BOOK TWO Section 1 Chapter ii
MAY 5, 2424
The clothes that hung at the front of the closet, ready for wear, were appropriate for the house–not a construction site–and Ari delved deeper, on her own quest.
She was going outside. On her own. She was ducking lessons today. She’d warned Justin she would. She hadn’t forewarned anybody in ReseuneSec, however, except Florian and Catlin–hadn’t sent word to Hicks, pointedly so. They hadn’t yet gotten the new Security team–they were still taking tape, but most of all Justin and Grant were still reviewing files, and she didn’t have to worry about trusting them yet, so she wouldn’t.
Just Florian and Catlin, and a fast move, that nobody would be expecting, well, except Sam Whitely.
It was still a scary venture–the first time to be really out in open country It was the very first time since they’d shot their way into Wing One that she’d really gone outside.
The makeup was scant, and the clothes she’d picked out had once served for riding–when she’d been able to get to Horse. The weight she’d lost since Denys died meant she could put her fingers in the waist of the once nicely fitting denims. The seat was a little less than fitted, now, but Sam wouldn’t care, out on the behind‑the‑building construction site, out under the cliffs that ringed Reseune. The sweater, at least, was meant to be loose.
Comfortable, and part of her life when Denys had been her protection, and Denys had fussed over her and worried about her breaking her neck–she’d almost believed the old miser had cared, from time to time. On a day like this, she could almost believe something had just occasionally stirred in Denys’s wizened little heart.
He’d say, if he were here, Don’t be a fool. Stay in.
He’d really say something if he knew the information Florian and Catlin were gathering up, and the net they were beginning to weave through the Wing, and around people whose whereabouts they needed to know, constantly.
But today she was going out on her own, not because it was policy, but because it was her chance to do it and she could do it and she would do it.
She was really going outside the safe bounds. A risk, and worth every minute of it. And she was going to scare hell out of Hicks’ office, and probably Yanni was going to blow up and yell, but she was going to do it anyway…just flexing the constraints, just making sure what her freedom of movement was like. She’d make ReseuneSec twitch, and she’d do it again, and someday, on the day she chose, it wouldn’t be a lark.
It wasn’t as if the new construction wasn’t constantly available to Base One in virtuality: she’d seen the new wing grow, day by day. But this, she’d decided, was theday. The whole site had, for the first month, been an ugly brown flat of disturbed earth, aswarm with bots twenty‑four/ seven, following their preprogrammed dig plan, tearing up the landscape and installing lines and conduits–a secret communion between them and the design specs, with rarely a human involved, except to watch it happen. Yanni had given his agreement– Yanniknew what it was, but if Yanni had kept his word, nobody but Yanni knew, not even ReseuneSec.
In the second month, human workers had moved in, installing, with robot assistance, a flat barrenness of ground‑forms, while still more bots scrambled this way and that on spider‑legs, measuring and installing connectors.
Last week, the vertical forms had arrived from upriver, fresh from their use up at Strassenberg, and the site had sudden risen up and up into a confusion of those huge prefab pour‑forms and their requisite braces, everything fitted together with a system of bolts and clamps into a configuration that had nothing to do with Strassenberg: the forms were capable of that.
The main pour had been three days ago. This morning the forms had come down at the apex of the wing, and the featureless new walls stood clear and white in the camera‑view.
Which was no longer enough for her satisfaction, or Sam’s. She hadn’t seen her friends in forever. She’d wanted to call Amy and Maddy out–but that was just too much noise.
“Sera.” Catlin arrived in the bedroom. “Florian is on his way back with the runabout. We can meet him at the curb.”
“Excellent.” Enthusiasm tingled through her. She escaped the bedroom, walked briskly, with Catlin just in the lead, down the hall, through the living room, to the front hall, and out the door to the general corridor.
Escape, for sure. She’d dreamed initially, mere cloud‑castles, of taking Horse out of pasture, bringing him up to Wing One where he’d never been, and simply riding around the end of the building alone and unexpected, but the runabout Florian quickly suggested in Horse’s stead was the practical thing. The safe thing. The thing that wouldn’t bring Yanni storming down on Hicks, and Hicks down on the venture midway with a flock of ReseuneSec agents. A car–that was fairly ordinary. Nobody would think a car was a break for a few hours’ freedom.
Downstairs. Down another corridor, and toward the glass doors that led to the outside. Florian pulled the runabout into view at the curb just as they passed the inner glass doors of Wing One. Door security in the section, ReseuneSec, caught by surprise, jumped to attention, properly opened the outer doors for them as they arrived, and one of the two guards, doubtless in communication with Florian, went outside quickly to open the passenger‑side doors of the runabout, probably thinking they were going down to the labs.
Catlin opted for the front seat, beside Florian–there was a heavy rifle waiting there, and she shifted it to sit down, burdened with her own armament. Ari, carrying not so much as a pocketbook, simply tucked up comfortably in the rear seat, and the instant she had settled and the doors had shut, Florian took off with a snap and an immediate jolt.
Right over the curb near the flower bed and onto the lawn just beyond the building edge–a track not meant to be taken. Florian clearly enjoyed himself in taking them at breakneck speed downslope across the neat grass of the lawn, and, by a sharp right, onto the construction road between Wing One and the river. The landscape bounced crazily. Ari grabbed onto the seat and laughed, wondering what ReseuneSec thought of the maneuver. But no one gave immediate chase, Catlin talked to someone, answering questions, and Ari watched the moving scenery–lazy brown river on the left, the robot‑mowed grasses on the right, where the riverside lawn still remained sacrosanct from the passage of the big earthmovers–
Terran, that lawn. Nothing from Cyteen’s native life got onto Reseune’s territory, except what drifted ashore via the river, and that only‑touched the shore–and died. Such seeds and fragments of woolwood and other deadly things that somehow got past diversion gates in the river itself met a determined last line of defense down there. Dedicated robot sweepers zapped intrusion to cinder, sniffer‑pigs found anything that took root, and a coffer dam and a high‑tech filtration system kept the river water on one side and routed their own runoff back to their own use. All that effort prevented Terran life from getting out any more than they could help nowadays, and most of all it kept low‑level Cyteen life from getting in.
They passed the dim arc of the coffer dam in the river, and swung around the long side of Wing One. Their course still ran well within the safe perimeter of the precip towers that sat up on the cliffs above their little valley, and on matching cliffs across the wide Novaya Volga. There wasn’t any real fear of a perimeter collapse, in these days of triple redundancy in Reseune’s atmospheric bubble; but the runabout, designed for the outback, with its six tires and a pressure seal on its doors, was nevertheless well‑equipped for that eventuality, with breathing tanks and emergency suits right under the seats: a small yellow sticker advised of that resource, should the sirens sound.