METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  Miles? Miles? Who the fuck talked about miles anymore? Except century-old men with bad attitudes.

  Her own anger, never far from view, bobbed to the surface. “Now? I’m busy, God damn it. What are you on? I don’t hear from you for over ten years, Mom won’t talk about whatever happened between you two, and you call me up and tell me to leave town now!?”

  Something blipped hard on the line, interference or monitoring, Sabo couldn’t tell. Again that lag. Was he bouncing off a daisy chain of comsats? With her father, anything was possible.

  “I’m coming home the hard way, Sooboo. Nobody’s going to like this splash.”

  She groaned. “Oh, god, Dad. Are you nuking Seattle?”

  “Just about. Get out.” Another deep breath. “Please.” That was followed by a burst of static.

  Sabo hadn’t heard her father say ‘please’ since she was four years old. “Bugger off, Dad. Call someone who gives a shit.”

  He had no answer, just more static and the kind of voice ghosts that turned up when the latency went off the map and the circuit wasn’t sufficiently filtered to compensate.

  She cut the line and went back to the mass accounting data. After a couple of minutes chasing phantoms in the visualization, she gave up and instantiated a window into the current open source low earth orbit tracking.

  If something was moving out of place up there, maybe, just maybe, she’d take her father seriously.

  He’d said ‘please,’ after all.

  And Elliott Bay.

  Really?

  * * *

  Many hours later, the mining package skipped roughly across the upper atmosphere. Behind him, and immediately above him, Bashar could see a blaze of heat and light. “It’s shallow angle entry with a semicontrolled glide,” he told himself out loud. Small reassurance.

  At least Moselle and Lu couldn’t get at him here. Slightly more reassurance.

  The noise was ungodly. To think he’d complained that space was silent. Even inside the cockpit, enclosed in the pressure suit, the howling and buffeting threatened to stun him. Bashar repeatedly shut his eyes and tried to meditate. This was about as effective as doing so in the middle of a firefight, but it was still more constructive than screaming his head off in pain and terror.

  He was out of comms, as well, for the duration. Too much interference from the raw chaos of the burn, as well the mining package’s ablative coating ablating, or whatever it was doing. Not to mention the racket onboard would have kept him from hearing anything anyway.

  Did people ride this down at other times? That would explain the cockpit. A potentially less traceable surface insertion than a fall bag or a glider either one, especially when the lucky pilot bailed out at a fairly low altitude and deployed a wingsuit or microlight glider.

  Bashar refused to wonder if he would survive the ride. That hadn’t been much of an option from the beginning of this misbegotten affair. What information Charity had come up with before he’d lost comms hadn’t been helpful. Using the boosters in a decaying orbit wouldn’t do much, she’d told him. Minor course adjustments intended to ensure the attitude of the mining package was correct when it encountered the thicker layers of the atmosphere. Even Bashar knew how critical that was. And the rock had no capacity for large-scale course redirects—that was done with the initial positioning, which had been completed long before he’d even gotten into orbit. Otherwise he could have just flown it into the Canadian Rockies or something.

  Any control he achieved would be with the airfoils in atmosphere.

  So Bashar divided his time between not-panicking about the rough ride and a hunt for the autopilot, or whatever autonomous system managed the lower stages of descent. The late, unlamented Bibendum had made it clear they weren’t controlling that from orbit.

  He wound up unhooking every component that was obviously not a flight control. Five pieces of rack-mounted equipment in all. Loose they were a terrible hazard, so he slotted them back into their racks reversed. The empty circuit connections stared at him like baleful silver eyes.

  When the mining package stopped jouncing and howling so much, and the fire above his head guttered to mixed streaks of brightness and ash, Bashar figured they had gone from a ballistic mode to at least semi-controlled atmospheric flight. He took over the joysticks to see if there was anything like wing bite.

  The problem now was an almost complete lack of navigational instruments. This wasn’t intended to be flown from the cockpit. There was no forward view. All he had was an altimeter, a compass, an airspeed indicator and a GPS readout.

