He dropped his pack. From a sack inside he pulled out a thing similar to the slug in Lot’s apartment—a transparent, gelatinous blob—though this one was larger, almost the size of a soccer ball, and it had numerous fan-folds of a thin gold cord embedded within its body, all radiating from a central point. Lot touched it. The slug had a hard surface. He felt as if he were stroking a hide of scaly armor. Dangling beneath it on a line of the same gold cord was a cassette, its spool visible through the transparent casing.

  “This hooks to your suit,” Gent said. He held the cassette against Lot’s abdomen and numerous filaments extruded from the suit’s fabric shell, hooking through six eyelet holes in the cassette’s rim.

  “Auxiliary organ plausibly compatible,” the suit informed him. “Stand by for attempted integration.” Then a moment later, “Integration complete.”

  A new voice came online. “Cooperating intelligences ninety-four-percent compatible.”

  The suit responded: “Affirmed. Six-percent negative compatibility isolate from integrated processes.”

  “Isolation confirmed.”

  Lot listened in fascination to the voice of the slug’s DI. It too w
as feminine, though distinctly different from the suit’s voice—softer, more demure—a subordinate persona. But it too spoke with an accent like that of Jupiter … and Nesseleth as well, now he thought about it. Curious, he asked Gent, “Where did you get these suits?”

  Gent gave him an impatient look. “City library.”

  “We mined the design,” Alta added eagerly. “Deep run. Nobody had accessed the file in maybe twelve hundred years.”

  “Bit garbage, then,” Urban said. “They’re probably seeded through with decay errors.”

  “The design’s clean,” Gent said sternly. He pulled several meters of gold line from the cassette, letting it drizzle onto the floor. “All degeneracies removed.”

  “All identified degeneracies.”

  “Is it from the Vasties?” Lot asked, thinking of what Yulyssa had said about Jupiter’s age and wondering if these suits had been designed by a culture known to him, their DIs endowed with the accent of that time. The Vasties were more than one place, and far more than one culture. Could an accent be a clue to Jupiter’s origin?

  But Gent dismissed the question. “It doesn’t matter.”

  He stepped up to the opening he’d made in the transparent wall. Holding the last couple of yards of gold cord in his hands, he started to swing the slug from the end of it. He took a moment to build up momentum; then he let the slug fly across the pit. It hit the far wall and splashed into a broad film, then held tight. Its edges were ragged: a smear on the wall glowing bright in the infrared.

  Gent turned to Lot. Over the muzzle of his hood, his gaze was hard. He tugged at the tube that connected Lot’s suit to his pack. “Think of this suit as a living creature,” he said. “It eats just like you do; the same liquid nutrients that’ll be sustaining you over the next several hours are also powering critical portions of your suit. The gloves, the boots, the leggings”—he slapped each part—“are hot zones. They’ll form temporary bonds with the elevator’s molecular structure. Enough to support you—”

  “Fly walking?”

  Gent scowled. “The process is overseen by the suit’s DI. It operates with discretion, but you can override with a repeated request.”

  “Okay.”

  “The second DI controls tension and flexibility in the cord and the anchor.”

  “It lowers me down?”

  “No.”

  Alta giggled. Gent gave her a scathing look. “It only slows you down. Are you ready?”

  “I don’t know. How—?”

  “The suit will take care of you,” Gent interrupted. He stepped away from the neatly blasted opening, hooking a thumb at it as he did. “Coriolis forces will carry you slightly away from the column. You just have to jump.”

  Lot’s heart lurched. Jump? He peered at Gent, and saw that he was serious. A nervous laugh bubbled up in his throat. Bit garbage? It was too late to go over the suit design now. He stepped cautiously up to the opening, sweat prickling under his arms. Jump. Gent would have done a thorough search for degeneracies. He knew that. If this was what the suit had been designed for, then there was nothing to fear.

  Clutching the sides of the opening, he gazed down into the dark void while his lips moved in silent recitation Jupiter, Jupiter, Jupiter.

  “Fury,” Urban said, his voice breaking between the syllables. “This is crazy. These suits are antiques. Dammit, we—”

  Lot jumped. He yelled as he did it, a long defiant roar that blasted the fear out of his throat as he plunged downward. Dark walls flashed past while the cord fed out behind him. He shot below the floor of the city. The milky glow of the nebula suddenly surrounded him, its few permitted stars peppering his retina. The seconds stretched, until, with a bone-jarring shock, he hit the end of the cord.

  The pressure snapped him face-up, but it didn’t stop his plunge. He continued falling, but slower now, as the Dull Intelligence wound throughout the cord smoothly adjusted the tension to absorb his velocity, gradually arresting his momentum until he came to a full stop, without recoil.

  He found himself facing up, the faintly glowing bulk of the city looming like a planetary mass. Then, in his peripheral vision, the infinite face of the elevator column came rushing in to meet him.

