by M M Buckner
Verinne tapped Heaven’s tapering apex with her stylus. “How about Deck Five? It’s the largest.”
“No, that’s where the toads are hiding,” I said.
‘Toads?” My friends gazed at me as if my teeth were in crooked. Grunze said, “What the fuck are toads?”
An image flitted across my mental screen, a dozen little kids gazing up at me as if I held the keys to secret knowledge. “I mean—Sheeba might be there. No, we certainly can’t punch a hole in Five.”
After that, we drifted apart and brooded, scratching our heads and glumly tugging our earlobes. Winston took a nap. Verinne continued to study A13’s schematic, but no one in our crew could generate a fresh idea.
Worse, even if we found an entrance, I still had nothing to offer that would lure Sheeba away. The idea of dragging her against her will revolted me. She would never forgive that violation. But try as I might, I could think of no enticement powerful enough to win her over.
Why didn’t the freaking NEMs boost my brainpower? I slapped the sides of my skull. Just when I needed him most, the crystal man went slack.
Suddenly, I remembered we hadn’t crossed through the blockade yet. We were still hovering outside its perimeter, within easy reach of the Net-linked doctors. Had my glass man succumbed to their orders? I checked my IBiS, and icons bubbled out of my thumb. Right, those quacks were still trying to wrestle my wayward NEMs into submission. A war of crossed signals raged through the Net, as deadly as any hail of laser fire. My glass man’s fight for independence was absorbing all his attention. And those sadistic doctors kept ratcheting up their fees.
‘Take us through the blockade!” I shouted.
“If you think that will help.” Grunze powered up the shuttle and eased us forward.
“Boss, I’m losing you. What about the Fortia bonds? Should I sell…” Chad’s voice faded from my earphone.
As soon as we crossed the blockade and lost Net access, I felt a deep liberating shift in my joints. My neck muscles relaxed, and my stomach calmed down (I hadn’t noticed the stomach cramps). Soon my flesh started to tingle, not just in my thumb but everywhere. That’s when a single word trumpeted through my brain like harmonic epiphany. The word was a name. And the name was Vlad.
Of course. Vlad would know a way into Heaven. And Vlad would be the perfect apology gift to offer Sheeba. If I brought back the young medic, she would soften her opinion and forgive me. Then maybe she would come away from that death trap.
I spun and faced Verinne. “You took one of the agitators. Where is he?”
Verinne’s wrinkly old eyes narrowed. “That prote wouldn’t tell us anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. We need him,” I said.
“What for?”
My brain clicked through possible lies. It was too embarrassing to admit that I needed to bribe Sheeba to trust me. I said, “He may know a back door into Heaven.”
Kat plowed between us. “Heaven has a secret entrance? Plasmic.”
Don’t ask me how this notion burst into my head, but the more I thought about it, the more plausible the backdoor idea sounded. Of course. Liam would surely have built a private entrance, and Vlad would know its location. “That agitator can show us the way in,” I said.
Verinne chewed her wizened lip. “We turned him over to Trencher a couple of hours ago.”
“Two hours ago!” Trencher would have slated the medic for euthanasia by now. But if they interrogated him first, he might still be alive.
Kat twisted her hair. “It’ll take a megaton of deutsch to buy him back. You wouldn’t believe how Trencher nickels-and-dimes us.”
Then Verinne’s gray eyes canted slyly. “We could steal him back.”
“From a Com gunship?” Kat recoiled so violently, she bumped-into Grunze and sent him spinning off at a tangent. “They’ll terminate us.”
Grunzie bounced against the cabin wall. “Kat’s right. Do you want to get us laid off? I’d rather die than lose my job.”
“Weenies, Verinne knows they won’t fire us. We own too many shares.” I blew Verinne a kiss. “Let’s do it.”
Grunze stuck out his chin. “Maybe you own mega-shares, Nass, but I’ve been running through my holdings pretty damn quick these last few years.”
“Me, too,” said Kat, “and we know Winny’s broke. At this stage in my life, the last thing I want is to risk getting kicked downstairs. I can’t live as a prote.”
