[ii]
HER NAME WAS Sita. She gave Iceweasel a hug. Iceweasel explained that she’d brought supplies.
“We have a lot here,” she said, “but there are things we’ll need to rebuild.”
They walked the corridor, towards distant voices. “We’re grieving, of course, but the important thing is all the work got out – samples, cultures. The data was always backed up, so no risk there.”
“How many died?”
Sita stopped. “We don’t know. Either a very large number or none at all.”
Iceweasel wondered if Sita had lost her mind, through grief or smoke poisoning or an exotic bio-agent. Sita’s mask dangled around her neck and Iceweasel’s own mask pulled her hair and chafed her face so she pushed it up her forehead, clunking her forgotten goggles, which ended up in her hair.
Even with these annoyances, the relief of breathing freely and seeing without smudged lenses brought up her spirits.
“Can you explain?”
“Probably,” she said. “But maybe later. Meantime, let’s get a work gang and unload your supplies.”
The subterranean corridors turned into a subterranean amphitheater supported by pillars and roof-trusses and something more substantial than aerosol to keep the ground from caving in.
“It started as a supercollider,” Sita said as she gawped. There was a hospital in one corner, a mess, and workspaces where soot-blackened people had intense discussions that were almost fist-fights. “The borer ran for months, doing its own thing. But the physicists got what they were looking for somewhere else – don’t ask me, particle physics isn’t my discipline – and moved on. By the time they left, we were done. Then when we branched into scans and sims, the old timers worried about being blasted from the Earth and built a bolt hole. Took a couple years, mostly automated. It’s not pretty, but it’ll do. I didn’t even know it was here until yesterday when the fire started. Surprised the hell out of me! I don’t know what was weirder, that those people had managed to build an underground city or that they’d kept it a secret.
“Or maybe it wasn’t secret? Maybe it was just me who didn’t know. That’s paranoid, though. Don’t you think?”
Whatever was going on with Sita, it wasn’t pleasant. She slumped against a rammed-earth wall snaked with thick conduit that ran along the ceiling joists and disappeared into the branching tunnels. She looked older than she had when they’d met.
“Vape?” Iceweasel said. “It’s Meta. Good for the situation.”
“Thanks.” They shared a companionable hit. A few seconds later, both of them had wry grins. “Hungry? We’ve got chow on, not much, but if we’re going to bring in your supplies, a meal is in order.”
“I’m good. Let’s get everything in before it gets nuked from orbit.”
“Don’t joke.”
The Meta had done for Sita, and she sauntered to a table of younger women and a couple of men and introduced Iceweasel. Most of the table had straight names like Sita, but there was one guy called Lamplighter, the only name she remembered ten seconds later. They gave her a cup of coffium while rounding up more porters for the work gang. Someone stomped in wearing a little mecha exo, and there were a pair of burros, too, high-stepping and swaying from side to side as their firmware solved and resolved the terrain, never trusting the ground not to give way. Burros were slow, but they got the job done.
“Let’s go.” Sita pulled on her mask. Sighing, Iceweasel pulled hers down. She wished she’d said yes to food – not just because she was hungry, but because she wanted to sit and find out what the hell had happened.
They went through the swinging boulder and went single-file through the thick woods to the trike and its cargo pods. She had half-believed it would be melted to slag by another drone-strike, but it was intact. The pods sighed open as the masked porters formed a bucket brigade into the woods.
Bucket brigades embodied walkaway philosophy, more emblematic than the consensus wrangle in a circle-of-chairs. Iceweasel’d participated in some default brigades, moving feedstock around for Communist parties, but never any with the gusto of walkabout brigades. Bucket brigades only ask you to work as hard as you want – rush forward to get a new load and back to pass it off, or amble between them, or vary your speed. It didn’t matter – if you went faster, it meant the people on either side of you didn’t have to walk as far, but it didn’t require them to go faster or slower. If you slowed, everyone else stayed at the same speed. Bucket brigades were a system through which everyone could do whatever they wanted – within the system – however fast you wanted to go, everything you did helped and none of it slowed down anyone else.
Back at the Banana and Bongo, she’d briefly joined the load-in bucket brigade. Limpopo had wanted to give her more safety tips and triple-check her gear and emergency kits. She’d submitted to it with grace because it was nice that someone was looking out for her ass, making sure she didn’t get into too much trouble even as she ran towards it as fast as she could. This had become her modus operandi during the B&B’s construction, first on the scene when drones spotted salvage, forging further afield with fewer supplies than anyone, counting on absolute minimum of gear and kindness of strangers and serendipity to stay alive. She’d gone from being the world’s biggest shlepper to someone who turned her nose up at taking spare underwear (that’s what hydrophobic silver-doped dirt-shedding fabrics were for).
Limpopo had expertly reviewed her kit, and pressed an extra six liters of water on her and a light-duty wet-printer that could dispense field medicines. She knew better than to object, but she did, relenting when Limpopo laid hands on her and lashed down the weight with such expertise she hardly noticed it. “You know that with all this water, I’m going to end up drinking constantly and stopping all the time to piss.”