  He twisted on the end of the cord, trying to get his feet around to cushion the impact. The wall slammed against his shoulder. He twisted further. The pads on his hands and his leggings skragged across the surface. He felt the rake of tiny claws creating friction to slow his skid, and finally he felt the suit’s hot zones fusing with the vast, vertical surface.

  He couldn’t move. He didn’t want to anyway. His heart was running so fast he could hardly breathe, while in his mind a dread awareness of the abyss below had brought on a kind of fibrillant shock. Empty space seemed to pull at him. Two hundred miles of nothing lay between him and the planet’s surface.

  Only gradually did he become aware of a buzz of anxious voices, barely audible over his own frantic heartbeat. “Gent?” he asked, in a hoarse croak. “Alta?”

  “Lot! Are you secured?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Shit, what a ride.”

  “Hold on. We’re behind you.”

  Hold on? Lot didn’t know how to let go. His hands and legs were locked on tight. He prayed they’d stay that way. Sweat dripped in his eyes. He shook his head and looked up, to see two more objects falling after him, then a third. Spidery, faintly incandescent figures against the dull cloudy roof of the city. Oh, Jupiter.

  He pressed his sealed face against the column’s smooth surface, not sure if he felt more terror or joy that he’d finally made it out of the city, and was on his way at last.

  Part III

  CHAPTER

  21

  LOT WATCHED THE THREE DESCENDING FIGURES, and soon realized only the last two were human. The first was far smaller and hotter: a plunging globule arcing gradually out from the column. Its identity puzzled him, until with a start he remembered the slug that had anchored his fall. He telescoped his vision, but couldn’t make out any detail. If it was the anchor, who controlled it? Who had signaled its release? Not him. Gent then? It was possible. But more likely, control lay with the suit’s DI. Bit garbage. He ruefully reconsidered Urban’s objections: any mutations in the suit’s neural architecture could easily prove fatal.

  Higher than the plunging anchor, though dropping at precisely the same speed, he could make out a human figure, arms and legs askew. He told himself there was no way their cords could cross. But he glanced at his own line anyway. The gold thread of it was visible for only a few feet before it disappeared against the dim glow of the night sky. But the section that he could see was pointing down, not up. A U-shaped loop must have formed as the full length of the cord plunged through vacuum at the same rate as the falling anchor. Against his belly, the cassette fought the slack, sucking in line in an intense, vibrationless spin.

  The anchor swept past him—well out from the column—at what seemed like meteoric speed. Lot half-expected the momentum of its plunge to yank him off the column. But instead the cord stretched, absorbing the kinetic energy so that he felt only a hint of recoil before the cassette busied itself hauling the anchor back up.

  “Get out of the way, fury, I’m coming in!”

  Lot started at the shouted warning, then ducked hard as Urban swung in nearly on top of him, boots striking the wall just inches above Lot’s head. “Alta’s right behind me,” Urban panted. His gloves locked onto the column. Lot watched him struggle to pull them off again. “Shit, how are we supposed to move?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Urban!” Gent barked over the suit audio. “You secure?”

  “Stuck fast.”

  “Heads up, then.”

  Alta swung in hard, but she moved with more grace than Lot or Urban, running sideways along the wall for a few steps before her boots locked on. Obviously, she knew how to handle the equipment. “Secure,” she called, with a glance back up toward the city. Lot looked up too and saw Gent begin to descend. �
�You guys want to get out of his way?” Alta asked.

  Lot felt a flush work its way up his cheeks. The anchor dangled at his waist, once again a sluglike knot of protoplasm encasing a thready flower of gold cord. “Maybe I should have taken a tutorial,” he said, not quite able to meet her gaze. Gent was approaching swiftly.

  “Cue your suit,” Alta said, as if the procedure should have been obvious. “‘Hark: climbing, climbing.’ You’ll get one limb free at a time.”

  Lot tried it. He managed to scramble a few feet toward Alta before Gent hit.

  “Now spread your anchor against the wall,” she went on.

  Lot frowned at the globular slug, then tried pushing it flat. Alta laughed at his effort. “Come on, Lot, we have to move fast. Just slam it. Punch it down.”

  His cheeks grew hotter still. But he shoved the slug hard against the gray, stained surface. When it stuck, he punched it square in the center. Ripples ran out from the point of impact as the anchor spread in a large patch across the wall. “Okay?” Lot asked.

  “Clear to jump,” his suit answered.

  He gritted his teeth. His muscles still hummed from his first jump. “Why can’t we just use the mats to slide down the column?”

  “Generates too much heat,” Gent said. “Besides, this way’s faster. You’re clear, Lot.”

  “I know.” He closed his eyes. Then, with a spasm of leg muscles, he launched himself away from the elevator column. This time he managed not to scream. He remembered to start counting, and reached a slow eight before the cord played out. Despite the cushioning effect of the stretching cord, the abrupt deceleration hit with jarring force. His head rang; his vision swam. Then he had the wall under his hands; locked on.

  Again Urban came down almost on top of him. “Some fun, huh fury?” he panted, landing a little more gracefully than Lot this time.