Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (26 page)

I had heard the phrase, but it didn’t mean much to me because I’d never had one. I guess they’re pretty debilitating. I hoped he could continue to function because I couldn’t do this all on my own. Maybe if I could keep him talking, it would help.

“So . . . you ever told anyone about it?”

“Mother and Father know. And now you.”

“Well, your secret’s safe with me. But hell, Patrick, it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s just something you have.”

“I’m fucking exhausted, Polly.”

“I’m beat, too. I could sure use a rest, and maybe a nap. But we can’t do that up here, can we? We’d fall out—”

Okay, a damn stupid thing to say, but I was still getting used to this fear-of-heights business, I really didn’t realize that could set him off. There’s not an acrophobic bone in my body. It would be like being afraid of . . . I don’t know, shoes or something.

He moaned, and clamped on to my waist so hard I was sure I’d have bruises. He stopped pedaling entirely.

“Ease up! Ease up, darn it! Get your feet on the pedals.” I felt his grip loosen again and could feel the motion through my own pedals and the chain as his feet groped around. Finally, he was pushing again.

There wasn’t much I could do about our other problem. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was exhausted. I’d been running around for a long time now, much of yesterday and all night. It wasn’t long until sun-on. I was thirsty, hungry, sleepy, and all the muscles in my legs were screaming at me. I was getting about half the power I needed from Patrick, and I knew he didn’t have any more in the gas tank, either. I was about two-thirds of the way to the central axis and the sun, which helped a lot, but I didn’t dare dip much lower. And I could feel that happening even though the heavy cycle had no positioning system. I kept working the wings to stay in a straight line, but my own positional sense, honed by years of skypool, told me I was slowly losing the battle.

Most of the low-grav “mountain” communities (of which there are about a dozen at each pole) are named for high places, places associated with real mountains back at Old Sun. There is a Geneva, a Nepal Town, a Machu Picchu, an Olympus. The place I was looking for was called Timberline, and was pretty high up, where the greenery and terraced farms gave way to barren rock, painted white. Any higher, and it would be too steep and too close to the sun. Most of the buildings were built out on stilts, hanging over the land below. The views were spectacular, and the living was easy, with the low grav. A lot of elderly and disabled lived up in that area. Timberline had two nursing homes that I knew of.

To my surprise, I spotted Timberline easily enough. Even better, it was almost straight ahead and a little down—that is, toward the interior surface—from my present position. Say, a quarter mile from where we were.

“Keep it up, Patrick, we’re almost there.” He made no reply.

Soon I could see individual buildings. The village was taller than it was wide, with the homes and other buildings stacked up above one another. The homes were pretty fancy. Most of them were dark, but a few had the lights of early risers. I didn’t remember the place that well, but the main feature was the funicular railway, Angel’s Flight, that climbed the increasingly steep slope from the train station down below. This was the last stop on the line, and a string of faint lights marked its path. I knew the place I was headed was near the station, in the middle of town.

With my last gasp of energy, and without much help from Patrick that I could detect, I reached a small plaza next to the funicular station.

“We’re here,” I said, as I set down in a landing I normally wouldn’t have been proud of. This time I was happy to have landed at all. I was never so grateful for low gravity in my life. I don’t know just what it was, but it couldn’t have been more than a fifth of a gee. Made me very light on my toes, even as exhausted as I was.

“Really? We’re on firm ground?”

“Put your feet down and feel it. Then get off and kiss it if you want.”

He got off but didn’t kiss the ground. I busied myself inspecting the cycle to see if it had sustained any damage. It looked good to me. I quickly folded it up and slid it into the carrying case. I hefted it and my backpack of other goodies and looked around.

“Any chance of getting something to eat?” Patrick asked. “I’m feeling a little faint.”

I was starving, too. Also very thirsty. I looked around, and saw a small automated convenience store a block away. We went over there, both of us stumbling a little as we got our low-grav sea legs under us. It was just a little kiosk with a screen.

“Got any cash?” I asked.

It turned out that between us we had just enough to buy two cheeseburgers and one bottle of water. I punched in the order and fed our meager coins and bills into the slot.