Verinne settled against the window and crossed her arms. “Whine all you like. I don’t care what the fuckers do to me. I’m an Agonist.”
The others gawked at her. Verinne was usually the conservative one. And she never used the F word. Her attitude stunned them. I was the only one who knew how little Verinne had to lose. “Cara. You and I will go together.”
Smile wrinkles rayed across her cheeks. The widow’s peak in her pale forehead seemed to point straight through me, and grainy creases circled her desiccated throat like necklaces of sand. As I studied her dying face, I realized Verinne had no intention of coming back from this surf. This would be her grand exit. But I had to come back. I had to save Sheeba.
And to do that, I needed the others. Things could get dicey on that gunship. Verinne and I could not handle the surf alone. But how could I convince Kat and Grunze to risk losing their executive status?
Then something clicked. An idea. “Grunzie, Katherine, here’s a proposition. How would you like to live forever?”
“Yeah right.” Kat rolled her eyes, and Grunze merely scowled and waved me off.
I crooked my little finger at Grunze. “Immortality. We’re talking the big I. It’s time you knew the truth about this war zone. There’s something I’ve been hiding.”
“You think we didn’t know that?” Grunze shook his head.
“Help me get the agitator, and I’ll show you how to achieve perfect, enduring health forever.”
Winston pulled the blanket off his head and sat up in his bunk with a yawn. “Define perfect.” His question took me aback.
As Verinne drew closer, a nervous tic jerked one of her eyelids. “Nasir, this is nothing to joke about.”
“It’s not a joke. I’ll tell you everything if you agree to help me. All of you. I want your word on it. Surfer’s honor. I can’t do this without you.”
Kat poked my chest with her finger. “Why should we believe you?”
“Because I have evidence.” I held up my left hand and, with the theatricality of a striptease artist, drew off my glove. “Check my IBiS, friends.”
Kat grabbed my thumb to read the bubbling icons, and Grunze leaned over her shoulder. For long seconds, no one spoke. They browsed my health status with fierce, widening eyes.
Winston tried to free himself from his Velcro restraints. “Would perfect apply to brain cells?” His handsome old reprobate face opened with hope.
“Yes, Winny. Take a risk,” I coaxed. “Where’s your surfer spirit?”
To demonstrate my new powers, I rattled off a chain of prime numbers, crushed a stainless steel cocktail shaker in my fist, then lifted Grunzie one-handed and bounced him against the shuttle’s low ceiling—which, of course, meant nothing given the zero gravity.
“Let me go, you pipsqueak.” Grunze felt my biceps and deltoids with his meaty fingers. “You’ve been training.”
I smiled. “Eternal youth, burly boy. Help me get this agitator, and I’ll let you in on the secret.”
Their artificial eyes fairly popped out of their sockets when I described all the injuries my NEMs had healed. Two small items I omitted—how my NEMs “cured” that poison gas booby trap and how they “healed” my punctured suit For the sake of credibility, I left those parts out.
“Is it true? Immortality?” For the first time in months, a moist gleam brightened Verinne’s eyes.
“Yes, cara.” I waved my arms and inadvertently propelled myself up to the ceiling. “Youth everlasting. It’s true.”
Grunze puffed out his chest. “I’ll take the bet.
”
Winston let out a deep, ragged breath. “I’m in.”
Peer pressure triumphed, and Kat caved. “You’d better be right.”
“Swear you’ll go with me to the gunship,” I said, “on your honor as war surfers.”
Grunze gestured. “Fuck you sideways. We swear.”
So we huddled together, and I cupped my hand around my mouth as if spies were listening. Then I told them the secret: Avoid doctors’ orders. My NEMs evolved because they were cut off from the Net.
Verinne arched one eyebrow. “Why didn’t we know this before?”
“Because the doctors were protecting their despotic patents,” I said.
“No, that’s not right.” Winny’s speech came out slurred as usual. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. “You’ve always been prejudiced against doctors.”
I’d forgotten Win was an MD himself. “Present company excepted, Winny boy.”
