“See! I behold, with eyes undimmed by tears
Eternal ages stretching evermore,
Once bloodlines cast away their phantom fears
And welcome Wisdom’s blessed sacred spores.
No sky-bound wretch shall end our line’s bright reign,
Nor bestial step this holy ground profane…”
—Cassilda’s words to the outcasts, The Heavenfall
----
Command Center/Lifeship Bridge, Continent Twenty-Four, The Patrick Henry
3922 A.D. (Solar Reckoning)/1461 Y.E. (Years of Exodus)
One third of the ship thought today was a lovely day for a revolution, one third were cowering in their hovels, and the final third were too deep in their entertainment programs to notice.
Actually, that wasn’t true, First Lieutenant Cassandra Niemoller—née Seward—admitted to herself as she watched the feeds of the Marxian mobs approaching the mansions on continent one, better known as “Heavenhaven” for being the outermost continent and having a view of the stars. The ceilarchs were finally awakening to the dangers on their doorsteps.
Too late.
“O captain my captain,” Cassandra subvocalized, and the images projecting on her vision through her webskull whisked away. As the transparent pictures vanished, the command center became visible again. Holographic representations of the crew’s sprites, apparent only to people who had webskull implants, flitted this way and that throughout the room.
Second Lieutenant Michael Richardson, Cassandra’s second at the dataflow station, gave her a sideways look but said nothing. She’d chosen the codewords from an old poem written on a scrap that her Americanist father had left her. Michael wouldn’t know what the words meant, not unless he’d studied Ancient English in school, and even if he understood their definitions, he probably wouldn’t understand the reference.
Cassandra barely understood it herself, but she imagined it was appropriate for the current scenario.
The Patrick Henry was supposed to maintain one command center and Lifeship bridge per hundred square miles of interior territory, but even after more than a thousand years of travel, so much of the ship’s space was still unused that this was the only manned command center on continent twenty-four.
Forty miles wide, one hundred miles long, the Patrick Henry was a feat of Terran engineering. Thirty cylinders—continents—rotated within one another like Old Russian nesting dolls, providing gravity to the inhabitants of a total land area that rivaled Old Spain’s. Undeveloped spaces between those cylinders’ inward and outward walls could be opened to the void, and spontaneous elevators could cross up or down those intercontinental spaces in almost no time at all, allowing travel inward and outward.
Zero-point energy condensers drew mass-energy from the fabric of space-time itself. Massless batteries capable of storing infinite power within finite space held that energy in reserve.
Animals ranged in forests outside the cities, while nanotech and smartsteel drew from the masslesses to maintain the atmosphere, feed the soil, and see to the voyagers’ needs.
A feat of Terran engineering, indeed, and now that feat was coming apart at the rivets. Politically, socially, and soon, physically.
“Report,” Commander Lattimore said, peering over the shoulder of Karl Wayhurst, the comms officer.
“We still don’t have contact with the inner continents, Commander,” Wayhurst said. “Chief Engineer Fukuda is on it, but he says that repairing the webwork across the whole of continent twenty-four will take a few hours, even with automation. That’s almost three thousand square miles of territory, and the rioters are in all the cities…”
Wayhurst’s report became a jumble of noise to Cassandra’s ears. She couldn’t get distracted. She had to get her people out before the dataflow was restored and the ceilarchs figured out what was going on in the inner continents, where most of the dispossessed had been relegated over the past several generations.
A soft chime resonating against Cassandra’s skull informed her that her sprite had opened up the secret connection to Hilda. Her sister’s voice bounced through her head a moment later.
Her sister’s grunt, anyway. Her voice came a moment later. “Busy.”
“I can see that,” Cassandra subvocalized. “How are we doing?”
She didn’t clarify what she wanted an update on. Hilda knew.
“Inner continents’ MPs are ours.” Mechanized Peacekeepers. “Some of them, anyway.” So Hilda’s engineering friend had come through for her and subverted the mechs. “They’re covering the escapees from the inner continents while I babysit the ceilarchs. These assholes don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.”
Cassandra breathed a sigh of relief and risked a glance over at Jacob. He stood at the helm’s door, looking alert but untroubled. The perfect security officer. Cassandra’s heart skipped a beat.
Women still flocked to that uniform, tried to get his attention in all the typical ways. Even if they’d known that Jacob Niemoller, first son of Lance Niemoller, the most powerful ceilarch on board the Patrick Henry, was married, loose women still would have tried it.
First Lieutenant Cassandra Niemoller, still known as First Lieutenant Cassandra Seward to everyone except the few who really mattered, had caught Jacob by not being one of those women. She was someone who cared about the same things he cared about—a miracle, considering the family he came from—and was willing to die for those beliefs.
And they might just die for them today.
