Taka Ouellette had talked about cancer.
Finally her heart slowed to jackhammer rhythm. She forced herself to move. She squirmed on her belly past the lip of the first polygon and into the concavity of the second; at least the ridges between provided a foothold against the slope. The grade lessened with each meter. Before too long she dared to crouch, and then to stand upright.
The wind blew harder against chest than legs—some kind of distance-cubed thing going on with the static field—but even against her head it wasn't as strong as it had been up in the crane. It blew her levitating hair into her face every time she turned around, but she barely noticed that inconvenience next to the ongoing convulsions of her diveskin.
Lubin was kneeling near the lifter's north pole, on a smooth circular island in a sea of triangles. The island was about four meters across, and its topography ranged from thumbnail-sized fiberop sockets to hatches the size of manhole covers. Lubin had already got one of those open; by the time Clarke reached him he'd put whatever safecracking tools he'd used back into his pack.
"Ken, what the fuck is going on?"
He wiped blood from his cheek with the back of one hand. "I changed my mind. I need you along after all."
"But what—"
"Seal up." He pointed at the open hatch. Dark viscous liquid lapped in the opening, like blood or machine oil. "I'll explain everything once we're inside."
"What, in there? Will our implants even wor—"
"Now, Lenie. No time."
Clarke pulled up her hood; it wriggled disquietingly on her scalp. At least it kept her hair from flying everywhere.
"What about the rope?" she said suddenly, remembering.
Lubin stopped in the middle of sealing his face flap. He glanced back at the gantry cranes; a fine white thread lashed back and forth from the nearest, a whip in the wind.
"Can't be helped," he said. "Get in."
Viscous, total darkness.
"Ken." Machine voice, vocoder voice. It had been a while.
"Yes."
"What are we breathing?"
"Flamethrower fuel."
"What!"
"It's perfectly safe. You'd be dead otherwise."
"But—"
"It doesn't have to be water. Hydroxyl groups contain oxygen."
"Yeah, but they built us for water. I can't believe napalm—"
"It's not napalm."
"Whatever it is, it's got to gum up our implants somewhere down the road."
"Down the road isn't an—isn't an issue. We'll be fine if they last for a few more hours."
"Will they?"
"Yes."
At least her diveskin had stopped moving.
A sudden tug of inertia. "What's that?" she buzzed, alarmed.
"Fuel feed. They're firing."
"At what? There wasn't any hot zone."
"Maybe they're just being cautious."
"Or maybe Seppuku was really there all along and we didn't know it."
He didn't answer.
"Ken?"
"It's possible."
The surge had pushed her against something soft, and slippery, and vaguely flexible. It seemed to extend in all directions; it was too smooth to get any kind of a grip.
They weren't in a tank, she realized. They were in a bladder. It didn't just empty, it deflated. Itcollapsed.
"Ken, when this thing fires…I mean, could weget sucked out into—"
"No. There's a—grille."
Vocoders stripped most of the feeling out of a voice at the best of times, and this syrupy stuff didn't improve performance any. Still, she got the sense that Lubin didn't want to talk.
As if Ken's ever been King of the Extroverts.
But no, there was something else. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.
So she floated there in amniotic darkness, breathing something that wasn't napalm, and remembered that electrolysis involved tiny electrical sparks. She waited and wondered if one of them would ignite the liquid passing through her and around her, wondered if her implants were about to turn this whole lifter into an airborne fireball. Another victim of the Lenies, she mused, and smiled to herself.
But then she remembered that Lubin still hadn't told her why she was here.
And then she remembered the blood on his face.
In Kind
By the time they reached their destination, Lubin was blind.
The frayed cable on the crane hadn't just gashed his face; it had torn his hood. The lifter's incendiary saliva had seeped through that tear before the diveskin could heal. It had diffused across his face. A thin layer had pooled beneath his eyecaps, corroding his corneas down to pitted jelly. A calm, mechanical voice in the darkness had told Clarke what he expected: the ability to tell light from dark, at least. Perhaps some vestigial perception of fuzzy blobs and shadows. The resolution of actual images was very unlikely. He would need her to be his eyes.
"Jesus Christ, Ken, why did you do it?"
"I gambled."
"You what?"
"We could hardly have stayed on top of the lifter. There are sterilization measures even if the wind didn't blow us off, and I wasn't certain how corrosive this—"
"Why didn't we just walk away? Regroup? Do it again later?"
"Later we could well be incapacitated, assuming your friend is still contagious. Not to mention the fact that I filed a false report and haven't called in since. Desjardins knows something's wrong. The more we delay the more time he has to prepare."
"I think that's gullshit. I think you've just got such a hard-on for getting back at him that you're making stupid decisions."
"You're entitled to your opinion. If I had to assess my own performance lately, I'd say a worse decision was not leaving you back on the Ridge."
"Right, Ken. Achilles had me on a leash for the past two weeks. I was the one who read Seppuku ass-backwards. Jesus, man, you've been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for five years just like the rest of us. You're not exactly at the top of your game."
Silence.
"Ken, what are we going to do? You're blind!"
"There are ways around that."
Eventually, he said they'd docked. She didn't know how he could tell—the sloshing of liquid that contained them, perhaps, some subtle inertia below Clarke's own perceptual threshold. Certainly no sound had tipped him off. Buried deep in the lifter's vacuum, the bladder was as quiet as outer space.
They crept out onto the back of the beast. It had come to rest in an enormous hanger with a clamshell roof whose halves were sliding shut above them. It was deep dusk, judging from the opacity of the sky beyond. The lifter sloped away in all directions, a tiny faceted planet birthing them from its north pole. Light and machine sounds came from below—and an occasional human voice—but these upper reaches were all grayscale.
"What do you see?" Lubin said in a low voice.
She turned and caught her breath. He'd peeled back his hood and removed his eyecaps; the gray of his skin was far too dark, and pebbled with blisters. His exposed eyes were clusters of insectile compound bumps. Iris and pupil were barely visible behind, as if seen through chipped, milky glass.
"Well?"
"We—we're indoors," she told him. "Nobody in sight, and it's probably too dark for drybacks to see us up here anyway. I can't see the factory floor, but it sounds like there are people down there. Are you—fuck, Ken, did it—"
"Just the face. The 'skin sealed off everything else."
"Does it—I mean, how do you—"
"There's a gantry on an overhead rail to the left. See it?"