“Let me get this straight.” Grunze rubbed his boulder-shaped head. “If we stay here inside Provendia’s blockade for a couple of weeks, we’ll change into superhumans?”
“You don’t have to stay here. Go anywhere you like. Just surround yourself in a Net blockade. Liberate your NEMs from doctors’ control, and you’ll live forever.” I gave Winston a friendly wink.
“No Net access?” Kat chewed her hair. “That’s harsh.”
“Immortality has its price,” I said. “Maybe you can find some doctor-blocker wetware.”
“It’s the damn doctors that keep you alive.” Win’s outburst startled all of us. His face went red from his effort to steady his palsied muscles. He leaned forward, straining the Velcro straps in his bunk. “It was doctors that invented bioNEMs. Doctors like me.” He poked his chest with his thumb. “Yeah, me. Bimbus ol’ Winny. I was on that project team.”
“Winston, I…” His words disoriented me. If Sheeba had been here, she would have hugged poor Win to soothe his feelings, but I was too flabbergasted to move. Apparently, so were the others.
“You think I like being the butt of everybody’s joke? Boozing it up to cover my dementia? Pretending I don’t know what’s happening? I used to be a physician.”
“Win.” Kat sailed over and enfolded the trembling man in her arms.
Verinne hovered and stroked his elegant head, but his clear blue eyes lingered on me. I felt his reproach like a brand.
“Winston, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you.”
“Trust me, the medical community doesn’t know about this,” he continued. He was having one of his rare lucid moments. His slur almost disappeared, and his eyes showed active intelligence. “We programmed the NEMs with failsafes. Do you think we would unleash immortality? Imagine what that might lead to. We couldn’t begin to predict—”
“But Win, I’m living proof.” To convince them, I pulled Sheeba’s ankh from my breast pocket and sliced a gash in my wrist. The wound self-sealed in under a minute.
“That shouldn’t happen.” Winston examined my unblemished skin, for all the world like a skeptical high-church doctor. “If what you say is true, you must have encountered some catalyst. An aberrant virus, a biocontaminant, something. This is a freak mutation.”
Kat grabbed Winston’s collar. “Are you saying our NEMs won’t evolve like Nasir’s did?”
“Not on your life. He’s been exposed to some triggering agent. It’s—it’s—” Winny squinted from one face to another, and his elegant head quivered. “What were we saying?”
Grunze frowned, and Verinne coughed. Kat tightened her arms around Win’s shoulders. “So much for your secret of youth, Nass.”
“Hell, I’ll giveyou my NEMs,” I blurted.
Mouths dropped open. Kat blanched. Verinne said, “It’s a capital crime.”
“Screw the docs,” I said. “If we stay off the Net, they’ll never know we violated their miserly copyrights. You’ll have perfect health forever, I promise.”
Winston leaned forward. “Is that a good thing, Nass?”
Again, his question threw me off balance. “Immortality.” I lifted my hands. “You choose.”
He wrinkled his handsome nose. “Okay. But—why are we going to the gunship?”
Win’s lucid moment had fizzled. It grieved me to see his blue eyes cloud over. “Because you gave your word,” I said softly.
Kat sighed and kissed him. “Nass means a gambling debt.”
“Oh, I get that.” Win kicked his blanket to the floor. “We’re doing a war surf.”
I glanced from Grunze to Verinne, then to Kat and Winston. As if on cue, we grinned at each other. Then we raised our fists and howled—
“WAR SURF!”
25
YOU CAN AFFORD IT
“It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
-VIRGINIA WOOLF
We planned the surf in record time because I told them A13 might disintegrate at any moment. They’d seen the pitted hull. They knew how precarious it was. Sheeba’s life depended on our speed. We had to get Vlad fast, then rush back to save her.
First, we laid a false trail to hoodwink Trencher. We accelerated directly away from the gunship and swerved behind a field of Greenland.Com factories—rough-looking old junkers with no running lights—an ideal hiding place. Then we veered very fast toward Earth’s South Pole, and Kat’s high-performance shuttle gave us a ride to remember. From four thousand kilometers out, we zoomed straight up under the gunship like stealth lightning. In less than an hour, we eased into the blind spot beneath the gunship’s belly.