“Sis?” Hilda’s voice resonated. “You there?”
“Sorry,” Cassandra subvoc’ed. “What was that?”
“Are the other databombs in place?” Hilda didn’t lead off with, I said, and she didn’t sound irritated. That was Hilda: steady, cool as ice, even when she was working security, fending off the Marxians at the gates.
“They’re in place.”
“Good—hold on.” The line went dead. Webskull implants typically only sent their wearers’ actual words, not ambient noise. Cassandra wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on around her sister.
“Hancock’s pen,” Cassandra subvoc’ed, and her sprite shot up into her vision as if through the floor. It looked like a fairy-winged woman shimmering gold, because centuries ago some top-tier webwork engineer had had a sense of humor, and it was wearing a pirate’s hat featuring the Jolly Roger.
A bit on the nose, Cassandra thought, much like the name the sprite had chosen for herself: Autonomous Intelligence, datastream aggregator. The little program had never been one for subtlety.
“AIda reporting in!” The sprite threw an enthusiastic salute that made holographic sparks fly when her hand came to a stop. “Orders, cap’n?”
Cassandra kept herself from grinning at the sprite’s comical enthusiasm and misunderstanding of the rank structure. “Unlock the escape pods between continents thirty and twenty-four,” Cassandra subvoc’ed.
AIda threw another salute and zipped into the datastream surrounding Cassandra, vanishing literally into the ether. That was a trick that would be useful for the escapees, except that they were physical, while AIda was a data construct; she needed the ship’s computers to exist.
She certainly wouldn’t exist on the bright blue and green ball that hung in the darkness only a few thousand miles from the Patrick Henry.
Hilda’s voice butted into Cassandra’s skull again. “We have a problem.”
“What is it?” Cassandra asked.
A data feed tapped against Cassandra’s mind, an insistent phantom sensation. She opened it.
She saw through Hilda’s eyes, heard through Hilda’s ears, stared as beams flared from the arms of an enormous mechanized peacekeeper stomping through rubble-filled streets.
The view shook as Hilda dove to the side, huddling behind the wall surrounding the Niemoller estate. Cassandra recognized the fancy ironwork atop the stone. What was Hilda doing at her in-laws’ estate?
And why was the ironwork at eye level? Hilda wasn’t twelve feet fall—
Cassandra’s breath caught as she realized that the stone walls had fallen. They were just rubble, and Hilda’s fireteam was using them for cover.
Motes of dust in the air flickered green as lasers sliced the air and burned into the stone.
Through the haze of dust and smoke, past the estates of the ceilarchs, the horizon of continent one rolled upward until the outer curve of continent two, half a mile above Hilda’s head, swallowed it up.
“The Marxians reprogrammed some of our MPs,” Cassandra breathed as the ten foot metal walker crunched over the debris on the walkway to the mansion.
Commander Lattimore’s head twisted in Cassandra’s direction. “What?”
She’d said that out loud. Damn it. Well, there was no covering her mistake now. “At least one MP, Commander, at the Niemoller estate,” Cassandra amended. “Please wait one while I confirm.”
In the instant that it took Hilda to rise and place a perfectly-aimed shot at the servos in the MP’s leg, Cassandra noted the fires raging across continent one and the twisted smartsteel debris marking strategic points: the security checkpoints gridded out every half mile, the command centers and Lifeship bridges, the well-manicured estates of the ceilarchs, the elevator rooms.
Normally, those last would reshape elevators to the other continents when needed, but Cassandra suspected that with all of this damage, the circuitry wouldn’t be functional again for a week, at least. Everyone on the outermost continent would be stuck there for a while without some impressive feats of engineering.
The loss of the checkpoints explained why the turrets and various defenses of the ceilarchs estates weren’t active.
Salvos of lasers followed by a pair of armor-piercing missiles thudded into the MP, and its smartsteel burst apart with the explosions. The robot collapsed in a dead heap.
“What are you doing looking at the Niemoller estate?” Commander Lattimore asked. “I need you diagnosing the problems with the comms to the inner continents.”
“I have a sprite on it, Commander,” Cassandra said, unable to pull herself away from the sight of the wreckage as Hilda hustled to her feet, grabbed the shoulder of a fellow security team member who was trying to get an already-dead comrade out of the rubble, and hoofed it toward the Niemoller mansion.
Hilda’s feet slapped atop the transparent paving of the Niemoller driveway. Stars glistened in the abyssal field beneath her, and a blue arc of the planet they’d named Tellus brightened the long edge of the drive.
“Lieutenant.” Commander Lattimore used that hard-edged tone of his, the one that demanded attention and submission. “Shall I relieve you?”
That was enough to startle Cassandra’s attention away from the data feed. She couldn’t leave now, not when they were so close to freedom. “No, Commander. I’m sorry. I’m on it.”
