Skye Object 3270a (14 page)

They would have to sneak off the elevator car, and somehow make their way to the construction zoo, where a great ship was being slowly assembled.

The construction zoo was not really a place. It was more like a gathering of parts and materials and pieces of the evolving great ship, along with the tentacled construction beasts known as lydras, a worker's habitat, and the lifeboat—all of it in orbit beyond the end of the elevator column. The trouble was, the zoo orbited at its own speed, and that was much slower than the speed at which the elevator column turned with the planet. So sometimes the zoo might be just a few kilometers away from the column's end, but at other times it might be ninety thousand kilometers away, on the other side of the world.

Whenever Skye asked Devi how they were going to get around all that, he just shrugged and said, “We'll work something out.”

They spent the afternoon in the city library, going over every report ever filed on the lifeboat, learning as much as they could about its structure and capabilities. Tannasen's reports were not nearly as exciting as Skye expected. Mostly, they recorded position information, spectral analyses, radar profiles, communications attempts . . . she almost nodded off more than once.

Then she found Tannasen's personal journal. On the day the lifeboat was opened he had written, We have found a healthy baby girl. Nameless. Parentless. It is impossible to look on her sleeping face without wondering why. Why is she here? What miracle let her be found? We may never know.

There were also reports from the team of scientists who had examined the lifeboat after it was brought to Silk, and from a couple of researchers who had investigated it again during the intervening years.

By the end of the day they had uncovered two interesting facts.

First, the lifeboat was not the inert piece of abandoned equipment Skye had envisioned. Its life support system still functioned, so that even after twelve years in the construction zoo with no passenger to care for, it continued to maintain a livable habitat inside the pod. Even more intriguing, a researcher who had visited the lifeboat several years ago reported a surge of activity in the air filtration system during the first few minutes she was in the pod.

“That would make sense,” Devi said, “if the lifeboat was trying to identify her. It could pull a few loose cells through the air filter, analyze them, and know whether or not this visitor was you.”

The second interesting fact was that Tannasen and
Spindrift
were due to return to the city in only nine days. Devi's eyes sparkled at this news. Skye could guess why: “An elevator will be going up the column to carry supplies to the ship.”

“Sooth,” Devi said. “And we'll need to be on it.”

Skye tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Devi? I think I'm getting an idea.”

Skye's plan required Zia's help. That was a problem, because Skye didn't want to drag Zia into another mess. “Let her make up her own mind,” Devi urged. “None of us are in this for the fun of it, Skye. What we're doing really matters.”

So she set it up with Zia to meet them by the soccer fields in Splendid Peace Park. It was evening, and the clear canopy that enclosed Silk was pumping sunset colors over the city's slopes. The rosy light was reflected in the windows of the towering apartment complex of Old Guard heights. Festival guns atop the heights fired pellets into the air that burst open into brilliant streamers that dissolved as they fell to ground, releasing delicious, tantalizing scents.

Skye and Devi wandered past the crowds of spectators gathering for the evening game, to an isolated stretch of lawn. Skye laid out a picnic blanket while Devi opened a basket of take-out food. Ord slipped out of it, melting around the edge of the basket.

Zia showed up a few minutes later. “So you two made up?”

Skye smiled. She was sitting cross-legged on the blanket. Devi was lying down beside her, watching the changing colors of the canopy. “For the moment anyway,” Devi said.

Zia nodded. “I didn't think it would take long. So where's Buyu?”

Skye's smile faded. She exchanged a guilty look with Devi, while Zia's eyes narrowed. “You didn't tell him? Skye! He was really worried about you today.”

Neither of them answered.

It didn't take Zia long to draw a conclusion. “Skye! You traitor. You're up to something, aren't you?” She glared at Devi. “You and the boy stargazer.”

“Zia!”

Devi spluttered, trying to hide a laugh.

