“Don’t.” Blip moved back to the control panel. “I’ll take us back down.”
Syn spun. Her eyes widened. “The bomb?”
“We’re calling it that?”
“What is it?” Syn asked.
“It’s a cobalt device.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you remember watching The Deserter?”
“I don’t think we finished that one.”
“Think big bomb.”
“Was that what blew up Zondon?”
“I think so.”
“Can we bury it?”
Blip sighed. “Won’t work.”
“Why is there a bomb on the ship at all? Did the Sisters create it?”
“To melt ice.”
Syn stopped and stared at Blip. “Ice?” Her eyes were narrowed.
“Seriously. Ice. One of the concerns is that we’d get to Kapteyn’s B and most of the water would be frozen in the caps like it was on Mars. So they prepared to deal with it the same way.”
“With a bomb?”
“They bombed the ice caps on Mars, and it melted the water.”
“They were idiots.”
“The Martians? The Colonists?”
“All of them. The Builders.”
Blip nodded.
Syn continued, “And Neci. She’s just like them.”
“How?”
“Insane. Who hunts for a bomb? Where did she get it? We never came across a bomb in any of our searches.”
Blip remained oddly silent.
Syn frowned and crossed her arms. “Where did she get the bomb?”
Blip matched her frown. “I think she had help.”
“From who? The burly’s?”
“The what?”
“Her creatures. The lumbering things that attacked us when we first arrived. She called them golem.”
“Maybe.” He nodded. “Maybe from Olorun. Maybe.”
“The plans!” Syn exclaimed, “She discovered the plans to the entire ship. Every detail. That’s it. That’s how she found it.” Syn stared at him, but her attention snapped back toward the base as she remembered the Ecology. She waved her arms and swam toward the doors facing inward. She rested her hand on the glass. “We’re not moving, Blip. How long have we been just sitting here?”
Blip nodded. “A bit. I’ve halted the Jacob.”
“I need to get down there. I need to stop it.”
“You can’t do that.”
She turned around. Her eyes were wide. Her voice shook. “Then what are we going to do?”
“You’re not deactivating the bomb. I don’t know how much longer we have before it goes off. It may go off in the time it takes to get back down the surface.”
“Then start going! We can’t waste any time.”
“What are you going to do when we get there?”
“I can figure that out on the way.”
Blip growled, “If you think we’re going to land and then you just take—”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
Blip allowed a short twerp that wasn’t a word. The Jacob hummed to life and began to descend. “It is my job.”
“You don’t need to do it.”
Blip floated up to her to look her in the eyes. “It is. You want to know why your Sisters killed their companions? Because we can’t stop giving you the right advice or what we think is right.”
“She said they killed them because they talked to Olorun. I didn’t believe her at first. But I’m beginning to think she’s right. Blip, is Olorun alive?
Blip stayed motionless for a long moment and then gave a nod. “Yes. She is. But she is insane and—”
Syn did not allow him to finish the thought. “Have you been telling her about me?”
Blip didn’t respond for a moment, then he gave a slight nod. “She’s very interested in you.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t…”
“Don’t say that!”
“I don’t.”
“Ugh,” Syn grimaced. “Fine, I won’t go to the bomb. What can we do?”
“I’m trying to communicate with the other bots. But they’ve done something with the code on this Disc. There’re all sorts of foreign layers. I could probably get through it and find a way to figure out what’s happening, tap into their info net, but I don’t think I could do it quickly.”
“So you have no way of knowing where they are or if any one of them survived.”
Blip shook, “You have to realize that they probably didn’t make it.”
Syn frowned. “We need to try.”
“Okay, let me think.”
With each moment, the gravity increased and Syn found herself closer and closer to the floor of the Jacob.
“I think I may have it,” Blip floated back to the control panel in the corner. A few red symbols popped up. Syn didn’t understand them at all.
“Yes?” Syn asked. She waved her hands to encourage him to speed up.
“I think there may be a base net communication port not too far from this tower’s base.”
“And?”
“And if they’re at all connected to the network in this Disc, even if they don’t use it, they should be able to get something from one of the info hubs.”
“What were they for?”
“Do you care?”
“We have a few minutes. Tell me the story,” Syn insisted.
“That’s just it. There’s a hub that ties in all bot communication. I never used it on our Disc. It was a backup unit in case primary communications failed. There’s an access point near the parks and the lake.”
Syn shook her head. “There’s no lake in this world.”
Blip narrowed his eyes.
“She burned it all.”
“Fine. We’re in Jacob 14. The comm hub is a good three kilometers away from here.”
“Then we run.”
“Three kilometers?”
Syn leaned in, “Will the hub let us find them?”
“It’ll send them a message. If there’s any alive, they’ll hear it. What do you want to say?”
“I… I don’t know,” Syn said, “We need to get them away.”
“Come to the needle?”
“Yes. Tell them I’ve come back for them. That it’s okay to use the Jacobs.” Syn remembered standing at the edge of the Desert of Nod as the host of bots gathered to see her off. She remembered her last words to them. “Tell them I’m keeping my promise. We’re taking them to Paradise. To our Disc.” She glanced up toward the sunstrips.
“You want to rescue them!” Blip rolled his eyes.
Syn nodded her head but went back to the window. She breathed onto the glass, fogging it up, and traced her finger in the haze. Before she realized what she was doing, she had written KERWEN in a rough handwriting. When she finished, she stared at the letters and then through them, out to the dark clouds they were now passing through. Gravity had reasserted and her feet were flat on the floor. She sighed. “How long did it take her to fall?”
Blip paused and then said, “She might still be falling.”
Syn spun, wide-eyed.
Blip said, “We were really high up. It’ll take a while for her to drop to where gravity pulls her into free-fall.”
The image stunned Syn. Kerwen slowly descending, gaining a bit of speed each time, unsure when she’d be pulled down in a straight descent. Did she try to do something to stop her fall? Is she still up there? Could we do something? Could we save her?
Blip said, “No.”
Syn raised her eyebrows. She knew she hadn’t spoken.
Blip smiled, “I’ve been around you long enough. That was your ‘Can we help someone?’ face. It isn’t going to happen. There’s absolutely nothing that we can do. I don’t even know how to find her.”