  Which at the moment told him he was at 81,400 meters, headed almost due east, making Mach ten somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

  No one bailed out at this altitude and airspeed. Not anyone who wanted to survive the first step.

  Bashar fought the controls in an effort to keep the nose up as high as possible. He wanted to make the glide path shallower, so as to overshoot the landing zone. Surely he’d already messed up their careful calculations to drop this into Elliott Bay just west of the New Seawall, but he needed to miss by miles. Kilometers. A lot of them, whichever they were.

  His sensorium flickered as text came into being, superimposed on his visual field.

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  cox:: they bombed Schaadts shack

  Schaadt’s? Had Baldie-with-no-name been a victim or the perp? He’d bet vinos-to-dollars he knew the answer to that, given what a slick bastard Baldie had turned out to be. Trail of bodies in his wake kind of guy. Everything at Schaadt’s had been a set up. Lightbull, the hard Greens, did it even matter who?

  No.

  More to the point, Charity’d found some bandwidth that could reach him. Well, he had lost a lot of his burn. But this just wasn’t the time.

  bas:: not now … im saving the world

  cox:: one more thing … samira is getting out of seattle

  His relief at that news was bone deep. His daughter had listened to him. Something had been salvaged. I have won, Bashar thought. At least the smallest and most important of victories. But time was slipping, fast.

  bas:: thank god and all the little fishes

  cox:: love you

  bas:: this isnt goodbye

  God, he wished that was true.

  He kept pulling the nose up. Was he going to make it?

  No matter what happened, someone would have to deal with Lightbull, with the hard Greens in orbit, with the darwin file and the island plagues, with J. Appleseed’s rogue AIs.

  A few governments still had surface-to-orbit missiles. Could he convince the United States Air Force to nuke Orbital Zero? As for the rest of it …

  bas:: dump everything to sooboo … all data … all of it

  bas:: someone has to take on lightbull and finish this

  bas:: ¿¿¿charity???

  bas:: ¿¿¿charity???

  bas:: ¿¿¿charity???

  Had she received that?

  * * *

  At 4,000 meters, the mining package’s airspeed dropped below Mach one. Bashar figured he was close to the Olympic peninsula. Even a hard stop in the mountains there would be better than nailing Seattle. But he was pretty sure he’d clear the peaks, and if he cleared the peaks, he’d clear Seattle.

  Mt. Howard east of Seattle was a little over 2,000 meters. Bashar figured it was even money on striking the Cascades there or just clearing them as well to nail some poor bastard farmer in the Palouse.

  Or his own wife.

  It was nut-cutting time. Ride the rock down, keeping the nose up as hard as he could, or step outside and check the weather? Bashar had no way to know for sure. All he could do was guess. Bibendum had said the suit had basic atmospheric capabilities. He’d have ten or fifteen seconds to figure it out. Must be a wingsuit, since there wasn’t enough mass on the back to hold a pop-up microlight.

  Unfortunately, he knew how to fly a microlight. Wingsuits were a mystery to him.

  Bashar hoped like hell Samira would take the
larger problem and run with it as she escaped the drop zone. He wasn’t sure he would ever hit the ground alive. And Charity …

  “I’m sorry,” he said to no one in particular as he popped the cockpit’s hatch, and stepped out into the screaming wind that snatched him away from the rock like the hand of God.

  His suit was smoldering, Bashar realized as he spun high in the air over the rugged terrain of the Olympic Peninsula, buffeted by the searing trail of his erstwhile craft.

  The suit stiffened and puffed to slam him hard where he’d expected to fall. Now he was spinning, not plunging.

  Bashar spread his arms wide like a starfish. Did this damned rig have jets?

  Well, of course it did, for maneuvering in microgravity, but they wouldn’t likely be affecting him here.

  His spin turned into a swooping curve. Ahead of him, the mining package left a contrail of smoke and debris as it crossed Puget Sound. Behind him was … he bent his head … smoke.

