Wireless (10 page)

Sagan nods and returns to using his utensils. “That’s very thought-provoking,” he says, as he gratefully raises another mouthful to his lips. “If this is based on hard intelligence it . . . Well, I’m worried. Even if it’s inference, I have to do some thinking about this. I hadn’t really been thinking along these lines.”

“I’m sure if there’s an alien menace, we’ll defeat it,” Gregor assures him, as Sagan masticates and swallows the neurotoxin-laced meatball in tomato sauce. And just for the moment, he is content to relax in the luxury of truth: “Just leave everything to me, and I’ll see that your concerns are communicated to the right people. Then we’ll do something about your dish, and everything will work out for the best.”

Maddy visits John regularly in hospital. At first it’s a combination of natural compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on this continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated, and Maddy can convince herself that she’s helping him feel in touch, motivating him to recover. Later on it’s a necessity of work—she’s keeping the lab going, even feeding the squirming white horror in the earth-filled glass jar, in John’s absence—and partly boredom. It’s not as if Bob’s at home much. His work assignments frequently take him to new construction sites up and down the coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours, picking at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen pinch-faced resentment of a couple fifty years gone in despair at the wrongness of their shared direction. So she escapes by visiting John and tells herself that she’s doing it to keep his spirits up as he learns to use his prostheses.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he tells her one afternoon when he notices her staring. “If you hadn’t been around, I’d be dead. Neither of us was to know.”

“Well.” Maddy winces as he sits up, then raises the tongs to his face to nudge the grippers apart before reaching for the water glass. “That won’t”—she changes direction in midsentence—“make it easier to cope.”

“We’re all going to have to cope,” he says gnomically, before relaxing back against the stack of pillows. He’s a lot better now than he was when he first arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening, but the aftereffects of the mock-termite venom have weakened him in other ways. “I want to know why those things don’t live closer to the coast. I mean, if they did, we’d never have bothered with the place. After the first landing, that is.” He frowns. “If you can ask at the crown surveyor’s office if there are any relevant records, that would help.”

“The crown surveyor’s not very helpful.” That’s an understatement. The crown surveyor is some kind of throwback; last time she went to his office to ask about maps of the northeast plateau he’d asked her whether her husband approved of her running around like this. “Maybe when you’re out of here.” She moves her chair closer to the side of the bed.

“Dr. Smythe says next week, possibly Monday or Tuesday.” John sounds frustrated. “The pins and needles are still there.” It’s not just his right hand, lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude affair of padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had to be amputated. He was having seizures when Maddy reached the hospital, four hours after he was bitten. She knows she saved his life, that if he’d gone out alone, he’d almost certainly have been killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?

“You’re getting better,” Maddy insists, covering his left hand with her own. “You’ll see.” She smiles encouragingly.

“I wish—” For a moment John looks at her; then he shakes his head minutely and sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They feel weak, and she can feel them trembling with the effort. “Leave Johnson”—the surveyor—“to me. I need to prepare an urgent report on the mock-termites before anyone else goes poking them.”

“How much of a problem do you think they’re going to be?”

“Deadly.” He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again. “We’ve got to map their population distribution. And tell the governor-general’s office. I counted twelve mounds in roughly an acre, but that was a rough sample, and you can’t extrapolate from it. We also need to learn whether they’ve got any unusual swarming behaviors—like army ants, for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether any of our insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to start spinning out satellite towns next year, he’s going to need to know what to expect. Otherwise, people are going to get hurt.”
Or killed,
Maddy adds silently.

John is very lucky to be alive: Dr. Smythe compared his condition to a patient he’d once seen who’d been bitten by a rattler, and that was the result of a single bite by a small one.
If the continental interior is full of the things, what are we going to do?
Maddy wonders.

“Have you seen any sign of her majesty feeding?” John asks, breaking into her train of thought.

Maddy shivers. “Turtle tree leaves go down well,” she says quietly. “And she’s given birth to two workers since we’ve had her. They chew the leaves to mulch, then regurgitate it for her.”

“Oh, really? Do they deliver straight into her mandibles?”

Maddy squeezes her eyes tight. This is the bit she was really hoping John wouldn’t ask her about. “No,” she says faintly.

“Really?” He sounds curious.

“I think you’d better see for yourself.” Because there’s no way in hell that Maddy is going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons the mock-termite workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or the feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into the mock-termite pen through the chicken-wire screen.

He’ll just have to see for himself.