Zia wasn't amused. She cocked her head back, staring down the length of her nose at him. She looked ready to take someone apart. “What's going on, Skye? Tell me everything. Right now.”

“Tell her,” Devi urged. “Let her make up her own mind.”

“Zia, you could get in trouble!”

“I've
been
in trouble! Sometimes it's worth it. But I hate it when people make decisions for me. Especially when they do it ‘for my own good.'”

Skye nodded guiltily. “Sorry.”

So. Nothing else to do now but talk. Zia would not shut up about it until she had the full story. “We need your help—”

“Wait,” Zia said, holding up a hand. “Ord!”

The little robot peeped cautiously around the corner of the picnic basket, one tentacle winding around the handle like a vine.

Zia said, “Ord, order a message bee for me. Send it to Buyu. Tell him to meet us here.”

“Message bee sent,” Ord assured her, then it ducked out of sight again.

“All right, Skye. You were saying . . . ?”

“I was about to say that we need your help getting into the lydra house.”

Zia's face relaxed a little. She sat down on the blanket, looking thoughtful. “Now why would you want to do that?”

L
ydras were artificial animals, designed to work in the zero-gravity environment of the construction zoo where the great ship was being assembled. They ranged from pocket-sized midgets to huge, tentacled construction beasts. Farmers like Zia's dad raised lydras in water tanks in the industrial levels beneath the city. Skye was interested in them, because a cargo of freshly grown lydras was sure to be sent up to the construction zoo every time an elevator car made the run.

“We don't all need to go,” Skye said as she pushed one of Ord's tentacles out of her face.

It was a few days later and she was dressed again in her electric blue skin suit. She carried a pack on her back, stocked with a few pieces of equipment, and a generous supply of liquid nutrients—enough to fuel both herself and her skin suit for the next few days. She stood on a narrow transit platform deep inside the industrial levels of the inner city. It was an ugly place, hemmed in by gray walls and a low roof. Wide double doors bore the legend “Adovna Lydra House - Entrance by Permission Only.” Ord nervously patted her cheek.

Skye had told Yulyssa she was going to make an evening jump, and then spend the night with Zia. Zia had told her dad she was going to spend the night with Skye.

“Oldest trick in the book,” Devi groaned when he heard about it. “Couldn't you be more original?” Easy for him to say. He was living on his own in Ado Town and didn't need to make excuses to anybody.

Buyu had put on a superior look. “I moved out too. Of course, it's the third time I've gotten my own place, so nobody's too worried about it. My dad says I'll give up and come home again in a few days.”

They had all laughed as they crammed together in a single transit car, but their mood had turned serious when the transit car's DI asked them their destination. “Adovna Lydra House,” Zia had said stiffly.

“Adovna Lydra House is a restricted area,” the car replied in a softly troubled feminine voice.

“We have a pass.” From a pocket of her gold skin suit Zia produced a key card she had borrowed from her dad three days before. She had used it to take them on a tour of the lydra house, and then had held on to the key instead of returning it. Her dad asked about it once, but a shipment was going out, and he had a lot on his mind.

Zia slipped the key card into a slot on the transit car's console.

Skye stared at her gloved hand: it was shaking. “You okay, Zia?”

“Sure.”

The key card was good for five days.

“Your entry is approved,” the car said warmly as it pulled away from the transit station, accelerating smoothly along its track. “We will arrive at Adovna Lydra House in four point two minutes.”

The journey had seemed faster than that. Now they stood on the industrial station fronting the lydra house, watching the car slip smoothly away through the gel membrane that sealed off the airless transit tunnel.

Skye looked around at her friends, determined to try one last time to persuade them to rethink what they were doing. “We don't all need to go,” she insisted. “In fact it's silly. If this plan works, then I'm the only one who really needs to reach the lifeboat.”

“Sure,” Zia said. “But you could get into trouble along the way.”

“You could need help working through a problem,” Devi added.

