Water sprayed her face and she wished she could taste salt on her lips. The trimaran continued to pick up speed, the sail like a knife in the sky, carving the wind into the shape of its own desire, its own needs. Birnbaum had explained it to them all as they were setting sail. L’hydroptere had marine wings, foils deployed at forty-five degrees under each of the floats on the trimaran. As soon as they’d unfurled the sails they had begun to pick up speed, but the magic came once they had reached ten knots. At that speed, the foils generated an upward thrust that lifted the ship from the water in the same way an airplane took off from the ground, increasing speed to forty-five knots in the first twelve seconds or so after the rising off the waves.
Now they were slicing through the air fifteen feet above the sea, only the foils actually touching the water itself. L’hydroptere was a thing of beauty, and it pleased Kate to feel a kinship between the ship and her own body. Sitting at the stern of the center float, she watched the others at work. Each of the hydroptere’s wings was equipped with what looked to her like little more than a steering wheel and a hand crank. The crank reeled in or unspooled lengths of the white rope that made up the ship’s rigging, moving the sails. Birnbaum had the wheel on the left wing, with Danny moving the crank at her instruction. She had already trained Hawkins and Trav, who were on the right wing, ready to perform the same job when she gave them the signal. Birnbaum had been modest about her abilities as a sailor. She’d had them underway minutes after boarding and now, an hour and a half into the journey, she had taught the squad the basics.
At the prow of the central float, the two additions to Kate’s squad—Zuzu and Broaddus—kept Hanif Khan under guard. Khan’s cuffs had been removed to keep him from accidentally slipping over the side of the hydrofoil trimaran. If the murderous bastard decided he wanted to die he could throw himself into the sea and be done with it. From the moment they’d set sail, Kate had been waiting for him to do just that and Khan’s apparent decision to keep living surprised her almost as much as her own willingness to keep letting him. She told herself she hadn’t killed him because POTUS’s people might have better luck getting useful information out of him, but she had started to think the truth might be a bit more convoluted than that. If she killed Khan now and discovered later that her father had been killed in the chaos he and his confederates had wrought, she would have no one left to punish.
According to Birnbaum, they were sailing west-northwest. Chasing the sun, she’d said, and Kate liked that idea. They were skimming along the rim of the world. Due west, she could see the sun sliding toward the sea. In moments it would begin to vanish over the horizon and then it would seem to speed up. She had watched enough sunsets in her life to know to expect that strange bleeding effect, the flashes of different colors before the sun disappeared for the night. Once, when she was ten or eleven years old, she had been sitting with her mother on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico—a place where people applauded the sunset every night as if it had been a show performed exclusively for them—and her mother had said that the sunset reminded her of life. Her own mother, Kate’s grandmother, had been dead only a few weeks by then. When Kate asked her about the comparison, her mother had told her that the leisurely progress of the sun across the sky was an illusion, that really the Earth spun with dizzying swiftness, and it was only there at the end, when the sun seemed to dash from the sky, that people could truly appreciate just how scant were the hours in a day, how miserly the God who granted them.
Kate no longer believed in God the way her mother did, but every time she watched a sunset she remembered the meager allocation of hours in a day, or in a life. As the salt air burnished her charred frame and the hydroptere soared beneath her, she thought again of her mother and she understood that she had been given a gift of hours. Inside the robot, the blazing sun of her life had ceased sinking toward its inevitable horizon.
Ahead of her, Alexa Day sat on the hydroptere’s left wing, hair flying around her face as she dangled her feet over the edge. Kate had watched Alexa’s face while the Tin Men had lowered her father’s corpse into a hastily dug grave in a small park overlooking the sea back in Haifa. Alexa had wept, but the girl had fire in her eyes—the kind of fire that forged steel. Though she grieved for Alexa’s loss, Kate had been heartened to see that fire; the girl would need it for the life that awaited her in the coming days and years.
Motion caught Kate’s attention and she glanced over to see Birnbaum hurrying along the span that connected the center float with the right and left sides. As she ducked beneath the sail and turned to hurry back to Kate, the sun vanished below the horizon and indigo darkness swept across the sea. Birnbaum turned on her guidelight, a shining beacon in the dark. The crescent moon and the stars would provide more than enough illumination by which to sail, but Kate knew the light was not for the squad’s sake—it was to comfort Alexa.
Torres lay in the netting that connected the central float to the wings like a spider’s web. The netting sagged just a little under the robot’s weight, but Torres lay there as if someone had shut her down.
“Get your butt up here,” Birnbaum said to her. “I want to have a look at you.”
Torres grumbled something that Kate couldn’t hear over the raging wind and crawled toward the central float—toward Kate.
“How are you, Sarge?” Birnbaum asked, coming to kneel in front of her.
Kate studied her face. “How fast are we going?”
“The old hydropteres—back when they first starting breaking speed records—could do about fifty, maybe fifty-five knots. That’s over sixty miles per hour. But that was decades ago. I figure we’re nearer ninety MPH, which puts us about six hours out from the main port of Athens. I’m estimating based on the charts in our onboard systems. Without a satellite connection, I can’t be sure.”
