“No, not sonies… I mean, not complete sonies,” Hannah said hurriedly, “but parts of them. Shells. Machine parts.”
Harman shook his head, feeling his eagerness deflate. “What does this have to do with …” he began.
“It looked like a place where they could land,” said Hannah.
Harman banked the sonie past the south tower, taking care to stay far out. There were over a hundred voynix atop the towers, but none on the scores of green bubbles that clustered and twisted around the bridge tower like grapes of various sizes. “There’s no opening anywhere,” called back Harman. “And so many bubbles… you’d never remember which one you were in from out here.” He remembered from their first visit that although the glass of the buckyglas globules was clear and color-free while inside looking out, the bubbles were opaque to an outside viewer.
Lightning flashed. It began to rain on them and the forcefield flickered up again. The voynix on the tops of the tower and the hundreds more clinging to the vertical tower itself turned their eyeless bodies to follow their circling.
“I can remember,” said Hannah from the rear niche. She was also on her knees, holding the unconscious Odysseus’ hand in hers. “I have a good visual memory… I’ll just retrace my steps from that afternoon I was there, look at the landscape from different angles, and figure out which bubble I was in.” She glanced around and then closed her eyes for a minute.
“There,” said Hannah, pointing to a green bubble protruding about sixty feet out from the south tower, two-thirds of the way up the orange-red monolith. It was just one of hundreds of green-glass bumps on that tower.
Harman flew lower.
“No opening,” he said as he twisted the virtual omnicontroller, bringing the sonie to a hover about seventy-five feet out from the bubble. “Savi landed us on the top of the north tower.”
“But it makes sense that they would have flown the sonies into that… garage,” said Hannah. “The bottom of it was flat, and a different substance than most of the green globes.”
“You two told me once that Savi said it was a museum,” said Petyr, “and I’ve sigled that word since then. They probably brought the sonie parts in piece by piece.”
Hannah shook her head. Harman thought, not for the first time, that the pleasant young woman could be stubborn when she wanted to be.
“Let’s go closer,” she said.
“The voynix …” began Harman.
“They aren’t out on the bubble, so they’d have to leap from the tower,” argued Hannah. “We can get all the way to the bubble and they can’t reach us by jumping.”
“They can be out on the green stuff in a minute …” began Petyr.
“I don’t think they can,” said Hannah. “Something’s keeping them off the glass.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Petyr.
“Wait,” said Harman. “Maybe it does.” He told them both about the crawler they’d been in when Savi drove Daeman and him into the Mediterranean Basin ten months earlier. “The top of the machine was like this glass,” he said, “tinted from the outside but clear when looking out. But nothing stuck to it. Not rain, not even voynix when they tried to jump on the crawler in Jerusalem. Savi said that the glass had some sort of forcefield just above the glass material that made it frictionless. I can’t remember if she said it was buckyglas, though.”
“Let’s go closer,” said Hannah.
Twenty feet from the bubble and Harman saw the way to get in. It was subtle, and if he hadn’t been to Prospero’s Isle, where both the airlock to the orbital city and the entrance to the Firmary worked with this same technology, he never would have noticed it. A barely visible rectangle on the edge of the elongated bubble was a slightly lighter green than the rest of the buckyglas. He told the other two about what Savi had called “semipermeable membranes” on Prospero’s airlock and Firmary.
“What if this isn’t one of those semiwhatsit membranes,” said Petyr. “Just a trick of the light?”
“I guess we crash,” said Harman. He nudged the omnicontroller and the sonie slid forward.
“If you couch him there, he shall die,” said a voice from the darkness. Then Ariel stepped into the light.
The semipermeable molecular membrane had been quite permeable enough, the rectangle had solidified behind them, Harman had landed the sonie on the metal deck amongst the cannibalized parts of the machine’s own kind, and the three of them had wasted no time getting Odysseus-Noman onto the stretcher and out of the garage. Hannah had grabbed the front of the stretcher, Harman had taken the rear, Petyr provided security, and they were into the green-bubble helix maze at once, traversing corridors, climbing unmoving escalators, and heading for the bubble filled with crystal coffins where Savi had said both she and Odysseus had slept their long cryosleeps.
Within minutes, Harman was impressed not only with Hannah’s memory—she never hesitated when they came to a junction of bubble corridors or stairs—but with her strength. The thin young woman wasn’t even breathing hard, but Harman would have welcomed a break. Odysseus-Noman wasn’t that tall, but he was heavy. Harman caught himself glancing at the unconscious man’s chest to make sure he was still breathing. He was… but only just.
When they reached the main bubble helix rising around the bridge tower, all three of them hesitated and Petyr raised his readied bow.
Scores of voynix were hanging from the bridge metal, apparently looking down at them with their eyeless carapaces.
“They can’t see us,” said Hannah. “The bubble’s dark from the outside.”
“No, I think they can see us,” said Harman. “Savi said their hood receptors see three hundred and sixty degrees in the infrared… the range of light that’s more heat than vision, our eyes don’t see into it… and I have the feeling they’re looking at us right through the opaque buckyglas.”
They advanced down the curved corridor another thirty paces and the voynix shifted their clinging postures to follow their advance. Suddenly half a dozen of the heavy creatures leaped down onto the glass.
Petyr raised his nocked bow and Harman was sure that the voynix would come crashing through the buckyglas, but there was only the softest of thumps as each voynix struck the millimeter-thin forcefield and slid off, falling away. The humans happened to be in a stretch of the bubble corridor where the floor was almost transparent—an unnerving experience, but at least Harman and Hannah had seen it before and trusted the near-transparent floor to hold them. Petyr kept glancing at his feet as if he were going to fall any second.
They passed through the largest room—museum, Savi had called it—and entered the long bubble with the crystal coffins. Here the buckyglas was almost opaque and very green. It reminded Harman of the time—could it only have been a year and a half ago—when he had walked miles out into the Atlantic Breach and peered in through towering walls of water on each side to see huge fish swimming higher than his head. The light had been dim and green like this.
Hannah set down the stretcher, Harman hurried to lower it with her, and she looked around. “Which cryo-crèche?”
There were eight crystal coffins in the long room, all empty and gleaming dully in the low light. Tall boxes of humming machines were connected to each coffin and virtual lights blinked green, red, and amber above metal surfaces.
“I have no idea,” said Harman. Savi had talked to Daeman and him about her sleeping for centuries in one or more of these cryo-crèches, but that conversation had taken place more than ten months ago while they were entering the Mediterranean Basin in the crawler and he didn’t remember the details well. Perhaps there had been no details to remember.