“I don’t know,” said Harman. He borrowed the flashlight from Ada and started walking down the next hallway. He was stopped by what looked to be white bars. While the others watched, he went back into the drifted living room, picked up the heaviest piece of furniture he could pry free of the ice—a heavy table, the legs snapping off as he tugged it free—and walked back to smash the icicles one after the other, battering a path down the snow-filled hallway.
“Where are you going?” called Daeman. “What good is it going to do to go down there. No one’s been there for a million years. We’re just going to freeze when . . .”
Harman kicked open a door at the end of the hallway. Light poured out. So did heat. The other three moved as quickly as they could across the treacherous surface to join him.
Much like the room they had faxed into, this space was windowless and about twenty feet square. But unlike the other room, this one was warm, lighted, and free of snow or ice. And unlike the other room, this one was almost filled with an oval metal machine about fifteen feet long. The thing was floating silently three feet off the concrete floor, and a forcefield shimmered like a glass canopy over its top surface. On that surface were six indentations with a soft black material lining them; each indentation was the length of a human body with two short grips or controllers near where the hands would be.
“It looks like someone was expecting two more of us,” whispered Hannah.
“What is it?” said Daeman.
“I think it’s a sonie . . . also called an AFV,” said Harman, his own voice hushed.
“What?” said Daeman. “What do those words mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Harman. “But people in the lost ages used to fly around in them.” He touched the forcefield; it parted like quicksilver under his fingers, flowed around his hand, swallowed his wrist.
“Careful!” said Ada, but Harman had already lowered himself first onto his knees and then onto his stomach, then prone and settling into the black material. His head and back rose just slightly above the curved upper surface of the machine.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Comfortable. And warm.”
That settled it for the others. Ada was the first to crawl onto the craft, stretching out on her stomach and grasping the two handgrips. “Are these controls of some sort?”
“I have no idea,” said Harman as Hannah and Daeman crawled onto the disk and settled into the outer impressions, leaving the two rear-center depressions empty.
“You don’t know how to fly the thing?” asked Ada, a bit more shrilly this time. “From the books? From your reading?”
Harman just shook his head.
“Then what are we doing on it?” said Ada.
“Experimenting.” Harman twisted the top off his right handgrip. There was a single red button there. He pressed it.
The wall ahead of them disappeared as if it had been blown out into the antarctic night. Cold wind and flying snow swept around them in a blinding implosion, as if the air in the room had been sucked out and the storm pulled back in in its place.
Harman opened his mouth to say “Hang on!” but before he could speak, the sonie leaped out of the room at an impossible velocity, pressing the bottoms of their boots back against metal and making them each cling wildly to the handgrips.
The forcefield bubble over their heads kept them alive as the sonie, the AFV, the thing, flew out from the white volcano with its ice-crusted and shattered buildings clinging to its seaward side. The night-vision lenses in their thermskin hoods showed them the fir forest along the coast gone back to ice and death, the abandoned and drifted-over robotic equipment along the curve of a bay, and then the white sea—the frozen sea.
The sonie leveled off about a thousand feet above that frozen sea and hurtled out away from land.
Harman released one of the handgrips long enough to activate the direction finder on his palm. “Northeast,” he said to the others over their suit comms.
No one replied. Everyone was clinging and shaking too fiercely to comment on the direction the machine was headed while taking them to their deaths.
What Harman did not say aloud was that if the old maps he had studied were accurate, there was nothing out this direction for thousands of miles. Nothing.
Ten minutes of flight and the sonie began losing altitude. They had passed beyond the ice and now were flying over black water scattered with icebergs.
“What’s happening?” said Ada. She hated the quaver in her own voice. “Is this thing out of energy . . . fuel . . . whatever it uses?”
“I don’t know,” said Harman.
The sonie leveled off a mere hundred feet above the water. “Look,” called Hannah. She raised a hand from its grip to point ahead of them.
Suddenly the back of something huge, alive, barnacled with age, flesh corrugated-tough, broke the cold sea, its mammal heat radiating like throbbing blood in their night-vision-enhanced sight. A spout of water shot high toward them and Harman smelled fish on the fresh air that the forcefield allowed through.
“What . . .” began Daeman.
“I think it’s called . . . a whale, I think that’s how to pronounce it . . . but I thought it was extinct millennia ago,” said Harman.
“Maybe the post-humans brought it back,” Ada said over their suit intercoms.
“Maybe.”
They hurtled farther out to sea, always east-northeast, and after a few more minutes of the sonie holding its altitude, the four passengers began relaxing a bit, adapting, as humans have done since time immemorial, to a strange new situation. Harman had rolled on his side and was looking up at the brilliant stars becoming visible between scattered clouds when Ada startled him by shouting, “Look! Ahead!”
A large iceberg had become visible over the dark horizon and the sonie was hurtling straight toward it. The machine had flown over or past other icebergs, but none this broad—it stretched sideways for miles like a gleaming blue-white wall in their night vision—and none this tall—it was apparent that the top of the monstrous thing was higher than their current altitude.
“What can we do?” asked Ada.
Harman shook his head. He had no idea how fast the sonie was going—none of them had ever traveled faster than a voynix-pulled droshky—but it was fast enough, he knew, that the impact would destroy them.
“Do you have other controls on your handgrip?” asked Hannah. Her voice was strangely calm.
“No,” said Harman.
“We could jump,” said Daeman from behind and to the left of Harman. The sonie tilted a bit as Daeman got to his knees and elbows, his head just within the forcefield bubble.
“No,” said Harman, putting the force of command in the syllable. “You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that sea, even if you survived the fall . . . which you wouldn’t. Get down.”
Daeman dropped to his belly again.
The sonie did not slow or change course. The face of the iceberg—Harman guessed that the thing was at least two miles across—rushed at them and grew taller. Harman estimated that it rose at least three hundred feet above the water. They would strike it two-thirds of the way down its cold face.
“There’s nothing we can do?” said Ada, making it more a statement than a question.
Harman pulled his hood off and looked at her. The cold air was not so bad within their forcefield cockpit. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across with his right hand to take her left hand. She swept her thermskin hood off to show him her eyes. She and Harman interlaced fingers for a few seconds.