Virtual golden sparks exploded from the floor as AIda burst out. “All done, Captain!” the virtual pixie proclaimed. “The escape clusters are prepared on continents thirty through twenty-five!”
“You have a data path to continent twenty-five?” Commander Lattimore asked.
Cassandra didn’t dare groan, never mind curse the sprite aloud.
Then the commander’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s this about the escape clusters?”
Oh, no. No, no, no.
“I saw Marxians moving through the inner continents,” AIda babbled on. “They’re setting up firing squads for the Americanists.”
At the mention of both the Marxians and the Americanists, Commander Lattimore’s hand drifted to his weapon.
This was bad. This was very bad. Nobody was supposed to know about the single databridge Cassandra had left in place between continents twenty-five and twenty-four. Even worse, nobody was supposed to know that she was interested in the fates of Americanists or Christians or Jews or any other group that didn’t bow to the ceilarchs: dregs of the world-ship, supposedly malcontents who were almost as bad as the rampaging Marxians.
The commander was no fool. He could put two and two together.
Cassandra was going to have to have a long talk with AIda, assuming they survived this.
“Lieutenant Niemoller,” said Commander Lattimore, not taking his eyes from Cassandra, “please escort Miss Seward to the brig.”
Miss Seward. Not First Lieutenant Seward. But that name would have been wrong, too, wouldn’t it?
Jacob left the door and came down the stairs to the main level of the command center. So did two other security officers. There were still a dozen scattered throughout the room, which had suddenly gotten very quiet.
Hilda’s voice vibrated Cassandra’s skull. “Cass, are you seeing this?”
Later, Hilda. Please, later. No distractions right now.
Jacob’s face was grim as he strode up to the commander. “Sir?” he asked.
“Please arrest Miss Seward, Lieutenant,” the commander repeated.
“On what grounds, sir?” Jacob asked. Cassandra had to fight to keep her face impassive; she wanted to scream at him just to follow orders, to avoid bringing suspicion on himself.
The commander’s eyes twitched toward Jacob. “On suspicion of treason and endangerment of voyage,” he said, pronouncing the terrible crimes as if Jacob were a slow child.
Please, Jacob. Please, just get out of here safely…
“Lieutenant Richardson, please lock down Miss Seward’s sprite,” the commander added.
Jacob’s gaze turned toward Cassandra. She ached at the sight of his noble face, his square jaw, his high cheekbones; ached to tell him it was all right, ached to beg him not to take her in, ached for him to tell her there was a way around this and they’d escape safely—
But escape to where? The wildernesses of continent twenty-five? The ship’s eyes were everywhere, the smartsteel ubiquitous; doors and tunnels would lock, turrets and hunter-seeker drones would bring them down, long before they got to the forests.
There was nowhere that was safe, except for the planet drifting in the empty black. Farther away from home than she’d ever been; farther away than she’d be able to reach.
A new frontier for a new America, the hope that generations of her ancestors had cherished in their hearts for a millennium and a half: even before leaving Terra, even before the travelers on the Patrick Henry parceled away their freedoms generation by generation to the ceilarchs until one day they awoke to find they were serfs again.
Richardson rose, summoning his sprite. It was a watery-looking thing of indeterminate sex, and code splashed as it emerged from the datastreams.
Commander Lattimore was no fool, no. He’d figured out that Cassandra had a dataroute to the inner continents. He’d figured out that she was an anti-ceilarchic sympathizer. He’d figured everything out.
Every thing, except for one.
He hadn’t figured out that Jacob and Cassandra were married.
“Belay that order, Lieutenant Richardson,” Jacob said, shifting his gun to Cassandra’s second.
“Lieutenant Niemoller, what—” sputtered the Commander.
The hums of charging lasers filled the room as the other security officers raised their weapons. Shouts filled the air.
“Don’t move!”
“Hands off the consoles.”
“On the ground, now!”
Jacob didn’t move. He eyed the commander unsparingly, his laser rifle never wavering from Richardson.
Richardson’s lips moved as he subvocalized a command to his sprite.
Cassandra didn’t bother to subvocalize. “Databomb the Zippy, AIda!”
AIda flashed into the datastream, heading for the ZPEs—the ship’s zero point energy condensers—as Richardson’s sprite slammed into Cassandra’s head. The programmatic construct wasn’t even physical, but Cassandra felt claws of code tearing through her implants as if they were digging into her own flesh.
Then the ship shuddered, all hundred miles long and forty miles wide of it, and the lights went out as AIda’s logic bomb took down the primary ZPE condenser and millions of massless batteries all across the Patrick Henry.
The pressure in Cassandra’s head vanished asRichardson’s sprite vanished, and she flung herself to the ground as lasers glittered in the dark.