Torres clambered up onto the central float just behind Birnbaum. Even in the dim moonlight, her ruined eye socket had a monstrous quality about it.
“You really think you can navigate well enough to get us there?” Torres asked.
Birnbaum glanced back at her. “I do, actually. Now sit there and wait your turn. As soon as I’ve got Wade’s arm reattached, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for your eye.”
“Don’t tell me you have a spare,” Torres said.
“No, but I might be able to restore certain basic visual functions without one.”
With the tap of a finger, Birnbaum lit up a small screen on her abdomen, displaying rows of symbols, some familiar to Kate but most not, though she had seen the screen before. Tapping in a code, the tech opened a hollow in her carapace just below the guidelight.
“There’s something weirdly intimate about that whole process,” Kate said.
“Tell me about it,” Torres muttered.
Birnbaum had begun to withdraw small tools from within her chassis, but now she paused. For several seconds she glanced out to sea, and then she turned and searched Kate’s eyes.
“Sarge, I need to ask you something.”
Kate nodded.
Birnbaum glanced away again. This time Torres reached out and took her hand, nodding her encouragement. Whatever this was, it seemed Torres already knew.
“I know your father’s in Athens—“
Kate bristled. “He’s there, yeah. And if he’s still alive, I hope to keep him that way. But if you think—“
“No, no,” Birnbaum said. “Just listen. If the President was back home or in, like, Australia or something, I wouldn’t have sided with you. But he’s close enough that there’s a chance we can make a difference, and that makes it our duty to do so. I believe you’d have made the same decision even if your father hadn’t been traveling with him. I just…I need your promise, Kate.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“We get to Athens, find POTUS—and your father, if we can—and then we head straight to the Hump. No matter what,” Birnbaum said.
Kate nodded, glancing from Birnbau
m to Torres. “That’s always been the plan. As far as I know there’s no safer place for the President than back at the airfield anyway.”
Birnbaum stared at her, wind buffeting them, whistling around them. “What if he has other orders?”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“No matter what happens,” Birnbaum said, “once we’re done in Athens, Torres and I are heading for the Hump.”
Kate glanced down at the charred arm in her lap. Her own arm. “What’s this about, Naomi?”
Birnbaum didn’t respond.
“Look,” Kate went on, “if the Commander-in-Chief gives a direct order—“
“Wade,” Torres said curtly, her ruined face unreadable. “She’s pregnant.”
Kate stared at Birnbaum. “She’s—“
“She’s got to get back to base,” Torres said. “She’s carrying—her real body—“
“Her original body,” Kate said without thinking.
“No!” Birnbaum snapped. “My real body. My baby needs me.”
“The process doesn’t endanger the baby?” Kate asked. “Who knows what they really pump into us in the canisters.”
Birnbaum stared at her. “The doctors promised me.”
Kate hesitated a moment and then held out her severed arm to Birnbaum.
“Let’s just get there,” she said.
“Shit, Wade, your bedside manner sucks,” Torres said.
Kate focused on Birnbaum. “When the time comes, you do whatever you have to do. Seems like that’s the way of the world now.”
Danny watched comets streak across the night sky over the Mediterranean and wondered if they were really there. He’d been working the crank on the left wing of the hydroptere until Birnbaum had asked Torres to take a turn. His mind felt exhausted and an unpleasant buzz had begun to infiltrate his head. His thoughts seemed too simple, as though their sharp edges had been sanded away.
Birnbaum had come back to take the wheel after doing whatever repairs she could on Kate and Torres. That had been two hours ago, and now Kate sat alone at the stern of the ship’s central float, where she’d been since they had set sail. Danny sat beside Alexa Day on the wing, water splashing up at them from far below.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Alexa asked.
“The stars?”
Alexa glanced sidelong at him. “The robots. You guys. In the moonlight, with the stars reflecting off the metal, you’re beautiful. Not sure how that works in battle—“
“We have a stealth mode,” Danny said, triggering it with a thought. His carapace went dull, darker and non-reflective. At night, he knew, it would almost be as if he’d vanished, except Alexa sat too close for him to have disappeared completely.
“Wow, that’s—“
“Cool, right?” Danny said.
“I was going to say ‘sad.’”
Danny laughed. “Maybe so,” he said, and turned to gaze at Kate again.
“Go talk to her,” Alexa said.
“She looks like she wants to be alone,” Danny replied.
Alexa bumped him with her shoulder. “I was angry at my dad. Now he’s gone and we’re all out here in the middle of the sea, and he’s almost all I can think about. I don’t…I feel lost without him.”
Danny studied her shimmering eyes. He wanted to tell her it would be all right, but he didn’t like to lie.
“You’ve lost a lot of your friends today. From your platoon,” the girl said. “But all of us… I don’t think we’ve really even begun to process how much we’ve lost. Birnbaum says we’ve got another four hours or so before we reach Athens. They’re gonna be the longest four hours of my life. So, anyway, I say you go talk to her.”
Danny nodded, staring down at the water, and then glanced at her again. “You’re pretty damn wise for seventeen.”
Alexa did not smile. “Chalk it up to a youth of burning candles and writing emo poetry in my journal. Go.”
