Chapter One ~ The Flood

When we first saw the damage to the dome and the gap where the computing centre had been, we presumed the worst, but it turned out that Zeid was right. Tabish and Mei and the rest running on virtual had realized what was happening and had enlisted the help of the machines.

The tracks of the low-slung mining digger led right to the dome and then over the seal and through the tough exterior. The patch was forming, but it would be days sealing completely. We went to the other side of the platform and looked at the loading dock we'd strode out of so confidently a few days before. It was completely flooded, but the lower hatches looked like they were keeping water from the interior.

"Before we do anything," Zeid said. "We have pumps for the mining troughs." He wrote a set of operating instructions and then hooked into the maintenance lines to bring a machine lumbering up behind us. "Just get it situated." I didn't want to break his concentration so I said nothing.

"Good place as any." He flicked an internal switch and the hoses began to stiffen as they took the water from the dock to the gully nearby.

"That's going to take too long. I think we should go through the dome too."

"Way ahead of you." Zeid pushed off from the side wall, and we stalked to the other side of the dome.

I pointed to the scout. "I'm sure Mei is operating that."

Zeid merely sighed, and said, "Try talking to her then."

The scout retreated as we walked up, and then stood still, for all the world like a flattened beetle waiting to pounce. "They look bigger when you're closer."

"They're more streamlined now," Zeid said. "Early model. OK, grab some of that cabling from the guy lines on the antennas. Might as well put it to use."

The antennas had come down as a twisted wreck, and the lines were tangled, but I merely pulled one of them and then cut it when the wire rope began to bind on the tower itself. That gave me forty metres, which was more than enough to reach the bottom of the Hole.

We attached the lines to the front of the scout, and then had it back up until we could clamber into the loops we'd made at the end of the wire. "I'm not so eager about this," I told him. "I never designed these suits for falling. We pop a few lines, for crack one of the boards, and it's over for us."

"You can stay behind if you want. But it's a real mess down there. It's going to need both of us."

Zeid was right, but we were risking a lot because we were too impatient to wait for the pump to clear the entrance. The scout lowered us as though it were delivering a baby, and we scraped down the wall until our feet found the floor. We unhooked, and heard the motors of the scout go quiet. "OK. The new computer room."

We were at least partially wading, and many of the rooms were too flooded to bother with, but the path of the mining machine was too obvious to miss. It had fallen and landed poorly, by the look of the broken pieces of machinery near the dome's hole. "They weren't trying to be gentle with that." Zeid pointed to where the miner had chewed through walls and goods trying to get its bearings before it set off in the direction of computing.

"We'll be a while cleaning this up."

Zeid grunted. "It's all automatics. If we can get them running."

We followed the destruction to higher ground, the lab nearest the exit where we'd first set out with our new bodies. Walls were torn out of the way as if they were thin plastic, and the supports that Tabish had insisted on when building the superstructure of the dome were scarred where the machine had dragged the heavy equipment around them.

"It was moving blind," Zeid commented. "See the blundering?" He pointed to the half-collapsed wall and pieces of the server trays it had left behind. "Set on seek, and I'm guessing they weren't able to change directions. No communication."

The path was clear enough although dread delayed our footfalls. With so much wreckage in its wake, it was hard to believe that the main superstructure of the processor bank hadn't been damaged. When we were close to the lab, we could see most of it was still perched on the wall the mining machine had torn from the hub. A scout crouched nearby, connected to one of the machines.

"I never really looked at the machines which ran us," I told Zeid. "Didn't dare too, I guess. Too much like examining your own skeleton."

"It looks like a spider sucking the blood out of a fly," Zeid said.

"You ever seen such a thing?" Most predator insects had been extinct in Waukegan when I was growing up.

"That must be how Mei communicated with the lander. That's why she could manipulate the other scout."

