by Wil McCarthy
Miguel's voice was thick with fear, but still its clarity surprised him; through the panic crowding and clouding into his forebrain, he found it a struggle to speak or think at all. And yet, deep inside a part of him felt calm. As if he'd split a mindlet off after all, one that could observe and react without getting emotionally involved in the situation.
“The electrons will stick,” he continued. “I guess we'll build up a charge on the leading edge, disperse it throughout the hull and then discharge it again as the protons fly away. So they'll kind of crawl around the outside of the hull.”
Peng scowled. “Do nothing, then? You sound pretty fatalistic all of a sudden.”
“Fatalistic?” Miguel almost laughed. “Peng, I sure don't want to get hurt.”
Lahler pressed a control on her panel, glanced over at something. She stiffened. “Brace for it! The—”
“Shit!”
“Aaah!”
Lahler's panel exploded in white light, as did Miguel's, as did Peng's. The viewport showed only the blank, rotating starscape, wholly innocent in appearance, as sparks began to fly and a terrible thundering/crackling/sizzling sound split the air like nearby lightning. Miguel was jerked hard against his harness buckles and he felt his neck snap, felt his shoulders snap, felt his back give way and come apart into separate pieces. Lightning sounds swallowed his scream.
Too fast for pain, too fast for fear, but even so Miguel felt a certain relief when the sounds quieted and everything around him went black.
Chapter Sixteen
From the Deputy Administrator's floor of the Power Board building, Jhoe had quite a good view of the sleeping city. No, not sleeping, hiding. Middle of the day, he reminded himself. Never mind the darkness. In the distance, he could see a tent building that had fallen in the evening quakes. No flashing lights around it, no response teams hustling to clean it up. Hiding, almost all of them.
“It looks so quiet,” said a voice behind him. Uriel Zeng's.
“Yes,” he said without looking away from the window.
“A million people crammed into those shelters. Ugh, it must be awful.”
Indeed, panic and chaos had filled the streets a few hours earlier, only recently dying away to the present state of quiet as the last of the people made their way to the shelters.
“You don't plan to join them,” Jhoe said. Not a question, but an observation of fact.
“We can't. Power's more critical now than ever before; if the shelters lose coverage they have only two hours of battery life.”
“And then it gets dark inside?”
“No, then the air vents shut off and everyone suffocates.”
Jhoe sighed. “Uriel, nobody's welded the doors shut. People can just walk outside.”
“Well, then they wouldn't be sheltered.”
“Just like you and I, right now. God, won't you two see sense? I hear the radiation levels have already gone two hundred percent above normal, and the aliens haven't even gotten close yet.”
“Doctor,” said Uriel, prompting him to turn. Uriel's so-young face looked tired, drawn. But her expression showed vigor just the same. “Two hundred percent above normal is still way below crisis level. Radiation is all around us, all the time. We've got two black holes and a white dwarf in this system, spewing out radiation all the time, not to mention Vano—” she pointed at the huge, smoldering ball in the sky “—which is spitting distance away. The atmosphere absorbs a lot of crap. It's much denser and higher than Earth's, you know. But we absorb the rest of it in our bodies.”
“And without radiation pills.” He shook his head in amazement. “That's... that's basic molecular medicine. You all must get cancer all the time.”
“Not all the time,” Uriel protested, her crabby expression slipping back into place.
“You will get it,” he said to her. “Standing out here in the thick of it all, I bet you'll get it really bad. Don't you even care?”
She shrugged, a little angrily. “I'll get over it, Doctor. I work around dangerous equipment and chemicals all the time. This isn't so different. I'm not going to abandon my post.”
“You have no sense. You and Luna have no sense.”
“It's not just me and Luna. About half of the staff are still on the job. Not all in this building, but around somewhere, keeping an eye on things.”
“Uriel.”
Jhoe and Uriel both turned toward the sound of Luna Shiloh's voice.
“Uriel,” Luna said, striding forward with long, quick, urgent steps. “The south junction is losing voltage, and I think the transformers are heating up. Can you round up some people and go take a look?”
