Jaysir noticed the attention Toby was giving to the denners and seemed a bit annoyed. “You want one of these,” he said, slapping the side of his strange machine. “Those guys are crude by comparison. You’ve got half the hibernation mechanism inside you already. It’s a set of synthetic organs that take care of all your natural systems, like temperature regulation, oxygen levels. It prevents shock and produces the natural antifreeze that keeps your cells from bursting when you freeze. All the cicada beds and denners do is take care of timing. Well, and they scan you as you’re waking to make sure you’re cooking evenly. Of course, the beds cook you, too. They supply energy while you thaw, microwaves to start with just to melt the ice around your cells. They talk to your synthorgans and send ’em the diagnostic information so the right enzymes and sugars can be produced to bring you round. Without all that, you’re basically just a lump of thawing meat. But denners don’t even do all that.”
“Yeah,” Corva protested, “but timing is the most important thing. You have to start the wake-up cycle at the right time. Exactly thirty years to the day after you go down … or whenever the McGonigals decide.”
“What do you mean, when we decide?”
“I mean, the Cicada Corporation has a monopoly on the hibernation beds. They control the cicada technology and the synthorgan franchises and everything else that sets or depends on their timings. Only they can change the frequency. And they do.”
“Corva,” said Shylif. It sounded like he was warning her of something.
She shook her head. “Anyway, you’re not a legal part of the lockstep if you’re not using the beds. Which means we are not supposed to be here. Luckily, there’re lots of ways people scam the system, and there’re all the other locksteps and people from them who turn up unannounced, and … well, you get the picture. It’s messy. There’s a space in there for denners with cicada-type organs, on a very gray market.”
Toby stared doubtfully at his new companion, who was rampaging among the barrels with Wrecks and Shylif’s denner. “But how does he do it? Wake himself up from being frozen solid at exactly the right time? And then what’s he got—a microwave projector in his head or something?”
“Basically,” said Jaysir, deadpan. “These little guys have about as much energy stored in them as a good-sized bomb. Their quantum clocks still work even at three degrees above absolute zero, and they’re their own cicada bed. That is part of their original design—it’s what made the denners popular to begin with, the fact they could survive without the beds. Makes ’em cheaper than other pets, right? We stowaways just added some upgrades, is all.”
He was talking about living creatures like they were machines. Toby didn’t like that. As he was reaching out to his denner, though, the ceiling of the tunnel suddenly flew away and they were in open air—or was it open space?
Far above, the sky was a black circle. The train was slowing as it rolled along a landscape of ice that made up the floor of a very deep, very wide pit. It must be kilometers across and tens of kilometers high.
The whole space was given over to tracks, warehouses, and yards packed with shipping containers. These radiated out like spokes from the center of the pit, where five threadlike white cables, each as straight as a draftsman’s line, rose up from the ice floor to pierce the domes and finally disappear in the circle of black above. These were space elevators, and based on what he saw rising on one, each was strong enough to support a vertical train.
“There’s our ride,” said Jaysir. “It’ll get us to orbit and stow us aboard one of the freighters.”
“As long as it’s a freighter that’s bound for Wallop,” added Corva.
Jaysir frowned at her. “You’re really gonna try it, huh?”
She gave a long-suffering sigh. “Jay, what choice do I have?”
The maker crossed his arms and glared at Shylif. “And what about you? You still think Coley was on that ship?”
Shylif shrugged impassively. “I have to find out.”
Toby’s thoughts were wavering unevenly between the shock of the revelation about his family and the idea that these people were proposing he ride a freight cylinder into orbit with them. Even apart from all the issues around hibernation, there was a pretty obvious problem with this plan. “Won’t there be security? If Ammond or … or my brother, if they’re really after us, won’t they be watching the docks?”
“Of course there’s security.” Jaysir shrugged as the train slowed and shunted into a siding. “But there’re legal limits on how much and what kind of technology they can use for security. That’s one of your brother’s policies. He wants to keep the lockstep at pretty much the tech level it was at when you … uh left. The price of that is that people like me can hack their way past the security pretty easily.”
The train bumped to a halt. “That doesn’t mean we can walk around like we own the place,” said Corva as she slung herself over the side of the car. “Don’t let yourself be seen. Jaysir’s only so good, and a lot of the bots here are still going to be under direct lockstep control.”
Toby followed her down the side of the car with Shylif coming last. “You mean,” he accused, “under Peter’s control. You said Peter owns this world, right?”
“He owns Cicada Corp—the hibernation system,” she said as they ducked between the shadows of stacked shipping containers. “That’s the cicada beds and all the machinery that coordinates shutdown and restart for the cities, the factories … You can build your own cicada bed, for private use, but it’s the whole industrial ecosystem around them that the McGonigals control. Supplies, diagnostics, repairs, emergency replacements in case of disaster … and the network that communicates with it all. It’s a monopoly.”
At ground level the freight yard looked like any one Toby had seen in any movie made in the past two hundred years: towers of containers, wide gravelly lanes between them, harsh lights and swiftly moving transport cranes like trucks on stilts. Bots walked here and there among the lanes, but there weren’t that many of them. Jaysir was following a particular route through the maze; he seemed to be looking for something.
“There.” He pointed at a stack that looked exactly like all the others. “They’re going to be loading that one in an hour. We need a bribable dock manager. Wait here, I’ll round one up.” He scuttled away into the shadows; his behemoth of a bot didn’t follow him.
“There’s an overlay for that,” said Corva sardonically. “Finding corrupt bots, I mean. There’s a big black market in bot hacks, and a lot of people deliberately turn a blind eye when their bots get infected with black-market viruses. You can make extra money from a hacked bot and still deny any involvement if the police catch your bots at it.”
Toby was thinking through the implications. “And Peter doesn’t own the police?” She nodded, but that was all, and he threw up his hands in frustration. “You said you would tell me the rest! About Evayne, and Mom and Dad? Or is keeping Toby ignorant just as important to you as it was to Ammond and Persea?”
Corva shook her head quickly. “No no, I just … it’s a big story. I’ve been trying to figure out where to start, is all.”
He glared at her. “How about anywhere?”
Corva stared off at the distant walls of ice. She was chewing her lip, her eyebrows scrunched in thought.
“I guess it grew out of a tiny seed, like they say,” she murmured at last. “But it’s all so crusted over with legend and myth it’s hard to tell. The fact is, the McGonigal family pioneered wintering over. They say your mother invented it so she could wait for your return from … well, heaven is usually the way they put it.”