“Can’t you have them shut down the aquifer?”
“Waterworks has respectfully declined my request,” said Costa. “Two of their other cribs are off-line for maintenance. However, they’ve agreed to reduce its throughput by twenty percent, down to half a million liters per minute, but it’ll be hours before the change is noticeable.” Chicago was a thirsty city that drank eight billion liters of lake water each day.
“Let me give it a go,” Reilly Dell said from the shotgun seat. “Believe it or not, I’ve actually had some experience with this kind of driving. There’s a particular kite maneuver that should work.”
Fred passed him control of the GOV. Reilly was not only another russ, but he lived in the same APRT as Fred, and they and their wives were part of a Wednesday night crowd. Reilly took the GOV down, but not deep enough to stir up the bottom. He dropped the nose of the GOV until it was pointing straight down. He reversed the fans and gave them only enough power to offset the crib drag. Though it was uncomfortable to be hanging upside down from the seat straps and craning their necks, now they could safely observe the entire crib facility.
It looked like what it was—a giant sucking drain. The inflow manifold was a ribwork of diaron beams that strained inrushing water and filtered out anything larger than a rowboat from being pulled in and transported ninety kilometers to the lakeshore treatment plant. The manifold itself was surrounded by a slightly convex concrete apron that covered about an acre of lake bottom.
Costa said, “Good work, Reilly. Hold it right there.”
Reilly turned to Fred and made an apologetic face, but Fred shook his head. After working with Costa that morning, it was sheer pleasure for Fred to be sharing the GOV with another russ.
“By the way,” Reilly said to him, “we confirmed the table at Rolfe’s for tonight. You and Mary will be there, right?”
Fred was confused a moment. He was about to say that today wasn’t Wednesday, when he remembered the canopy retirement ceremony advertised for that evening. There was supposed to be a party and a Skytel show, and the gang was going. Fred said they’d be there, and then added, “That reminds me, you sign up for that refresher course in bloomjumping?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Reilly said, “but after coming out here today, I think I will. Does the city even know how much wild shit there is still floating around out here? Whoever came up with the idea of dropping the canopy is nuts.”
What the city maintained, what the media trumpeted, was nothing less than the end of the Outrage. In recent decades, terrorist attacks had become ineffectual and rare, or so the experts claimed. The rabid zealots of terror of the twenty-first century had been exterminated, or gone underground, or lost interest. Earth’s biosphere was now 99.99 percent nanobiohazmat free. Any residual nanobot or nanocyst still dispersed in the atmosphere or hydrosphere had gone wild, lost its virulence, and was no more lethal than hay fever. In fact, most nanocysts contained ordinary pollen, not the smallpox, marburg, or VEE they were designed to ferry. The big, region-wide filtering systems known as canopies that had once been the lifesavers of cities throughout the United Democracies were now, according to the authorities, little more than giant, very expensive air fresheners.
The two men grew silent, lost in their own thoughts, which must have followed similar lines, for when they spoke again they’d come to the same conclusion.
“They won’t be able to hire enough bloomjumpers,” Reilly said.
“We’ll be able to name our own price.”
“You still certified, Fred?”
“You bet, and I’m going to increase my rating.”
THIS MORNING WAS the first time in years that Fred had actually flown through the Chicagoland canopy. After dropping Inspector Costa off at JD headquarters, Fred had detoured to HomCom headquarters to retrieve his own GOV and to pick up another partner for the remainder of the mission. He was pleased to see Reilly’s name on the on-call roster. As the GOV sped them across town to the lake, Fred quickly briefed his brother on the morning hunt for Cabinet. They passed over the breakwaters and their floating burbs and parks and were soon over open water. On the horizon ahead, the cordon of canopy generators rose from the lake like kilometer-high reeds. Due to the diluting effect of the lake winds, the generators were spaced close together. They pumped out such a dense concentration of anti-nano that the air around them seemed to ripple.
In no time, Fred’s GOV had passed into the first canopy layer. Below them were the buoys of shipping lanes where the big lake freighters crossed the canopy.
As they flew through the outer canopy layer, they saw bright, pinpoint flashes outside the GOV windows, too numerous to count. Each flash marked a brief, intense battle between an invading nanobot or cyst and the canopy’s anti-nano defenses. The anti-nano won every time.
“Doesn’t look too bad,” Fred said.
“About what you’d expect,” replied Reilly.
They passed over the floating Decon Port Authority where they would be obliged to stop on their return flight. Soon they were leaving canopied space to the great, unfiltered world beyond.
Reilly told the car to give them an auditory count of anything glomming to the outside of the GOV, and they traveled some minutes before the counter chimed. In a moment, it chimed again, but then fell silent for most of the rest of the outbound trip.
Reilly said, “ID those.”
The car replied, “Preliminary analysis identifies two gloms, both simple, one-phase carboplex disassembler nanobots.” The GOV’s frame and body were composed of carboplex—food for these particular bots—but it was covered with a tough and much less digestible diamondoid coating.
Reilly said, “Did you grease ’em?”
The car replied, “Affirmative.”
When they reached the coordinates Costa had given them and no more chimes had sounded, Fred said, “Not so bad.”
He spoke too soon, for a volley of chimes rang out. Then, after a pause, another volley, and a third. Numerous dimpled nozzles all over the car’s exterior exuded layers of heavy anti-nano grease. Here and there, the grease flashed in little, white-hot puffs as it encountered and incinerated the nanobot gloms.
Fred brought up the windshield HUD and enlarged the over and under GOV diagrams. The gloms showed up as red flags when first detected, amber when engaged by anti-nano grease, and blue when destroyed. Besides carboplex disassemblers, the gloms they were picking up included concrete, diaron, and silicate disassemblers as well. In other words, typical city-eaters.
Fred said, “Not so good.”
THE GLOM CHIMES had slowed down when they submerged. However, the anti-nano grease didn’t cover the car evenly underwater, and the little amber flags persisted for minutes before finally turning blue.
“We’ve confirmed our preliminary assessment,” Costa said. “Cabinet has an underground station here. It’s very well concealed and heat baffled, and it has tapped into the crib’s comm. You can just make it out in IR.” The windshield HUD displayed an IR overlay. There, at about eighty degrees east, at the very edge of the concrete apron, Fred saw a few wisps of fluttering ghostly ribbons. These marked exhaust heat being swallowed up in the rush of cold lake water. Starke’s hidden installation was putting out more heat than it could covertly dissipate.
“Must be working at capacity,” Fred said.
“I agree,” said Costa. “Ordinarily, it would be invisible, but now it’s trying to run Starke Enterprises from down there.”
“How did you find it?” Reilly said.
“Through snitches, of course,” said Costa. “From about a thousand of Cabinet’s closest friends. We were tipped off as soon as it went active. Mentars are their own worst enemies.”
Reilly gave Fred a look like—doesn’t she know there’s about a million mentars listening in?