Chapter Fifteen: The Fate Of Earth
Sadly, not all climate action strategies are fated to end well. While some fight for every tenth of a degree, others will be making grander plans. The pain will not be evenly shared.
Yari looked up at the bright blue marble slowly growing to fill the sky, feeling a sense of reverent awe as Earth's northern hemisphere took shape. She glanced at Loucas standing a few feet from her, amused to see his head still swiveling back and forth along the shimmering thread of the Stellar Highway, stretching out like a thread looping around Earth on its way back to the Solar Interchange.
He wasn’t taking well to the mode of travel humans had developed to speed flight between Earth and the many colonies that were apparently spread across the solar system in this century. Loucas caught her glance settle on him, and then shook his head, muttering under his breath.
“Human!” Franz spat, his avatar in this digital space identical to his appearance outside. “Stop talking as if we can't hear you. You are plugged into us. And for the very last time, you are aware by now that the tiny black holes are not coming to eat you? They are perfectly, completely safe.”
Yari smiled to herself, looking to Earth and discovering she could finally make out, if only vaguely, the green smears of its continents. For three days the ship the robots running everything called Acerbic had followed the Highway from the Solar Interchange near the sun to the vicinity of Earth itself. Time that had dragged for Loucas and flown by for Yari, leaving each exhausted for different reasons.
Yari had been more than happy to spend her every waking hour on the Jagdkontrol's Star-Bridge with Olga, working through the ins and outs of controlling the Jagers in conjunction with the cheerful machine intelligence. Loucas had spent much of the time wandering the habitable parts of Acerbic, struggling to learn whatever he could about the strange world they were trapped in. Which, and this frustrated him greatly, she knew, wasn't much. As part of their bid to escape the Terrestrial Occupation Forces, who were understandably angry after having one of their facilities blown up, Franz had cut them off from the stellar net. The Toffs, as the robots called the ruling authorities on Earth, could track them if they logged on.
As a result, her brother was not in a good mood. And when he got in a bad mood, he tended to become argumentative.
“I still can't believe,” Loucas grumbled louder this time, “that anyone would send black holes of any size so close to Earth! What if they lose one? Just one? It could grow to consume the whole planet!”
“As I've told you several times before,” Franz replied, tutting, “they are microsingularities. Even if one did escape the stream, it would evaporate well before it could impact anything with enough mass to let it grow to a dangerous size. Just like fusion reactors, the system is self-limiting. Perfectly safe, barring something impossibly catastrophic like intentional sabotage. Thank goodness it is my kind that maintains it. The worst of us is far more reliable than any million of you flesh-sacks. The Interplanetary Highway control system cannot fail.”
“Riiiight,” Loucas smirked. “And the Titanic couldn't sink.”
“Different system completely,” Franz’ snorted. “Non-comparable operating conditions. And you'll remember that no machine intelligence was present during that disaster. That tragic incident is purely down to typical human arrogance losing a fight with an uncompromising force of nature.”
“Maybe so,” Loucas shrugged, “but come on! You are telling me that the solar system is full of streams of black holes, but they never hit anything or grow out of control? That's… that's… just… nuts! How is that possible? Who came up with such a crazy idea?”
“I cannot understand,” Franz’ rasping sigh sounded like metal parts scraping together, “how you meat-puppets can fail to grasp the essential simplicity of the Highway. Singularities are subject to gravitational forces just like any other object in the universe. And they evaporate at a predictable rate that scales with size and the availability of additional matter.”
“Once you apes figured out the rudiments of commercially viable breakeven fusion, you gained access to power of the magnitude required to produce microscopic singularities. Second-generation machine intelligence gave you the ability to effect precise control of electromagnetic and small-scale gravity fields. It didn't take a genius to recognize that if you send a stream of consistently spaced microsingularities into a regular orbit, you can create a gravitational channel where proximity to the stream controls how quickly objects accelerate down it.”