Buyu started striding toward the double doors, his pack swaying on his back. “Face it, Skye,” he called over his shoulder. “We'll get in just as much trouble for knowing about this little adventure as we will for going along—so we might as well go along, right? We planned it that way.”

“You're all crazy!” Skye told them—not for the first time. Then she smiled. “But I'm glad you're with me. Okay. Let's go.”

It was early evening, though there was no way to tell that in the windowless passages of the industrial levels. The farmers who worked in the lydra house had gone home hours ago, including Zia's dad.

Now Zia used her key card to open the doors. A gush of cold air washed over them. At first, the interior looked absolutely dark. Skye was surprised. When they'd visited before, the lights had been dim, but it had been easy enough to see. She shuffled in behind Zia, holding onto her shoulder. The doors closed behind them, and for a moment she could see nothing. It reminded her of the lava tube. She listened to the trickle of circulating water. A pungent scent lay thick upon the air.

Ord hissed in her ear. “Nasty things here, Skye. Bad news. Go home?”

“Not yet,” she said, stroking the tentacle that coiled around her arm.

Zia said, “The lights go down after the farmers leave, but it's not completely dark.”

Indeed. As Skye's eyes adjusted, she could make out cold points of light overhead, like a projection of the thin starfield visible from Silk. The false starlight glittered faintly against the surface of a rectangular pool nearly as big as a soccer field. Water trickled into it at several points around its edge. This was lydra pond number 1. Something slapped the surface of the water, and Skye jumped.

“Whatever you do,” Zia said, “don't fall in the water.”

As her dad had put it, lydras were construction beasts, and they were always looking for something to do.

Zia took the lead. The others followed her single file around the edge of the pool. It felt like a long way. Twice Skye tripped over something that slithered away from her foot. “Zia, I thought lydras were supposed to stay in the water?”

“And we're supposed to stay in Ado Town,” Zia said.

“You mean they can crawl out?”

“Only the little ones. The big ones weigh too much. They need the buoyancy of the water to hold them up. That's why they're raised in ponds.”

Lydras in the Adovna ponds ranged in size from seed stock only a few cells in size, to juvenile specimens two meters across. Earlier today, the juveniles in pond 1 had all been harvested. They'd been sprayed with a chemical solution that sent them into a state of hibernation, and then they'd been packed inside shipping containers. In just over an hour the containers were scheduled to be loaded aboard the next elevator bound for the top of the column.

As they rounded the far end of the pond, Skye made out the shapes of the white shipping containers, lined up in a row beside a warehouse door that would open onto a cargo bay.

Zia reached the first container: a box as tall as her chest and three meters long. She touched the locks on its upper surface. They opened with a smooth click. Skye and Devi crowded in close beside her as the lid slid back.

At first Skye could see nothing. Then Buyu produced a flashlight. The beam fell on a mass of wet tentacles, glistening in a spectrum of colors from red to blue to green and purple. Skye felt her stomach squeeze tight. Ord hissed again and crept around behind her neck.

“Last chance to turn back,” Devi said in a low voice.

Zia giggled. “We'll be okay. Really. Because they're dormant. Look.” With her gloved hands she picked up a pink lydra from the top of the heap. It was a bundle of tentacles arranged around a disc-shaped body, with small eyestalks sprouting between the limbs. Zia lifted one tentacle after another, then let it fall. The lydra did not respond. “They'll stay dormant until they're hosed down, or until the chemical wash evaporates in hard vacuum. So we'll be fine. Now let's make some room in this box before the cargo handlers get here.”

The plan was to dump some of the lydras back into the pond so that the four of them could fit inside the shipping container. Skye wished they could dump all the lydras, but the weight had to be right. They could take out only enough animals to balance their own mass.

She slipped her gloved hands into the box. Ord shivered. “Bad job, Skye.”

She couldn't argue.

Lydras looked as if they ought to be soft and squishy like Ord, so when Skye touched them, she was surprised to discover they were not. “Hey, they feel hard.”

