by M M Buckner
“Deepra! Deepra! Deepra!” the fans were chanting over the phone. Verinne would be uploading the Reel to millions. And Sheeba? Where was she? Bright missile tracers blocked my view, but I imagined her drifting just out of sight, watching.
Yes, I could do this. Be here now. The sharp copper tang of the zone curled my tongue, and I grinned. I no longer felt pain. Numbness crept up my chest and made me shiver. “Heat,” I told my suit. Only a few more seconds. Wedging my good leg under the solar panel, I resumed my Buddha lotus, and the fans erupted in cheers. I gripped the bouncing panel frame and gazed defiantly up at the light-streaked blackness. “Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen,” the fans counted down.
Then I caught something in peripheral vision. Movement. A shadow. I turned and saw figures crawling up between the panels. They wore faded gray space suite with old-fashioned, collapsible helmets and clunky external air hoses. And they were carrying something heavy and menacing that looked like—chains?
“Protes!” Kat shouted.
“Fuckin’ agitators,” Grunze said at the same time. “Get out of there.”
“Ten, nine, eight,” the fans counted.
Two agitators, one tall, the other short, they circled and flanked me. When the short one swung his chain, the heavy metal links lashed across my helmet and hurled me backward. Stunned, I gazed at the villain through a burst of sparks. At first, I thought his chain had damaged my visor, but the light trick was inside my head. Another chain whacked across my armored ribs and knocked the wind out of my lungs, but my boot stayed wedged under the solar panel. Then the short agitator tried to shake my boot free and drive me off.
At that moment, the gunship sent a targeted burst of missile fire in our direction, and the hostiles disappeared under the panels. Cowards.
“Three, two, one, zero!” The fans screamed applause.
“Fuckin’ A, you did it!” Grunzie shouted, proud of me despite the fact that he’d just lost two mil.
“Margarita, martini, Manhattan, what’ll you have?” Winston asked.
Sixty seconds in Heaven. That record would stand for decades. I did it. I, Nasir Deepra. Laughing aloud, I un-wedged my boot and spoke a quick command to activate my thruster and get the hell out of the zone. But my thruster didn’t respond.
“Nasty Nass, quit clowning,” said Winston.
Kat laughed. “Double or nothing, he’s got a malfunction.”
Quickly, I grabbed the solar panel to keep from flying off on a tangent, and I voiced commands to launch a backup navigation routine. Noisemakers zipped around me in bright streams, but the thruster showed no sign of life. Worse, the hostiles reappeared with their chains.
“On!” I shouted at my thruster. “Come ON, you bloody machine!”
But even the backup system was dead. If I let go of Heaven, my forward inertia would hurl me into the night, and who knows how long before my friends would find me? So I gripped the panel and waited. Caught between two devils—my company and my employees-—I couldn’t guess who would kill me first. In total unabashed panic, I wailed for help.
Then out of the inky black, Kat’s robot zoomed to my rescue. Like a white blur, it soared full throttle toward me, rocketing undaunted through the hail of missile fire. On it came, straight as an arrow into the zone. In no time, it would be here to whisk me away.
“Martini. And make it a double,” I said, mentally counting the seconds as a heavy chain looped toward my feet. On came the robot, faster and faster, streaking like a comet. Wasn’t it going to brake? It seemed to be accelerating.
Then I saw the helmet, the EVA suit, the screaming thruster on her back. Just before she slammed into my chest at top speed, I saw the black piping on her shoulders. Sheeba.
7
ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY
“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
-H.L. MENCKEN
Sheeba and I plowed into Heaven at Mach 10. Actually, exaggerate. We weren’t going quite that fast, and the solar panel absorbed a lot of our momentum when it collapsed beneath us. On cue, our expensive pro-line body armor deployed, enveloping each of us in full bubble-cluster body shields. These bouncy wrappers kept us from squashing each other to bloody gore. My IBiS set off pyrotechnics in my thumb, and as the bubble wrappers deflated, I expected to lose consciousness—but I wasn’t mat lucky.