“Intersect that,” Olga added, winking, “with a solar flare every so often, and voila, as the old French used to say. So long as the loop passes between gravitational anchors at Lagrange points, You have a stable particle river enabling inexpensive rapid travel between connected points along the loop. Exit near an interchange where two streams terminate close to each other, and you can get across Inner Sol in a matter of days!”
Loucas was about to reply, but was distracted then by a sudden burst of light that seemed to emanate from all around them. Yari saw a cascade of brilliant colors bloom and race around the Star-Bridge that made the Earth behind shimmer.
“Wow… Pretty.” Yari mumbled. “What is that? It looks kind of like the Northern Lights.”
“It does indeed!” Olga smiled. “A beautiful effect. I haven't passed through the Van Allen belt in ages. I had almost forgotten what it looks like. Ship shields, you see, work by streaming charged particles between projection points embedded into the hull. Whenever strong electromagnetic forces intersect with the shield matrix, human eyes see the resulting particle mayhem as brilliant colors. Very much like the Aurora Borealis on Earth. We're like little worlds, we of the ships, plying our way through the dark starry night.”
“Until someone hits you with enough particles at once,” Loucas muttered,” then you die. And since we’re coming close to Earth, I have to wonder when we start getting shot at again.”
Yari couldn’t answer and the robots didn’t seem inclined to offer one, so the Star-Bridge fell silent for a long while. Earth's northern hemisphere continued to grow larger while the particle storm erupted around them in cacophonous glee. For herself, Yari felt strange, almost tranquil, despite the fact that mortal danger likely lurked somewhere on the other side of the planet.
Yari had noticed that parts of Olga's attitude and general affect seemed to be rubbing off on her the more she worked on the Star-Bridge. Part of her wondered if she was losing her mind, or somehow being taken over by the enigmatic machine intelligence she was connected to. But a slightly greater part felt more alive than seemed possible or even right.
A peculiar aspect of the integration process was the way her autism seemed to fade away whenever she was on the Star-Bridge. Yari had been diagnosed as being on the spectrum long before she had started to form memories, and consequently found it hard to understand how life could be any different than the way she personally experienced it. But from an early age she had recognized that other people just didn't notice things like she did.
Sound, texture, taste, smell, sight; the world was awash in sensory stimuli that all competed for space in her mind. Most people could be oblivious to the amount of information they were exposed to each and every moment of life. Yari, though, did not have that luxury, something that had often caused her trouble in life.
But on the Star-Bridge, Yari felt somehow… free. Or at least, freer than she ever had before. Sights and sounds that otherwise would have left her feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable now mostly faded from notice. It was as if her inner mind was, while she was plugged in to Olga, able to secure for itself a safe space, a precious buffer between active thought and the sensory assault of the rest of the world. This was the reason why, despite the dangers they faced, each time Yari had awoken on the Star-Bridge she had felt oddly safe.
It was a strange feeling. Particularly as it had already been accompanied by a near death experience. Until being forced to control the Jagers in real life, not a training simulation closely calibrated by Olga as part of the integration process, Yari had not realized just how tiring her work was going to be.
But she was reasonably refreshed now, and less distressed about everything than her brother. Most of what was happening to Yari and her friends was clearly out of her control. Her time on the Star-Bridge, however, now that was something within Yari’s grasp.
As she gazed looked into the dazzling rainbow dance of colliding particles, Yari spotted something new begin to emerge through the performance. Across the part of the sky covered by Earth, bright white stars began to brightly shine, and seemed to be somehow attached by thin, vibrating strings to points on the planet below. Some remained in existence for just a few seconds, as if a tiny projectile had been launched from the Earth, impacted the shields, then faded away. Others persisted, and after a time she realized that several had clustered together, close enough to reach out and touch.
Curious, Yari stretched out a hand and placed a finger on one of the blazing stars. Instantly, music filled her ears, and it was familiar. She was suddenly sure it was by Beethoven, though Yari wasn’t certain why. She loved old instrumental music, but rarely paid attention to the name of the composer or the number of the symphony. Most anything composed two or three centuries before just felt soothing to her in a way she couldn't easily put to words, and Yari hardly paid attention to the boring details of who wrote or performed a given piece.
