But mechas had no cargo space, so she’d taken a trike with balloon-tires as big as tractor-wheels, tugging a train of all-terrain cargo pods of emergency gear. It took four hours to reach the university, by which time, the survivors had scattered. She lofted network-node bumblers on a coverage pattern, looking for survivors’ radio-emissions. The bumblers self-inflated, but it was still sweaty work getting them out of their pod and into the air, and even though she worked quickly – precise Meta quick, like a marine assembling a rifle blindfolded – everything was smeared with blowing soot by the time they were in the sky.
“Fuck this,” she said into her breather and turned the A.T.V. and its cargo train around in a rumbling donut. The survivors would be nearby, upwind of the ash-plume, and out of range of the heat that must have risen as the campus burned. She’d seen a demo of a heat sunk building going up before. It had been terrifying. In theory, graphene-doped walls wicked away the heat, bringing it to the surface in a shimmer, keeping the area around the fire below its flash point. The heat sink was itself less flammable than everything else they used for building materials, so if the fire went on too long, the heat sinks heated up to the flash point of the walls, and the entire building went up in a near-simultaneous whoom. In theory, you couldn’t get to those temperatures unless eight countermeasures all failed, strictly state-actor-level arson stuff.
She tried not to think about state actors and why they’d want to reduce the Niagara Peninsula’s Walkaway U campus to char.
The bumblers reported in. Something had used them to connect to the walkaway net, a couple klicks upwind, just as she’d thought. With luck, it would be refugees and not other would-be relief workers, or worse, looter-ghouls.
The bumblers used their low-powered impellers and ballast to opportunistically maneuver themselves into a stable triangle over the zone, then used signal timing to generate coordinates. They got pictures, but all she saw was canopy, a distance away from the burn. It was hard to tell, but she thought there may be clearings in there that served as fire-breaks.
She kicked the trike and headed that way, rolling her tongue around her mouth to escape the bitter taste.
Not long after, she had to dismount. The brush was too thick for the A.T.V. to doze, let alone the cargo train. She stretched, touched her toes, swung her arms. The drive had punished her butt and back. Her hands ached from gripping the handlebars. She thought about vaping, maybe a little crack, but when she moved her mask aside a fraction of a millimeter, her mouth and nose flooded with bitter air blowing from the ash field. Fuck it, Meta would be plenty, even if the dose was wearing off. She should have made it in patch form, so she could slap more on without breathing the toxic mix of plastic, carbon, and barbecued human.
The walk into the woods relieved her muscles and mind. The birds sang alarmed but reassuring songs as they assessed the fire damage. She used to go out on the rooftop of her dad’s place listen to the birds calling in the Don Valley. The sound was primally reassuring.
As she got closer, she looked and listened for signs of human activity, but it was weirdly pristine. She was about to turn back to the trike to retask the bumblers, assuming they’d glitched, when she spotted the antenna.
It was an artificial tree, not a good one, but hidden amidst others so she didn’t spot it immediately. It was a pine, like a plastic Christmas tree. Amidst its arms were the characteristic protrusions of a phased-array, the same as you’d find around the Banana and Bongo. She kicked where its roots should be, and saw it was solidly in the soil.
“Hello?” Where there were antennas, there’d be cameras, if only to send pictures when things went blooey. They’d be pinheads she couldn’t spot, but nearby. “Hello?” she said again.
“This way,” a woman said. She was wrinkled and slender with skin the color of teak and gray hair in a ragged bob. She’d come out of the woods on the antenna’s other side, and she was wearing a breather, but looked friendly. Maybe that was the Meta.
Iceweasel crossed to her as she walked into the bush. Iceweasel followed. They came to a granite protrusion, Canadian shield thrusting through the soil. The woman gave it a shove and it slid aside on a cantilever. It was silent, and spoke of talented engineering. It weighed a fucking ton, as Iceweasel discovered when she didn’t get out of the way and was nearly knocked on her ass when it brushed her.
“Come on,” the older woman said. Behind the rock was a narrow corridor with rammed-earth walls, lit by LED globes punched straight into the dirt with crumbly impact craters around each one. The woman squashed past her – Iceweasel saw that her wrinkles were dusted with soot, making them seem darker than they really were – and shut the door with a thud that resonated through the soles of Iceweasel’s boots.
“Up ahead,” the woman said. Iceweasel pressed on. Around a bend, she stepped unexpectedly into a perfectly round tunnel, taller than her, with smooth walls and tooling marks from a boring machine. The walls were hard and clear, the lighting here more thought-through, spaced with machine precision.
The strange woman removed her mask. She was a beautiful woman of Indian – or Desi – descent, gray in her eyebrows and a fine dark mustache. She smiled, her teeth white and even. “Welcome to Walkaway U’s secondary campus.”
[II]
HER NAME WAS Sita. She gave Iceweasel a hug. Iceweasel explained that she’d brought supplies.
“We have a lot here,” she said, “but there are things we’ll need to rebuild.”
They walked the corridor, towards distant voices. “We’re grieving, of course, but the important thing is all the work got out – samples, cultures. The data was always backed up, so no risk there.”
“How many died?”
Sita stopped. “We don’t know. Either a very large number or none at all.”
Iceweasel wondered if Sita had lost her mind, through grief or smoke poisoning or an exotic bio-agent. Sita’s mask dangled around her neck and Iceweasel’s own mask pulled her hair and chafed her face so she pushed it up her forehead, clunking her forgotten goggles, which ended up in her hair.
Even with these annoyances, the relief of breathing freely and seeing without smudged lenses brought up her spirits.
“Can you explain?”
“Probably,” she said. “But maybe later. Meantime, let’s get a work gang and unload your supplies.”
The subterranean corridors turned into a subterranean amphitheater supported by pillars and roof-trusses and something more substantial than aerosol to keep the ground from caving in.
“It started as a supercollider,” Sita said as she gawped. There was a hospital in one corner, a mess, and workspaces where soot-blackened people had intense discussions that were almost fist-fights. “The borer ran for months, doing its own thing. But the physicists got what they were looking for somewhere else – don’t ask me, particle physics isn’t my discipline – and moved on. By the time they left, we were done. Then when we branched into scans and sims, the old timers worried about being blasted from the Earth and built a bolt hole. Took a couple years, mostly automated. It’s not pretty, but it’ll do. I didn’t even know it was here until yesterday when the fire started. Surprised the hell out of me! I don’t know what was weirder, that those people had managed to build an underground city or that they’d kept it a secret.
“Or maybe it wasn’t secret? Maybe it was just me who didn’t know. That’s paranoid, though. Don’t you think?”