I didn't bother to mention that he hadn't believed me earlier. Instead, I was horrified by how close we'd come to complete system failure. "The power cables," I pointed. A set of cables ran to the emergency backup for the machinery, but the bus wasn't powerful enough to run the entire system. "We'll need power first. They're running on backup batteries."

It was amazing that Mei could do anything. With as little power as they had, they could run perhaps one substantiation at a time, and even that one would be stripped down to minimal instructions. Most of the backup power would be needed to maintain volatile memory.

I left Zeid testing the circuitry while I snaked a few power cables from the lab that had been used to charge our units. Then he insisted on double checking the power they supplied. "Any disruption to the service might have meant the cycles were off, or poorly formed, and if it's spitting out dirty power, we'll do more damage plugging them in."

I left him to it, and pulled at some of the other units which had been torn off on the journey. I didn't know what each part of the main rack did, but I figured it should be on hand in case it was crucial to the unit as a whole. After that, I stood dumbly while Zeid fiddled. He seemed to measure, and then move something, and measure again. It was a long cycle before he was completely satisfied, and he shut off main power, connected it, and then powered it up again.

I had pulled some of the cablings from the wall, identified communications arrays by the amperage ratings, and separated them until I could trace them to the console in the lab. I left that for Zeid to connect, once the system had cycled and the crew were used to running on full power again. Lights and machines had flickered on all over the Hole once the units had power, but I couldn't tell whether that meant the machines recognized the command unit or whether they were responding to the power drain.

Zeid sorted the wiring for one of the slaved lab machines, and then tossed me a power cable. "We need to plug in too. We've been pushing it hard."

I'd been ignoring the flashing lights, but he was right. We hadn't stopped for solar and the internal atomic batteries weren't meant to run us on full power. "How long before we hear from them?"

Zeid shook his head, a doctor hovering over the bed of a sick child. I checked the ports on the hatches, and once I saw the water level had dropped in the dock, I opened them and hauled the pump after me into the rest of the Hole. Ideally, I would be able to pick the lowest point, but instead I found one likely spot and started the machine. The hose pulsed, and then settled into a rigid bar, transferring the water in the Hole to the gully outside.

By the time I was back by the units, Zeid had connected the equipment I'd saved. I didn't know anything about its architecture, but I couldn't help wondering if I'd saved some useless bit of archive, or whether one of my fellow escapees had been in that machine. Had we been scattered over the entire machine, and they now had holes in their memories, or were those crucial connections necessary for the operation of that many of us? I wanted to ask Zeid, but he mumbled something I took to mean I shouldn't be interrupting.

The Hole was huge, now that I had a chance to see it from within my chassis. I'd never dared bring my machine into it when it was all functional, and the gaps my feet made in the substrate, the delicate hatches which fell apart when I opened them, showed that my machine was too much for the place. I was as delicate as I could be, one more bull in a trashed china shop, but I could at least set up another pump, and lift and bolt together the walls which the mining machine has dislodged. Others were too crushed to do anything with, and I lifted what pieces I could and brought them to the dock.

"Should we plan to move them back?" I asked.

"We're getting some signals now, but I don't think these units should be moved again."

I went back into the rest of the Hole. We hadn't planned on weather. And in fact, now that I pondered our mentality when we were building over the past hundred cycles or so, we thought Eliam would remain stable, despite the fact that such a forest would have to be sustained by prodigious amounts of water. We hadn't been paranoid enough. We'd been thinking too much about Jorge and his possible return and not enough about whether we'd survive in the meantime.

The pumps had drained most of the space, although there was still mopping to do. I turned my mind to reactivating some of the cleaning machines and shifting equipment so that we could get some building bots in the place. There was little they could do about most of the mashed separators and torn cabling, but at least the smaller pieces could be brought to a central location for sorting. I started that procedure, and then worked on the sorting machine, examining its criteria so that useful metals wouldn't be discarded.