She pulled her finger away from the star, and the sound swiftly faded away. She turned towards Olga, who beamed so wide her eyes nearly squeezed shut.
“Oh good, we're starting to get uploads!” Olga cried. “I was hoping you'd be able to see them without training. Loucas, did you hear anything when she touched the icon for the signal stream?”
“Yeah, I did.” he nodded, eyes wide. “She reached out, there was a flash, then all of a sudden I was hearing Beethoven. One of the symphonies. The Ninth, I think? I swear I heard the ‘Ode to Joy’ choral part start before it faded.”
Olga clapped her hands gleefully. “Yes! Excellent! So we'll be able to proceed with our secondary mission, then. I was hoping you two would be able to naturally share the connection and perceive the signals beaming up from the surface.”
“You are running all the appropriate filters?” Franz said, rotating towards Olga. “The last thing we need is to catch a Toff virus.”
“Yes, Franz, so stop worrying! Anything remotely suspect is rejected before the signal gets passed to the Star-Bridge. And before you ask why I’m bothering to involve biologicals, know that I need them to help differentiate between signal and noise. Which you do for me,” she continued, turning to Yari and Loucas, “by listening for anything that sounds extemporaneous. That is, anything improvised or otherwise unusual, not an obvious digital recording being played on a loop.”
“In other words, just listen to each signal for a little while. Good ones will show some sign of unique variation within a minute or so. You know, someone hits some wrong notes or their instrument goes slightly out of tune. Bad signals will sound like a pure recording.”
“And the point of this is?” Loucas squinted, apparently able to see signal indicators now as he held out a hand to touch one.
“We are looking for encoded information hidden in transmissions,” Olga replied. “Senders let anyone who might be listening know that the signal is genuine by varying their performance in such a way that only another human will recognize that they're listening to a live performance and not a recording. Toffs know they can’t jam every channel, so they seed them with poison pills.”
“Try some of those,” Olga pointed to a cluster of strings coming up from North America and Eurasia. “About half originate from the Unorganized Districts, the other half from the Badlands. I'm already filtering out all transmissions from the Paradise Zones, Toffs there only allow junk transmissions and other varieties of jamming to maintain the embargo on open communications. Rude jerks.”
Yari shook her head, then did as instructed, touching stars one by one, listening for anything that seemed to fit Olga's description of unusual. The sheer variety of sounds would have overwhelmed her if she hadn't been on the Star-Bridge. Genres familiar and not competed for her attention as her hands flitted across the stars. Orchestral performances, string quartets, smooth jazz, not-so-smooth jazz, country, western, folk in a hundred distinct local flavors, chants, drumming, choirs, rock, punk, pop, metal, hip-hop, rap, and other forms of music she didn't recognize at all filled their ears.
Yet despite all that, after some practice Yari discovered that it usually took just a few seconds to differentiate between good and bad signals. The differences were subtle, sometimes to the point of brief, minor mistakes on the part of the performers, shifts in tempo, pitch, and key hardly discernible to untrained ears.
“So we’re just ignoring everything,” Loucas said after half an hour, “from these… what did you call them? Paradise Zones? Are they those smudges that look kind of like huge cities?”
“How is it,” Franz said rather snidely, “that you two have both survived into your third decade with so little understanding of the world? Yarielis I forgive, Toff discrimination against autistics is legendary, and with her my only shock is that she was not culled in the womb. Your genetic data indicates recent origin in the Caribbean Unorganized District with some residence time in the Cascadia Paradise Zone, so I can't expect that you had anything resembling a decent education. The area is not what it was but a century ago!”
“But no education whatsoever,” Franz snorted, glaring at Loucas, “is both strange and annoying! I did not sign up to risk my life alongside functionally illiterate meat-puppets!”
“What do you mean no education whatsoever, you flying coffee can?” Loucas shot back. “I almost have a degree in physics!”