“Beau, your leg.”
Sheeba tried to press her hands over the rip in my space suit, although it had already self-sealed. My right thigh felt as if someone had twisted it in two.
I said, “Turn off your thrusters, dear!”
Sheeba’s thruster pack was still blasting away, pinning us against the hull—pressing my back uncomfortably against a broken support strut. I grasped her controls and shut off the ignition. Then Provendia’s spotlight silhouetted a pair of dark figures moving toward us, one tall and one short—the agitators. Their chains unreeled like snake heads. Then I did faint.
I awoke in semidarkness, and details took shape slowly. A ringing vibration. Cold, stale air. One stripe of pale gray light spilled through a partly open doorway, and moldy stains bloomed across a metal ceiling. I lay rigid, afraid to move, afraid to find myself paralyzed from the neck down. Cold seeped up from the floor.
“Sheeba?”
“I’m here, beau.”
She crouched in the oval-shaped doorway, listening. The air smelted like a stale refrigerator.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine. You should rest.”
The room was barely larger than a closet, and its ceiling hung low enough to induce claustrophobia. A scummy fungal growth coated the welded steel walls and floor, and there was something peculiar about the room’s shape. After staring for a long time, I realized it wasn’t square. It was shaped like a stumpy triangle. The oval door cut across its sharpest corner, and the wall opposite the door was curved.
“Sheeba?’
“Do you need something, beau?”
I was trying very hard to figure out where we were. Someone had painted a large E on one of the straight walls, and a W on the other. East and West? I studied the curved wall, but instead of an N or S, there was a hand-scrawled A. Another A marked the door. What bizarre place had we landed in?
The ice-cold floor chilled my bones, and the scratchy blanket offered little warmth. Scratchy, yes. I moved my fingertips over its rough weave, delighted to find mat my hands still functioned. But what had happened to my gloves? And my EVA suit?
Sheeba crawled toward me. She wasn’t wearing her suit, either, only her white smartskin longjohn and socks. “Nass, we’re inside the ship. Do you want some water?”
“The gunship?” Ye gods, we’d been arrested by my own company. Maximally embarrassing moment. This was going to cost me a bundle.
“No, I mean we’re in Heaven,” Sheeba said. “Those workers tried to shove us off into space. They don’t want us here, Nass.”
When Sheeba’s words finally soaked through to my brain, I sat bolt upright—and discovered that I was not paralyzed, only bruised and battered from head to toe. My right leg felt bludgeoned, and my left thumb was practically playing a symphony. “We can’t be here!”
“Why did they want us to leave? We wouldn’t hurt anybody.” Sheeba squeezed water into my mouth from a plastic sack, then wiped my chin with her sleeve and made me lie back down. “Take it easy, beau. Your leg’s broken in two places.”
When I tried to sit up again, she laughed gently and cradled my head in her lap. Her fingers made soft round circles over my temples, across my forehead and down the bridge of my nose. “I keep thinking and thinking about these wars, Nass. The employees have everything they need. Why do they get so angry?”
I shivered with cold—my smartskin longjohn was supposed to deliver better insulation man this. My thumb-screen kept up a steady tremor, but I didn’t want to check it while Sheeba was watching. Sheeba disapproved of implanted biosensors. Skin dye, contact lenses, tattoos—
that cosmetic stuff was fine, but Shee thought health care should “harmonize with nature,” whatever the heck mat meant.
“Maybe if the whole world did a group meditation, then people wouldn’t feel so aggressive.” She smoothed my eyebrows. “You know, we could pick one day and do a unified chant, like a global tantric purification.”
I chewed my vibrating thumb. “We’re inside A13?”
“Liam promised to send a doctor,” she said. “Are you hungry. They left us these hard crackers. Not bad if you don’t mind the carbs.”
“Where’s my suit? Sheeba, we have to get away from this place.”
“Well, that’s the thing.” She raked her fingernails through my hair the way I loved, and tingles of pleasure washed down my spine. She continued in a soft murmur, kneading the cords in the back of my neck. “When I talked Liam into letting us come inside, he took our space suits.”
