Exodus, page 63
“I didn’t think so. Are you sure your treasure is so valuable?”
“It is.”
“So to continue ahead informs the pirates of its worth.”
“Then they clearly don’t know what we’re here for,” Ellie said.
“Most of us don’t,” Uemi-Jubalee said moodily. “Going to tell us now?”
“No,” Gyvoy said. “But it’s nothing these wannabe-pirates can ever use or sell.”
Jazon gave him a look of pure incomprehension. “So valuable you risk everyone’s life, but has no value to anyone else? I don’t understand.”
“And that’s the way we’re going to keep it.”
“So I ask again,” Finn said. “What’s the strategy? Take an Ovar with the Daves and fly to intercept them?”
“No,” Gyvoy said in a weary tone. “I need everyone with us when we go into the factory. We don’t know what’s in there, and, well…look what happened on Hoa Quinzu. So we’re bringing some decent firepower with us. Besides, the pirate ship is mobile and hard to detect. There’s no guarantee you could intercept them, and if you did, they wouldn’t have had the balls to come after us in the first place if they weren’t carrying some serious weaponry.”
“So what’s the plan?” Ellie said.
“Thinking tactically, they won’t attack us until after we’ve visited the factory, right?” Finn said.
“Right,” Gyvoy agreed. “They want what we’re going to scavenge. So they let us do the hard work, then intercept us when we’ve brought it back to the Silver Cloudspear. What we’re looking for shouldn’t take long to find. Then when we come out, we either try to evade them—switch off that fucking transponder, activate some electronic warfare units, and fly vertical at full speed—or if they’re close enough to intercept, we let the Daves loose on them.”
If we still have the Daves at that point, Finn thought gloomily.
“I suppose that makes sense,” Ellie said.
“Of course it does. It’s my idea,” Gyvoy said without a trace of irony. “Uemi, you’re staying on the Silver Cloudspear.”
“Always the plan,” she retorted.
“I want real-time updates on the pirate so we know what we’re facing when we come out. No surprises.”
“That I can do.”
“Great. Okay, people, let’s finish prepping the armor suits, then be sure and get some rest. I want everyone at their peak when we arrive at the factory.”
* * *
—
During the Silver Cloudspear’s final approach, Uemi-Jubalee ran a full radar sweep of the factory. It was a lenticular shape three hundred kilometers across, and tilted at an angle to the airboat. The surface appeared crinkled with deep ridges and peaks, although a perfect definition was impossible, as something about it was distorting the radar pulses.
Ellie had smiled admiringly at the sight on her lnc patch while they were suiting up in their sixth deck cabin. “Well, whadda ya know—the original flying saucer mothership!”
Finn frowned at her. “What?”
“Flying saucers—the spaceships aliens used back when they buzzed aircraft on Earth, yes?”
“Aliens visited Earth?”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Then, uh…?”
She grinned as her patch segments closed up. “Never mind, but trust me: steer clear of any medical exam rooms in there.”
Sometimes, he thought, their lives were just too different.
“You two should get a room,” Elsbeth told them as she wriggled into her armor.
Finn blushed at how harshly the Daves laughed.
“How far away is the pirate?” Gyvoy asked.
“We had another positive scan forty minutes ago,” Uemi-Jubalee replied. “The pirate airboat increased speed. It’s only a hundred and seventy klicks behind us now.”
“Okay, keep watching.”
* * *
—
Finn wound up in Koa, along with Ellie, Gyvoy, and one of the Daves. The other Dave, Bensath, Elsbeth, and Iarik were in Kaizen. Although “in” didn’t really cover the position the Daves took.
Dylan got Koa to fold some of her mandibles in an odd arrangement close to her nose, holding a Dave in a protective embrace. That way he had a full field of view ahead as he sat beside a pair of heavy-duty kinetic cannons they’d clamped to a crease in the topmost mandible. Once they’d sorted that out, Kaizen duplicated the arrangement for the other Dave.
Finn was glad he didn’t have to sit out front like that, but he was equally glad to have the Daves riding shotgun.
The Silver Cloudspear came to rest fifteen kilometers away from the factory. The darkness at this level was almost absolute, helped by an omnipresent mist. It was a universe of overlapping shadows that seemed to absorb sound to the same degree they swallowed light. Even with his suit’s visual enhancement sensors, the image was murky.
As he clambered into Koa, Finn sensed as much as saw the massive bulk of the factory in the distance—a zone of complete blackness lurking between the crepuscular vapors.
Inside the Ovar, he gently gripped a couple of the uvulas with his armor gauntlets to hold himself in place. He had to crouch slightly so his helmet didn’t knock against the ceiling of the passenger cavity.
“You hold on tight there, fellas,” Koa said. As ever, the chitin segments of her lips lagged behind the words.
They took off, heading out into the gloom.
“Dave, let us have a visual feed,” Gyvoy asked over the team’s secure lnc.
Finn’s suit manager put the feed on the visor display, which revealed almost nothing. The Silicate was wearing a sensor band around his head, but light amplification and thermal imagery just produced a wall of false color blotches.
It took Koa and Kaizen five minutes to reach the factory.