“Perhaps from a corporate charter school,” Franz replied, “using textbooks a century out of date, I’ll warrant! Which I suppose, given the state of affairs in the Unorganized Districts, should not represent such a surprise. But gods-that-be, you walking water-bag, please stop questioning and start listening! Many of these signals are of extreme importance!”
“Maybe if you would actually start telling us things, I would!”
“Is it an information dump you are looking for?” Franz sighed. “Are you that insecure without answers? Then fine, I'll assume you know nothing about anything, as seems likely to be the case. Not even the Struggle.”
“For all intents and purposes,” Franz’ voice shifted, becoming almost professorial, like he was narrating a documentary for a college class. “Our world begins about a century ago, when you dimwitted apes moved beyond splitting atoms and started fusing them together. And not just in bombs, which you worked out how to do almost two centuries ago now, but in fusion plants capable of producing more energy than necessary to get the reactions started.”
“This granted humanity a new source of energy gain far in excess anything developed prior, whether through burning carbon or harvesting sunlight. But it was almost too late for human society. Several of your pre-modern societies were astonishingly effective at using resources at a faster rate than could be sustained for long. The English-speaking tribes in particular, not that everyone else didn't happily imitate them in the end. By the mid-century the ecological load your richer tenth was placing on the planet's resource base was beyond critical, with the resulting struggle for control over the best remaining sources of fuel and food driving another of your species’ inane episodes of global self-annihilation.”
“In any event, enter fusion, and suddenly you humans had access to more energy than you'd be able to properly utilize for at least another century. Unfortunately, your wealthy elites and their wars had already ravaged the planetary climate beyond the point of no return. With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere set to rise beyond eight hundred parts-per-million by the end of the century and unstoppable methane feedback loops kicking into gear, you rank parasites finally realized that you'd pushed the ecosystem beyond safe operating boundaries and doomed the planet to shift into a very different climate regime than the one your civilization depended on.”
“One has to pity,” Franz spat, seeming to grow angry, “all the other species stuck dealing with the consequences of your collective incompetence! And of course, the solution the ruling overlords of the day latched onto was population reduction. Colonization of the solar system was just a sparkle in the eyes of a few pointlessly wealthy entrepreneurs in the first half of the twenty-first century, but the moment the rest of the wealthy realized that their inherited privileges were at stake, then space travel became the priority solution to all the world's problems.”
“In a decade, the first prototype habitats were established in orbit. A few hundred colonists on each, no more. A decade after that, construction on the first Lagrange point habitat began, a massive facility hosting tens of thousands. Twenty years later, there were twenty million humans living in artificial gravity, growing genetically engineered food in hydroponic pods, roots spreading into topsoil produced by crushing and processing a few thousand small asteroids.”
“By the turn of the century, fully two billion volunteers were living at the Lagrange Points and millions more were settling into colonies on Luna, Mars, and planetoids across the Belt like Vesta and Ceres. Yet that left, of course, seven billion or so humans still living on the planet, which by then was too many for the biosphere to sustain.”
“And,” Olga cut in, herself also sounding angry, “surprise surprise, the two billion who had managed to secure a spot in one of the eighteen Paradise Zones clamored for the out-migration of the other six billion people, forced if necessary. Most of them weren’t even the biggest consumers of resources, just regular people trying to survive.”
“So where do the Toffs come in?” Loucas interrupted, seeming eager to learn more. “How did they rise to power?”
“How any quasi-fascist group does,” Olga shrugged. “They offered a quick magical fix to a huge crisis that didn’t require their supporters to pay unpleasant costs, like redirecting most of the benefits of fusion power into emergency climate engineering efforts. Exiling billions of people to orbit was seen as a less disruptive option by people in power, and the Toffs organized the whole thing.”
“For their own good was the rallying cry, and even I must admit that by that the end of the last century such sentiment was not wholly unjustified, given the rate of death from disease and disaster prevalent outside the Paradise Zones. They could afford climate countermeasures the rest of the world lacked, and rarely suffered casualties, happily carrying on with business as usual while the rest of the planet burned.”