The
Korolev
is huge for a flying machine but pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He’s a fighter jock at heart, and he can’t stand Navy bullshit. Still, it’s a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn’t have a cockpit, or even a flight deck—it has a
bridge
, like a ship, with the pilots, flight engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around the captain’s chair. When it’s thumping across the sea barely ten meters above the wave tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour, it rattles and shakes until the crew’s vision blurs. The big reactor-powered turbines in the tail pods roar, and the neutron detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind them tick like demented deathwatch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled down below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the engine rooms as possible. It’s a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has difficulty resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists because whenever he loses concentration his gut instincts are telling him to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is no aviator’s friend, and skimming across this infinite grey expanse between planet-sized landmasses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by instinct, a sailor.

They’re two days outbound from the new-old North America, forty thousand kilometers closer to home and still weeks away even though they’re cutting the corner on their parabolic exploration track. The fatigue is getting to him as he takes his seat next to Misha—who is visibly wilting from his twelve-hour shift at the con—and straps himself in. “Anything to report?” he asks.

“I don’t like the look of the ocean ahead,” says Misha. He nods at the navigation station to Gagarin’s left: Shaw, the Irish ensign, sees him and salutes.

“Permission to report, sir?” Gagarin nods. “We’re coming up on a thermocline boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time surrounding uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we’re on course for home, but we haven’t charted this route, and the surface waters are getting much cooler. Anytime now we should be spotting the radiators, and then we’re going to have to start keeping a weather eye out.”

Gagarin sighs: exploring new uncharted oceans seemed almost romantic at first, but now it’s a dangerous but routine task. “You have kept the towed array at altitude?” he asks.

“Yes, sir,” Misha responds. The towed array is basically a kite-borne radar, tugged along behind the
Korolev
on the end of a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. “Nothing showing—”

Right on cue, one of the radar operators raises a hand and waves three fingers.

“—Correction, radiators ahoy, range three hundred, bearing . . . Okay, let’s see it.”

“Maintain course,” Gagarin announces. “Let’s throttle back to two hundred once we clear the radiators, until we know what we’re running into.” He leans over to his left, watching over Shaw’s shoulder.

The next hour is unpleasantly interesting. As they near the radiator fins, the water and the air above it cool down. The denser air helps the
Korolev
generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns grey and murky, and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored bridge windows like machine-gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in case they hit a downdraft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for takeoff runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn’t flying as usual as far as Gagarin’s concerned, and the one nightmare all ekranoplan drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose first at cruise speed.

Presently the navigators identify a path between two radiator fins, and Gagarin authorizes it. He’s beginning to relax as the huge monoliths loom out of the grey clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots shouts: “Icebergs!”

“Fucking hell.” Gagarin sits bolt upright. “Start all boost engines! Bring up full power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine degrees and get us the hell out of this!” He turns to Shaw, his face grey. “Bring the towed array aboard, now.”

“Shit.” Misha starts flipping switches on his console, which doubles as damage control central.
“Icebergs?”

The huge ground-effect ship lurches and roars as the third pilot starts bleeding hot exhaust gases from the running turbines to start the other twelve engines. They’ve probably got less than six hours’ fuel left, and it takes fifteen minutes on all engines to get off the water, but Gagarin’s not going to risk meeting an iceberg head-on in ground-effect. The ekranoplan can function as a huge, lumbering, ungainly seaplane if it has to; but it doesn’t have the engine power to do so on reactors alone, or to leapfrog floating mountains of ice. And hitting an iceberg isn’t on Gagarin’s to-do list.

The rain sluices across the roof of the bridge, and now the sky is louring and dark, the huge walls of the radiator slabs bulking in twilight to either side. The rain is freezing, supercooled droplets that smear the
Korolev
’s wings with a lethal sheen of ice. “Where are the leading-edge heaters?” Gagarin asks. “Come on!”

“Working, sir,” calls the number four pilot. Moments later the treacherous rain turns to hailstones, rattling and booming but fundamentally unlikely to stick to the flight surfaces and build up weight until it flips the ship over. “I think we’re going to—”

A white and ghostly wall comes into view in the distance, hammering toward the bridge windows like a runaway freight train. Gagarin’s stomach lurches. “Pull up, pull up!” The first and second pilots are struggling with the hydraulically boosted controls as the
Korolev
’s nose pitches up almost ten degrees, right out of ground-effect. “Come on!”

They make it.

The iceberg slams out of the darkness of the storm and the sea like the edge of the world; fifty meters high and as massive as mountains, it has lodged against the aperture between the radiator fins. Billions of tons of pack ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and groaning with the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The
Korolev
skids over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they’re into the open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an expanse of whiteness, they are also clear of icy mountains.