“I heard them,” I told it, my voice shaking.
“NO. NONE OF THIS IS REAL.”
A low, raspy sound drowned out the radio voice, so loud I could feel it rattling in my chest as the writhing haan arms parted and a blast of steamy, hot air ruffled through my hair and clothes. I felt the strength go out of my legs, and sank down onto my knees as underneath the deep rumble, a rhythmic, insectlike clicking began to resonate….
I awoke with a start, cracking the back of my head on the cheap plastic molding behind me. It had gotten hot in the cramped tube over the night, and I was covered in a film of sweat. The air smelled like armpits and morning breath, and my stomach felt painfully hollow. I rolled over on my back, and rubbed my eyes.
“Shit.”
The memory of the dream churned for a while, leaving me on edge. They were getting stranger, and that weird signal… it kept getting stronger. I remembered the other surrogate, the one I’d met at Dao-Ming’s apartment building, and the fear in her voice.
“Do you hear the message, too?”
It’s not just a dream, I thought. I’m not the only one who had heard it. Were the foreigners really trying to reach us? Had the thing in the dream just now been some kind of haan response to it?
I rubbed my eyes, and nudged the sheets at the other end of the tube with my foot. “Alexei, wake up.”
When he didn’t stir, I tried to poke him with my toe but he wasn’t there.
“Son of a bitch…”
I tried to call him, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t respond to a 3i message, either, but I saw there were a couple other texts that had arrived during the night.
DraganShao: Yun provided chat logs that implicate you but nothing specific. The clips from the pirate broadcast could have been downloaded after-the-fact. I’m going to try to defuse this. Lie low.
Vamp: Figured out what happened. Call me.
I pulled Vamp up on the chat.
Vamp, what’s up?
Okay, I had Chong, the guy that used to work at the power company, do some digging, and it looks like Xinzhongzi has a substation that went up less than a year ago. They’re using it to power something with a massive draw inside the colony. To get a cascading failure means figuring the capacity of each station in the grid. The presence of this extra one has the failure moving out of control.
But we want the blackout, so can’t we just let the failure go?
I don’t think we’ll get a total failure with the Xinzhongzi station there. It has a ridiculously high storage capacity so it keeps soaking up the excess, and things stabilize before we can get anything but a localized outage.
You can’t take it down?
We can’t access it at all. Unlike the rest of Hangfei’s power grid, this station is brand new and locked down tight. We haven’t been able to get past their security. I’m sorry, Sam.
No, I sent. No way. We aren’t getting shut down because of Gohan Sòng’s gonzo bullshit.
Sam, we have a limited window to get in there. Liàngzı chuán is going to get a handle on this failure before too long, and that will be that.
Then we take it down.
Take it down how? It’s inside Xinzhongzi, on the other side of the security wall. On the other side of about fifty thousand protesters and security troops. Even if we could get in to the colony, the station itself is going to have security.
I fumed inside the sweltering tube, wanting to scream. It had worked. The whole thing had worked, and now, at the last minute, the whole thing was going to get derailed. It couldn’t all be for nothing.
Sam?
Vamp was right, though… we’d never get at that power station. We’d never get into any of them, let alone that one. If Vamp couldn’t sneak in remotely, then there was no way to…
Sam?
There is a way, I sent.
How?
I fished out the gate remote, and turned it over in my hand. One of the endpoints had been set to the black hole drop, but I could set another one.
Does Chong know where the new power station is? Does he know where exactly inside Xinzhongzi it is?
If he doesn’t, he can find out.
Good. Tell him to contact me. I have an idea.
And what’s that?
I balked at telling him. I knew what he’d say.
Just have him contact me.
Sam, what are you going to do?
Please?
His heart icon pulsed for a bit.
I’ll tell him.
Thanks.
He signed off, and I rubbed my temples.
“New power station…” I muttered.
A new station to power something with a massive draw… Gohan had bought up Xinzhongzi, cleared it out, then built… something. Something for the haan who would live there.
But what?
I took a deep breath, trying to get my footing. The hunger I felt grew worse, so bad that for a moment it frightened me a little. I always felt a little hungry, but it had gotten worse than I should have let it. I found the bag of rations I’d taken from my apartment and looked inside. Alexei had taken one, leaving me with five. I unwrapped one of the bars, and bit it in half, chewing as I pulled the tube’s latch. I pushed the door up to let in sunlight, and a wave of humid heat rushed in along with a few scaleflies. Outside, residents had begun to stir and some of the ones lucky enough to have bottom units had set lawn chairs out on the blacktop. An old man across the way stood in front of his open tube, wearing only boxer shorts and sandals as he washed himself with a facecloth. A tinny voice carried from someone’s tablet nearby.
“…has residents beginning to ask questions about the strange sightings, which more and more citizens are coming forward to insist that they saw…”
When I swung out onto the ladder, I saw a figure below, huddled against the side of the bottom tube. He sat hugging his knees, the material of his suit draped down onto the blacktop around him while the sun glinted off the glassy dome of his skull.
“Nix?”
I climbed down, then knelt for a closer look. His eyes were dim, but the flickering light had a sunset pink hue. His head had slumped forward, his forehead almost touching his knees.
“Hey, Nix,” I said, giving him a gentle shake.
His eyes flashed, and the glow intensified in each as he lifted his head. When he did, the hunger I felt grew much worse, so bad it made me feel weak, and sick. Through the surrogate cluster I could feel the hollowness inside of him, as it threatened to drag him under.
“Nix?”
His pupils did a slow revolution, focusing on me.
“Sam?”
“Were you out here all night?”
He looked around, and I felt a faint thread of confusion through the mite cluster. He didn’t seem to know where he was, or how he had even gotten there.
“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t sound sure.
“Nix, you’re starving,” I said. “You need help.”
“You need to cease your attack….” He drifted off.
I didn’t respond to that. I couldn’t stop the cascade now even if I wanted to. The best I could do was let it go until they could fix it, but I couldn’t do that.
I glanced up and down the row. The old man still scrubbed himself with the cloth, but his attention had turned toward us.
“Nix, can you make it up there?” I pointed to the crash tube I’d rented, and he nodded.