Starfish

"Really." Clarke didn't seem especially interested.

"Getting this from the gel, I mean. We've got a radio link. Why didn't someone just tell us?"

"Because your radio's out," Clarke said distantly.

Surprised, he checked the diagnostics. "No, it's working fine. In fact, I think I'll call in right now and ask what the fuck this is all about…"

Thirty seconds later he turned back to her. "How did you know?"

"Lucky guess." She didn't smile.

"Well the board's green, but I can't raise anyone. We're flying deaf." A doubt tickled the back of his mind. "Unless the gel's got access we don't, for some reason." He linked into the lifter's interface and called up that vehicle's afferent array. "Huh. What was that you said about machines giving the orders?"

That got her attention. "What is it?"

"The lifter got its orders through the Net."

"Isn't that risky? Why doesn't the GA just talk to it direct?"

"Dunno. It's as cut off as we are right now, but the last message came from this node here. Shit; that's another gel."

Clarke leaned forward, managing somehow not to touch him in the crowded space. "How can you tell?"

"The node address. BCC stands for biochemical cognition."

The display beeped twice, loudly.

"What's that?" Clarke said.

Sunlight flooded up from the ocean. It shone deep and violent blue.

"What the fuck — "

The cabin filled with computer screams. The altimeter readout flashed crimson and plummeted. We're falling, Joel thought, and then, no, we can't be. No acceleration.

The ocean's rising…

The display was a blizzard of data, swirling by too fast for human eyes. Somewhere overhead the gel was furiously processing options that might keep them alive. A sudden lurch: Joel grabbed useless submarine controls and hung on for dear life. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clarke flying back towards the rear bulkhead.

The lifter clawed itself into the sky, lightning crackling along its length. The ocean raced after it, an enormous glowing bulge swelling towards the ventral port. Its murky light brightened as Joel watched; blue intensifying to green, to yellow.

To white.

A hole opened in the Pacific. The sun rose in its center. Joel flung his hands in front of his eyes, saw the bones there silhouetted in orange flesh. The lifter spun like a kicked toy, rammed deep into the sky on a pillar of steam. Outside, the air screamed. The lifter screamed back, skidding.

But it didn't break.

Somehow, after endless seconds, the keel steadied. The readouts were still online; atmospheric disturbance, they said, almost eight kilometers away now, bearing one-twenty. Joel looked out the starboard port. Off in the distance, the glowing ocean was ponderously collapsing upon itself. Ring-shaped waves expanded past beneath his feet, racing to the horizon.

Back where they had started, cumulus grew into the sky like a soft gray beanstalk. From here, against the darkness, it looked almost peaceful.

"Clarke," he said, "we made it."

He turned in his chair. The rifter was curled into a fetal position against the bulkhead. She didn't move.

"Clarke?"

But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.

Unregistered contact, it complained.

Bearing 125x87 V1440 6V5.8m1sec^-2 range 13000m

Collision imminent 12000m

11000m

10000m

Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.

"Ah, shit," Joel said.

Jericho

One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.

Not yet. Not yet. Soon.

She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied her any refuge in darkness.

Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.

That was where it would come from.

Oh God. If only there was another way.

It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it would've taken.

Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.