Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The heat stick cools shortly before sunrise. As it dwindles, we move closer and closer to the center of the hut, until finally we’re piled together, two men and a sheep. My eyes close but my mind is still awake, going from warbots to the sensation of Ambrose’s arms and thighs before returning to warbots. Somewhere in there, I also come up with a plan.

There—the first sliver of dawn. I drink in the feeling of Ambrose’s body beneath mine, listen to the quiet bleats Sheep makes in her sleep, then I stand up, stamping warmth into my feet. “Now we go,” I say.

“Yes, but where?” Ambrose says grumpily.

My mind really does feel refreshed. I see the appeal of WakeSleep for military missions now. Instead of spending the dark hours dreaming, I meditated my way to a strategy. “I can think of two more river switchbacks we can use to our advantage in case we’re still being stalked. That should take us near Inverness. From there—I do have a thought, but I’ll wait until you’re really awake.”

“I’m up, I’m up,” Ambrose says, eyes closed. “Just savoring the last moments of WakeSleep.”

“I’ll tell you along the way,” I say. “I think you’ll like what I’ve come up with.” I really do. It makes me excited, to have this idea that Ambrose doesn’t yet know of, and that he will like.

Sheep is unwilling to get moving on this cold morning. She nips at me as I prod her onto all fours. “Shazyt!” I exclaim, rubbing my forearm. My skin is already purpling where she’s pinched it between her hard flat teeth.

She might actually look remorseful. Or not. It’s hard to tell such things with a sheep.

The perimeter alarms didn’t go off during the night, which means—maybe!—we’re truly not being hunted anymore.

We gather up the alarms to use again, then I lead us along the region’s hiking trails, hoping that each fallen tree we clamber over—and there are many, thanks to a big winter storm a couple of months back—will slow any pursuers.

“So,” Ambrose says, huffing as he hikes alongside me, “are you finally going to tell me this plan I’m going to love?”

“I will be happy to tell you it, Ambrose Cusk,” I say, stopping to face him. I feel nervous. “Let me say all of it before you decide, please. Here is what I am thinking. We have to be on the move, and I’d like to be on the move somewhere . My home has been compromised, and the warbot has logged our last known location as north of here, so that’s where the world’s higher-ups will look for us if the war quiets enough that they decide to hunt us down again. They would assume that we’ll continue to move south. But what if we don’t go that way? What if we take the upcoming road heading due west instead—I wish I had a map to show you, but I can draw you one in the dirt, if you like—but if we pass through Inverness and then over toward the Isle of Skye? We’d have to find a way onto it, but we could repair an old boat, and Skye is off all the flight paths I’ve observed so far. It’s EMP dusted, so we’d be hard to find. We could pick a ruined old house and fix it up. And... live there.”

“Together?” Ambrose asks.

I swallow. “If you like.”

As the final reverberations of what I’ve proposed pass through the air, I gauge Ambrose’s expression. He’s looking at me but not quite looking at me, fidgeting his fingers. I flood with shame. “It’s a stupid idea,” I say, before he can decline. “You want to get back to the rest of the world, to the people who love you.”

Ambrose sighs. “No, no, it’s not that. I don’t want to go back, not anytime soon. It’s just...” He takes a deep breath and looks at me. “... just that I have another idea to propose.”

My shame at proposing Skye turns to anger. I march off down the trail, and call over my shoulder. “You are keeping another secret?”

He hustles to catch up with me. “No, no, not that. No secret. Just an idea I’m worried you won’t like.”

I’m glad he can’t see the irritation on my face. “Continue.”

“Of course we have no means of sending out a ship . Even the Cusk Corporation probably doesn’t have the bandwidth to send another craft out now that war is here.”

“I can confirm that fact from Dimokratía intelligence,” I say. “Continue.”

“Are you familiar with fly technology?”

I can predict where he’s going with this. “The University of Glasgow has modest astronomical facilities,” I say. “Or at least it did until it was abandoned after the EMP dusting. You’re proposing we go there. To fix the problem you created. You want to send out a fly.”

A fly is a marble-sized projectile, fired into space directly from Earth’s surface, from a superpowered gun that launches it at the kind of speed it will take the Coordinated Endeavor thousands of years to reach. At its tiny size, all it can contain is data. It was envisioned as the primary way we’d get information back and forth from the Titan base should conditions in the solar system prevent radio communication. Cusk sent one after Minerva Cusk’s base on Titan went dark, not that any response came back. With the minimal friction of space, it would maintain speed all the way to the exoplanet, as long as it didn’t run into anything.

