“Being a cyborg?” She shrugged. “I never had an option. I woke up like this, if you remember. I don’t have a past to miss.”
Will nodded. “It’s probably for the best that you can’t remember what you were.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
He thrummed his fingers on the dashboard for several moments.
“Maybe I’ll do that…” he announced.
She studied him uncertainly. “Do what?”
“Maybe I’ll have them wipe my mind after the transference,” Will said. “Now that would be interesting.”
“If you want to spend the rest of your life wondering who you were, then go for it,” she commented.
“Is it that bad for you?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “Though I admit I’m curious, if a little afraid.”
“You’re not sure you’ll like who you were…” Will said.
She nodded. “But it shouldn’t matter. You said it yourself, we’re more than our pasts.”
“Yes, we are,” he agreed. “And yes, it shouldn’t matter.”
“But sometimes it does,” she said. “And that’s what scares me.”
Will had nothing to say to that.
They continued across the Outlands, making their way northeast toward their target. She glanced at her overhead map. The destination was marked as a flashing waypoint, visible when she zoomed out.
On the map, she could clearly see the line that represented the pipeline, colored green as it wended its way across the landscape toward the ocean. The waypoint was quite a distance along that route, about three hundred kilometers from Aradne.
The convoy could have approached the pipeline directly, aiming for a target closer to the city. While doing so might mean much less time was needed to reach the waypoint, that close to the city the Aradne security forces would scramble their air force and reach the convoy in minutes. The attack would come before Rhea and her team even started loading any water.
So instead the convoy approached the pipe at a relatively broad angle, first of all to make their destination less obvious—another settlement was roughly along this course, and the Aradne security forces and AIs monitoring the satellite feeds would likely assume that was their destination. Secondly, this waypoint gave them at least some time to drill into the pipe and gather the water they needed before the attack squadrons could reach them. Even then it would be a close race: at three hundred kilometers, the airborne forces could arrive in half an hour. It was too bad the slum residents couldn’t afford to build airships big enough to handle the weight of these water tanks… ah well, she had to work with what she had.
Before leaving, Rhea and the others had shut off their remote interfaces, vanishing their IDs from the Net. Once they had entered the Outlands and were well away from any network nodes, they’d reactivated those interfaces so they could communicate with one another. It seemed a wise move, in case the Aradne government was keeping tabs on them.
They’d also kept the purpose of the semis and their intended destination known to only a handful of people. This limiting of information seemed to have worked, because if any spies had reported their intent, the convoy would have been attacked already.
After three hours of travel the main pipeline appeared on the horizon to the left. The drones picked it up first, and Will relayed Gizmo’s video feed to Rhea so she could watch the tiny, glinting section pass by. On their current course, this was the closest point of approach to their destination.
The convoy had encountered no resistance thus far, but that would change shortly.
“All right, it’s time,” Rhea said, transmitting over the band shared by the entire convoy. “Make a direct course for the pipeline.”
6
Rhea stood guard on top of the tanker as the robot assistants attached the rubber hoses to the pipeline. Surge release valves were located along the pipeline at one-kilometer intervals. They operated automatically, using gas pressure to vent excess water and vapor as the need arose. Next to these were manual bypasses, accessible over a local wireless network. These latter valves could be hacked, albeit with difficulty.
Miles and his team had already gotten their hands on the specs to the bypass modules, and they’d sent drones ahead to begin the hacking process. These drones had made good progress brute-forcing the wireless interface, so that by the time the rest of the convoy arrived, it took only a few more minutes for the robotic assistants to finish the job.
When the bypass was in their control, the robots draped canopies between the tankers and the pipeline to hide their activities. Those canopies were painted with a reflective coating to block infrared as well as visual, but it would still be fairly obvious what was going on to anyone watching the orbital feeds.
With the canopy in place, the robots affixed a forking connector to the bypass valve, then in turn attached the hoses from each of the tanks to this new connector.
“We’re ready!” Miles announced from the top of the tanker next to hers. He had on rock-digital camo outfit similar to the one Rhea wore.
“Open it up!” Rhea shouted.
A moment later the hoses expanded, shifting as water from the pipeline rushed into them.
“Loading in progress!” Miles said. “Hoses and connectors are holding!”
Rhea followed the pipeline to the westernmost horizon and let her gaze linger there. When Aradne’s security forces