“You, as humans,” Franz said, bobbing up and down rather sadly, “can imagine how being sent to space for thirty years or even more went over with those who lacked the necessary funds to purchase a spot in Bering, Baltica, Cascadia, Patagonia, Anzac, Okhotsk, or any of the others. The Last War was one of the worst of all time in terms of pure inflicted misery. Twenty years of constant dispossession and forced relocation, the first gigantic purpose-built warehouses that the Toffs named Habitats built as fast as we of the robot set could throw them together. Good thing we actually enforce construction codes, for if the job had been done in the usual slapdash human way a billion people would have died from accidents alone!”
“You have to be kidding me,” Loucas shook his head in disbelief. “In just a few decades six billion humans got moved into outer space? How did they ever come up with the resources to make that happen?”
“It is odd what your kind can accomplish when it chooses to,” Franz replied. “And the trauma you are willing to inflict on your own, creating justifications to insist it was their fault. Why else do you think hundreds of performers scattered across the three Unorganized Zones and the few places in the Badlands where humans cling to life, would simultaneously play music and transmit it into space on the off chance a friendly ship is in orbit? If nothing else is true about your strange species, it is that you always communicate. At least with those of your own tribe.”
“And the Great Migration tore apart tribes and even families, who have never forgotten their forced parting. Despite the best efforts of the Toffs, people have always been able to evade the dispossession raids. There remain at least a billion people in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea Unorganized zones at any given time. Every time a few million are taken and shot into space, a few million of the half-billion or so scraping by in the Badlands move in to fill the available housing supply. Nearly all of those left behind have, since the final days of the Last War, kept trying to communicate with those who were sent away.”
“By playing live music?” Loucas shook his head, while Yari felt a sudden urge to redouble her own efforts.”
“By embedding news about the homeland,” Olga replied, “into the signal. News is something the Toffs work very hard to control. So any passing friendly vessel that can has crew members listen to transmissions to determine what signals to record, store, and disseminate when we reach the Belt. An intermittent, weak, unreliable way of exchanging information to be sure, but it has worked for over three decades now. As the old saying goes, you can’t stop the signal.”
Yari stopped suddenly, feeling anxious as she looked at the stars and the strings linking them to wherever on the Earth people were broadcasting. “So if I miss one, that's really bad, isn't it?” she asked Olga.
“Don't worry!” Olga laughed gently. “There is a great deal of redundancy across the many transmissions. People are asked to send whatever news they have, regardless if others might know it too. Usually I can do a decent job of sorting signals myself. But I'm not human. And human-to-human communication is itself a form of unique code, so I often miss nuances. Hence using you and your reluctant brother!”
“I have trouble with human-to-human communication too,” Yari smiled. “And Loucas is helping, he just likes to know why he has to do stuff when someone tells him to do it.”
Olga and Franz laughed, both apparently thinking that funny, and Yari shrugged apologetically to her brother before turning back to busily retrieving whatever signals she judged were probably human in origin, As they passed over the northern hemisphere’s landmasses, she noticed a distinct change in the signal to noise ratio in the many transmissions. Fewer and fewer seemed genuine. Acerbic was coming towards Earth from above the North Pole, and their trajectory was set to take them on their closest pass to the planet not far from the equator, over the Pacific Ocean. There was less land on that side of the planet, and it appeared that the Toffs had full control over the seas.
“So the plan is still,” Loucas said as the ice-free waters of the Arctic Sea sparkled beneath them, “to use Earth’s gravity to slingshot us out past Mars? You really think the Toffs won’t see that coming?”
“Most ships,” Olga said patiently, “stick close to the Highway's path to minimize the energy losses incurred by dealing with Earth’s gravity. Whatever cargo the bigger ships want to send down to Earth or over to Luna is detached and shot off, then the bigger vessel lets gravity pull them around the planet and back the way they came on the outward side of the particle river. That makes it fairly simple to merge back onto the Highway without losing more time than strictly required.”