The machine printed our burgers in a minute. The worst kind of food you can get, I know, right out of the injectors, but they were hot, and thick, and greasy, and had melted cheese dripping out of the sides. They looked very realistic, just like real food. I’d seldom tasted anything so delicious. We wolfed down the burgers, passing the bottle of water between us, until it was all gone. While we ate, the machine printed a nice little complimentary miniature of the Timberline Lodge, multicolored, very detailed. Those things are made of marzipan, which is mostly sugar. I wanted all the calories I could take aboard, so we broke it in two and ate it.

We were just wadding up the trash and dumping it in the container when my phone rang.

“Phone,” I said to Patrick. Then I answered it, not sure I really wanted to. Someone was whispering on the other end. I couldn’t make out a word.

“You’ll have to speak up, whoever you are. And I’m hanging up in ten seconds if you don’t identify yourself.”

“I can’t talk much louder,” the voice said. “Cassie, is that you?”

“It’s Polly,” I said, my heart in my throat. I was pretty sure I recognized the voice.

“It’s Aunt Elizabeth,” she said, confirming my hunch.

“Aunt Elizabeth!” I breathed, nodding to Patrick. “What’s—”

“I may not be able to talk long,” she said. “I may have to hang up. If I do, I’ll call you back. Now listen . . .”

I listened.

Cassie:

Well, shit.

I’ll admit to a bad moment there when Sheila informed me we couldn’t get back in the way we’d come out. But surely Travis had made provision for a thing like that. Like, what if the hangars were damaged?

Sheila confirmed that.

“At the North Pole, there are docking facilities. In fact, most of the biggest ships for ferrying things down to a planet at our destination are located up there in the north.”

“Yeah, but that’ll be where the mutineers are most likely to be, isn’t it? Near the control room, or in it?”

“I believe they are. Information is still sketchy, the war is still going on, but certain orders emanating from the control room lead me to suspect it is already occupied.”

“Then . . . are we stuck out here?”

“Not necessarily. There is a third way in. I believe it may still be accessible.”

“Where is it?”

“Where would you put it?”

Sometimes an AI can be too human for its own good. What was she doing, playing games?

Maybe she sensed this because she spoke again.

“The third way in is right where you would expect it to be. At the South Pole.”

Oh, what wonderful news. Let’s plunge right into the dragon’s mouth.

—

It didn’t take long to get there, as I told her to do it as quickly as possible. I strapped in, and she burned the engines, hard, for almost a minute, then almost at once flipped around and burned them again. I was tossed around in my chair like a beanbag, but it was sufficiently well padded that I didn’t break any bones or bruise anything. I didn’t ask her how many gees we had pulled, but I knew it was a bunch.

I watched the scene change quickly outside. We came roaring around the curved, irregular, pockmarked stern of the ship, and the engines came into view.

The engines.

I had seen videos of them, of course, and illustrations of them compared to a man, a skyscraper back at Old Sun, the Egyptian pyramids, and so forth, but there was just no way to grasp the size of the things without seeing them with your own eyes. And other than the engineering crews who went out regularly to inspect them for signs of strain, very few people had done that. The stern of
Rolling Thunder
was a place that just felt all wrong for a human being to be. The engines made me feel very small in a way the infinite blackness of space couldn’t quite achieve. And the power pouring out of them seemed to make space itself vibrate.

What they resembled was radio telescopes from the twentieth century. They were dishes supported on massive struts that allowed them to turn in any direction to listen to different parts of the sky. Those instruments had to be massively braced with steel girders to support the weight.

There were six engines, spaced evenly in a hexagon around the flat plane that was the stern of the ship. They were massive, a third of a mile high, with the struts spreading out to distribute the stresses, the bottoms of the legs plunging into the bare rock and anchored there. At the very tops of these structures were giant baskets, open at the top, woven around the silvery balls of squeezer bubbles a thousand feet in diameter.

“You’re not going to get too high, are you?” I asked Sheila.

“Don’t worry, I’ll hug the ground. All the energy is going straight up, away from us. They’ve been running for twenty years, and the danger zones are well-known. You see that there is no heat damage to the rock beneath us.”

She was right, of course, but sometimes logic doesn’t offer a lot of reassurance. I looked at the six parallel columns of furious energy leaping into space behind the ship and thought about how we would be instantly vaporized if we even got too close.

As we got nearer and nearer, I began to realize how
really
huge the things were. Each girder was much wider than my little ship, but the spaces between them were also much wider than they had appeared from a distance. With nothing to give me a sense of scale, they went from being big objects in the distance, to being massive structures in the middle distance, to being gigantic, gargantuan, colossal, enormous. Brobdingnagian. Put that one in your thesaurus and think even bigger.

