In the Mouth of the Whale
Part 1. Bow Shock.
12.
Ori woke from a dream of falling and heard the voices of the supervisors outside her sleeping niche, ordering everyone to get up and fall in. It seemed that the recruits had been divided into ten teams that would take turns to ride a little way down the cable and fly real drones, out in the real air. Ori was assigned to the tenth team, the last to descend, and although she told herself that going last was good, a sign of trust, she was dismayed to see Hira marching off to the train at the head of the first team. She hadn't realised until then how much she disliked the woman.
After a long, long wait, Ori's team was led out of the hangar, through an airlock and a long connecting tunnel to an adjoining hangar, this one very much larger. The team was led past stacked goods of every description, through sectors for sorting and storage where lifters and other machines trundled back and forth, past low rectangular bunkers, some with windows, some without, to a curving inner wall of thick, transparent diamond. It was the sheath that held the cable inside the Whale, and the cable could be dimly seen inside it, black and grooved and latticed. Ori and the others were marched into a big airlock set in the wall of the sheath, crossed a short tunnel beyond, and were processed two by two through a smaller airlock. Ori was one of the last to pass through, into a narrow crescent of a room with a mesh floor. She followed the others up a ladder that rose through a long tube, passing floor after floor, the ladder beginning to vibrate under her fingers and toes as she climbed, until they emerged in a small, low-ceilinged disc of a room in which immersion chairs were arranged like spokes in a wheel. Ori realised then that they were aboard a train, and the deep hum and the vibrations she could feel in the soles of her feet meant that it was under way.
It did not travel far. By the time Ori and the rest of the team had checked out and activated the immersion chairs they'd been assigned, it had halted. Teo told her to take it easy and follow the instructions, but Ori hardly heard her. The drone was coming online and she was extending into it, and when the mask clamped down and the sensory feed kicked in she was there, clamped in a launch cradle that everted from the hangar pod and swung out and up into daylight.
She was hanging prone, head down, the hangar carriage beneath her belly, a drone sitting in a cradle on her left. Just like the beginning of every simulation, except the simulations had always been set in infinite volumes of clear and empty air, and now she was looking straight down at a deck of pale white cloud that sheeted the sky for as far as she could see, sculpted into mountains and valleys and great continents. Flotillas of smaller clouds hung here and there above the cloud deck, more or less at the level she hung. The small clouds cast perfectly defined shadows on the cloud deck, and a sharp narrow line haloed with rainbows of refracted sunlight cut through them, running off towards the flat horizon: the shadow of the cable on which the train rode.
Ori switched to the drone's rear sensors (it was a little like turning her neck) and saw the cable rising above, dwindling into a narrow thread, crossing the great filmy shadow of the ring-arch and vanishing into the zenith of the blue-green sky. Somewhere up there, its vast bulk lost in vast perspectives and sunlight dazzle, was the Whale and everything she had known in her life. The tank farm and the nursery where she'd spent her brief childhood. The machine shop where she'd worked first, the air-conditioning plant, the commons of jockey crew #87 and the marshalling yard spread across the flank of the Whale. Where Inas and the rest of the crew were probably working right now, prepping drones for the long drop. Ori felt a swell of hopeless longing pass through her, and then, with a kind of jolt, the rest of the drone's systems came online. Its internal checksum showed that its power, guidance, and navigation packages were all working. A clock started up, running back from thirty to zero; off in the distance, a red dot appeared, a virtual marker floating above the cloud deck five klicks away.
‘There and back,' Teo's voice advised her. ‘Try not to screw up.'
The counter reached zero and started to flash; the drone beside Ori flared away from its cradle, its blunt triangles dwindling into frigid sunlit air. Ori followed more cautiously, puttering along at a shade under a hundred kilometres per hour in a dead straight course as the other drone dwindled away towards the red dot. Cross-currents buffeted her when she left the shadow of the cable, juddering in little vortices along the control surfaces of her vanes, introducing a significant vibration into the drone's stubby wings. The autopilot flashed a warning, but she kicked up her speed a little and was able to stay in control, driving straight on at a steady pace. The other drone flashed past, travelling in the opposite direction, as she neared the red blotch of the way point. She swung around it and headed back, towards the vertical pillar of the cable. The train looked toy-like against the cable's bulk, clinging to a track that was no more than a faint vertical line. As the cable began to fill Ori's forward vision and the sun went behind it, the autopilot locked her out and the drone pitched up in a sharp J-turn, balancing on its thrust as it fell with clean machine precision towards the cradle of its pod and the link cut off and Ori was back in the immersion chair, her first and last practice flight over.
Teo told Ori and the rest of the team that they had all done well. That they wouldn't return to the Whale, but would ride down on the train to the place where they would start work at once.
Ori felt a little flare of triumph. She'd been right: the Trues had saved the best until last. The rest of the team were happy too. They fetched bowls of tea from the cramped kitchen niche and sat on the floor around the immersion chairs and joked about the flocks of sprites they'd attract, the wonders they'd see.
The train descended a long way, stopping several times in refuge loops to allow trains carrying raw materials to the tip of the cable to pass before moving on again. Ori experienced a dropping sensation like riding an elevator, mixed up with her relief and happiness. Felt as if she was floating, leaving behind her old life, yes, but beginning a new and glorious chapter.
The air grew warm and humid, despite the roaring fans of the air-conditioning system. There were creaks and groans in the walls and bulkheads, sudden alarming cracks and snaps, as atmospheric pressure gloved the train ever tighter.
At last, the train stopped and Teo selected one of the recruits and sent her down the companionway, told the others to sit quiet and wait their turn. Ori wondered if everyone else was pretending that they weren't afraid of what lay ahead. A few minutes later, the train started up again, descending, slowing, stopping, and the next recruit was dispatched. So it went until it was Ori's turn. She followed a floating arrow down to the service level above the drone hangars, where two philosopher-soldiers, dressed in yellow coverall uniforms under their exoskeletons, were waiting by the open door of an airlock.
Ori felt a sense of stolid resignation clamp over her – the survival mechanism for her people, who had no say in their fate, who could at any moment be uprooted from their niche at the whim of any True. Despite Teo's assurances, it was possible that she had failed after all. Perhaps she was about to be expelled into the frigid and poisonous air, and the long fall to the sea of hydrogen that wrapped the core. Although she'd burn up long before she reached it, her body mashed by pressure and charred and fragmented and blown to ashes and the vast world's four quarters. She did not struggle. There was no point in trying to struggle. She straightened her back and did as she was told and marched into the airlock, and at once the halves of the outer door parted, exhaling a gust of cold stale air, revealing a small, dimly lit chamber.
‘You'll serve here for ten days. The station's AI will tell you what to do. Try not to kill yourself. The commissar hates it when that happens,' one of the philosopher-soldiers said, and shoved her hard in the small of her back.
Ori stumbled over the lip of the open door and behind her the two halves of the door slammed shut.
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