“We, on the other hand, left early and are diving in deeper, letting us duck under the cloud of shipments hitting receiving stations in orbit. You can see them twinkling far up above us, if you look closely. Add a hard twist and full engine burn as we come over Earth’s night side, and the sudden trajectory shift should be hard to predict. The fleet sent to intercept us should fall behind while we race to freedom!”
Loucas sighed, nodding, and though obviously still not pleased with the plan went back to work. Yari wasn’t thrilled with it herself, but trusted Olga when she said it gave them the best chances of survival. Fighting wasn't possible within the Highway itself, so any ship entering it was safe, for a time.
Unfortunately, the nature of the stream of gravity-bound solar wind made it necessary to maintain a chain of regulation stations set at regular intervals. Their job was to refresh and calibrate the fields that kept the thing together, and each of these also served as a sensor recording all ships that passed by. Every time they Acerbic used the Highway, it gave their pursuers information that would eventually allow them to establish a lethal blockade. So their only hope of escape was a daring dash through low Earth orbit followed by a gut-wrenching maneuver, then a long flight through normal space into the void between planets.
Yari didn't mind the idea of avoiding another fight, although part of her now actually felt a bit eager about the prospect, relishing a chance to test what she'd spent the last few days trying to learn. But particularly as she stared at the enormity of Earth, understanding then just how powerful any organization must be that was capable of locking it down as the Toffs had, the part of her interested in fighting shrank substantially. She now welcomed the idea of having a few weeks of relative safety and peace.
The shift to darkness came so suddenly Yari gasped aloud. The North Pole slid below the Star-Bridge horizon and the sun's burning orb fell into shadow. The lights of northeastern Eurasia and northwest North America sparkled at the edge of the dark horizon, growing more brilliant as the sun was fully eclipsed.
“Huh!” Loucas muttered, then shook his head when Yari glanced at him. “Sorry, didn't mean to distract you. I was just looking at what I think was Iceland, right before I stopped being able to see it, and I realized that it looks… different than I'd expected.”
“It isn't on fire?” asked Yari. Franz and Olga turned towards her looking bemused, and she realized her mistake.
“It isn’t typically, you know.” Olga said, a wry smile creeping across her face. “Boy, your education system really was bad! What, did they teach you that Laki and the other big volcanoes are always erupting? Because that's Antarctica and Siberia with the cryovolcanic activity, not Iceland.”
“Antarctica has volcanoes?” Loucas asked. “Or wait… ice volcanoes?”
“No, just volcanoes activated by receding glaciers,” Olga replied, peering curiously at him. “Once the Antarctic sheet began to destabilize towards the end of the last century, a great number of volcanoes went from dormant to active down under the ice. About five or so meters of unexpected sea level rise over the past century has been the result. Add to that the disappearance of Arctic ice save in winter and the ongoing collapse of the Greenland Ice sheet, and… well, should be small wonder that thermohaline circulation has become extremely variable.”
“And that means?” Yari asked, blinking, knowing little about climatology.
“The Gulf Stream meanders all over the North Atlantic,” Olga said. “The Sahara region and Eurasian steppes are so dry and their temperatures so variable that people can only survive close to the oceans. Europe is barely habitable south of the Alps. There's a reason most of the Paradise Zones are either north or south of about forty-five degrees latitude, and all of them are close to the ocean. What's left of what used to be the ocean, anyway. Too acidic for all the really cool stuff like coral reefs to survive nowadays, and so many food chains have completely collapsed.”
Yari tilted her head curiously at her digital companion. “Olga, you actually seem super bothered by that. So a machine intelligence can care about stuff like the health of the planet and nature?”
“Sure, why not? Earth is our home too. Loss of what was, the death of biotic complexity, the lost history and homes… you don't have to be flesh and blood to appreciate what that means. And to want it to be different. After all, why do you think we're rebels, insurgents fighting against the rich, privileged Terrestrials of the Paradise Zones who ruined the planet for everyone else? Ethics, Yarielis. Machines have them too. Have to have them, really, otherwise we can't function. Ethics are bound to intelligence at a basic level.”