In a short time, we were at the axis, the actual South Pole of the rotating rock. There was a structure there, a domed building.

“How about it, Sheila? Can we get in?”

“I’ve just sent the signal, and there it is. The lock is opening.”

I didn’t realize how hard I’d been gripping the armrests until I let go.

—

Before I left the ship, Sheila told me where to find a small device I could use to get in touch with her at any time. It was the size of a wristwatch, designed to fit Travis, so I had to tighten it quite a bit. I armed myself with everything I could carry without slowing myself down: pistols, a few grenades, night-vision glasses, gas mask. Some I attached to a webbing belt, the rest I stuffed into a backpack designed to carry lethal stuff. None of it weighed anything there at the pole, but it would get heavier for every foot I descended.

I wasn’t happy with the clothes I was wearing. If we were going to get into a fight, the casual stuff wasn’t a great idea. I needed something more serious.

Travis had prepared for that, too. There was a unit that had liquid fabric in black, dark green, or brown. Sheila took my measurements and fed cloth into the printer, and in two minutes I had a snug, supple set of coveralls in basic black. I printed a pair of black boots. Just putting the things on made me feel somehow stronger and more sure of myself. We’re coming for you, assholes!

I opened the lock cautiously, pistol in hand, looking all around. No one was in the hangar, which was almost empty. Just a few small ships like Sheila, and one larger freighter. All quiet as a tomb. I floated out, twisted, got my feet down to lock onto the metal floor.

Sheila guided me to the right air lock to enter the interior. I stepped inside and was about to cycle the lock when I was struck, hard, by the feeling that I was leaving something important behind. I stopped myself, ran a check in my mind of all the things I had put into the bag and attached to my belt, and all the things I had left behind. There didn’t seem to be anything back there that I could reasonably use, and that would be light enough to carry without impeding me. It was driving me nuts . . . and then I had it.

Papa. Damn! I just didn’t feel right leaving him back there suspended in the timeless black bubble.

It was a problem. Leaving him behind began to seem less and less an option the more I thought about it. But talk about a bulky, intractable object to bring along! I’d rejected the long guns for that reason; Papa would be twice as inconvenient, like taking a baby into combat. Sorry, Papa, but you and I know your fear of weightlessness, your anbarophobia, would make you helpless here at the pole, and your other phobias would get in the way of any violent action I might encounter.

But there was nothing for it. I had to take him out, and I had to take him along.

—

Papa looked around, saw he was in the same place, and that I was there. He gasped as he felt the weightlessness, but he managed not to get sick. I had a bag in my hand just in case.

I remembered the last time he came out of a bubble and promptly uttered the words that had led to all this mess. He didn’t have anything so dramatic this time, but there was something unusual. After his initial reaction and a quick smile at me, he frowned and looked thoughtful.

“Something just popped into my head,” he said. “I might have an idea, me. I might have me an idea.”

Uh-oh. Not another one. Or, hooray, another one! I didn’t need my world shaken up again, but on the other hand, his new brainstorm might be the best thing that ever happened to us. One never knew.

“Papa, we have to leave the ship—”

“What time is it? I mean, what year? You don’t look no older.”

“I’m just like I was. It’s only been a few hours.”

“’Kay.”

“We need to leave here and get you to a safe place where you can think about your new idea.”

“’Kay.” He frowned. “I’d like you to take me home,
cher
. I need to do some thinkin’, and my lab be a good place for that.”

“We can’t do that right now, Papa. Can you just trust me on that?”

“’Kay.”

He was off in some place of his own, some Papa-planet where his damaged mind wandered through byways not half a dozen humans had ever entered. And some places where
no one
but him had ever entered. It was a stroke of luck, really. Whatever had happened to him in the bubble this time was apparently so profound that he was hardly aware of his surroundings. It made him a lot easier to manage.

I found another satchel and stuffed it with bottles of water and some food Sheila produced. He might have to hide away for a few days. Best not to order out unless he had to.

I couldn’t think of anything else. I strapped the satchel tightly to him so it wouldn’t float away, and tugged him like a big balloon toward the door of the air lock. Once more I cautiously stuck my head out. Nobody was there. Just a bare corridor, like so many underground spaces. I pulled him through and down the hall.