Silence. Cassandra had never heard true silence before. Even the shouts of the security officers and the frantic cries of the bridge crew couldn’t drown out the ringing in Cassandra’s ears, the inverted echoes of a lifetime spent in an ever-spinning cylinder.
Holt-Westman capacitors, or “massless batteries,” could condense mass-energy from the vacuum of spacetime, but that energy had to be stored until it was used, and a massless could compress an infinite amount of mass-energy into a finite space without needing to dedicate any of that space to chemical storage. Hence the term “massless:” infinite energy stored without mass.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
And now the primary ZPE was offline, as were all but the emergency masslesses, which would keep the thirty cylindrical continents spinning and the air circulating for up to several months.
AIda appeared like a bolt of blue flame, though she didn’t illuminate the space around her; she was, after all, only a sprite, only substantive inside Cassandra’s head.
Still, she was real enough to dive into one laser rifle after another and ruin the code flowing through their circuitry, deadening each one in its wielder’s hands, until the only humming beam of light in the room was Jacob’s, sweeping from side to side, burning random streaks across the consoles—
No, not random. With the other officers offline and cursing their malfunctioning rifles, he was taking the opportunity to systematically destroy the monitoring equipment.
Though it felt like hours, it was only a few seconds before Jacob was pulling Cassandra up by the shoulder. A green beam of light blazed from his rifle, slicing just past the cheek of Richardson, who was peeking over his console.
“We have to go,” Cassandra and Jacob said at the same, and her heart swelled. Even in the middle of battle, they were one. One flesh, the Christians would say.
The Jews would probably say something different but similar. They probably wouldn’t even mutter about the Christians while saying it. A century of shared persecution had given the two religious groups a new respect for each other.
Cassandra recalled AIda with a subvoc’ed command, and the sprite rushed back to her and dove into her webskull as Jacob pushed the door open into an out-of-doors darker than Cassandra had ever seen. “Mission accomplished!” AIda chirped. “The line to the secondary Zippy is still open, though. I set the charge for ten minutes.”
Cassandra nodded. She hadn’t wanted to blow both Zippies quite yet. She needed a working elevator.
Her former coworkers, however, didn’t. Cassandra placed her palm on the keypad to the command center’s door. “Lock Heard ‘Round the Worldship,” she subvoc’ed. AIda carried the program into the network, and lights briefly flickered on the keypad and then the building as the virus flashed through the ship at the speed of data.
It was a tiny change, just a few dozen bits flipped in a few thousand buffers, and AIda didn’t need much energy from the backup ZPE to complete the task and return. A few seconds later, Cassandra drew her hand back from the keypad. “It should hold them for a few minutes. They’re locked up tight,” she said, then turned and bumped into Jacob.
Her husband stood stock still on the curb as panicked people rushed down the sidewalk past them in the gloom. “That’s not good,” he said.
Cassandra peered around him. The sun-screens were down and the cityscape was darker than she’d ever seen it, but in some places along the rising horizon of the continent there was flickering light.
Fires. The Marxians were everywhere. They would rather burn the ship into a void-encrusted bit of charcoal than—
—Than what? Cassandra still didn’t know what the Marxians actually wanted, just that they were willing to kill everybody who wasn’t them to get power.
For a moment, she felt guilty about leaving Jacob’s family to them. As bad as the ceilarchs were, at least they’d left the dregs of society in relative peace.
Then she remembered that nowadays half of the ceilarchs were themselves declared Marxians, and she didn’t feel quite so bad. Besides, rioting crazies made a great distraction.
Cassandra tugged at her husband’s arm. “We have to go,” she said. “Right now. The elevator’s this way.”
Jacob pulled out of her grasp and moved down the street against the flow of the crowd.
“Jacob!” she hissed. “Jacob, come back!”
He shook his head, shouldering his way through as people rushed past him. Suddenly the flow dried up, and Cassandra saw what the people had been running from.
Plasma-rifle-wielding crazies. A mob of them.
They were chanting slogans, the sounds of their voices replacing the thousand varied hums of the ship. “Wreckers, hoarders, saboteurs: we won’t endure you anymore! Christians, Jews, and Kulaks too: there’s no place for you on our crew!”
On the crew, the Marxian thugs meant. What did the idiots think would happen if they managed to take over the ship? Even if they could slaughter the ten million people scattered across its thirty concentric continents, they wouldn’t be able to pilot it.
But that wasn’t what they wanted, was it? After two years in orbit, waiting as automated drones tested Tellus’s atmosphere and the genotype seeders birthed Terran flora and fauna to mingle with planet’s native species, the Marxians were as anxious as anyone else to get down to the surface.
