"Because your radio's out," Clarke said distantly.
Surprised, he checked the diagnostics. "No, it's working fine. In fact, I think I'll call in right now and ask what the fuck this is all about…"
Thirty seconds later he turned back to her. "How did you know?"
"Lucky guess." She didn't smile.
"Well the board's green, but I can't raise anyone. We're flying deaf." A doubt tickled the back of his mind. "Unless the gel's got access we don't, for some reason." He linked into the lifter's interface and called up that vehicle's afferent array. "Huh. What was that you said about machines giving the orders?"
That got her attention. "What is it?"
"The lifter got its orders through the Net."
"Isn't that risky? Why doesn't the GA just talk to it direct?"
"Dunno. It's as cut off as we are right now, but the last message came from this node here. Shit; that's another gel."
Clarke leaned forward, managing somehow not to touch him in the crowded space. "How can you tell?"
"The node address. BCC stands for biochemical cognition."
The display beeped twice, loudly.
"What's that?" Clarke said.
Sunlight flooded up from the ocean. It shone deep and violent blue.
"What the fuck—"
The cabin filled with computer screams. The altimeter readout flashed crimson and plummeted. We're falling, Joel thought, and then, no, we can't be. No acceleration.
The ocean's rising…
The display was a blizzard of data, swirling by too fast for human eyes. Somewhere overhead the gel was furiously processing options that might keep them alive. A sudden lurch: Joel grabbed useless submarine controls and hung on for dear life. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clarke flying back towards the rear bulkhead.
The lifter clawed itself into the sky, lightning crackling along its length. The ocean raced after it, an enormous glowing bulge swelling towards the ventral port. Its murky light brightened as Joel watched; blue intensifying to green, to yellow.
To white.
A hole opened in the Pacific. The sun rose in its center. Joel flung his hands in front of his eyes, saw the bones there silhouetted in orange flesh. The lifter spun like a kicked toy, rammed deep into the sky on a pillar of steam. Outside, the air screamed. The lifter screamed back, skidding.
But it didn't break.
Somehow, after endless seconds, the keel steadied. The readouts were still online; atmospheric disturbance, they said, almost eight kilometers away now, bearing one-twenty. Joel looked out the starboard port. Off in the distance, the glowing ocean was ponderously collapsing upon itself. Ring-shaped waves expanded past beneath his feet, racing to the horizon.
Back where they had started, cumulus grew into the sky like a soft gray beanstalk. From here, against the darkness, it looked almost peaceful.
"Clarke," he said, "we made it."
He turned in his chair. The rifter was curled into a fetal position against the bulkhead. She didn't move.
"Clarke?"
But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.
Unregistered contact, it complained.
Bearing 125x87 V1440 6V5.8m1sec-2range 13000m
Collision imminent 12000m
11000m
10000m
Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.
"Ah, shit," Joel said.
Jericho
One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.
Not yet. Not yet. Soon.
She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied her any refuge in darkness.
Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.
That was where it would come from.
Oh God. If only there was another way.
It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it would've taken.
Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.
But she couldn't blame the gel. It simply didn't know any better, according to the systems people; it was just doing what it thought it was supposed to. And by the time anybody knew differently— after Scanlon's cryptic interview with that fucking thing had looped in her head for the hundredth time, after she'd taken the recording down to CC, after their faces had gone puzzled and confused and then, suddenly, pale and panicky— by then it had been too late. The window was closed. The machine was engaged. And a lone GA shuttle, officially docked securely at Astoria, was somehow showing up on satcams hovering over the Juan de Fuca Rift.
She couldn't blame the gel, so she tried to blame CC. "After all that programming, how could this thing be working for ßehemoth? Why didn't you catch it? Even Scanlon figured it out, for Christ's sake!" But they'd been too scared for intimidation. You gave us the job, they'd said. You didn't tell us what was at stake. You didn't even really tell us what we were doing. Scanlon came at this from a whole different angle, who knew the head cheese had a thing for simple systems? We never taught it that…
Her watch chimed softly. "You asked to be informed, Ms. Rowan. Your family got off okay."
"Thank you," she said, and killed the connection.
A part of her felt guilty for saving them. It hardly seemed fair that the only ones to escape the holocaust would be the beloved of one of its architects. But she was only doing what any mother would. Probably more: she was staying behind.
That wasn't much. It probably wouldn't even kill her. The GA's buildings were built with the Big One in mind. Most of the buildings in this district would probably still be standing this time tomorrow. Of course, the same couldn't be said for much of Hongcouver or SeaTac or Victoria.
Tomorrow, she would help pick up the pieces as best she could.
Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe the quake won't be so bad. Who knows, that gel down there might even have chosen tonight anyway…
Please…
Patricia Rowan had seen earthquakes before. A strike-slip fault off Peru had rebounded the time she'd been in Lima on the Upwell project; the moment magnitude of that quake had been close to nine. Every window in the city had exploded.
She actually hadn't had a chance to see much of the damage then. She'd been trapped in her hotel when forty-six stories of glass collapsed onto the streets outside. It was a good hotel, five stars all the way; the ground-level windows, at least, had held. Rowan remembered looking out from the lobby into a murky green glacier of broken glass, seven meters deep, packed tight with blood and wreckage and butchered body parts jammed between piecemeal panes. One brown arm was embedded right next to the lobby window, waving, three meters off the ground. It was missing three fingers and a body. She'd spied the fingers a meter away, pressed floating sausages, but she hadn't been able to tell which of the bodies, if any, would have connected to that shoulder.
She remembered wondering how that arm had got so high off the ground. She remembered vomiting into a wastebasket.
It couldn't happen here, of course. This was N'AmPac; there were standards. Every building in the lower mainland had windows designed to break inwards in the event of a quake. It wasn't an ideal solution— especially to those who happened to be inside at the time— but it was the best compromise available. Glass can't get up nearly as much speed in a single room as it can racing down the side of a skyscraper.