“You talked to who? Liam?” I felt faint again. “You asked the agitators to bring us inside? Sheeba, we can’t stay here!”
“Beau, your leg needs attention. Besides, this is what we came for. To seek the dark canal.”
“No! We have to LEAVE!”
“But why, Nass? I have so many questions, and there’s magna cum energy in this place.”
“The agitators will kill us and eat us.”
Sheeba’s mouth dropped open.
Of course I was making that op. I couldn’t tell her the real truth about Heaven, not then, not my delicate Sheeba. Scenarios played in my mind. If the agitators held us for ransom, Chad would need time to raise the cash. How long would that take? With my bioNEMs, a short-term exposure might not hurt me. But Sheeba had no NEMs to protect her. The dear child was completely exposed.
This was no time for surfer scruples. I would hail the gunship. Provendia would arrest us, my fellow directors would sue my ass to kingdom come, and the World Trade Org would ream us for who knows what arcane human resource infractions. I could visualize the hourly news, Nasir Deepra’s fifteen seconds of fame. But with Shee’s life at stake, a little public humiliation wouldn’t bother me at all.
I searched for my helmet-mounted sat phone, but the room was bare. The agitators had taken it. They had taken everything. Without my phone, we were disconnected from the known world. They had even taken my travel mirror. Phew, Heaven smelted old and rancid, not sugary sweet I took shallow breaths in case the air was infected. The field reports about the disease had been woefully nonspecific.
Sheeba was still chattering away, unsuspecting, “He carried you down here in his arms, beau. You wouldn’t believe how considerate he was.”
Sheeba, how green can you be? I counted ten to stop hyperventilating. “Did you see where they put my sat phone? Tell me everything that happened.”
While I wrapped myself in the blanket, Sheeba told me about this agitator thug called Liam, the factory foreman who had been “kaleidoscopically polite.” Outside on the hull, when this “mega-kind man” tried to shove us off into space, she touched helmets with him so her voice would carry to his ears. Clever girl to think of that I could only guess what charms she used to persuade this rogue to abduct us.
She said Liam and his sidekick brought us into Heaven through an airlock, and she described their ancient twentieth-century EVA suits, worn bald and patched with duct tape. Once inside, she said the agitators stripped us to our smartskin longjohns and blindfolded both of us.
“That was certainly polite,” I said. The idea of that thug ogling my Shee in her underwear made me seethe.
“Don’t worry, beau. I counted the steps to this room and memorized the Ordic emanations. I can feel my way back to that airlock—no prob.”
“Can you feel your way to our EVA suits?”
“Well…”
“We need the sat phone in my helmet to call Grunze.” I tried to get up, but when I rolled onto one knee, blood rushed away from my brain. An icon blinked on my left thumbnail, and I hid it behind my back.
“Don’t stand up. You’ll get dizzy. Watch.” Sheeba grinned and used the wall to push herself up to her feet. “Something weird’s going on with the floor.”
She widened her stance as if she were balancing on a moving conveyor belt, then took a few steps toward the wall marked W, weaving like a drunk. “Preter-sleek,” she said, giggling. Then she did a quick pirouette, toppled and caught herself against the wall. She threw her head back and shrieked with laughter. ‘Too fun!” After steadying herself again, she stepped toward the E wall, holding her hands out like a tightrope walker. “Wee! Look at me! It feels different going this way.”
I realized what was happening. “Sheeba, it’s the artificial gravity.”
“When I move this way, I feel a teensy bit heavier.” She pivoted on her heel, then ran toward the W again. “Ooh, this way feels light!”
“It’s centrifugal force,” I said.
“Yeah, like the factory’s spinning really fast, you know? Like a giant bucket swinging in a circle, and we’re pinned to the bottom.” She spoke breathlessly, balancing on tiptoes. Then she sat down, peeled off one of her socks and rolled it into a ball.
