“I’ll get the children settled in the crew quarters,” Rikki said.
“Cargo hold one is empty,” Dana said. “We’ll talk there.”
The little ones were exhausted, from the trek and emotionally. Rikki got both children settled in hammocks. After dimming the galley ceiling lamp to night-light levels, she headed for the cargo hold. The last thing she heard from crew quarters came from Todd, something about having been cast out.
As she entered the hold, Antonio was saying, “But we have to know more about the moons.”
“No one’s arguing,” Dana said. “The question is how. Look where hacking got us.”
Standing in the hatchway, Rikki cleared her throat. “If I could interrupt.”
“All ideas cheerfully accepted,” Blake said. “We’ve got nothing.”
“Not this idea,” Rikki said. “And I’ll start by admitting I’m no Biblical scholar.”
She knew a few of the old stories—didn’t everyone?—but she had grown up knowing God as just Someone invoked to add zest to cursing. Learning that the Church made Galileo recant what he had seen with his own eyes hadn’t given her religion, either. But Dana sometimes seemed to respect the old tradition, and Rikki would not offend her friend for anything.
Rikki continued, “Still, listening to Todd scares the crap out of me. Li has that poor child—and so, I assume, all the children—believing she is God’s messenger. Li has made herself into Noah and Lot and Moses and I-don’t-know-who-else all rolled into one. Casting us out of the settlement, commanding us to feed everyone else by the sweat of our brow, she’s like God banishing Adam and Eve for original sin. To contradict Li is more than wrong, it’s heresy.”
Antonio nodded. “To the children we’re the bad people.”
“It’s horrible, I know,” Dana said. “But the flooding, the moons—”
“Are parts of a bigger problem,” Rikki interrupted. “We have to be one colony again. The problem is bigger than getting at the lab instruments, bigger than access to Marvin.”
“Bigger than…drowning like rats?”
Rikki slammed the bulkhead with a fist. “Yes, damn it. Bigger than that. Li was right, years back, about one thing. Our survival was never about us. It’s about who and what comes after us. Despite every warning, despite Li’s evident fascination with every manner of authoritarian and utopian society, we allowed her to take charge. We continue to do her bidding. We’ve stood by as she brainwashed more and more children. Is that the legacy we plan to leave behind?”
Stony silence—and then the other three began speaking at once.
“She’s got us over a barrel,” Antonio said. “Without endangering the children we…we can’t…”
“There’s no way past the land mines,” Dana said. “If I could get over the mines, silently, then maybe…”
“There has to be a way to disable them,” Blake said. “I keep racking my brains for something new. I admit Marvin or Carlos can be as good with software as us, or Antonio and my hack wouldn’t have gotten caught. But maybe if I can…”
“Just stop it!” Deep inside Rikki, something had snapped. “All of you. I’ve heard it too many times. Pilot our way in. Invent our way in. And tonight’s failure, hacking our way in, the transgression for which Li would freeze us back into submission. I am so sick of the delusions!
“To rescue those children and redeem ourselves, we need to start working together.”
42
Bulging, rippling—and threatening, with each errant draft, to tear itself apart against the rough stone walls of the sinkhole—the hot-air balloon strained against its tethers. Its ethanol-burning heater roared.
“Eighteenth-century tech,” Dana said, shaking her head. “Your wife.”
“You asked to pilot your way in,” Blake said. In the night-dark sinkhole shaft, he was a shadow: face smeared with grease; flight suit, gloves, and boots all matte black. She was made up the same. “Be careful what you wish for.”
Was it piloting when you couldn’t steer the damned thing? Well, they wouldn’t be in the balloon long. One way or another.
“Uh-huh.” She glanced at her wrist. “Time to go.”
With little time to spare. They would have a bare forty minutes tonight without a single moon in the sky. In duration of darkness, several other nights would have been better, but the prevailing wind had not cooperated. Tomorrow offered a longer window—and the forecast of snow. Snow and reduced visibility were complications they didn’t need. The later into the season it got, damned near every night might bring snow, even a howling blizzard.
“Saddle up,” he agreed.
She pretended not to have heard the quaver in his voice.
Dana clipped them together, chest pressed against his back. She wore a bulky black backpack; he a black satchel strapped over his stomach. Pockets in their flight suits bulged with tools and supplies. More gadgets—holstered or bagged lest they clink together or reflect any light—dangled from their tool belts. Stealthy, they might hope to be. Agile, they were not. Groping behind her, she backed them onto the seat, little more than a child’s swing, that dangled from the balloon. They slipped on smart specs. He grabbed hold of the seat’s ropes.
She throttled down the burner to its pilot-light setting and switched off the dimmed flashlight that hung from her belt. The seconds she gave her eyes to adjust to the dark—while, within the balloon, the air would already be cooling—seemed interminable. The only sounds were a slow, echoing drip from deep within the cave, the faint hiss of the burner’s blue flame, and the creak of tether ropes. She wondered how much more tension stalactites could take before they snapped.
The better question might be how much more tension she could take. Search and Rescue was a young person’s game.
“Godspeed,” she wished them both, then armed and triggered the tether release.
They fell up through the sinkhole into a starry sky.
*
She could only guess at where the ground was. A hundred meters beneath her toes, at the least, the distance growing by the second as
