Equinox Page 9

  Luka gave his friend a prickly look. “Fine,” he said. He touched the panel and Charlie’s workspace was replaced with his. He opened up the permissions so she could follow along and began to navigate. When he found the right record, he leaned forward and read it again. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “It’s supposed to be delivered to the Elephant Island Broker Post.”

  “That explains it,” Charlie said. She bit her lip and thought it over for a moment. “Actually,” she said, “that doesn’t explain anything. Why would power brokers want mining equipment?”

  “No idea,” Luka said. “Maybe to trade?”

  Charlie shrugged. “At least we figured it out before you brought the whole thing down here. Go stack it under the hangar and forget about it. It’s someone else’s problem now.”

  “Wait,” Luka said. He continued navigating the manifest.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think this is actually for the brokers.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s in too many crates.”

  “So?”

  “So the more crates a shipment requires, the more you pay for delivery. This thing could have been packed in half the number of crates, and power brokers of all people would know that. If there’s one thing they understand, it’s how to save a few caps.”

  “How many crates is it?”

  “Seventy-nine. It could have easily been done in half that. And the components are packaged so that each crate is almost exactly the same weight, which is completely impractical.”

  “Then who do you think it’s for?”

  Luka looked up at Charlie and his workspace blinked off. “This thing is packaged to go into orbit,” he said. “It must be going to the Coronians.”

  “What would the Coronians want with mining equipment?” Charlie asked. “And if they did want mining equipment, why wouldn’t they just assemble it themselves?”

  “Parallelization,” Luka said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe their assemblers are busy with other things. More important things. They probably have far more power than they have time, so they’re outsourcing to us.”

  “Time for what? What do you think they’re doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Luka said. “But I can guarantee you one thing. Whatever it is, it’s in their best interests rather than ours.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  HONEYPOT

  THERE WAS ANOTHER GAME AYLA liked to play on the docks of the Nanortalik Pod System, though this one she did not play until she was a teenager, and she always played it alone. She called it “stowaway” and the objective was to sneak onto as many ships in the port as she could, explore as much of them as possible, and get back off without being detected. Although she was not above liberating the occasional ration pack from the galley, or even some form of exotic trinket she calculated wouldn’t be missed, the point was never to plunder. Instead, the game was entirely about stimulating her imagination—envisioning herself living aboard all the different types of ships. She imagined waking up in the top bunk of a cramped and narrow cabin; sitting shoulder to shoulder with her shipmates in front of a hot boxed meal at a long table in the mess hall; using a folding door to close herself inside a closet-size room and having to use a tiny stainless steel head with corrosion bleeding through white painted pipes. She loitered among bridges where she imagined herself learning to operate equipment as old as magnetic compasses, mechanical marine chronometers, and infrared sextants, and as modern and sophisticated as BCIs, PCIs (Prehensile-Computer Interfaces), shipmate AIs, and holographic interfaces. Below deck, she learned to identify several types of convoluted and arcane machinery, and in her mind, spent her days repairing propulsion and electrolysis systems, cleaning air scrubbers, and patching bulkheads with a high-pressure emergency adhesive guns. As she passed lockers of environment suits, she wondered what it would be like out in the open beyond all hermetically sealed walls, and to be able to carry your containment with you wherever you wanted to go.

  She tried to envision the ports and other pod systems all the different merchant and cargo ships visited, and all of the interesting and dangerous things they inevitably encountered out on the open water. Her forbidden tours elicited an excitement that collected in the pit of her stomach and sometimes even traveled down to become almost unbearably erotic in their taboo.

