Up Against It - M. J. Locke [35]
And now she could see the wreckage. A cluster of fabric bubbles, lit from within, covered the devastated warehouses. They and the storage tanks and reactor vessels crept by underfoot at Phocaea’s nearside pole, which surrounded the cable well and commuter touchdown pads. Assembler tubing lay about in a jumble, and teams of suited work crews were cleaning up, testing, and prepping the equipment, piping, and damaged manifold. A field of insectoid robots crept across the surface of the graphite slick that covered most of the crater floor, harvesting the mineral piles deposited by the other day’s runaway disassemblers. She could see the neon-yellow police tape as she neared. That meant the warehouse itself where Kovak had made his suicidal plunge was still locked up. She frowned, and made a note to contact Sean. The investigation was important, but getting disassembler systems back online was even more so.
The power plant was not visible from here, nor were the metals refining plants, but the docks, shipyards, and mine tailings lay at the edge of 25 Phocaea’s horizon. Between those and the warehouses lay a chain of gamma and X-ray lasers—gaxasers—that encircled Phocaea’s belly: the converted-crater antenna array that transmitted Phocaea Cluster’s images and voices to Earthspace for “Stroiders.”
Their “Stroiders” contract was for exactly one year, and they had four months and thirteen days to go. At which point Phocaea would own fifty-one percent of the array. They would have unthinkable bandwidth. They would be the Upside communications node of the outer system. This was the only reason Phocaeans had agreed to such a sustained intrusion on their privacy.
Her turn came. Jane slowed—maneuvering, pneumojets firing—and the touchdown pad rose to meet her soles. As her sticky-boots grabbed the pad, she disengaged and sheathed her tether (escape velocity here was a good one hundred ten kilometers per hour; she wasn’t likely to attain that accidentally). Nearby, Cable Klosti Alpha cranked slowly in its well. The vibrations tickled her feet and calves.
She shuffled with the other commuters to the nearby banks of lifts. They entered the lock, and then stepped into the antechamber and filed into the commuter lift lines. After a brief wait, they boarded. Several of her fellow commuters glanced up at the glassy “Stroiders” nubs in the lift’s corners. They grabbed handholds and the door closed. All tumbled lazily, bumping one another, as the lift accelerated into the stroid’s rocky interior. Down became up.
People began removing their visors. Jane recognized a few of them. After a hesitation Jane did likewise (if she did not, they would all stare and end up recognizing her anyway). Her ears popped, and she yawned. Her fellow passengers did double takes as they recognized her.
“Jane!” “My God, what a terrible thing—” “Poor Marsha—poor Carl! Did you hear—?” “Commissioner, how long will we be on emergency rations?” “What’s the latest on the lock failures?”
She answered their questions as concisely and reassuringly as she could without lying, wishing she had more good news. Soon the lift entered the Hollow, an immense cavern about a kilometer below Phocaea’s surface. The lift slowed as Zekeston, the great habitat wheel, filled the lift’s windows.
You had to look quickly if you wanted a glimpse of Zekeston. The Hollow was not much larger than the city itself. The spotlights on the descending lift cast a shrinking cone of light onto the city’s hull, giving a brief glimpse of the giant wheel’s Hub. As they decelerated, down became up again, below them, it turned on the axis defined by these lifts and the Klosti Alpha cable. Jane caught a glimpse of machinery and suited humans, each with their own tiny lights, moving along the city’s hull. Then with a sickening lurch, the lift stopped its descent, and rotated to match Zekeston’s momentum. The lift sank through Zekeston’s hull and entered the Hub. The lift doors opened. Cold air stung Jane