The ship still tracked Heaven’s whirling spin around its counterweight, and Kat set her onboard navigation computer to match it. Since we lay a considerable distance out from the center of rotation, we circled at terrific speed.
This time, I asked Win politely if he would stay and man the shuttle, and he graciously agreed. That last burst of clarity had sapped his strength. As we prepared to go EVA, I briefed the crew on the waste chute Sheeba and Liam had used for their entry. Our scans showed Trencher had still not deployed a security perimeter. Preter-gross incompetence. I made a mental note to have him fired—then erased it. Trencher was just the sort of greasy slime to ferret out our identities and launch a WTO investigation.
Verinne handed out short-range radios so we could talk to each other despite Provendia’s Net blockade, and as we stepped through the airlock, the usual banter ensued. The chitchat waned, however, when we realized how fast our shuttle was whirling through space and how tight we had to grip the handholds to keep from flying off. The ovoid gun-ship loomed above us as glossy and wet-looking as black oil. We pinged its hull with locator fixes and set our thrusters navigation to track its angular momentum. We had to glide only a few dozen meters to the gunship and grab hold, but this rushing velocity kept us tense and quiet.
Grunze went first. He banged into a scoop drive, slipped off, then caught a vernier and clung tight. He didn’t make it look easy. Verinne went next Waiting for my turn, I realized how different this surf felt from others in the past With my spanking new EVA suit and best-of-breed thruster, I should have been mega-blissed on the delicious sting of fear. But I wanted to get it over with. The only thing that mattered was getting back to Sheeba.
When my turn came, I made a wild leap for the scoop drive, missed my target, and Grunzie caught my leg. Thank the golden gods for his weight training. With one hand, he slung me in an arc toward the row of handholds. We made it. See us plastered against the glassy hull, belayed to each other by a safety line, and slithering along the surface like four anxious flatworms.
We found the waste chute welded shut Give Trencher his due—no one would use that entry again. While Grunze made asinine jokes about the ship’s constipation, Verinne and I reviewed the schematics on our heads-up display. We had to crawl another death-defying ten meters to reach the nearest airlock.
Trust Verinne to bring t
he right surf accessories. She unclipped an electropick from her belt, and with one zap, she breached the airlock entry controls. As soon as the outer door slid open, I leaned in and pressed against the wall to feel for the vibrations. My crewmates must have thought I was nuts. But I felt no sirens, no buzzing alarms. Trencher, what a stiff.
We cycled through the airlock, then cautiously edged into the vacant corridor. Verinne had assured us the gun-ship used standard ambient magnetism to simulate one-half Earth gravity. So we weren’t surprised to find ourselves traipsing along the empty corridor like acrobats. No guards anywhere.
Ambient mag gravity feels weird. It’s not even close to the real thing. As you move through it, the programmable lining in your space suit automatically configures to the magnetic fields generated by the floors and walls. This permits you to walk, bend, sit, even jump up and down with a certain efficiency. But your body has no weight. You feel no familiar downward pull. Your flesh and blood bob around freely inside the restraining silken cage of your suit, and your stomach does gymnastics. It’s macabre. At least ambient magnetism creates no Coriolis effect—thank the engineers for small favors.
Trencher’s laxity allowed us to locate the crew quarters and steal uniforms, just as Sheeba and Liam had done. In fact, we were able to prowl through the entire ship without detection. Once my crewmates got over their initial anxiety, they couldn’t stop grinning at each other. Sneaking around an active Com gunship engaged in live war—this had to be the sleekest surf they’d ever done.
We found Vlad locked in the brig. The bunk on which he lay, his tray of untouched food, and a small portable toilet were enveloped together in a transparent quarantine balloon. And perched around the balloon like a ring of creepy voyeurs were six active videocams on tripods. Vlad was sick. And Trencher was catching some Reel.
Verinne, our resident camera geek, slipped behind the videocams and set them to run instant replays for a few minutes.
Once the cams were disabled, Grunze poked the diaphanous medical balloon. “What’s wrong with this guy? He looks shriveled.”