Nobody on the Patrick Henry wanted to wait a century for the terraforming to complete. Everybody wanted down now. The ceilarchs could enjoy their mansions and their rolling estates and the full gravity on continent one and look down on the stars and the planet beneath them, but everybody else was anxious to walk on real ground, to see a real sky, for the first time in seventy generations’ lives.
“Give us the ground, give us new lives, or we’ll take it from you with guns and knives! Give us the earth, give us the sky, or else we’ll see how well you fly!”
If the Marxians couldn’t have the planet, they’d space the ceilarchs and squat in their mansions instead. Sounded about right.
Jacob stopped in the street in front of the crowd, straightened his back so that all of his commanding six feet four inches were obvious, and said, “This is an unlawful assembly. Disperse.”
He still had his armor on, and the helmet made his words echo. It stopped the crowd for a moment.
Only one moment. “Bourgeois oppressor! Get him!” somebody shouted, and the makeshift plasma rifles of the Marxians came up. They fired, and globs of superheated plasma boiled in the air.
Cassandra flung herself behind the wall of a bus stop on the curb. She knew intellectually that it wouldn’t do a thing to stop plasma fire, but she couldn’t deny the instinct screaming at her to take cover.
Jacob’s reflexes, honed to a monomolecular edge by years of training and enhanced by the medimods his suit was pumping through his system, had his laser rifle at his shoulder in an instant. He swept a beam across the mob, burning a nasty line across three of the Marxians, and almost simultaneously sidestepped.
With the medimods enhancing him, his sidestep was any other man’s sprint.
He raced with inhuman speed for a metal column jutting out from the corner wall of the nearest storefront, but fast or no, he had to cover a lot of ground from the middle of the street to the curb.
Plus, the second Zippy drive chose that moment to blow.
The few residual lights went out, on continent twenty-four and surely across the entire rest of the ship. Smartsteel screamed as the dozens of forming and reforming columns that connected each continent to the ones surrounding it suddenly froze. Thirty concentric rotating cylinders hitched.
As they hitched, so did gravity. Not entirely, but enough to make two hundred thousand square miles of concentric cylinders stagger like a drunkard.
Jacob stumbled, and a ball of plasma, a lucky shot, splashed on his waist. He yelped, tripped on the curb, and rolled.
The mob started screaming. “What was that?” Their surprise didn’t stop two more plasma balls from striking Jacob as he scrambled on his hands and knees to the column and took cover behind it.
His face was a rictus of pain. A burst of panic made Cassandra’s heart pound as she watched her husband put his back to the column, raise his rifle past his shoulder, and fire one-handed and backwards at the enraged mob.
The rifle’s enhanced targeting and boresight cameras broadcasting to his helmet more or less canceled out the awkwardness of the position. He took down another couple of Marxians, and the mob scattered through broken storefront windows and behind abandoned vehicles to take cover.
“Help us!” somebody screamed from the mobward darkness. “Christ have mercy. Someone help us!”
Jacob’s entire posture changed. His back went ramrod straight, the pained slouch disappearing as if it had never been.
He was going to do something stupid, wasn’t he? And they had to get out of here.
They had to get away from the crazies and the c[ Jacob’s family needs to be on the outs with the ruling class. Escaping with them needs to be part of the plan. Otherwise, if Jacob could live the good life, why would he leave?]eilarchs. Jacob had said so himself.
He was the secret Christian, not Cassandra. Well, she was the secret Americanist, not him, so they were good matches for one another.
And right now, her match, her mate, was about to charge a bunch of plasma-rifle wielding Marxians—
“We can stop them, Cap’n!” AIda’s voice resonated in Cassandra’s skull. “The turrets.”
The glance Cassandra cast down the darkened street seemed to take a year, though it was an instant. Everything seemed to be moving slowly. Was it all in her mind? “No power for the smartsteel,” Cassandra subvoc’ed.
Or maybe she thought it. Either way, her webskull picked it up.
“The built-ins,” AIda said. “Hurry!”
Built-ins? Of course! There were ancient hard-point turrets—not even made of smartsteel, but of hard steel—scattered across Patrick Henry, set up in case the power transmission from the Zippies was interrupted or somebody hacked the metal or other nanotech. They even had their own batteries. That was why for centuries, the security command centers had been placed near concentrations of the old turrets.
Just in case someone insane shut down the ship’s primary power systems.
“Hold up, Jacob,” Cassandra shouted as she scrambled back to the command center’s door. Ignoring the pounding sounds from within—it sounded like her former comrades were working hard to escape—she placed her palm on the control pad and sent AIda into the system.
“Offline,” AIda said. She peeked out of the pad and scowled in an exaggerated parody of a human frown. “It’ll need power, or I can’t get in.”
“Don’t the turrets’ masslesses have power?”