“That's because they're engineered to live in space,” Devi said.

She picked up a green lydra with tentacles the length of her forearm, and held it in the thin beam of Buyu's flashlight. Peering closely, she could see that its body was armored in thousands of tiny scales. When she ran a hand along one of the tentacles, it felt as if it were encased in a shell, and yet it bent easily. Her skin suit was designed the same way.

It made sense. The pressure of vacuum would destroy the body of any ordinary animal, but the lydra's scales acted like the hard walls of a space ship, maintaining air pressure inside their bodies. When the lydra needed to move, the scales slid smoothly past each other, allowing the tentacles to bend. “It feels nice,” Skye said. Like a toy that could be set in any posture.

Zia had disappeared into an equipment alcove. Now she returned, pushing a bin set on wheels. “Fill this up,” she ordered. “It'll give us the weight of the lydras, then we can dump them in the pond.”

They worked quickly, moving the hibernating lydras from the huge shipping container into the smaller bin. Most had tentacles less than a meter long, but Skye discovered an orange-colored specimen with tentacles almost twice that length, each one as thick as her lower leg. She and Zia worked together to lift it, but it was too heavy. Zia frowned. “I wonder how one this large was overlooked in the last shipment?” Buyu came over to help but Zia shook her head. “Leave it. It's so big, that it's probably started to feed on the smaller lydras. If it doesn't get shipped out tonight, it could cause a lot of problems in the juvenile pond.”

Skye frowned at the orange lydra. She wasn't eager to share the cargo container with such a monster. Zia saw the look on her face and grinned. “Stop worrying! It's sedated.”

“Worry?” Skye said. “Me?” She shoved an orange tentacle back over the rim of the box. It hit with a wet slap against the tangle of dormant lydras. “Doubt never enters my mind.”

“Oh sooth. I believe you.”

When the bin was loaded, they noted the weight, then wheeled it to the edge of the pond. Zia ordered the bin to tip. Illuminated in the flashlight beam, the lydras splashed into the water. For several seconds they sank, drifting helplessly toward the shadowed bottom. But just before they passed out of sight, Skye saw a few of them stir. Tentacles snapped, and several young lydras shot off into darkness. “It didn't take them long to wake up,” she said softly.

Zia threw a companionable arm around her shoulder. “Hey ado, we could ask city authority for permission.”

Skye grimaced. “That's all right.”

“I thought you'd feel that way.” She ordered the bin back to its storage room. “Okay. It's time for the next step: Load the humans.”

Skye felt her stomach knot. Jumping off the elevator column was exciting. Getting chased by a viperlion was exciting. Testifying in front of the city council was exciting. But climbing into a box full of tentacled carnivores . . . that was crazy.

Zia went first. Then Buyu. They nestled down among the dormant lydras, grinning like it was fun or something. “Aren't you going to put your hoods up?” Skye asked.

Zia shrugged. “Think we should?” She smiled as her hood rolled up over her head and across her face. Buyu also sealed his suit.

Devi turned to Skye. “You okay?”

“Sure.”

He touched her face with his gloved hand and smiled. Then his own hood rolled up and sealed. He climbed into the container.

Skye reached up to stroke Ord. “Remember what to do?”

“Yes good Skye,” the little robot whispered. “Seal the container.”

“Then?”

“Slide like spit down the side” —Skye grimaced as Ord echoed exactly Zia's stern instructions— “then crawl under the container. Spread thin and stick like gold mold to the container's underside. No motion and no noise allowed!”

“Okay,” Skye said. She lifted Ord from her shoulder, and set it on the ground. “One more piece of advice: Watch out for crawling lydras.”

She shrugged her hood on. Then she reached around to the bottom of her backpack, checking for the tube that carried liquid nutrients to her suit. It was firmly in place, in a socket above her hip. So she climbed the container, leaving Ord squatting on the floor, its head rotating from side to side as it searched the dark for crawling monsters.