“Piss clear.” It was a walkaway benediction, especially in nomadic mode. It was polite to offer unsolicited opinions on your neighbor’s urine. Clear was the goal. Anything darker than a daffodil was grounds for having water forced upon you. If your piss was orange or brown, you’d be passively and aggressively made to drink a tonic of rehydration salts, and endure your peers’ condescension for letting your endocrinology get the best of you. You could fab underwear that you pissed through while on the move – it wicked everything in seconds, and neutralized anything unpleasant or dangerous. It had the side benefit of noting and processing your hydration and dissolved-solids, but almost no one wore them because a) pissing in your pants was gross and b) (see a).
Limpopo sent her off with a kiss that was only partly motherly. The grin it gave her lasted for an hour on the trike. She and Seth and Etcetera were like electrons orbiting around Limpopo’s nucleus, all trying to jump to higher-energy orbits. There was something gravatic about her.
This kind of reverie was easy in a bucket brigade, even wearing a mask and goggles with cremated tire-taste in your mouth. It was the combination of brainless work and efficiency, and as she worked up a sweat, the rhythms of the line settled.
The best part of a bucket brigade is that when the load finished, it naturally brought everyone together at the head-end, because you walked upstream until you got a load, and if there were no loads, everyone walked all the way. They gathered at the trike and caucused over it.
“There’s no reason to camou it,” Sita said. “Anything that flies over and spots it will figure it’s a relief vehicle, that’s natural. It’s not leaking info about the underground.”
“But a relief vehicle implies people to give relief to.” This was a guy with crazy-hair, blue-green with Einsteinian frizz on the sides, and bald on top. He was maybe 60, with an unexpectedly beautiful face, like a wood-elf. Now Iceweasel thought about it, these walkaways were a couple sigmas older than the median age walkaways. The part of her brain that tried to figure out why someone in reality would want to bomb them filed this away.
“Anything we do to it will be useless,” said another older woman, short and hippy, with the kind of hourglass figure and giant boobs that all the women Iceweasel had drawn as a child came with. “A camouflaged trike won’t look like the forest to decent image-processing. It’ll look like something hidden.”
“That settles it,” Sita said. To Iceweasel: “Gretyl’s the university’s top computational optimization person, if she says it, it’s true.”
“Argument by authority,” the other guy said good-naturedly.
“The longer we stand here, the greater chance we’ll get spotted,” Sita said.
“Self-serving bullshit.”
“There’s whisky at the mess-hall,” she said.
“Now you’re talking.” They set out.
*
They took good care of her. There was a fresh crew who’d been asleep for the unloading who salted away all the supplies they’d brought in. The people she’d been out with adopted her, punching out a chair and assembling it for her and insisting she sit while they brought breakfast – yogurt studded with pistachios and tailored culture they assured her would moderate her stress, which explained why they were so fucking laid back, despite being firebombed.
They gave her a glass of something sweet and bubbly, rattling with ice. She thought it might be booze, but couldn’t say. “What exactly were you people doing that caused you to be nuked from orbit?”
“That was a love-tap,” said Gretyl. “Nothing compared to the Somali strike.”
Some people at the Banana and Bongo were obsessive about the global walkaways, but Iceweasel hardly followed it. She was dimly aware of the sub-Saharan walkaway contingent.
“Somali?”
Gretyl gave her more credit than she deserved: “Not exactly Somalia, I understand the debate, but the last national border the strike zone had been in was Somalia, so we call it that for convenience. This is not the time for pedantry.”
“I’m not pedantic, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.” The university walkaways looked at her like she was an idiot. That was okay: people cared about things that she never bothered with. She’d made peace with having priorities that were different from everyone else, starting with her fucking father.
Sita said, “The campus in Somalia – or in a place that used to be Somalia – was taken out last month. We don’t even know what hit them. There’s literally nothing left. The sat images show flat dirt. Not even a debris field. It’s like they never existed – ten hectares of labs and classrooms just... gone.”
Iceweasel felt prickles up on her neck. “What do you think hit them? Do you think that you might get hit with it next?”
Sita shrugged. “There’s lots of theories – it’s possible they burned them out like us, but were especially expedient about cleaning up, getting it done between satellite passes. That’s the Occam’s Razor approach, as everything else assumes fundamental technology breakthroughs. But there are some of those around, goodness knows.”
Gretyl picked up the conversation smoothly, laying her palms flat on the table. “Which brings us back to your original question: what are we working on that would make someone from default want to reduce us to a crater?”
At that, everyone shifted to look at the guy with the blue frizzy hair, whose name Iceweasel had instantly forgotten. “We’re trying to find a cure for death,” he said, and gave her that mischievous wood-elf smile. He even had a chin-dimple. “It’s kind of a big deal.”