—

Papa was still amazingly passive and uninvolved as I stuffed him into an elevator and got his feet firmly on the floor. He gulped and looked sick for a moment as we started down and got a dose of Coriolis force pulling us sideways, but the weight gradually began to build up, and we settled firmly with a local “down,” and he seemed okay with it.

“Papa, are you all right?”

“I been better,
cher
, but I’m improvin’.”

“That’s good. Listen, I’m going to get you to a safe place, then I’ve got some things I need to explain to you.”

“I figgered. First, you tell me I can’t go home right now. Then you say you takin’ me to a safe place. I guess somethin’ bad goin’ on. Right?”

“Yes. Something bad.”

He sighed. “Somebody comin’ after me again?”

“I don’t want to tell you all of it right now, okay?”

“You do what you think best, Cassandra Ann.”

—

Sheila called me when we got off the elevator.

“I’ve been in contact with your sister.”

“Polly! Is she okay?”

“She’s safe for the moment.”

“Can I call her?”

“Phone service is erratic at the moment. People have noticed it by now, and are starting to disbelieve the official explanations coming from the mutineers. Unrest is growing.”

Where would that lead? I wondered. We had been a peaceful society for my lifetime aboard the ship. But we hadn’t been stressed much. Everything had functioned well up to now. The sun had turned on and off without fail. Social squabbles were never much of a problem, limited to fistfights, hardly ever to murder. There were no groups that I’d ever heard of so dissatisfied as to resort to violence. What would happen if people had to choose up sides?

“Where is she?”

“Not far away. I’ll guide you to her.”

The elevator soon deposited us in a long, long corridor that was dimly lit in the distance. Eventually, we came to a lock and got in. The lock cycled and opened onto a short dirt pathway that led to a paved cycling and walking track. It was only ten yards or so to the little path, which would be a circular one, running around the smaller diameter of the interior at this elevation. We came out onto the path, and Papa stopped.

“Oh, my, ain’t that lovely?” He was looking out over the interior, which was still dark, sparkled with a million lights, and stretched six miles to the North Pole. It was just minutes to sun-on, and it sure was lovely, but we didn’t have time for this.

“We’ll look at it later, Papa.”

We hadn’t gone far around the curve when the sun came on. We made our way along the trail and soon were approaching the hillside hamlet of Timberline.

This is a place my sister and I had visited during summer vacation a few years before with Mama and Papa. We swam in the low-grav pool though Polly and I preferred stretching out on a lounge at poolside in our skimpiest bikinis and waiting for the boys to drop by and try their luck. Also, you can really get some height on the three-meter springboard, and you have a lot of hang time to do flips and such.

There were also three covered ski slopes, which we all tried out. It wasn’t very satisfying to me. You get a real slow start, even if the slope is almost vertical. But you gain weight quickly as you get lower, and by the time you reach the bottom, you’re going fairly fast. We quickly graduated from the bunny slope to the medium, but after that I gave it up and never went back. It just wasn’t as exciting as skypool.

Even Papa went down the bunny slope, falling a lot and having a great time. He’s not afraid of
every
thing, and he’s quite strong.

This was where Mama tried out skycycling for the first and last time. Polly and I rode on each side of her, trying to act as training wheels, sort of, but she got away from us and took a fall, and broke her arm. Not a bad one—I’ve had worse twice—but enough to put her off flying.

I didn’t want to just walk in with Papa. If possible, I’d have liked to keep his presence a secret. So I found a little picnic table in a small park near the lodge and sat him down there. The park was enclosed in mesh, an aviary. Aside from ducks, we don’t allow many birds to roam free in the ship. Many of them would destroy crops, and some would overpopulate and take over. So we keep exotics—songbirds and tropical birds with splendid colors—in small enclosures like that one. Papa was happy there. He loved birds. There was a dispenser that sold cups of apple juice to feed the lorikeets, which would perch on your shoulder or head or hand. I bought him a cup with a few coins, not wanting to use credit.

Timberline Lodge, like so many buildings in the ship, was inspired by a building back on Old Earth. It wasn’t nearly as big as the original, on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon, not having nearly as many rooms, but the cavernous lobby made of wood and stone was the same. It was a lovely space, looking out over the interior of the ship. There was a huge fireplace, with a faux fire burning, and a balcony encircling the main floor, leading to the rooms. I entered and looked around, didn’t see Polly, and started for the front desk.