Rising to a crouch, he made his way carefully across the span to the central float and then worked his way back to Kate.
“Hey,” he said.
Kate cocked her head at him as if she had only just noticed his arrival. “Pretty out here, isn’t it?”
Danny sat down facing her. “Calm before the storm.”
“I don’t mind whatever fighting we’ve got ahead of us,” Kate said. “I just don’t like not knowing. Are they still alive or not, y’know? I’m trying not to think about it.”
“How’s that going?”
Kate slid her foot out to kick him lightly on the leg. “Lousy, thanks.”
“Athens won’t be like Haifa or those little villages on the road from Damascus,” Danny said. “We get there, it’s gonna be full-on madness. Real-deal anarchy. If the G20 Summit got hit the way we think, the people in Athens will know none of this is an accident. They’re not going to be sitting around waiting for the power to come back on.”
Kate nodded. “I’ve thought about that. We’ve got to keep the girl safe. Hanif Khan—I don’t mind if he catches a bullet—but Alexa…”
“So we leave her on the boat, with protection?” Danny asked.
“Maybe Zuzu and Broaddus.”
Danny glanced back at Alexa, whose gaze was fixed on the stars. “I don’t think she’ll go for that. My guess is she’ll be begging for her own gun before we even reach shore. Not to mention that we’ll need all the soldiers we can get. Zuzu and Broaddus could be really useful if we find the President and need to get him to safety. Someone has to stay with the boat, but only one someone. A sentry.”
“So the girl stays with the sentry.”
Danny shrugged. “We’ll see.”
Kate studied him without speaking. Danny shifted, glanced away, and finally met her gaze again.
“Listen,” he said, “I know now’s not the time. In the middle of all this…it’s just the worst time imaginable. But there are things. Things that need to be said.”
Her eyes went cold. “Pretty sure you said all you needed to.”
“Maybe, but I said it poorly. You mean something to me, Kate. I joined the army because I needed something to believe in, but I believe in you.”
“Danny—“
“So I’ll follow you into battle. I’ll follow you to the end—“
“Listen—“
“But I can’t need you. If you hate me for it—”
Kate kicked him again, harder this time. Sea spray speckled their bodies and the rush of the wind and the roar of the trimaran’s foils knifing through the water tried to drown out their words, but they heard one another. They always had.
“Stop talking,” Kate told him. She did not look away, but he had the feeling she wanted to. “It’s just possible that I love you, Danny. There’s my confession. But every hour that goes by, I feel more empty inside. Things that used to matter to me are starting to matter less and less.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t want my old body back,” she said. “Not ever.”
Danny stared at her. “Are you…how can you say that?”
“We’d have been dead a dozen times today if we were just flesh and blood.”
“Still.”
Kate gazed out across the waves.
“You realize what you’re saying?” Danny asked. “You’ll never feel again. Really feel, I mean. Never feel a human touch or the sun on your face.”
Kate laughed. “This from the guy who can’t man up and admit when he likes somebody.”
Danny threw up a hand. “Hell with that, listen to what you’re saying. You’ll never taste chocolate or have sex or have a baby or…or anything.”
Kate lowered her eyes, gazing down into the water below them. “You don’t get what it means to me to be whole again. I look forward to being in the bot. To being strong. To being able to run. To being more than human.”
“Less than, Kate. We’re less than human.”
She glanced out at the sea. “If they put us back in our human bodies, there’
s no guarantee I’ll ever be able to pilot a bot again, and I just can’t take that risk. You don’t understand.”
A chill slithered up Danny’s spine.
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s one thing I’ll never understand.”
But it occurred to him that perhaps he understood very well.
~22
Snipers waited outside the metro station in Piraeus. The moment Syd and Bingham stepped into the moonlight, gunshots rang out. A bullet took a piece out of the concrete wall behind Syd’s head before she ducked back inside. Bingham stood her ground, taking fire even as she sighted her weapon on the nearest sniper—on a roof across the street—and shot him.
“One down,” she called back to the others who waited inside the subway station entrance.
Felix tried to breathe. His chest hurt and he told himself it had to be the claustrophobia finally getting a grip on him. His skin felt oily and gritty from their subterranean journey. The idea of a sea voyage made him want to weep with relief, but they still had to survive long enough to reach the marina.
“Two down!” Bingham called from outside the station entrance.
Through the opening at the top of the stairs Felix could see the darkened façades of squat apartment buildings—a row of gray boxes that seemed identical. Piraeus had its share of wealthy residents thanks to the presence of Zea, one of the largest and loveliest marinas in Europe, but the city was also a major port, which meant merchant ships, cruise liners, and cargo vessels docked nearby every day. The whitewashed buildings had a kind of uniformity that made it difficult to gauge the prosperity of the neighborhood. But what did prosperity mean now?
“Chapel,” President Matheson said. “You and Bingham clear the snipers.”
“Can’t leave your side, Mister President,” Chapel replied.
“You don’t leave my side and we never get out of here,” Matheson snapped. He winced with pain, touching the rough stitches where the bullet had grazed his temple. “If we don’t act now we’ll all die right here. You want to do your job, follow orders.”
Chapel nodded. “Yes, sir!”
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