3 - takeoff
[i]
THE ASHES OF Walkaway U were around Iceweasel. It was an unsettled climate-ish day, when cloudbursts swung up out of nowhere, drenched everything, and disappeared, leaving blazing sun and the rising note of mosquitoes. The ashes were soaked and now baked into a brick-like slag of nanofiber insulation and heat sinks, structural cardboard doped with long-chain molecules that off-gassed something alarmingly, and undifferentiated black soot of things that had gotten so hot in the blaze that you could no longer tell what they’d been.
There were people in that slag. The sensor network at WU had survived long enough to get alarmed about passed-out humans dotted around, trapped by blazes or gases. There was charred bone in the stuff that crept around her mask and left a burnt-toast taste on her tongue. She’d have gagged if it hadn’t been for the Meta she’d printed before she hit the road.
The Banana and Bongo was bigger than the Belt and Braces had ever been – seven stories, three workshops and real stables for a variety of vehicles from A.T.V. trikes to mecha-walkers to zepp bumblers, which consumed Etcetera for more than two years, as he flitted through the sky, couch-surfing at walkaway camps and settlements across the continent. She’d thought about taking a mecha to the uni, because it was amazing to eat the countryside in one, the suit’s way-finders and lidar finding just the right place to plant each of its mighty feet, gyros and ballast dancing with gravity to keep it upright over the kilometers.
But mechas had no cargo space, so she’d taken a trike with balloon-tires as big as tractor-wheels, tugging a train of all-terrain cargo pods of emergency gear. It took four hours to reach the university, by which time, the survivors had scattered. She lofted network-node bumblers on a coverage pattern, looking for survivors’ radio-emissions. The bumblers self-inflated, but it was still sweaty work getting them out of their pod and into the air, and even though she worked quickly – precise Meta quick, like a marine assembling a rifle blindfolded – everything was smeared with blowing soot by the time they were in the sky.
“Fuck this,” she said into her breather and turned the A.T.V. and its cargo train around in a rumbling donut. The survivors would be nearby, upwind of the ash-plume, and out of range of the heat that must have risen as the campus burned. She’d seen a demo of a heat sunk building going up before. It had been terrifying. In theory, graphene-doped walls wicked away the heat, bringing it to the surface in a shimmer, keeping the area around the fire below its flash point. The heat sink was itself less flammable than everything else they used for building materials, so if the fire went on too long, the heat sinks heated up to the flash point of the walls, and the entire building went up in a near-simultaneous whoom. In theory, you couldn’t get to those temperatures unless eight countermeasures all failed, strictly state-actor-level arson stuff.
She tried not to think about state actors and why they’d want to reduce the Niagara Peninsula’s Walkaway U campus to char.
The bumblers reported in. Something had used them to connect to the walkaway net, a couple klicks upwind, just as she’d thought. With luck, it would be refugees and not other would-be relief workers, or worse, looter-ghouls.
The bumblers used their low-powered impellers and ballast to opportunistically maneuver themselves into a stable triangle over the zone, then used signal timing to generate coordinates. They got pictures, but all she saw was canopy, a distance away from the burn. It was hard to tell, but she thought there may be clearings in there that served as fire-breaks.
She kicked the trike and headed that way, rolling her tongue around her mouth to escape the bitter taste.
Not long after, she had to dismount. The brush was too thick for the A.T.V. to doze, let alone the cargo train. She stretched, touched her toes, swung her arms. The drive had punished her butt and back. Her hands ached from gripping the handlebars. She thought about vaping, maybe a little crack, but when she moved her mask aside a fraction of a millimeter, her mouth and nose flooded with bitter air blowing from the ash field. Fuck it, Meta would be plenty, even if the dose was wearing off. She should have made it in patch form, so she could slap more on without breathing the toxic mix of plastic, carbon, and barbecued human.
The walk into the woods relieved her muscles and mind. The birds sang alarmed but reassuring songs as they assessed the fire damage. She used to go out on the rooftop of her dad’s place listen to the birds calling in the Don Valley. The sound was primally reassuring.
As she got closer, she looked and listened for signs of human activity, but it was weirdly pristine. She was about to turn back to the trike to retask the bumblers, assuming they’d glitched, when she spotted the antenna.
It was an artificial tree, not a good one, but hidden amidst others so she didn’t spot it immediately. It was a pine, like a plastic Christmas tree. Amidst its arms were the characteristic protrusions of a phased-array, the same as you’d find around the Banana and Bongo. She kicked where its roots should be, and saw it was solidly in the soil.
“Hello?” Where there were antennas, there’d be cameras, if only to send pictures when things went blooey. They’d be pinheads she couldn’t spot, but nearby. “Hello?” she said again.
“This way,” a woman said. She was wrinkled and slender with skin the color of teak and gray hair in a ragged bob. She’d come out of the woods on the antenna’s other side, and she was wearing a breather, but looked friendly. Maybe that was the Meta.
Iceweasel crossed to her as she walked into the bush. Iceweasel followed. They came to a granite protrusion, Canadian shield thrusting through the soil. The woman gave it a shove and it slid aside on a cantilever. It was silent, and spoke of talented engineering. It weighed a fucking ton, as Iceweasel discovered when she didn’t get out of the way and was nearly knocked on her ass when it brushed her.
“Come on,” the older woman said. Behind the rock was a narrow corridor with rammed-earth walls, lit by LED globes punched straight into the dirt with crumbly impact craters around each one. The woman squashed past her – Iceweasel saw that her wrinkles were dusted with soot, making them seem darker than they really were – and shut the door with a thud that resonated through the soles of Iceweasel’s boots.
“Up ahead,” the woman said. Iceweasel pressed on. Around a bend, she stepped unexpectedly into a perfectly round tunnel, taller than her, with smooth walls and tooling marks from a boring machine. The walls were hard and clear, the lighting here more thought-through, spaced with machine precision.
The strange woman removed her mask. She was a beautiful woman of Indian – or Desi – descent, gray in her eyebrows and a fine dark mustache. She smiled, her teeth white and even. “Welcome to Walkaway U’s secondary campus.”