“I’ll hit the bomber,” Garrett called back.
“Then shoot the other one!” Broben raised his pistol.
Behind Garrett, Plavitz said, “But it’s running away.” His tone was amazingly calm.
“Who gives a shit, it’s big as a goddamn Buick, for christ sake! Shoot the son of a bitch!”
“What in the hell is goin’ on out there?”
Everyone stopped running.
The voice had come from the bomber.
Something dropped down from the bomb bay, and for a moment Broben thought it was another spider. But it straightened as it emerged from underneath the fuselage and walked beneath the wing on two legs.
The crewmen raised their guns.
The figure stepped out from the shadow of the wing.
“Jeez Louise,” said Francis.
Wendell Bonniker pushed back his A-3 cap and turned his head and spat on the floor. “Never met her,” he said.
THIRTY-ONE
Farley, Wennda, and Yone hurried along the groove in a slight crouch. They were well past the Typhon now but Farley couldn’t let go of what had happened back there. The thing had looked him in the eye, or so he’d thought, and he had gone completely rabbit.
It’s just a glorified fighter plane, he told himself. It’s what a P-47 will turn into in a hundred years.
They crossed one of the lines that marked where the groove bisected the circular design outside a repair bay. Wennda suddenly called a halt and frowned down at the line.
“You all right?” Farley asked.
She looked up at him. Then she climbed up out of the groove.
“Wennda?” Farley tried to keep his tone calm. “What are you doing?”
“Come up,” she called down. “The Typhon can’t see us now.”
Farley looked at Yone and Yone shrugged. Farley climbed out of the trench, then pulled Yone out.
They stood before one of the repair bays. This one held a massive framework gantry from which hung hooks and claws and cables meant to move across a hangared typhon to effect repairs. But there was no typhon in here, just an empty platform centered on the ditch-like groove that led toward the tunnel’s central groove. The bay that housed the Typhon was far behind them, near the wall that marked the end of the enormous tunnel.
A drone skittered by, carrying a metal box in that direction.
“Look here,” said Wennda. She indicated the large circular design on the ground in front of the repair bay. The circle was paler than the rest of the floor, and outlined in a ring of metal. The main groove ran through it; another groove ran from the outer ring to the repair bay.
“What am I looking at?” Farley asked.
“These circles turn ninety degrees,” Wennda said. “So that the sleds that hold the typhons can move out onto them. Then they rotate back to line up with the trench.”
“It’s a transport system,” Yone realized. “To move the typhons to other repair hangars. Or to where they took off and landed.”
“I think it is how they took off,” Wennda said. “It’s a magnetic accelerator.”
Farley frowned. “Come again?”
“A launch rail.” She waved at the bay. “That’s where they housed them, repaired them, programmed them. Then they moved them to the main rail and launched them, one after another. I’d bet my next ten dessert shares that this tube comes out somewhere in the crater.”
“The well,” Farley and Yone said at the same time.
“We have to go that way,” said Wennda.
“Whatever causes the vortex is still operating in there,” Yone said doubtfully.
She shrugged. “It’s still the way out.”
“Perhaps we will find a third way.”
“I’m all for it,” said Farley. “So long as we keep moving.”
Yone indicated his injured leg. “You should leave me behind. I will only keep you from reaching your aircraft.”
“I don’t leave my people behind,” Farley said.
“Even without me slowing you up, you know that you will only catch up to your crew if something goes wrong on their side of things.”
“I also know that things go wrong a lot more than they go right, so we’ve got to try. And if everything goes perfectly and they make it out with the bomber, we still have to try. No one ever made a flight by giving up.”
Wennda smiled a Mona Lisa smile. “Are they all like you where we’re going?” she asked.
Farley smirked. “I’d have to say most of them are like me, but less so.” He pointed down the vast tunnel. “Get moving, soldier.”
They stopped to check out one of the open-frame buggies. The little vehicles weren’t much more than two molded bucket seats in a hard plastic framework on four balloon tires. A storage box behind the seats. The tires were dry-rotted.
Wennda pressed a button on the steering wheel and shook her head. “The only things that have been maintained here in the last two hundred years are the Typhon and the launch rail. I’ll be surprised if we find anything that powers up.”
The repair bays continued. Perhaps their typhons had been operational after the destruction, but had gradually worn out over the years, until only the one remained. The bugs—repair drones, Wennda called them—must have cannibalized whatever was closest first, then begun to work their way down the line.
At one point they encountered a bug that had broken down. Its belly lay on the floor and its tendrils moved fitfully as the four rear legs tried to lift it but could not. Even as it struggled to rise it was swarmed by other drones. By the time the three humans drew even with it the faulty bug was half stripped and no longer moving.
“Are these things alive?” Farley asked as they gave a wide berth to the bugs savaging the body of the damaged bug. “Is the Typhon alive?”
“What you mean by alive?” said Wennda.
“I mean is it an animal or is it a machine?”
“Your question is binary,” Wennda said. “It only lets the Typhon be one or the other.”
“Well—isn’t it?”
“It’s not that simple.” She indicated the vast facility around them. “These people made machines the size of germs that used organic chemicals for fuel. They fed, they made little machines, they combined to make more complicated machines.”
“So they were cells?”
“Manufactured cells. Entire machines made out of millions of little machines. Independent pieces programmed to work together.”
“But were they alive?”
“Is a baby alive? It’s just a bunch of chemicals that organize into cells that combine and grow and reproduce.”
“The Typhon isn’t a damn baby.”
“The Typhon was made to be exactly what it is, Joe. By people. Hating it is like hating a hammer.”
“A hammer that decides what it’s going to hit.”
“You fly a machine that drops bombs. Aren’t you a hammer that decides what to hit?”
Farley frowned. “All I can say is that I know I’m not,” he said. “I’m more than that.”
Wennda raised an eyebrow. “How do you know the Typhon doesn’t feel the same way?” she asked.
Overhead lights came on as they advanced. The first time it happened it scared the hell out of Farley. He thought they’d been spotlighted from above, but Wennda was unconcerned. “It looks like I was wrong about things powering up,” she said. Then she saw Farley about to bolt. “It’s okay, Joe. It’s reactive lighting. There’s a motion sensor here somewhere.”
“So we’re being tracked?”
“If we are, I doubt there’s anyone reading it. It’s just an automatic system to save power.”