  Gradually Ayla’s fantasies became as real to her as her own life, and almost equally important to her. She began writing them down as narratives in silicon-paper notebooks, recalling details from notes and footage captured with a polymeth tablet during her clandestine expeditions. The stories became a series that naturally came together into what she believed was the very first novel ever written in the Nanortalik Pod System. She spent months not only editing, refining, and rewriting, but building up the courage to give a copy of her work to her father. When she finally did, he immediately and wordlessly set the notebook aside while he finished eating a late dinner. It stayed there on the table for days, untouched, until Ayla grew to hate the sight of it. She still remembered very clearly the morning she walked by and noticed that it was missing, and then all the mornings that followed during which she waiting for her father to say something about it. Anything. When finally she asked him if he had read it, he said that he had, and then said no more, and that night, Ayla snuck onto a ship with the mysterious and evocative designation Accipiter Hawk etched into her magnificent bow, and this time, she did not sneak back off.

  She remained hidden in stowage for three days and was finally apprehended in the galley on the fourth while refilling her water canister and trying to locate rations. Her hair was long then, and it was matted and oily, and she had not changed her clothing since she’d boarded. The man who caught her spoke with an accent she did not recognize and positioned himself between her and the door. He watched her for a long time and when he smiled, Ayla could see that his teeth were eroded down to what looked like steely gray slivers. The man wondered aloud what he ought to do with her. He told her that stowaways had no rights or protections aboard the ships on which they were apprehended, and that they traditionally became the property of the man who found them. He was leaning against a shallow cooking surface, and when he pushed himself up, Ayla could tell that he was about to move toward her, but then he stopped when another man entered the room. The man was not as tall and was so boyish that Ayla was surprised to see the first man exhibit immediate deference. The smaller man’s voice was as soft as his complexion as he introduced himself as Costa Verde, the captain of the Accipiter Hawk.

  Ayla was fed and given poorly fitting but clean clothing, and she was assigned a private cabin right beside the captain’s. Costa personally informed the rest of the crew of Ayla’s presence, and told them that, since it was too late for them to turn back, she would probably be with them for a full circuit, but that he was sure that she would be treated respectfully, and as their guest. Ayla was encouraged to use the radio on the bridge to talk to her father before they were too far away, but she refused, so Costa raised him personally and reassured the man that his daughter would be returned healthy and unharmed on their next northern approach.

  That night, Ayla could not stop thinking about the man in the room beside her. She wondered if Costa Verde was his real name, but then she wondered what a real name was anyway. Pod systems maintained meticulous census records and usually controlled their populations with great care, assigning everyone unique IDs, encryption keys, and cataloging their biometric signatures. But when your home was the space between ports and pod systems, there was nobody to track you, and your name was whatever you decided to tell people it was. Maybe names out on the sea were more real than those you inherited or were assigned long before the world even knew who and what you really were.

  As the Accipiter Hawk continued her southerly route, Ayla learned all she could about the ship. She had the basics of navigation down in only a few days, and within a week, knew h
er way around the ship almost as well as any of the crew. The Hawk’s onboard computers were no more complex than her workspace back home, and she learned how the ship was steered and calibrated, and how to read the diagnostic metrics. At night, she recorded everything she learned that day and sketched the Hawk as well as she could from schematic renderings. The bow was a majestic bulbous sphere with the bridge’s row of viewports appearing from the outside as a tinted visor. The shape not only gave the vessel great forward strength, but it reduced drag as it moved through the dense atmosphere at an average of twenty knots with top speeds closer to thirty-five. Ayla thought the Accipiter Hawk looked more like a ship that should be exploring the solar system or even the galaxy than endlessly circumnavigating the globe.

  When they stopped at their first port, Ayla was not permitted to leave the ship. Despite her objections, the Hawk was sealed and Ayla was charged with what she interpreted as the mundane and rudimentary task of babysitting the vessel. She was sullen and irritable when the crew returned the next day until she saw the gift that Costa brought her. It was an old mechanical monarch butterfly that looked so real that Ayla almost could not accept that it was not alive. Its wings absorbed ambient light to power a simple radar system that helped it find safe surfaces to perch atop while batting its ornate wings, and a miniature spectrometer gave it a predilection for bright pastels. The toy was initially confined to Ayla’s cabin until it eventually escaped and found its way onto the bridge, where it had made its home ever since.