“Nope, no masslesses! They’ve got archaeobatteries, and those haven’t been used or charged in for-e-ver.”
Cassandra wanted to groan, or maybe to shriek, but she kept focused on the task at hand. The invention of the micro-massless, like the battery in Cassandra’s head fueling AIda’s continued existence now that the ship’s Zippies were down, must have come after the ancient turrets had been put in place. Early masslesses would have been size-prohibitive to dedicate to ancient turret systems.
Regardless, the designers obviously hadn’t accounted for centuries’ worth of corrosion on their ancient batteries.
Cassandra risked a glance toward her husband. Jacob had shoved himself into a standing position. Sweat beaded on his forehead, visible through his transparent helmet, as he leaned back against his pillar. His mouth huffed and puffed open and closed; the muscles of his eyes clenched and twitched.
He was psyching himself up to take out the crazies. And probably get himself killed in the meantime.
Cassandra wasn’t going to let that happen. “AIda, can you dump some of the power in from my implanted massless? No, wait.” With the ship’s masslesses and the ZPEs down, that wouldn’t leave enough power to summon an escalator to the intercontinental drop pods.
Not and keep AIda alive. As long as she stayed in Cassandra’s implants, she was depending on the massless resting at the base of Cassandra’s spine. Cassandra cursed herself for not overcharging her battery before this whole mess went down. She didn’t like carrying around the potential-energy equivalent of several tons of mass within a micro-massless, but it would have been worth it. “Never mind—”
“Aye aye, Cap’n!” AIda belted, and then the air tingled around Cassandra as her massless dumped into the turrets’ batteries.
Cassandra only had time to exclaim, “AIda, no!”
“Don’t worry, Cap’n,” AIda said, her voice fainter—or was that because of the noise of the turrets as they burst upward out of the streets, the sidewalk, and even the shops’ floors, between Jacob and the mob? “I’ve got enough left to get you out.”
Jacob’s eyes met Cassandra’s in a wordless goodbye. She gulped and subvoc’ed, “But you—”
Just as Jacob turned and pied the corner, the multibarreled guns on the waist-high, hydrant-thick turrets started to spin, and then flashing light and stuttering noise washed over the world.
They left behind streets and buildings covered in blood and bodies. Jacob got two steps away from his cover, then lowered his rifle in shock as he surveyed the bullet-riddled corpses.
“Wow. Targeting is complicated,” AIda said. She definitely sounded slower. Quieter. Tired, as if a computer program could be exhausted. “So…you’re leaving anyway, Cap’n.”
“Come here,” Jacob was saying through gritted teeth as he favored his burned leg. His hands motioned toward himself, coaxing something or someone down the dark street. “Come on.”
Shapes appeared in the darkness, picking their way around whimpering forms and puddles of blood. Four, five, six, seven: a whole family. The father’s face had been beaten to a pulp, the mother was stumbling, the elder teenaged daughter was whimpering, the younger children were wailing.
But where fish necklaces swung at the mother’s and father’s and elder girl’s necks, the four young boys wore little skullcaps, and at least one of them had sideburns that were long twirls of hair.
It wasn’t one family. It was two.
The more and more frequent Marxian uprisings targeted Americanists and Christians when they could find them, but they absolutely hated Jews, and Jews were far less likely to take up arms in defense of themselves.
So the Christians did for the Jews what the Jews would not.
Smartsteel screeched behind Cassandra. She’d never heard that sound before; it was like the very substance of the Patrick Henry was protesting the fact that its Zippies and masslesses had gone offline. A round tube rose in fits and starts from the substance of the street. It was large enough to fit ten people.
“Called you an elevator…” AIda yawned.
“How? There’s no power.”
“Took some extra from your massless. There’s enough to get you to the drop pods.” AIda stretched in an exaggerated motion.
“But you need that power to survive in my webskull,” Cassandra protested. “Who knows how long I’ll go before a chance to recharge?”
“There’s no network down there on Tellus,” AIda said. Her voice was slowing, and Cassandra thought she detected a hint of sadness. “You don’t need me. Face it, Cap’n. A sprite doesn’t belong down there.”
Cassandra wanted to argue. Unfortunately, she knew AIda was right.
Damn.
She turned back to her husband, who was limping toward her, escorting the group of refugees. The daughter of the family was old enough to be trouble and young enough not to care, and based on the way she looked at Jacob, she might do her best to make him not care, either.
“Come on.” Cassandra looped an arm around her limping husband’s waist, but she couldn’t ignore his hiss of pain as she helped him to the elevator.
The interior was devoid of ornamentation. The networks were supposed to route and maintain the temporary connections between the continents to keep them from interfering with the rotations of the continental cylinders, so normally there wasn’t a reason to have many internal controls.
Now, power was at a premium. Cassandra desperately hoped it would be enough.
