He did a few midair jumping jacks, his sneak suit a hovering whirlwind as another drone passed underneath.
Frizz laughed. 'They must only see in infrared. We're totally invisible!'
Aya frowned. Invisible or not, Hiro was enjoying his sneak suit way too much. The large tents weren't far away, and they'd already seen one inhuman out here in the dark.
Another of the lifting drones glided up beside Aya, ignoring her and reaching into the pile. Moggle jumped away from its grasp, but the drone was too single-minded to notice, picking through the tangle until its huge fingers found a girder. They closed on it and pulled, dragging along a snarl of cables that almost swept Aya from her feet.
'Hey, watch it!' she said. The drone ignored her, hauling the girder away toward the low tents.
'Come on,' Frizz said, pulling her away in a bounding, near-zero-g step. 'Those things could fly right into you and not even know it.'
Aya nodded. 'I guess being invisible is sort of dangerous.'
Another long leap took them to the edge of the nearest tent, where Hiro and Moggle waited, peering through the gap between canvas and dirt.
The tent covered a pit, about ten meters deep and brightly lit. Rusted girders were everywhere, glinting in the worklights. An inhuman wearing a breathing mask floated overhead, spraying some sort of goo onto a pile of scrap?like the foam from a fire extinguisher, but silvery and seething.
The goo began to bubble, the metal writhing and twisting. Rust and chunks of concrete spat out, clouds of dust hissing into the air.
'Hey, Aya,' Hiro whispered. 'Remember that really boring story you kicked about recycling a year ago?'
'Yeah.' Aya's nose caught a smell like approaching rain. 'Those must be nanos?like smart matter, but not as smart. You can purify old steel with them, or combine it into stronger alloys.'
'Nanos can also eat whole buildings if you're not careful,' Hiro said. 'That's why they're working in a pit, in case they get out of control.'
'So the freaks could use nanos as weapons, right?' Aya said.
Hiro snorted. 'Whatever makes my little sister happy.'
'I'm just saying, they're not exactly making sushi down there,' she mumbled. 'I hope you're getting some shots, Moggle.'
The inhuman air-swam toward a rusted girder that a lifting drone had just dragged in. He gave it a spray of the silvery nanos, and another wave of heat billowed from the tent.
The drone glided away from the wriggling mass, heading toward the pile of scrap that had already been treated. The bubbling nanos were gradually subsiding, leaving a shiny lump of steel. The drone closed its huge fingers around the metal and dragged it out of the tent.
'Let's see what happens next,' Hiro said.
Beneath the next tent was another pit, a pile of purified steel lumps at one end. At the other sat a dozen curved shapes made of thin, crisscrossing lines, like skeletons made of wire.
'Nano-frames,' Hiro said.
Aya nodded. 'Those were in your hole-in-the-wall story, right?'
'Yeah, but I kicked that ages ago.' He paused for a second, and they watched a lifting drone drag a lump of metal across the pit. Another hovering inhuman guided its progress, making gestures with his fingers.
'That looks like fun,' Aya said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Moggle was shooting.
'See how that drone follows whatever his hand does?'
The nano-frame was glowing now, turning bright white. It was about fifteen meters long, with swelling curves like the hull of a boat.
'Nano-frames are the patterns inside holes in the wall,' Hiro explained.
'Huh,' Frizz said. 'I always wondered about that.'
The chunk of metal inside the nano-frame began to turn red, its edges softening like a melting ice cube's. A wave of heat spilled out from the tent.
Aya squinted, her eyes stinging. It felt like standing too close to a fire.
'Whoa,' Frizz said. 'How come my wall never gets this hot?'
'Because you never made anything that big,' Hiro said.
The metal was moving now, flowing across the nanoframe like a viscous liquid, taking on its shape. It filled the spaces between the wires, like skin covering a skeleton. When it had stretched across the entire frame, the steel began to cool back into a solid. The inhuman was already guiding the lifting drone, nudging another lump of metal onto the next nano-frame.
'So here's a question,' Frizz said. 'What do all these shapes make when you put them together?'
Aya looked at the jumble of pieces. All were gently curved, but she couldn't figure out how they went together.
'They look like boat hulls,' she said.
Hiro snorted. 'Ah, the popular solid steel canoe.'
'I said like boats,' Aya said.
'There's no point guessing,' Frizz said. 'Let's keep moving till we get to the end.'
The next tent was much larger, as wide as a soccer field.
The pit beneath it was at least forty meters deep, full of finished metal shapes and tangles of circuitry. Several inhumans floated inside, each manipulating a pair of hand-shaped lifting drones. The air was full of clanking and hissing as hot metal collided and fused.
As she crept along the tent, Aya saw how the system worked. Each inhuman added one new piece, then passed it down, hardly pausing before setting to work on the next.
'An assembly line,' Frizz said. 'Like an old Rusty factory.'
'Except much bigger,' Hiro said. 'Thanks to those drone hands.'
Aya nodded, remembering the Rusty term for this: mass production. Instead of making things only when people needed them, like holes in the wall did, Rusty factories had churned out vast quantities of stuff?t he whole world in a giant competition to use up resources as quickly as possible.
The first hundred years of mass production had created more widgets and toys than the rest of history put together, but had also covered the planet with junk and sucked its resources dry. Worse, it was the ultimate way to turn people into extras?sitting all day performing the same task again and again, each worker a minuscule part of the whole machine. Anonymous and invisible.
As they neared the end of the tent, the shape of the assembled pieces gradually became clear.
One finished piece stood there, almost as tall as the pit was deep, with curved sides swelling gently in the middle. It was sleek and aerodynamic, the top tapered to a sharp point. Flight control surfaces stuck out from its sides, like fins on a shark.
Aya remembered this history lesson too?no one could forget it?and realized that the inhumans' plans didn't really need mass drivers, or smart matter, or anything more advanced than classic Rusty technology.
The awful thing that stood before her was a missile? an old-fashioned city killer, pure and simple.
And every few minutes, another one was coming off the assembly line.
'Huh,' Aya murmured. 'I was actually right.'
Hiro nodded slowly. 'Somehow, I wish you weren't.'
'But this doesn't make any sense,' Frizz said. 'Why build all those mass drivers and then use old-fashioned missiles?'
'Maybe chunks of falling steel weren't evil enough for them,' Hiro said. 'Think of all the stuff Rusty missiles carried. Nanos, bio-warfare bugs, even nukes.'
Aya swallowed. 'So this isn't about using up metal, or even knocking down a few cities. It's about ?' 'Killing everyone,' Hiro finished.
'So they strip the ruins all over the world, shoot the metal here, then launch it right back at us?'
Frizz shook his head. 'Isn't that a little complicated?'
