April in Bangalore was like April in New Orleans, or Houston. Humid and, even before ten in the morning, headed for high heat. Xavier said as much to CWO Singh, who shrugged, as if he were weak. “April is the hottest month here, though not the wettest. That’s August.”
“That’s good,” Xavier said. “We only have to risk heatstroke, not drowning.” The driver, one of the enlisteds, laughed—to be silenced by a glare from Singh.
They parked, then grabbed masks and gloves, and, once the cherry picker was back in operation, Xavier rode up to the Adventure hatch.
All the way up he kept noting the strange tilt to the vehicle and debating the need for additional support—a frame, maybe, or even some kind of jacks under the busted fin. The ship rested on hard-packed earth, so Xavier wasn’t worried Adventure would sink. But it felt wrong to have it looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
One thing he noticed once he reached the hatch level—downtown Bangalore itself, glittering towers that had been lost in the haze, or simply not in his eye line, during his hasty exit yesterday. He started feeling sick and faint, so weak that he had to wrap his gloved hands around the railings of the cherry picker basket. How many millions of people lived here? Nine million? In India altogether, a billion?
He was no stranger to numbers on that scale. Houston had a million people when he lived there, the United States more than a quarter billion.
But for the past two decades he had lived in a habitat ten kilometers long and five or so wide, with fewer than a thousand people. They did rub shoulders from time to time, but he never ever got the sense that he was crowded.
Now, though, even twenty kilometers north of the city center, in what was, by Indian standards, uncrowded suburbia, Xavier felt closed in, suffocated.
The heat didn’t help, of course. Nor did Xavier’s precarious perch atop a very old piece of Indian equipment.
Not wishing to disgrace himself by vomiting over the side, or even fainting, he opened the hatch and plunged into the cool interior.
Adventure’s crew had left batteries running on low, essentially keeping the lights on and the environmental systems running. The sudden, relative cool made Xavier feel better—he wasn’t even bothered by the slanting floor.
He opened the hatchway to the storage module . . . all of the containers seemed to have come through the crash landing intact (something he’d worried about just before dozing off last night). There were sixteen identical units, each one about the size of a typical cardboard banker’s box from his youth. Fourteen of them held goo; the other two . . . equipment.
He could not off-load all of these things by himself, so he had to allow the enlisted men into Adventure. The four of them seemed uninterested in the exotic machine, acting as if they were entering the cargo hold of one of the rotting Antonov transports parked on the apron not far away. They plodded like robots as they set up a chain to pass containers along.
With the weight limits of the cherry picker, it took half a dozen trips down, then up, to get all the containers out of Adventure and into the trucks. Xavier realized that by supervising from above—obviously necessary—he had allowed Singh and especially Pandya free rein with the materials on the ground. Either one of them could have been hiding inside a truck, unseen, prying open a container.
Well, nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t too worried that they would find anything useful. . . . Adventure’s cargo was literally just packages of goo. Even the vital proteus gear was secreted inside goo.
Once everything was loaded up and the crane lowered, Xavier and the team headed for the holding area, a corner of a munitions storage bunker about two hundred meters from the ops area, across the runway. It was more exposed than Xavier liked—his particular bunker and its kin were rounded mounds, wisely separated by several meters of open space, with the whole complex bordered by several dozen yards of mud and grass inside a wicked-looking security fence. There were fences beyond that, marking the boundary of Yelahanka Air Base.
He would have preferred an actual warehouse, a building among other buildings, of course. So that, should the impulse strike him over the next day or two, he could make unscheduled or unescorted visits. True, he would face the usual challenges of evading security—locks, cameras, and whatever new toys had been developed over twenty years.
But he had always found that even layered systems are vulnerable at one point . . . with their human operators.
For example, as the enlisteds were helping him stack and arrange the containers near the entrance to the bunker (which proved to be empty; so much for the alert status of the Indian Air Force at Yelahanka), one of them, the most junior aircraftsman, dropped a container on its corner.
The box ruptured, not only exposing the inner sheathing but tearing it, allowing a puddle of goo to escape.
The young man’s eyes—the only expressive part of his face visible over his mask—went wide with fear, either that Xavier would have him arrested or that he might die from exposure.
The sudden silence was apparent to Pandya, who said from outside, “Everything all right in there, Mr. Toutant?” He gave Xavier’s name a beautiful French pronunciation.
“Just some final rearranging!”
Then he pulled down his mask and put on his most engaging face. “It’s not really dangerous. What’s your name?”
He slowly lowered his mask. “Aircraftsman Roi,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get a shovel or a—”
Xavier was already bending to the box, righting it and prying off the lid. “Take a look,” he said. “You’re the first on Earth.”
He did, slowly bending toward the container with its wrapped greenish material, like foaming gelatin. “What is it?”
“It’s just raw material,” Xavier said, an honest if incomplete answer. “It’s what we found on Keanu when we arrived twenty years ago. It’s very . . . adaptable. You can make almost anything out of it.”
Now Roi’s eyes went wide in an entirely different manner. This was curiosity, possibly cunning. (It occurred to Xavier that he had been wrong in identifying Pandya as the likely intelligence agent on Singh’s squad, that it might well be Aircraftsman Roi. It was also possible that everyone on Singh’s squad was a spy—that was how he would have done it. But he was now committed to this gambit.)
“You can touch it,” Xavier said, demonstrating. It was harmless; had to be, since on Keanu the HBs made food out of it.
Roi dabbed a finger in it, smiled. “How does it work?”
“You need to have the right machine—a 3-D printer, what we call a proteus. You tell the proteus what you need, and, basically, it turns this goo into it. Food, equipment—”
“Money?”
Had him. “Anything,” Xavier said. “Especially if you’re just thinking of selling some of this to, say, a Chinese entrepreneur—” That was risky, because his sense of this world was twenty years out of date: China might not have entrepreneurs anymore, or if they did, they might be considered evil.
“Mr. Toutant?” Pandya was in the entrance, though the stack of containers kept him from seeing what the group inside were up to.
“One moment,” Xavier yelled. “Just a final adjustment!”
He turned away, and Xavier leaned close to Roi. “I would be happy to make you a little gift,” he said. He took off one of his gloves. “I could scoop the spilled material into this, and no one would ever know.
“But my colleagues might ask—” Xavier let the last word linger just long enough to earn a knowing smile from Aircraftsman Roi, who then said: “I have two hundred new rupees in my pocket.”
“You know, that would be a welcome gift. If I’m asked, I can say I exchanged the material for some money. We don’t have any!”