  But perhaps even more meaningful to Ayla wasn’t what Costa came back with, but what he came back without. The man who had originally discovered Ayla in the galley was with them when they left, but not when they returned. Ayla decided not to ask about him, even when she was offered the chance to perform some of the man’s bridge duties. She enthusiastically accepted, believing that becoming an official member of the crew would get her off the ship during future stops, but she underestimated the solemnity with which Costa took his pledge to her father. At every subsequent port and pod system, the routine was the same: the rest of the crew disembarked while Ayla was left safely sealed inside, alone with her temper and indignation.

  Although she could not see the rest of the world with her own eyes, she nevertheless learned a great deal more about the way it worked than what she had been taught back home. She hadn’t realized the extent to which what remained of humanity relied on the Coronians and their highly discriminative distribution of electricity. The primary industry on the planet was moving raw materials into orbit for which the Coronians paid in power while the rest of the economy was an exercise in dividing and subdividing that power among capacitors that could be traded for an almost unimaginably eclectic assortment of goods and services. But no matter how many layers deep the economy ran, there was simply no getting around the fact that the Coronians were the keystone—the keepers of the lifeblood on which all the technology that kept humanity alive depended.

  Costa made the decision to skip several ports in order to get Ayla home sooner, and as soon as they were within radio range, the Hawk began hailing. Communications were unpredictable due to the movement of global radiation bands so the fact that they received no response did not concern them at first. But when they got to within a day of the southern coast of Greenland, Costa could no longer conceal his concern. Something was wrong.

  Even though Nanortalik was Ayla’s home, she remained on the ship once again as the crew disembarked and investigated. They returned in less than ninety minutes and Ayla could see just about everything she needed to know in Costa’s expression. It was impossible to say who did it, or why, but thermal scans confirmed that there were no survivors. Costa told her that they had covered up the worst of it, and that he would take her back to say her good-byes, and to see if there was anything she wanted to take with her. Ayla thought about the notebook she left with her father, but decided that she did not want it back—that she wanted no artifacts or reminders or vestiges of her former life. The Accipiter Hawk was her home now. It had been her home for almost nine months, and it would almost certainly be her home for the rest of her life, however long or short that might be.

  The next time the Hawk came into port was the first time Ayla disobeyed a direct order. Instead of remaining on the bridge, she followed the rest of the crew down to the primary airlock and began suiting up with the rest of them as best she could. Costa stopped inspecting his gear and watched the girl, but neither he nor anyone else intervened. Instead, he showed her what she was doing wrong, and helped her lift her air and power cartridge, and made certain it was properly seated. She was no longer their guest. Ayla was a permanent member of the crew now, and as such, she would have to accept not only additional responsibility, but also additional risk.

  Costa later told Ayla that the Cape Spear Port off the eastern coast of Newfoundland would not have been his recommendation for her very first excursion. The port was a ramshackle collection of dry-docked vessels and shipping containers connected by poorly welded corrugated tubes. The crew wore respirators and kept a close eye on their radiation badges as they scoured the dim convulsion of shops and stalls for supplies. Although it was probably one of the worst ports Ayla could remember seeing, to her, it was also magnificent—second only to the Accipiter Hawk herself in its marvel. Although she was told multiple times to let the rest of the crew do all the talking, Ayla initiated several conversations, and even though she eventually attracted the attention of a group of men who had to be persuaded by Ayla’s entire crew to seek amusement elsewhere, the majority of the people she interacted with were surprisingly warm and almost as starved for information and interaction as she.

