Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [29]
His privacy was over.
Too bad, no air for a giggle, the girl thought.
Though perhaps she didn’t think in words. He wasn’t sure anymore. They now leaked both symbols and emotions between themselves.
You’ ll have to settle for a smile, he thought right back at her.
And he obliged.
Such an amazing thing to move one’s lips again, after five centuries. For real—no simulation, this. And though their eyes drank hungrily of the amazing world of Martian polar night, laid open before their night-vision, Nathi also listened to the song of their body, deep inside.
Up in the dark sky, bright blue streaks—the ion exhaust trail of their shuttle. It had given a parting boost to their magnetic wings, propelling them sideways and almost horizontally. They would cover quite a distance before running out of steam.
It was a stroke of genius. Who would have thought back in the castle that the girl would leave the shuttle, falling naked into freezing, almost airless space? Just in case, Nathi had hacked one of the smart spacesuits they had discovered inside the shuttle, programming it to pretend that it was occupied. As he expected, no one had dared to shoot the shuttle down in the first few minutes of its flight, without asking their superiors—the girl was much too valuable—while he and the girl had been busy cleaning their skin of that damn marker nanodust, in order to regain invisibility.
Thank goodness that the enemies had weapons all set on stun. The low energy blasts flowed around their polaritonic skin like water. Not so the nanodust. To clean it was a job for nanobots, of exquisite finesse. For even one remaining nano-speck could break their disguise.
It worked. The shuttle was still roaring away—the center, hopefully, of the castle’s attention—while they gained more distance, thanks to their good initial gliding speed, enough to carry them across the polar cap. They flew above the branching web of “Martian spiders,” their fractal hairlike cracks looking so much like “lightning flowers”—the Lichtenberg figures just like those seen on victims of a lightning strike or in art venues, captured in artful slabs of polymer. A lightning frozen, splayed over the Martian ground.
How can one not marvel at Mars? Both majesty and beauty were in its stark landscapes, wrought by the electromagnetic force but often looking as if made by water—that had fooled so many people once.
O Mars the beautiful! Too bad he couldn’t sing.
This leg of their journey didn’t take much toll on their energy supply, for they were warm enough at their speed. But, best of all, the Fairy was still alive. She must be, for the castle showed no sign of launching orderly pursuit. What if she’s winning? The girl beamed, and Nathi wondered if more posthumans in the castle joined their side, other than the guard that let them go. Why not attack right now? Why did the Dragon Guard decide to wait?
They soon knew why.
In front of their eyes, the empty shuttle suddenly changed course. At first, it slowed down somewhat; then it turned, bound for the castle. No interceptors had been sent in order to intimidate the non-existing pilot. No warning shots. Some-how, someone at the castle had regained control remotely, had hacked the navigational brain of the shuttle speeding at full power and ordered it back.
Which meant that backdoors had been built into the shuttle, masterfully hidden. Who knew whether the Flamethrower healer wizards had discovered every backdoor in his mind?
Nathi knew that there was a Watcher at the castle, recently arrived. A woman who had lost her son, about the girl’s age, to the Flamethrowers not long ago, in a prisoner exchange gone wrong. He didn’t expect mercy. Watchers, the highest-ranking wizards, had full access to the e-World’s layers far below anything a posthuman could perceive. And they had special cyber-faps of their own. Any one of them could wrap the best posthuman hacker around their fingers while asleep.
The castle’s silence was deceptive. He was certain