“With schematics!” Ambrose says. “We’d send it with schematics for the kind of tech they’d need to excise the virus from the DNA of the young colonists. All the exoplanet base will need to produce such a device is a Rover, an OS, and elements. It just needs the right designs and the awareness of the virus in the first place.”

“Do you really think they’d be able to produce a machine on Sagittarion Bb that could fix this?”

“Assuming they’ve—we’ve—successfully birthed children on the exoplanet—which is a big ‘if,’ I know—the machine with these schematics wouldn’t be altering the genetics of a zygote. It would be conducting surgery on a living human, repairing the amygdala. But yes, there could be a surgical fix, just like there are surgeries to treat abnormal amygdalae here on Earth. And the future zygotes could have their DNA altered so the viral damage is undone before they ever begin to grow. That tech is simpler. We could send the schematics for both devices in the same fly.” His voice goes quiet. “Should you agree.”

I don’t know yet if I agree. I know other people would have a feeling already, but I will have to wait for my emotions to reveal themselves. I hold up a hand. “Hypothetically, once we have the launch cannon prepped—assuming it hasn’t been looted—flies are not overly difficult to send,” I say. “We could launch as many as possible, at varying speeds. They can’t adjust their trajectory once in flight, so some would probably get pulled by other bodies’ gravity. Space is so empty that interferences should be rare, but they’ll be journeying for a long time and the tiny probabilities will add up.” Despite my ambivalence, my voice speeds up. Maybe my feelings are resolving. Maybe I’m excited. Maybe I like this plan. “Depending on how many flies are available in the Glasgow space center, we could tweak the speeds so they’d arrive every few years on the exoplanet, to build in some redundancy.”

“ If we decide this is a good idea,” Ambrose says, the hint of a quirk on his lips.

“Yes, ‘if.’”

“I created this problem, by letting Devon Mujaba near the Coordinated Endeavor ,” Ambrose says. “And I’d like your help fixing it. For the sake of our future selves.”

“All of our anger at Cusk and our home countries, all the reasons why we were open to Devon Mujaba’s promises in the first place, still hold,” I say, speeding up my hiking. Ambrose and Sheep kick up their own pace to keep up. Sheep huffs in complaint. “None of that has changed. This escalated war is only further proof that humanity should be stopped.” I slow to climb over a fallen log, brambles at the far side pulling at my pant legs. “We of all people should be disillusioned with humans.”

“Yes, but I guess I’ve discovered that I’m not,” Ambrose says.

“I guess I am, and I am not,” I say. I scramble for words. They are not easy to find, not in this realm and on this this topic and with this person. I’m about to say something the likes of which I’ve never said before. I force myself to continue, and it feels like leaping off a high ledge into a pool of unknown depth. “I was raised to be alone, to be powerful by being contained. To beat away human needs. I think sometimes that it is too late for me, that I will never relate to anyone else. That is why I retreated here. But there’s another me out there. Another Kodiak. Who will spend his life relying on you.” I furiously avoid Ambrose’s eyes, because it is already hard to speak. “I know nothing of what his life will be like. Maybe he and that Ambrose will decide that settling Sagittarion Bb is a big mistake. Maybe they will die of illness or injury there. Maybe they will never arrive in the first place. But what if... what if that me has found some happiness? What if he has found someone, some people, to rely on? If he even has a family? And that will all be taken away by what Devon Mujaba did. Sending out the flies would mean giving them the choice, on Sagittarion Bb. They can decide what should become of humanity. They will have more information about what it’s capable of.”

Ambrose stops hiking, and Sheep and I stop beside him. He glances back along the trail, likely looking for signs of pursuit. Then he looks at me. “That sounds like a yes.”

I finally look into his dark eyes. “It is a yes. A last-ditch mission to the Glasgow observatory sounds like a better way to spend the final days of my life than wandering aimlessly through some wet woods.”

Ambrose holds his hands up to his mouth, like he’s kissing his palms. I look at his fingers, feeling stirred, then start off at a fast clip. “Come on, then, we can’t waste time.”