“You okay?” she asked as the wind rose again, and saw in the next instant the blood on his face.
He leaned in close. “Change of plans,” he said, and struck her forearm with the edge of his free hand. Clarke yelped, her grip broken. She fell. Lubin caught her, pulled her abruptly sideways. Her shoulder slammed against metal and twisted. Suddenly the crane wasn’t around her any more. It was beside her.
“Hang on,” Lubin growled against her cheek.
They were airborne.
She was far too petrified to scream.
For endless seconds they were in freefall. The world rushed towards them like a fly-swatter. Then Lubin’s arm tightened around her waist and some new force pulled them off-center, into a sweeping arc that only amended gravity at first, then defied it outright. They swooped down over whitecaps and churning flotsam, and she seemed to grow kilograms heavier; then they were rising again, miraculously, the wind catching them from behind. The colossal squashed spheroid of the lifter loomed above and then ahead and then below, its numberless polygons reflecting like the facets of some great compound eye.
And then they were dropping again, through an invisible tingling barrier that scratched sparks across her face, and Clarke barely put her hands out in time to break the fall.
“Ow!”
They were on a steep slope, facing uphill. She lay on her stomach, hands splayed forward, in a triangular depression perhaps three meters on a side. Her diveskin squirmed like a torture victim. Lubin lay half on top of her, half to one side, his right arm pressed into the small of her back. Some defiantly functional module in her brain realized that he’d probably kept her from rolling off the edge of the world. The rest of her gulped air in great whooping breaths and played I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive on infinite loop.
“You all right?” Lubin’s voice was low but audible. The wind still pushed at their backs, but it seemed suddenly vague, diffuse.
“What—” Tiny electric shocks prickled her tongue and lips when she tried to speak. She tried to slow her breathing. “What the fuck are you—”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He lifted his hand from her back. “Keep low, climb up the slope. We’re far too close to the edge of this thing.” He clambered away uphill.
She lay in the depression, the pit in her own stomach infinitely deeper. She felt ominously lightheaded. She put one hand to her temple; her hair was sticking straight out from her scalp as if her head had its own personal Van Allen belt. Her diveskin crawled. These things have static-fields, she realized.
Taka Ouellette had talked about cancer.
Finally her heart slowed to jackhammer rhythm. She forced herself to move. She squirmed on her belly past the lip of the first polygon and into the concavity of the second; at least the ridges between provided a foothold against the slope. The grade lessened with each meter. Before too long she dared to crouch, and then to stand upright.
The wind blew harder against chest than legs—some kind of distance-cubed thing going on with the static field—but even against her head it wasn’t as strong as it had been up in the crane. It blew her levitating hair into her face every time she turned around, but she barely noticed that inconvenience next to the ongoing convulsions of her diveskin.
Lubin was kneeling near the lifter’s north pole, on a smooth circular island in a sea of triangles. The island was about four meters across, and its topography ranged from thumbnail-sized fiberop sockets to hatches the size of manhole covers. Lubin had already got one of those open; by the time Clarke reached him he’d put whatever safecracking tools he’d used back into his pack.
“Ken, what the fuck is going on?”
He wiped blood from his cheek with the back of one hand. “I changed my mind. I need you along after all.”
“But what—”
“Seal up.” He pointed at the open hatch. Dark viscous liquid lapped in the opening, like blood or machine oil. “I’ll explain everything once we’re inside.”
“What, in there? Will our implants even wor—”
“Now, Lenie. No time.”
Clarke pulled up her hood; it wriggled disquietingly on her scalp. At least it kept her hair from flying everywhere.
“What about the rope?” she said suddenly, remembering.
Lubin stopped in the middle of sealing his face flap. He glanced back at the gantry cranes; a fine white thread lashed back and forth from the nearest, a whip in the wind.
“Can’t be helped,” he said. “Get in.”
Viscous, total darkness.
“Ken.” Machine voice, vocoder voice. It had been a while.
“Yes.”
“What are we breathing?”
“Flamethrower fuel.”
“What!”
“It’s perfectly safe. You’d be dead otherwise.”
“But—”
“It doesn’t have to be water. Hydroxyl groups contain oxygen.”
“Yeah, but they built us for water. I can’t believe napalm—”
“It’s not napalm.”
“Whatever it is, it’s got to gum up our implants somewhere down the road.”
“Down the road isn’t an—isn’t an issue. We’ll be fine if they last for a few more hours.”
“Will they?”
“Yes.”
At least her diveskin had stopped moving.
A sudden tug of inertia. “What’s that?” she buzzed, alarmed.
“Fuel feed. They’re firing.”
“At what? There wasn’t any hot zone.”
“Maybe they’re just being cautious.”
“Or maybe Seppuku was really there all along and we didn’t know it.”
He didn’t answer.
“Ken?”
“It’s possible.”
The surge had pushed her against something soft, and slippery, and vaguely flexible. It seemed to extend in all directions; it was too smooth to get any kind of a grip.
They weren’t in a tank, she realized. They were in a bladder. It didn’t just empty, it deflated. It collapsed.
“Ken, when this thing fires...I mean, could we get sucked out into—”
“No. There’s a—grille.”
Vocoders stripped most of the feeling out of a voice at the best of times, and this syrupy stuff didn’t improve performance any. Still, she got the sense that Lubin didn’t want to talk.
As if Ken’s ever been King of the Extroverts.
But no, there was something else. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
So she floated there in amniotic darkness, breathing something that wasn’t napalm, and remembered that electrolysis involved tiny electrical sparks. She waited and wondered if one of them would ignite the liquid passing through her and around her, wondered if her implants were about to turn this whole lifter into an airborne fireball. Another victim of the Lenies, she mused, and smiled to herself.
But then she remembered that Lubin still hadn’t told her why she was here.
And then she remembered the blood on his face.
In Kind
By the time they reached their destination, Lubin was blind.