By the time I was ready to check on Zeid again, he was talking. I walked to where he crouched by the room's dedicated machine, and listened as the blank screen delivered the voices of the people I thought I'd never hear from again. Tabish was giving a report, and because the processes were still unstable, his voice was tinny and emotionless.

"Once the deluge happened, we realized what it meant. We'd meant to build drains into the construction, if you remember, but we didn't want to make the ground unstable. That's when we powered up the mining machine and prepared to be cut off."

He made it sound so nonchalant, but I knew what he meant. They programmed the mining digger to drop through the dome, and then sent it a series of instructions-any one of which could have gone wrong-defining where the machine should drag the main computer banks. "Everyone's OK?" I interrupted.

"Yes," Zeid said, before turning back to the messaging. "I'm hooking up some better communications, but in the meantime, is there anything I should be focusing on?"

"Some of the automatics," Tabish continued, his laundry-list voice itemizing what needed to be done to build new equipment. "This substrate has been damaged too much. We'll need to build, and then transfer. So let's build some processing units like those you're using in the bots. We'll daisy-chain those and get some real processing. Then we can transfer."

I could see what it was going to be like. We were the only mobile bots, other than the specialized scouts, so we would be the ones building equipment and setting up lines for them to monitor the processors. "I'm going out to shut down the machines."

I turned to go, but Mei's voice, as emotionless as Tabish's but somehow conveying more feeling, thanked us. "You have many hard days ahead," she said. "If you hadn't pushed for independent units we'd have all died. Ignominiously. Pointlessly."

Despite the static, Zeid heard her sentiment the same as I did. When we were wrestling over which machines to shut down and which we still needed for reconstruction and minerals, he said the message had been for me. "You're the one who pushed for it. Maybe you were paranoid about Jorge or whatever. But Mei's right, Sam. Without these machines we'd have no way to think our way out of that box. Even if we figured out where to drag the machines."

"Mei knew to hook up the scout," I protested.

"She also knew it was a long shot. Let's get this done, and worry about it later."

We were two days giving the crew enough processing to animate virtually, and even then they were cartoons and the world around them was grey metal. "I don't know why it's grey," Divya complained. "We could have chosen any colour for a default. It didn't have to be grey."

I laughed. I was relieved she was present enough to complain about it. Mei seemed to be her old self too, although while she concentrated on the communication lines to the machinery she rarely spoke. Tabish was calling up more robust plans for a new substrate, and running a few algorithms through the designs before they were modified or deleted. I thought at first he was interested in portability, as though we were going to spend our time in mobile units, but he was concerned about where we'd be located.

When he finally broached the subject, he'd obviously discussed it with the rest already. "I think we should relocate. We keep the Hole as a base, and we run operations out of here, especially coastal stuff, or mining, but otherwise we move our units to that hill you found before you went into the forest."

Zeid was as surprised as me. "You're thinking the machinery is solid enough to take a beating over that trail?"

"We'll make crawlers," Mahek said. "We'll send in a few to clear the path, and then others to make it into a proper road."

"But that will destroy plants before we have a chance to study them," Divya protested. She'd obviously tried the same arguments on the rest, for they said nothing while they waited for us to respond.

Zeid sighed. "It's a lot of extra, but I take your point. It will do some trashing, I'm with Divya on that. But there lots of life left in the forest."

"But this has evolved especially to live on the tailings. On the remainders of the original strike," Divya pleaded.

"And there'll be lots of greenery once we have the road." I couldn't see the problem. We had more than enough samples, and for all the gullies we'd been closing off, there were a thousand others running in different directions.

"You're going to argue with me?" Divya sounded shocked. "After everything?"

Zeid made a warning hiss. "Sounds as though you've already decided. And we'll save what we can, Divya. But we can't afford another one of these storms. And if they're regular. . ." He waited but no one answered.

Mei was partially responsible for the drones delivering weather stations, but she'd been busy checking the path ahead of us. Instead of apologizing, she set about rectifying the mistake.