“Sure,” Uriel said, “But could you cut the district load by fifty percent in the mean time? Makes my job a lot easier.”
Luna paused. “Can... we do that without cutting off any of the shelters?”
“Uh, I think so. I'd have to look at the board to be sure.”
“I'll check the board,” Luna said. “You get that chopter in the air.”
“Okay.” Uriel pushed away from the window and trotted off.
Luna smiled, put a cool hand on the back of Jhoe's neck. “You'd better get to one of the shelters soon.”
Jhoe glared at her. “But not you.”
“Jhoe, I can't. I'll be thinking about you, though.”
“Great.”
Her gaze moved away from him, toward something outside the window. Her eyes widened.
“I'll be damned! Look at that!”
She pointed, and Jhoe followed her arm and her eyes to see... Lacigo. The tiny, starlike white dwarf had... grown? And brightened. The ring of sky immediately surrounding it looked distinctly greenish.
“It got bigger,” Jhoe said stupidly.
“No,” Luna corrected, “it's splitting into separate pieces. Look there. Could those be the alien ships?”
Jhoe looked at her for a moment, saw that she wasn't kidding. “Uh, so far away? It doesn't seem like we could see that.”
“Really? Why not? If they're accelerating as fast as they're supposed to, they must be burning awful lot of energy. I think we could maybe see them from here. Introspectia was much closer when we first saw it, but it looked like a blobby white star, just like that.”
Jhoe looked more closely. Lacigo, never bright enough before to hurt the eyes, hurt him a little now. But, as Luna indicated, it seemed to have split into several distinct pinpoints of light, which did not quite touch one another. In fact, with effort he could see the most central pinpoint as a tiny disc of brightness. And he could see the others as... streaks? They seemed to lengthen even as he watched.
Blinking, he looked away. Pink and green spots danced in front of his eyes. “Ow,” he observed. “This is probably bad for your eyes.”
Luna nodded. “It is bright, it looks like welding torch. I guess we shouldn't look directly at it. Look how blue the sky is getting!”
Jhoe let out a breath through pursed lips, almost but not quite a whistle. “It looks almost like dawn on Earth.”
“Like what?”
“Dawn. Um, before the sun comes up. The horizon goes from black to yellow to blue, and then the whole sky starts changing color.”
“Then you're right,” Luna said, “it is like that.”
He dared a glance up at Lacigo again, and the streaks had gotten longer and brighter, and had separated themselves more distinctly from the light of the white dwarf. A whole region of sky around them had turned a deep but rapidly brightening blue.
“Quakes,” Jhoe said, using the Unuan invective for the first time. “In a few minutes we'll have an ordinary sky-blue sky!”
“How wonderful,” Luna said, sounding as though she meant it. “I've always thought Earth must have a beautiful sky. Oh, look at the clouds!”
Above, the haze of Unua's cloud deck had begun to pale, gray-brown giving way to beige and then, in the wisps reaching closest to Lacigo, fading to a color that approximated Earthly white. The sky behind them had gone
a pure azure through which the stars, other than Lacigo and its strange new companions, could not be seen at all.
“The clouds, yes, I see them,” Jhoe said.
“Is that what it looks like on Earth?”
“Well... sort of.”
Hostile aliens had changed the color of Unua's sky. That should terrify him, he knew, but somehow he did not feel terrified. No more than he would at the sight of a waterfall, or a snow-capped mountain, blue-white in the moonlight. This just didn't look like something dangerous.
Luna caressed his neck for a moment and then took her hand away. “I have to go back to the coordination center. You'd better get going.”
Jhoe's eyes didn't leave the blossoming of the sky. “Do you need anything before I go? I feel like I should help, at least do something.”
Luna half-smiled at him. “You? The dispassionate observer? I thought you weren't supposed to get involved.”
“I could take that as an insult,” Jhoe said. “Can I help you or not?”
“Actually, you can,” Luna said. “We're pretty shorthanded. Can you get down to the supply room and dig out box of glowpegs? We're going to need them for the board.”