  The need for comfort over the loss of Ayla’s home gave her and Costa the opening they’d both been waiting for, and it wasn’t long before the room beside the captain’s quarters was vacant once again, and remained so on the captain’s orders as a buffer against the racket of an insufferably creaky bunk. Costa knew that the concept of marriage still existed in most pod systems and, offering a sliver of smoothed tungsten carbide pipe, proposed to her off the coast of Chile in the closest thing to a decent café that he knew of. In the ensuing ceremony, Costa used his own authority as captain of the Accipiter Hawk to declare himself and Ayla forever connected.

  It was a little over three years and hundreds of stops later that Ayla, while on lookout, noticed something that neither she, nor the rest of the crew, had ever seen before. It wasn’t particularly unusual to come across flotsam on the approach to ports—almost always useless garbage dumped prior to picking up fresh supplies—or at points out on the open sea where radiation winds converged, but to come across dozens of blips in entirely open and neutral water suggested a very recent catastrophe. The signature Ayla was able to get off the ship in the center of it showed that it was partially submerged, badly listing, and clearly taking on water. Its bilge pumps were completely silent and long-range scanners showed nothing threatening in the vicinity. Costa ordered that the Hawk’s reconnaissance drones be deployed to get a closer look at the both the ship and the carbon fiber crates that appeared to be finding their way out of the breached hold. The drones detected not a single heat signature or heartbeat.

  The first crate they hoisted aboard contained weapons of a sort Ayla had never seen before. The crew inspected the long, angular rifles—sighting them and activating slides with a great deal of satisfying metallic clamor—though they lamented that there was no ammunition. The second crate contained chemicals and various forms of laboratory equipment. Both the name of the ship as recorded by the drones, and the ornate patterns of crosses painted on her bow, began to make sense. The Resurrection was posing as some sort of evangelical vessel, but was actually moving very high-value cargo between some decidedly un-Christian parties.

  All nine members of the crew of the Hawk congregated on the bridge to deliberate their next move: pick up the rest of the crates and go, or approach the ship and check for survivors. When Costa called for a v
ote, the entire crew—including Ayla—voted for taking the crates and leaving since the drones detected no signs of life. But as he tended to do whenever a vote did not go his way, Costa reminded everyone that the Hawk was not, in fact, a democracy, and despite the general sentiment, ordered a cautious approach. If there was nobody alive, they would take every last crate and never look back. But the thing he prized most in his life—his wife—had come about not as a result of raiding and scavenging, but of putting the lives of people first, and he was not about to change course now.

  Before Ayla could even ask, she was told that she would stay behind. The tone her husband used and the way he looked at her made her accept what she already knew was true—that she had no experience with, or training for, these types of excursions; that someone needed to stay aboard the Hawk to provide them with support; that if anything went wrong over there, she would only be a liability.

  Ayla positioned the drones around the Resurrection, combined their feeds into a single interactive model, and put on a headset to monitor communications. Other than the boarding party, the ship remained entirely lifeless. It was a beautiful vessel, Costa reported. one of the most modern he had ever seen, and other than the fact that it was sinking, it appeared to be in very good shape. The crew began discussing the possibility of trying to patch her up enough that they could tow her to the nearest dry dock. The price they could get for a ship like that would probably be hundreds of times what it would cost them to repair it. one of the crew might have even suggested that they keep it and sell the Hawk instead, but Ayla wasn’t sure because by that point, she had stopped listening. Something was bothering her—something about the crates they brought on board. She’d probably seen thousands of crates on the docks of Nanortalik over the years, and hundreds more since leaving home, but these were different. The holes in the bottom weren’t right. And if they were vented, they should’ve taken on water and already sunk. She went down to the cargo traps where the crates were stowed and when she shone a light into one of the holes at the bottom of one of the crates, she instantly understood everything. She didn’t know exactly how they worked, but she could tell they were miniature propulsion systems, and that the crates could be maneuvered and steered. The Resurrection was a honeypot—a situation intentionally staged to appear innocuous and even opportunistic, but whose purpose was to ensnare the unsuspecting, the overly confident, and the greedy. Or, in this case, the naively compassionate.