The elevator pod lurched upward, and Jacob shouted in pain. Sweat covered his forehead, and even the quick grin he spared for Cassandra was a wordless lie.
As the smartmetal built itself into a column and the pod climbed toward the ceiling of continent twenty-four, the girl placed her hand on Jacob’s chest and gave him a look that was either pitying or pitiable. Cassandra returned a glare of such venom that the girl paled and yanked her hand back.
They were all refugees now. There was no reason for Cassandra to give special treatment to a teenaged hussy who was trying to steal her husband.
The walls and ceiling turned transparent, revealing the black of the continental roof as they approached.
Then they passed into intercontinental space.
From the outside, the Patrick Henry looked like a tube one hundred miles long and a bit more than forty miles wide, with a massive cluster of engines jutting out from the aft and maneuvering thrusters studded over its outer shell. But inside, it was a series of thirty rotating concentric cylinders or continents, each one separated from the ones inside and outside of it (or above and below it, if one took the rotational gravity of each cylinder into account) by a small intercontinental space.
Cassandra had been here many times, traveling inward and outward between the concentric continental cylinders. But she’d never seen it like this.
Oh, the bottom of continent twenty-five and the top of twenty-four, which she’d just left, were still too close for comfort. They always made her feel like she was only moments away from becoming a Cassandra sandwich. But the light was dim and eerie, and while normally lifts were scheduled to run simultaneously once an hour to reduce the length of periods of rotational interruption, there were no other elevators visible this time.
No snaking smartmetal tubes like spiders’ webs flowing from one continent to the other and back. No workers in the darkened void. Only bulkheads, and glinting smartsteel wires, and spooky shadows and deeper darkness.
Partway between the continents, the elevator made a ninety-degree turn around one of its short axes, forcing all of them against the wall until it completed the maneuver. Where they’d been traveling upward toward the outermost continents, now the reoriented lift descended along the continent twenty-four cylinder, heading toward the aft of the Patrick Henry and the empty void of outer space beyond it.
One of the Jewish boys plastered his hands to the transparent walls and stared. Cassandra didn’t bother to ask if he’d ever traveled away from continent twenty-four before. The answer was obvious.
They descended in silence, acceleration pressing them upward toward the ceiling and fighting the centripetal forces of the continents, which kept trying to press them against the wall toward continent twenty-four as they zipped down the side of its cylinder.
The light grew as they fell, and all at once Cassandra realized that it was coming from below them.
Normally, the intercontinental spaces were closed to the vacuum and pressurized, just like the cylinders they surrounded. With effectively infinite mass-energy at the ship’s disposal, it was no trouble to maintain hundreds of thousands of cubic miles’ worth of atmosphere; the intercontinental zones added only a few thousand cubic miles to the count.
Now, however, leaving one arm around her husband’s waist to support him, Cassandra leaned against the wall just like the Jewish boy and stared down toward the aft of the vessel, where the smartmetal “floor” of the intercontinental space had flowed away, revealing star-studded void.
The stars. Cassandra had only seen them with her own eyes a few times in her life, most recently during her plum posting on continent one. When she had met Jacob.
The bright stars and even brighter planet beneath the glassteel floor had taken her breath away. Now, if it was possible, those stars were even brighter.
And faster. How did they move so fast?
“Not stars,” slurred AIda. “Drop pods.”
Yes—drop pods, thousands of them, their chemical drives burning bright as they dropped away from the ship. Their darkened dock-clusters were attached by elevator paths to the continental cylinders.
One of the clusters flared to life as the elevator passed by it. Six engines burst alight, bathing the roof of the elevator in a glow that made the internal sun-screens and fake sky seem dull. The dock shuddered as the half dozen pods blasted free, and the elevator shook with transmitted force as they accelerated downward toward open space.
The empty dock, a dull metal snowflake, faded into the black vacuum above them until it disappeared, swallowed by the darkness of the vast continental wall.
“Wow!” exclaimed the little boy. It was the first thing any of them had said since entering the elevator, and despite the dire circumstances, it brought a smile to Cassandra’s face. “Are we going to that one?” The boy pointed.
The snowflake he was pointing at had no pods; they had already launched. They passed the empty rigging, and then another, and another. Cassandra’s hopes fell. Were they too late? Had all of the pods been taken?
“I gotcha, Cap’n.” AIda’s voice was very faint.
“I see it! I see it!” This time the boy had the right idea. The cluster he was pointing to hadn’t launched yet, and the elevator was heading straight for the docking station off its loading tube.
“Good th—ow.” Jacob growled, a guttural sound, and his hand drifted toward his leg. “Thing the pods have their own masslesses.”
The pods and the smartsteel at the aft of the intercontinental spaces were designed for crises just like this one: they had to allow people to escape even if primary power was offline throughout the ship.