“I think I can manage that.”
“I think so, too. They're in the northeast corner, bottom rack. Yellow boxes about this big.” She held her hands a few centimeters apart. “When you're done, you'll go to the shelter? I'd really prefer that you did.”
Above, one of the streaks, now well separated from Lacigo and clearly visible, had begun to curl. White on azure, it looked much like the contrail of a high-flying atmospheric transport, soaring through the skies of Earth. Familiar and yet... not the same thing at all. He knew that it should frighten him. Cancer. Radiation. Death.
“Yeah,” he said. “I'll go.”
Luna looked up once more at the sky, drinking in the images there, and then in near-synchrony she and Jhoe broke away from the window and stomped away on their separate errands.
The elevator took Jhoe down to the basement, and when its door opened he stepped out into dimness and gray. A large room, rows of shelves and cabinets lurking in the shadows. In general, Malhelan architects threw light around as if their lives depended on it, but this place seemed forgotten, an afterthought, underground and therefore hidden from even the wan glow of the Unuan sky.
Hidden from the radiation as well? No, certainly; the building, designed to be light and flexible, probably offered no more protection than a heavy coat. Suddenly, he felt its weight hulking above him, ready to crash down at any moment. Unpleasant.
He hurried to the northeast corner of the basement, looked for something that could be called a “bottom rack,” and then for yellow boxes the size of paired fists. Spying them, he grabbed one in each hand. The shadows seemed to advance on him as he stood up again. He hurried to the elevator.
It had closed.
Awkwardly, he stretched out a finger around the box of glowpegs and pressed the VOKU button. The door did not open, and from the sounds behind it he could tell that the elevator had gone up to another floor. He found the air whooshing in and out of him in quick, shallow breaths. He tried to slow and steady his breathing, but without success. He had to admit, he felt more anxious now than he had in decades. Here in the basement, he found his earlier numbness had fled, leaving his nerves bare to the fact that Unua's ground could not be trusted, that aliens ran unrestrained through its skies, that he had no truly safe place to retreat to.
This is not my planet! he wanted to shout. This is not my danger to face!
And yet, he had come to this planet of his own free will, and the danger had followed regardless of his wishes. Luna and Uriel and the others, facing the same peril as he, seemed not nearly so afraid. This was their planet, their city, their own little place in the vast universe, and they seemed stubbornly determined to protect it, if only in the smallest of ways.
The elevator door opened suddenly, ringing a bell at him. He jumped, then relaxed a little and stepped inside.
It took him up to the Deputy Administrator's floor, and his feet took him the rest of the way to the coordination center. Orange and yellow and red lights burned against the black city map of the diagnostic board. A knot of people stood in front of it, arguing heatedly.
Jhoe held the glowpeg boxes out in front of him like wards against evil.
“So shut them down!” Luna was saying. Her arm swept an arc across the board. “Here and here and here. Isolate the problem and deal with it separately.”
“Can't do it,” one of the men was saying. He stabbed a finger at one of the red glowpegs on the board. “You see that? You see that? I can't get a signal through there with the lines out. It's defunct, Luna. Can you say that word?”
“Shut them down manually,” another man called out from a workstation in the far corner of the room. “Send Uriel out on it.”
“I've already sent Uriel out,” Luna said. “To the north side, too far away. Listen, I could call every team we have, but they can't be everywhere at once. Those substations need to go down right now!”
“Fine,” said the man in front of Luna, his voice and movements tight. “I'll get in my car and drive out there. Isolate the whole neighborhood, yes? There's nobody out there anyway. I'll just throw the switch.”
Luna blinked with surprise. “Oh, I didn't even think of that. Quakes, I'm really frazzled.”
“What's going on?” Jhoe said. He stepped forward, his hands still partly extended. “What's wrong?”
Luna turned toward him, looking as if she'd forgotten about him and was annoyed to find him still in the building. “One of the big transformers finally blew,” she said, “about one minute ago. Voltage is going unstable, and it's chewing up three substations on the south side. It's bad. It can bring the whole grid down if we don't isolate it.”
