“Pete’s just discovered socialism. Last week it was meritocracy.”
Kenani laughed. “Well, that’s cool.” He gazed sadly down at the lands below. “I’d have everybody get them, then. I’m going to miss all this richness.”
“But why?” Toby shook his head. “Why are you coming with us. Are you sneaking away?”
“Yes, I’m sneaking away, along with an assorted lot of criminals, subversives and dissidents, scientists, and whatnot.” Kenani indicated the passenger modules behind the gallery. “Most of us are just fed up living in a world that’s never going to change. Where there’re no new frontiers. Everything’s owned—I mean, there’s not a centimeter of beachfront anywhere in the world where the likes of you and I can set foot! And every last bit of the solar system’s been surveyed and claims staked. It’s all we’ve got, and all we’re ever going to have. And they own it.”
Passing below was another area of city—but this one wasn’t a roiled gray chaos like the others. It was more like an interconnected labyrinth of buildings, stretching on kilometer after kilometer, with no streets or windows to break the geometric perfection of its shapes. This place, and others like it, was where all the resources of the planets were funneled. It was a machine city, an entire economy dedicated to serving the needs and whims of the trillionaires. They had no need for human workers. They had their bots.
“In Consensus, nobody can own more than a hundred robots,” said Peter.
Kenani snorted. “Good luck with that,” he said. “Then again, why not? Make it Sedna instead of Consensus, kid, and I’ll back you all the way.”
THRUM, THRUM.
The sound was everywhere—filling the universe outside and roving through his belly and chest, his throat and his skull. Toby could feel it rattling down his arms and legs, awakening a painful tingle in them. He could feel it coursing up his spine, wrapping his jaw and tongue, penetrating his glued-shut eyelids.
He struggled to open those eyes, but when he finally did, he saw nothing. A groan escaped his lips and he felt his head loll forward. It came to him that he was sitting on some sort of surface, his knees bent up, arms lifeless at his side. And with him—
He felt the denner’s fur brush his face. The little creature was climbing around and over him, nudging him with its head. All the while, its rumbling song vibrated through Toby, awakening his body from an impossibly long sleep.
He took a ragged breath. “How long,” he tried to say. It came out as a weak croak, but Orpheus seemed encouraged. He butted Toby’s cheek and the vibration became louder still.
Now Toby felt cold, too, a biting attack on all parts of his body at once. Something deep within him was fighting against it, a radiance like a tiny inner sun. He was running on battery power, he realized, much of it supplied by his own implants. Not all of it, though. Corva had said, with a straight face, that Orpheus would heat him to life using microwave energy.
Thinking of Corva brought home to him where he must still be: bagged in a shipping container en route to a world she’d called … was it Wallop? He could feel the survival bag wrapped around him like a blanket. In fact, even when he kept his head still there was a dizzying sensation of motion. Maybe it was simple vertigo. Maybe, though, the container was on the move.
“Corva?” Toby made a supreme effort and unbent himself, reaching up a hand to cautiously unzip the bag. Fearsomely cold air puffed in, waking him even further. He stretched his right arm out of the membrane and his fingers made contact with another bag. Corva wasn’t moving, but he could feel the vibration coming from her cocoon: Wrecks was hard at work.
“Shylif!” There was no answer. Was it possible he was dead? And Corva, too? What then would Wrecks be up to?
No, there was another possibility, and however unlikely it seemed, it must be true. Skinny little Orpheus had managed to awaken Toby before the others.
He reached up to stroke the denner’s fur. “You’re amazing, you know that?”
At that moment he felt a falling sensation, and all around him the tightly wrapped packages shifted. He heard plastic wrap tearing—he hadn’t been imagining movement after all. Then, with a bone-jarring thump, the container struck something and stopped moving.
“Corva?” he asked again. There was no response, just Wrecks’s purring. Orpheus, he suddenly realized, had fallen silent. It was Toby’s own shivering that was sustaining his body heat now, and that wasn’t going to last long.
He felt terribly weak, as though he’d been sick and bedridden for days. This was nothing like the cicada beds, which pumped you full of sugars and nanotechnology that would fix you as good as new before you even woke up. Toby retched, but nothing came out; his stomach was empty and demanding to be filled.
He reached out again, found Corva’s knee, and felt around for her backpack. Opening it was hard, and he toppled over twice, scraping his chin on the corner of a crate. But inside he found some food bars and a bottle of water.
He brought out the food and water and eagerly devoured a bar. Then he hesitated.
Corva and her friends had helped him, at no apparent profit to themselves. Then again, Ammond and Persea had seemed just as selfless at first. Maybe the stowaways had no agenda beyond simple human decency. Or maybe the fact that they’d tracked him between worlds, awaiting a chance to break him out of his captivity, simply meant they had their own use for him, yet to be revealed. Corva had hinted as much.
She had also promised to finish telling him about his family. Yeah, maybe—but now that he was free of Ammond and Persea’s subtle censorship, he could surely find out the rest of the story himself. He didn’t need Corva for that.
To hell with other people’s agendas. There was one companion he knew he could rely on. He found another bar and offered it to Orpheus, who purred like crazy before attacking it. Toby gave a great sigh to quiet his inner arguers, and said, “Come on, Orph, let’s see where we are.” He groped around for the twisty passage through the boxes. After a moment Orpheus got the idea and with a chitter guided Toby into the correct gap. Moments later they were at the shipping container’s airlock.
Toby patted along the side of the door until he found a control pad. As he touched it, a little keypad glowed green, startlingly bright and the first thing he’d seen for … how many years would it be?
After his eyes adjusted, he peered at it and saw that it was reading a breathable atmosphere outside. Now that he was standing up, he could feel the drag of gravity on him, too, and it felt … well, just about normal, despite his weakness. They were either on a rotating station somewhere, or this was a pretty sizable planet. He ordered the lock to cycle, and a few seconds later the outer door opened.
It wasn’t too bright out there, but even so he had to squint. What he was looking at wasn’t at all clear. Light percolated in from the sides, but right in front of him was a kind of wavering, streaky darkness. It seemed somehow familiar, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then a crooked line of white shot from on high down into plunging depths, revealing vast billowing clouds to all sides, and he saw that the streaks were runnels and beads of rain coursing down a transparent wall just a few meters in front of him. He only just had time to realize this before thunder banged off that wall; in the distance another bolt of lightning vaulted between two towers of cloud.
Toby was so busy gaping at the bottomless well of downpouring mist that he nearly toppled right off the lip of the shipping container. Swinging wildly, he managed to grab a frost-painted handle and looked down. He was three up on a stack of containers; five more loomed overhead. This stack was just one in a row of them. The place must be a warehouse.