“What are you doing?” I leaned back on my elbows, perplexed.
“Watch this.” She tossed her balled-up sock in the air, and then the most uncanny thing happened. Instead of rising and falling back into her hand, the sock flew in a funny loop and fell in a curve toward the wall marked W.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Psychedesque!” Sheeba went to get her sock. “It’s the Coriolis effect. Verinne’s handouts told all about this stuff.”
“You read them?”
“Sure. Artificial gravity’s beyond spiritual. It’s a phys-iocosmic law.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, tossing her sock at different angles and clapping her hands at the screwy magic that kept curving its path toward the W.
“W, that’s West,” she pointed. “That means retrograde. And East means prograde, the direction of our spin.”
“And A?” I asked.
She stretched both arms out full length and pointed at the pair of A’s on the curved wall and the door. “That’s axial, in line with the axis of the spin. That’s like neutral. You feel less effect when you move that way.”
She tossed her sock ball at the door, but it still veered slightly West and missed the mark.
I prodded my broken right leg. Above the knee, my flesh felt swollen and tender and hot to the touch, so I focused on the Nasir-shaped glass man coexisting inside my skin. Right now, the bioNEMs would be scurrying around like busy clerks, moving calcium molecules to mend my fractures.
“Did you notice the creepy shape of this room?” I asked.
She munched a cracker and studied the walls. “Heaven’s a cylinder, and the decks are round, so I guess all the rooms are shaped like pizza wedges.”
“Of course they are.” Her power of deduction surprised me. I helped myself to a cracker. It tasted of yeast and sugar, remarkably satisfying, so I took a second and a third.
Then a shadow blocked the light falling through our open door. Sheeba moved out of the way, and a tall angular man with a hawk nose and tangled blond hair ducked through the low opening. An agitator. I drew back against the wall and searched around me for some means of defense. Could I strangle him with the blanket?
“Liam.” Sheeba dropped her sock and blushed. Then she turned to me. “This is Liam, the foreman.”
So this was the mighty chief of thugs. He looked like a common criminal. Thin and washed-out, in threadbare coveralls and frayed sneakers, he duplicated every factory worker I’d ever seen. A nasty blond braid swung down to the middle of his back, and his height and wide lean shoulders made him awkward in the narrow room. He seemed uncertain where to stand. His blue eyes darted nervously. Why, he was just a juvenile, not even thirty years old. This was the war leader? Contempt replaced my fear.
“I demand to speak with my people. Return my sat phone at once,” I said.
Sheeba touched my arm. “Nasir
, he saved your life.”
“Shhh,” I whispered, warning her off. “Don’t give our names. Don’t give any information he might use against us.”
The juvenile chieftain grunted. I have a distinct recollection of his lip curling.
“But Nass—”
I clenched Sheeba’s wrist to quiet her, and the chieftain’s pale blue eyes rested on my hand. They were deepset, hooded and gloomy. His eyebrows, mustache and beard bristled like copper filaments, several shades darker than his yellow hair. But it was his nose that impressed me, long and narrow, curved like a beak. I tried to stand and face him, but the pain in my leg, plus the weird Coriolis effect, made me stumble and fall. When I turned my head too fast, disturbing events transpired in my ear canals.
“Lean on me, Nass.” Sheeba hooked her elbow under my armpit.
I waved her away and held myself up on my one good knee by deliberately leaning toward the E, the direction of our spin. Sneering at the boy-chief, I marshaled my most authoritative tone. “State your intentions.”
The juve quirked his lips and didn’t answer. Ill-mannered brute. I suppose, kneeling in my underwear, disabled and disconnected from my crewmates, I must have cut a poor figure. Still, I held myself as erect as possible and stared him down.
But he was no longer looking at me. The cur was ogling Sheeba. Devouring her, you might say, with his miserable, ice-blue eyes. As Shee knelt to examine my broken leg, his gaze stole along the lines of her waist and hips with a kind of forlorn awe. The punk infuriated me.
I shook my fist. “Give me back my phone.”