“Shall I go?” said the man in front of Luna.
She nodded. “Yes. Take the Fourth and Jewell station, and cut switch number two. Elle, you take South Jama. Cut five through eight. I don't care what order you do it in. And—” She looked around, frowning. “I seed someone for First and Quincy. Damn it, where did everyone go?”
“I'll do it,” said the man in the corner workstation.
Luna turned on him angrily. “No, you will not. If your ass gets out of that chair again I'm going to kick it, hard. Is anyone else not busy right now?”
“I'm not,” Jhoe said calmly.
“Jhoe!” Luna rolled her eyes at him. “Will you get out of here? I thought you were going to the shelter.”
“I know how to throw a switch.”
She sighed. “These people have years of training, Jhoe. They have special licenses and special equipment.”
“Luna, I know how to throw a switch! Lend me your car, okay? Lars has been teaching me how to drive.”
“Lars has been teaching you how to drive,” Luna echoed darkly. “Oh, well, that's different, then! We'll just trust the whole city to you, right?”
Gritting his teeth, Jhoe stabbed a finger at the man in the corner workstation. “Can I do what he's doing?”
“No,” Luna said.
“Can I do what anyone in this building is doing? Darkness, Luna, you obviously need some help, and I know how to throw a switch.”
She paused, appearing frozen, for a moment, with indecision. “Shit,” she said then, and handed Jhoe her keys.
~~~
Oh, for a pair of sunglasses! Jhoe thought as he drove along the deserted street. Above and ahead of him, Vano, now approaching its zenith, looked as huge as ever but significantly less imposing; a pale, peach-colored disc against a blue-white background. The sky around it had gone as bright as Earth's own, and Jhoe found himself squinting against it. He was no longer accustomed to such glare. Alas, he would bet his own teeth that sunglasses had never sold well on Unua. If he looked hard enough he might find something like welding goggles, or perhaps he could simply reprogram his corneal symbionts to filter and soften the light, but either
of those options would take time, and right now he didn't have any. Urgent mission! Save the city!
Spaced at intervals along the sides of the street, stringy, red-brown trees grew two and three and sometimes four meters tall. Choker trees? Yes, the little bundles of dark berries confirmed it. He'd tended to think of those as rather ugly plants, but actually, in this light they possessed a certain dignity he had not previously noticed. By contrast, the buildings he passed appeared surprisingly shabby, cracked and wrinkled and old as mummies dragged out into the sunlight.
He wheeled cautiously around a corner, and the power substation, object of his quest, came into view. He pulled up in front of it, working levers and pedals, bringing the car to a sudden, lurching halt. Its engine growled at him and died. Jhoe growled back at it as he removed the enabling key and climbed out.
His body cast a deep shadow against the unnaturally illuminated pavement. His breath came heavy and quick. I must have lost my mind, he thought. I shouldn't have volunteered for this, I should have gone to the shelter. He imagined the radiation like a fog surrounding him. Well, more like a rain, he supposed, and a deadly one.
Still, the rain had come a thousand times harder and faster during the journey on Introspectia, and he hadn't given it much thought then, merely taking his weekly radiation pill and leaving it at that. Why should this seem any different? He hadn't had a pill in several months, true enough, but he was pretty sure the prophylactic effect was supposed to last a while, fading slowly as the body flushed and renewed itself. Would his last dose still have enough strength to fight off this weakened threat?
Bah. Luna Shiloh needed his help. The city of Verva needed his help. Soon enough he could indulge the instinct to cower and cringe.
Behind its high fence of white plastic, the power station formed an unpainted tangle of metal wires and shacks and towers, the whole assemblage half again as large as Luna's house. Jhoe strode up to the gate, studied its locking mechanism, inserted the sharp wedge of green metal that was its key. After a few moments' fiddling he popped the gate open and swung it wide. The machinery ahead of him emitted a soft, disturbing whine, as if in anxiety or pain. The sound seemed to reach right through him, wiggling his teeth, wiggling his internal organs. Already, he didn't like this place.