When the elevator’s walls slid away to reveal the loading dock for the clusters, Cassandra had never been so happy to see real, artificial light.
The loading dock was an enclosed hexagonal chamber with one elevator door, one airlock that led out to the intercontinental superstructure for manual access, and six evenly spaced circular trapdoors on the floors. Each one would lead down into a different pod. A control console was in the very middle of the room.
And a score of people were clustered in the very center of the room, looking frightened.
They were of every age, every coloration, every phenotype, and while some of them carried Bibles or wore simple Americanist garments, others had a few more exotic effects with them: copies of ancient Mesoamerican stories, tiny prayer wheels made after the styles of old Tibet. Remnants of days and ages long past, kept alive during a thousand year trip through the stars.
The Americanists weren’t the only ones who were attached to their roots, and they weren’t the only ones whose attachment was seen as a threat by the ceilarchs or the uprising mob. About the only religion that Cassandra didn’t see represented in the crowd was the Marxian one.
A good thing, too. If any of these people had been carrying a translation of Das Kapital, she would have spaced him.
“Better…hurry,” AIda mumbled.
Jacob grunted as she pulled him into the docking bay. “All right, people. Listen up.” Cassandra went to the terminal and punched in the manual override code she’d set in her logic bombs into each one. 07041776: obvious enough to be guessed after a number of tries, obscure enough to keep the ship’s security forces tied up for a few minutes as they tried to brute force the lockdown code. She didn’t want to kill the ship. She just wanted to free her people. “Five people per pod. Move quickly. We launch in ninety seconds.”
She opened the last trapdoor, then turned to see the people still huddling, terrified. “You five, that pod there. You five, there—”
Some of the ones she’d pointed at grabbed some of the others, holding them close. “But we’re family.”
“Then go together, there. Now!”
Cassandra and Jacob ended up in a pod by themselves. It was a tight squeeze even for the two of them. There were five acceleration couches, two pairs of of which faced one another across the small pod and the final one, which sat alone near the half-floor, half-wall window on the opposite side of the pod. Other than that, there was a computer for targeting the pod, a few lockers with emergency supplies, and not much else.
Cassandra punched the target coordinates into the pod’s computers, then turned to find her husband slouched across an acceleration couch, his helmet off, his face a mask of sweat as he guzzled water from one of the pod’s lockers.
“Seventy seconds to launch,” the computer announced. Cassandra silently gave thanks once again that the life preserver functions of the ship used separate computer and battery systems from the rest of the vessel. “Please strap in.”
Jacob hardly seemed to notice as Cassandra strapped him in; his throat gulped over and over, up and down, up and down. “How are you doing?” Cassandra asked.
He paused long enough to say, “Thirsty.”
Plasma burns would do that. In the tight space, Cassandra could smell the stink of burnt flesh. She didn’t care; he was her husband.
She’d do anything to protect him.
“Forty seconds to launch. Please strap in.”
Cassandra belted herself down in the seat next to Jacob. “AIda, are you there?”
“Here…Cap’n.”
Cassandra’s massless was almost dry. “AIda, I—”
“It’s been good knowing you…Cap’n.” AIda’s voice was slow, barely there. “Take lots of pictures. Okay?”
“Okay,” Cassandra whispered.
“Ten seconds to launch.”
“Bye, Cap’n.”
Cassandra’s skin prickled as her massless suddenly expelled the rest of its energy into the dock’s computer. With it went AIda.
A sense of hollow loss filled Cassandra.
“Prepare for acceleration.”
Metal reverberated as the whole dock rotated to face aftward, making Cassandra dizzy. Hooks released, and the sound reverberated through the drop pod as it detached from the dock. Then chemical engines roared, and Cassandra, a lifelong spacer who’d spent most of her life in the sub-gee gravities of the inner continents, was forced back into her couch.
Lights flashed through the inscribed arc of the window. Black intercontinental struts cast strange shadows in the lights of the hexagon of drop pods as they roared toward open space.
They blasted out into the night. True night, the likes of which had enveloped nobody but spacewalking techs for more than a millennium.
Until today.
There were so many stars in the black. And so many drop pods. Half-dozens of them, like schools of fish, studded the night all around Cassandra.
“Prepare for planetfall,” the computer said.
The drop pod accelerated toward Tellus, and a blood haze enveloped Cassandra’s vision.
She looked over at her injured Jacob and offered him a smile. “Soon,” she croaked.
They were falling toward Tellus, a blue and green marble in the dark.
Falling toward a new frontier.
Falling toward a new America.
Falling toward freedom.
As the G-forces overtook Cassandra, one final thought flickered through her mind.
I hope Hilda got out.
Then unconsciousness claimed her.