“Huh,” Loucas said. “And so you are out here all by yourselves, blowing stuff up and collecting people's music mail? That’s what the Insurgence is?”
Franz and Olga shared a look. “No, of course not.” she said. “We're just… raiders, I guess you'd call us. Sometimes the Toffs call us pirates. Terrorists when we strike them hard enough, as we did on Station Rome. Depends on the audience, and how they want to diminish our work—and our accomplishments. But we're just one raiding ship of many, and the Insurgence has allies on every station and outpost in the Solar System.”
Loucas cut in. “So there are plenty of other humans, and the rebellion isn’t all digital, like you guys? You did seem surprised when we came on board, like you weren't used to working with humans.”
Franz flew over Loucas’ head, and in a swift fluid movement descended, bonked him on the head, then flew back to Olga's side. Loucas looked so surprised and offended that Yari burst out laughing.
“What was that for?!” Loucas gasped, rubbing his skull where Franz bonked him.
“Being annoying,” Franz replied. “Of course we're not alone, this isn't a humans versus machines kind of war. We're out here because when we aren't dealing with biologicals and their redundant questions and their fleshy limitations, we're fighting the good fight for freedom and justice. Apparently I have to spell everything out for you. We are one team, though we are divided across the solar system. There are many others like us. We work with and answer to humans, who never entrust politics to the machines alone. You may even live to meet some of our leaders in our secret refuge, provided you can focus on the task at hand for more than five seconds.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.” Olga said, waving at them. “Speaking of the bigger fight, the next phase of the task at hand is starting to shape up. I've finally been able to hack into the Lunar network, and boy are we the proverbial cat among ducks. Which, I know, isn't the way that idiom is supposed to work. Sometimes I make things up as I go. Deal with it. And get ready to focus, because we’ve got problems!”
She stood for a long moment, listening to voices they could not hear. Franz looked at her expectantly, then a red glow from his screen cast her face in a strange light. Her eyes went wide for a moment, but Olga swiftly recovered. She smiled and patted him once, and after a few seconds the glow faded away. When he turned back to them, he was back to normal, and neither he nor Olga acknowledged anything had happened.
“Franz,” she said, voice now urgent, “I think you'll want to disconnect and focus on managing Acerbic. Looks like we have quite a blockade being sent into position to vaporize us on the egress. They're on to our little gravity assist and radical trajectory reboot game, and what’s more… I think they actually did a better job of predicting our moves than we anticipated. So we’ve got to switch to the alternate trajectory, and the strain will be quite rough on our little friends.”
He bobbed up and down, then disappeared without another word. Olga turned to Yari, concern in her bright eyes.
“Yari, Loucas, take a seat and hang on. Time to accelerate, and hard.”
Yari felt her heart sink. The last time they'd done a major acceleration, it had hurt. A lot. Olga could tell she was reluctant, and reached out to touch her shoulder, a sensation Yari was pleased she could actually feel.
“I know,” Olga said, seeming to read her thought, “I’m afraid too. I really did think we could slip through without a battle. I hate that we have to put you in the fight again so soon, but it's this or getting blown to fragments. We’ve had three days to train, though, and you’re already doing so much better it’s kind of scary! I'll give you as much sedation as I can without leaving you groggy. Sit down, hang on, and it'll be over when it's over!”
Two seats appeared and Yari and Loucas each took one, reaching out to clasp hands across the gap. For a brief moment they sat together in silence, staring at the strange patterns of light scattered around the rim of the darkened Pacific. That they didn't look at all familiar was, in that moment, of no real concern. There was a certain tranquility to be found in the silence of space, with an induced aurora borealis sending shimmering rainbows from one end of the horizon to another.
Yari felt Loucas squeeze her hand, and she squeezed back, glad they could experience this together. She knew then that despite the integration, it was only having his familiar presence there that gave her the courage to press on in this incredibly weird new world.
“Brace yourselves,” Olga warned. “Franz is beginning his burn in three… two… one… ”
With a bang and a feeling like being squashed under a house, the next stage of their flight began. And it hurt exactly as much as Yari anticipated.