  No wonder his legs were getting hot. His suit was on fire.

  Damn it.

  Stop, drop and roll wouldn’t cut it. Not here two miles up in the air.

  If he’d simply fallen, he’d have hit the ground by now. Instead, Bashar was in a kind of spiral glide over what looked like the eastern end of the Olympic National Forest. Not a good landing zone for a man coming in hot, hard and aflame. He tried to steer toward Puget Sound, or at least the Hood Canal.

  Looking up again, he watched the mining package drop toward Seattle as the eastern sky faded to dusk.

  “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” Bashar said.

  It cleared the downtown skyscrapers like the fist of God, then, also like the fist of God, barely cleared Capitol Hill.

  A cloud of steam and ash shot up when the rock hit Lake Washington. Even as he watched, the blast tore the top off Capitol Hill. Most of Bellevue was toasted, too, surely. But Seattle.…

  Seattle hadn’t died. Knocked hard, yes. Fucked, yes. But not dead. And people would come looking now to figure out what happened. Hard people, like the man he had been.

  He had won. His daughter was still alive, and so was Seattle.

  His suit aflame, his eyes full of tears, Bashar turned his face toward the sparkling waters and let himself plunge. Milton’s words came into his mind as he fell.

  I toiled out my uncouth passage, forced to ride the untractable abyss, plunged in the womb of unoriginal night and chaos wild.

  “Good-bye, Samira,” he told the world.

  * * *

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  ***

  Let Me Hide Myself in Thee

  Samira Bashar Oxham breathed deeply to hold her profanity at bay, then let it loose when she remembered the empty work pits around her. No one to be offended or distracted by it here in the empty subbasements beneath J. Appleseed. That, she reflected, was the joy of working the weekend.

  She’d spent weeks chasing down discrepancies in her employer’s records, layers uncovered while chasing a bug in the heavy lift mass budgets and now, just as her leads became promising, data was vanishing like rats from a sinking ship.

  And then there’s my father.

  She never heard from the man, never knew from moment to moment if he was dead or alive, and then suddenly, he’s calling to warn her out of Seattle with veiled threats of death from above.

  Near as she could see it, the occasion called for more profanity and she offered it up on the altar of her Saturday.

  As if summoning Old Scratch himself, Sabo’s earphone chirped. She sent it to voice mail with a blink. It chirped again and she did the same again. On the fifth attempt, she clicked in, her voice sharp and cold. “I’m busy right now, Dad.”

  “Not Dad,” the voice answered.

  “Mom?” Something in Charity Oxham’s voice tickled Sabo’s ear. When was the last time she had spoken to them both on the same day? Or within the same ten minutes? She recognized the tickle for what it was: Apprehension. “What’s going on?”

  “Listen to your father, Sabo.”

  The words found their intended button and Sabo sucked in her breath as dozens of past conversations flooded the moment.

  She couldn’t remember the substance of those conversations—they were about whatever argument-of-the week a headstrong teenage daughter might fall into with the likely genetic source of her stubborn nature. Still, she remembered her mother’s laugh and the words that always followed after. “Don’t listen to your father,” she would say. Then, the smile would fade and her eyes would go hard. “But someday, Sabo, you’re going to come to me and I’m going to tell you to listen to him. When that happens, you’d damned well better listen.”

  Now, her mother’s voice took on an urgent note. “Do you understand me, Sabo?”

  “Leave Seattle?”

  “Immediately,” Charity Oxham said. “Go. There’s a ride waiting on the roof.”

  The roof? Sabo opened her mouth to ask but her mother continued. “I’m sending you a present from your father. You know where to go to pick it up.”