“Okay, let’s see it,” Gyvoy said.
Both the Daves switched on their cannon lights. Four intense beams sliced through the murky gloom and played across the factory’s surface.
“Well, that’s why Uemi couldn’t get a decent radar return,” Ellie muttered.
The factory was coated in some kind of vegetation that Finn strongly suspected was more fungal than anything else. There was no sign of the actual structure; instead they seemed to be coasting over a flat landscape of slick rubbery fronds several meters long, an insipid gray-green in color. They undulated slowly in the meager air currents.
“It’s like kelp,” Finn said.
“Not a bad guess,” Dylan said. “We call it airkombu. Some of the stations have a few clumps, always growing on the underside away from the light. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Down here they must use a thermosynthesis variety rather than photo,” Elsbeth said. “No way is this dependent on light to grow.”
“Sure, real interesting,” Gyvoy said. “Come on, stay focused, this isn’t a science mission. Dylan, take us to the rim, let’s see if there’s a way in there.”
“Right away, boss.”
The four pools of light swept over the expanse of dithering fronds as the Ovar flew toward the closest rim. When they did finally reach the edge, the transition from solid to eternal emptiness was so profound that for a moment Finn was worried he was getting hit by gulf sickness again.
“Do you require a suppressant?” the suit manager asked.
“No.” He forced himself to study the rim of the factory, which was just visible in the fringe of the spotlights. Then the Ovar were swinging around and the Daves trained their beams on the cliff-like wall extending below the rim.
“Here we go,” Gyvoy said contentedly.
The vast cliff was also covered in airkombu fronds, but it was broken by a huge oval hole that measured a good three kilometers across at its widest. One of the Daves swung a beam along, and another oval was revealed at the extremity.
“Uemi, Jazon, we’ve found a way in. What’s the status out there?”
“No sign of our friend at the moment,” Uemi-Jubalee said. “But they’ll probably be running another sensor sweep in a few minutes.”
“Okay. We’re going in. Dylan…”
“On it.”
“This is real exciting,” Koa said. “The Ovar have so many stories of these places, but they’s all so old, you can’t believe none of them. Now me and Kaizen can carry us some new tales up to the shell.”
The oval opening turned out to be conical, narrowing for a couple of kilometers until it reduced to a tube only half a kilometer across. Airkombu was still dense, waving away on the surfaces, but its coverage was no longer total. There were gaps now. Finn could make out thick pipes of some kind, and even sections of smooth machinery that appeared to be made from interlocking gems the size of the Ovar.
“We need to find Finn some kind of network node to interface,” Gyvoy said. “Pilots, can you take us in closer to the surface, please? Daves, watch for any kind of entrance.”
“You got it, boss,” Dylan said.
The Ovar slipped in closer to the curving walls of the tunnel. Inside the bright circles of light, the carpet of airkombu fronds became a drab blur, with clear zones flicking past almost too quickly to see.
After five minutes, a Dave called out: “There.”
The Ovar circled around. In the center of the beams, a section of the tunnel structure was visible, a dark material of unsymmetrical patches whose levels didn’t quite match. A lopsided pentagon was missing altogether. The light shone a short way inside, revealing some kind of chamber.
The team used their suit jetpacks to fly over to the entrance. A Dave went in first, followed by Elsbeth and Iarik.
“Clear,” the Dave called back.
“You stay out here and cover our exit,” Gyvoy said. “Everyone else, with me.”
Finn followed him into the chamber, using the jetpack fans at their lowest setting. Part of him wanted to zoom along at full speed, but natural caution overrode that easily enough.
The chamber was an irregular dodecahedron, with each panel a different subtle color, and most of them with differing textures. No airkombu grew inside, though he did see a few milky toadstool puffs wedged into tiny clefts. There were several gaps in the wall, opening into blackness. Finn gave them a weary glance and told his suit manager to keep a sensor lock on them.
“Sensors, people,” Gyvoy said. “Find me some data cables, or if you can’t do that, I’ll settle for a power line.”
A flock of tiny scarlet sensor balls dropped out of the silo tubes on Elsbeth’s suit. Gyvoy also dropped out several. Finn extended his helmet antenna and flew a slow sweep pattern across the walls.
“Power in here,” Elsbeth announced. She was floating beside one of the gaps.
“Dave,” Gyvoy said.
The Silicate eased himself through. “Clear.” The chamber beyond was different, like a giant violet quartz crystal that had been hollowed out. Fist-sized objects glittered behind the translucent walls when helmet beams played across them. Elsbeth’s sensor balls gathered at the apex of the chamber where there was a smaller opening.
“There are some power conduits here. They’re carrying about five hundred kilovolts.”
“Drop a transponder buoy,” Gyvoy said. “Okay, Dave, onward.”
It became a simple routine: Follow the power line. The chambers they passed through varied in size and composition. Finn decided they were best thought of as cells in a mechanical body, with no two the same. They must have had different functions, complementing one another in some synergistic fashion.
Small wonder we can never hope to match Celestial technology.
After twenty minutes they emerged into a broad white compartment with walls that had dozens of irregular two-meter indentations that really did look like cells.