  She did. Being raised by green wolves in the new world order had given Sabo an edge that most of her friends and colleagues lacked. She’d spent the bulk of her childhood moving between the hidden cities, living from backpacks and learning her reading, writing and arithmetic from a portable AI tutor provided by the Foundation while her parents did work she knew little about even to this day. But part of that work was a family-wide brutal form of know-your-neighbor security that they had meticulously trained their daughter in, with safe houses and drop sites. And before Bashar had gone off even his extremely limited version of the grid entirely a decade earlier, there’d even been a close network of people through which Sabo knew she could always find her parents and vice versa if ever there were need.

  Of course, her father had dismantled that network before disappearing. And now suddenly, he was back.

  Sabo forced her attention once more to the voice in her ear. “Is Dad okay?”

  Her mother’s voice was unreadable. “Your father can take care of himself. Now get the fuck out of there. Get off their network and make your way to the roof.” She paused and Sabo thought she heard indecision in her mother’s voice. “Quietly, Sabo. Eyes wide open.”

  She nodded even as her hands moved over the light screen suspended above her desk, logging herself off of a dozen systems as her eye moved to the door. “Okay, Mom. I’m going.”

  “Good.” Charity’s voice was distant, distracted. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Her father had said the same—another rarity in the Bashar-Oxham Tribe of Three. And one that spoke of something Sabo couldn’t fathom but had to respect.

  Her parents were afraid.

  “Call me when you get the package,” her mother added.

  “I will.” Then, when the line hiccupped into quiet, Sabo hung up and started moving files from her desk into her iSys.

  Something flashed behind her left eye and she paused, her hands at the corners, ready to collapse the shimmering screen. It was an IM on a messenger program old enough that she didn’t recognize it, asking her to approve a file transfer.

  She looked to the door again and then back to the screen. “What is this?” she mumbled to herself.

  She approved the transfer and, a second later, pulled the audio file into her server along with everything else. Then she closed the screen, blinked her pit-lights off and made for the center aisle and the door that waited at the other end. She was in the hall moving toward the elevator when the file opened.

  A simple line of music played in her left ear. It was unfamiliar and crackling with age. Something preserved from as far back as the vinyl years, she suspected. It was a gospel choir accompanied by an organ and piano.

  “Rock of ages, cleft for me,” they sang, “let me hide myself in thee.”

  An IM window opened behind her left eye. Y OR N appeared in bright blue fo
nt.

  She crooked her index finger to enter ‘Y’ then paused. I don’t understand, she sub-vocalized.

  The file played again. Louder now in her earbud. “Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.”

  More words reproduced themselves in the window beneath hers.

  I HAVE INFORMATION REGARDING GREEN SPACE MASS BUDGET DISCREPANCIES. There was a pause. Then: LISTEN TO YOUR FATHER, SABO. Y OR N?

  Fuck. Sabo stood at the elevator now and pushed the button. She needed to be leaving. Her ride was waiting, whatever her mother had meant. She sighed. Yes.

  The response was instant. L2 SERVER ROOM STACK 7.

  The doors whispered open and she slipped inside the elevator. She pressed the button for L2 and tapped her foot impatiently as the elevator whispered upward.

  The floor was quiet and Sabo approached the server room quickly. Its hatch was a security wet dream, with bioptic scanners, thumbprint locks and an old-fashioned numeric code sequencer.

  And it was open. Just a crack, but open nonetheless. That kind of security lapse was unheard of.

  Unless I was meant to find it open, she thought. Convenient. Or perhaps not, given that she needed to be on the roof right now.

  She pulled the hatch wide, a wash of cold air rushing outward. Her iSys accommodated for the dim light by dialing up her ocular implants. She scanned the large numbers above each stack until she found the seventh.

  Sabo slipped into the cage and looked around. She didn’t recognize this particular server though from the case design and the relatively clunky power supply she suspected it was older than the others nearby. The machine hummed quietly, its diagnostic cable hanging loose.

  The instant message window flashed to life again. UPLOAD FILE SMA.EXE. Y OR N?

  “Who is this?” She watched her voice-rec translate the words into an orange flashing font. The audio clip replayed, then its single line of lyrics appeared in the same orange font.