“Everyone, turn your helmet lights down,” Elsbeth said.
In the darkness, Finn’s helmet sensors showed him tiny green spots of light flowing slowly around the edges of the indentations.
“Well, something’s active in here,” Elsbeth said.
“Finn, can you see a contact bulb?” Gyvoy asked.
“Not really.” He was looking around, trying to spot anything that even resembled a contact bulb.
“This was built a long time ago,” Gyvoy said. “No telling what the bulb looked like back then.”
“Or if they had one,” Elsbeth said.
“Or what they were,” Ellie chipped in. “I mean, what if they’re not even humanoid?”
“There has to be a way,” Gyvoy said. “There has to.”
Finn didn’t like how desperate the Traveler sounded. He’d never actually considered that Gyvoy might not know what the hell he was talking about. Suppose it is all just bollocks? How many Traveler legends are genuinely based on fact?
He ordered the suit manager to open his helmet. The visor hinged up, and he smelled the cold air. There was a rank, salty tang to it that made his nose wrinkle up. Now he could see everything without artificial enhancement, so he studied the indentations and the pale emerald embers that moved with sedate fluidity. There was nothing familiar here, but some deep intuition was telling him that this was the place to connect to the station. Somehow.
Maybe I do have a bit of Celestial heritage after all. Maybe the Jalgori-Tobus are more than just Changelings.
Finn looked at the emerald lights again. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to the way they flowed. But as he watched, he realized that one of the indentations was constantly encircled by them.
The palm segments of his left hand gauntlet opened up, and he pressed his skin against the indentation, very aware how silly it must look. The indentation turned blue and seemed to grab his skin, sticking him into place.
“I, er…Oh, Asteria’s arse!”
“What is it?” Gyvoy’s voice was close to a shout.
“It’s a neural interface.”
“Finn, you’re a fucking genius; I knew you could do this. Go get us the operating system.”
The contact was extremely weird, not so much filling his mind with information but surrounding it with massive lumbering routines. Bizarrely, his mind chose to interpret it as being in the middle of a herd of elephants as they clustered around a water hole. He chose a single routine at random and tried to focus on it. The tenuous specter expanded around him in the same way the clouds of Kingsnest had kept growing during the Diligent’s approach. The motion slowed, and just like it had in the hoodoo hangar, his perception of the immense topology shifted. There were towering levels stretching away from him that were, and always would be, completely incomprehensible. But right at the foundation of the routines was a basic architecture that provided him with understanding.
He set himself a course and sailed along it. The edifice was helping him, he knew, because that was its purpose. So many aspects of the factory were apparent to him in this state—how it gathered items from the multifarious subsidiary stations that were distributed around the immensity of Kingsnest, how they were further modified by processes unknowable. There, in long passages within the factory, they were brought together and grown into unity: the engines to move worlds. And finally, the factory blessed them with purpose and understanding of their astonishing powers, teaching them how they worked.
Finn’s eyes snapped open, and he rasped down a breath as if it were the first in forever. He stared incredulously around at the rest of the team, then smiled uncontrollably as his eyes watered.
“I know where it is,” he told them.
“What do you mean, where it is?” Gyvoy demanded.
“This place? It’s just a management network for the surrounding factory systems. There’s a lot of them, and they’re all separate. Although…what they do is synchronized. I don’t quite understand. But the actual Archimedes Engine operating system is issued by a completely different section.”
“Wait,” Elsbeth said. “You’re here for an Archimedes Engine operating system?”
“Yes.”
“But—”
“Hey,” Gyvoy snapped, “you’ll get your money. Finn, all these independent systems, they must all be linked. That’s how networks work, right?”
“I don’t think so. Not here.”
“Asteria’s arse. So what do we do?”
“Don’t panic. I know exactly where the operating system is, and I can take us.”
* * *
—
Koa had picked up on Finn’s enthusiasm, the way he was almost babbling as he described the route. As a result, she was flying fast and confidently along the tunnel, with Kaizen racing along behind. It became an exhilarating ride, through junctions that were wide, empty spaces with a dozen other tunnel entrances protruding out of the walls. Finn knew which one to pick, however, and they’d dive straight in. Transponder buoys were dropped regularly now, just in case. His suit’s inertial navigation display had them at forty kilometers from their entry point.
“Any minute now,” he said contentedly.
“Gyvoy,” Uemi-Jubalee called. “The pirate just went past us.”
“What do you mean, past you?”
“Fifty klicks away. They’re heading to where your Ovar went into the factory.”
“Oh, crap.”
“They won’t be able to fly in here,” Elsbeth said. “At least not at any speed. And if they send armor suits after us, they’ll never find us.”
“We’ve been dropping buoys all the way,” Ellie said.
“They’re not transmitting,” Gyvoy said. “And we have the activation codes.”
“There’s something else,” Uemi-Jubalee said anxiously. “I think there’s more than one airboat.”
“What?”
“Their e-war pods are distorting my sensors, but the return dopplers are odd. It suggests there’s at least one other airboat; they’re flying in a very tight shadow formation, hiding behind the lead. But the discrepancies are unmistakable.”
