Chapter Forty-Three Sadie
Forty-Three
Sadie
“Welcome for what?” I asked Ivy. “Imprisoning us?”
“For saving you,” Ivy said, as if this was obvious.
I was beginning to think maybe her databanks were corrupt. “Is that what this is?” I asked, lifting my chin toward the glass doors of the refrigerator. Air pushed through a grate on the wall, smelling slightly like the solvents we used to clean our starfighters.
Oh, stars. Whatever chemicals they were using to prepare our bodies to be frozen were already coming through that grate.
“I saved you all!” Ivy said, not really answering my question. “And you are so very, very welcome. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
Maybe it was better to play along. “Thank you!” I said.
“We’re so grateful to you for saving us!
And you were really effective at it too.
We’re all saved now. So if you don’t mind, we’d like to be going…
” I inched my foot toward the grate, pulling it tight against the restraints that tethered me to the back of the unit.
If I pivoted my toes, I could just barely slide them to the edge of the grate, but I couldn’t reach to kick it in.
“How,” Ivy said, “do you intend to show me your undying gratitude?”
I shot an alarmed look at Nedd, who shrugged, as if to say, It was your brilliant idea to thank the insane artificial intelligence.
I shot him a glare that I hoped replied, Unless you’re going to help, you don’t get to criticize.
I thought my message got through, because Nedd opened his mouth. “We thought a thank-you would suffice.”
The AI made a disgruntled noise but was interrupted by screams in the warehouse.
Through the refrigerator glass and the windows that overlooked the warehouse, we watched a DDF starship fly through the nowhere portal, headed straight for the warehouse wall.
The Dulo shot out the wall and kept flying, right out of the warehouse again and into the sky beyond.
Outside, I could see more buildings like this one, rows and rows of them.
I blinked.
Who had that been? Gilaf? Alanik? Arturo?
“That was one way to get in,” Nedd said.
Stars, how bad had things gotten out there that one of our flight members had flown a ship through that gate?
“It was,” I agreed. A moment later, the radio at my belt sputtered to life.
“Nedder?” Arturo said. “Sentry? Are you there? Do you copy?”
I tried to reach the radio so I could press the button to respond, but it was just out of my reach.
Scud. There had to be a way to respond. Nedd and I stared at the hole in the warehouse wall as if willing Arturo to return.
He didn’t.
“I guess that wasn’t our rescue, then,” Nedd said.
“I wonder if you are suffering memory loss,” Ivy said. “As I distinctly said, you have already been saved. By me.”
Right.
“If we’ve been saved,” Nedd said, “then why are you putting us in storage?”
“I am merely protecting you from the consequences of your own ignorance,” Ivy said imperiously. “So many of your people don’t seem to understand that I’ve saved them. Even the people who programmed me never came back to show their appreciation! Can you imagine?”
I wondered what happened to those people and if it involved her chaining them up. But I didn’t think asking was going to help us get out of here, which had to be our first priority.
While Ivy was talking, I flexed my foot up and down, pushing through the tingling sensation to work my toes under the edge of the grate.
There were no visible bolts on the outside, which was promising.
Besides smelling terrible, the gas emanating from the grate was starting to make my lungs burn.
I guessed it wouldn’t kill us if the end goal was for us to be frozen and preserved, and it was slow-acting, possibly to prevent it from killing us as it transitioned us into cryosleep.
But I still wanted to stop breathing it as soon as possible.
“All those fighters out there,” Nedd said, “did you save them too?”
“I certainly did!” Ivy said. “Do you know what those Superiority aliens would have done to me if they’d found out what I was doing here? I saved all these people from them. Would you like to know how many?”
Oh, stars. Ivy had co-opted the station that watched the preserve, convincing the varvax here to work with her instead of their own government.
“A couple hundred thousand?” Nedd guessed.
“Almost five million,” Ivy said.
Stars, how big was her operation, if she’d been able to collect five million humans? How many other planets were there like Blightfall, and how long had this been going on? It would take far fewer than five million troops to overwhelm Epiphany. We had to warn them.
I kept up my efforts, wiggling my toes up and down under the edge of the grate.
It was hard to tell through my boot if it was moving, but I thought I felt it give the tiniest bit each time my toes flexed.
Unless she had a camera pointed directly at my foot, Ivy wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing past the frame of the refrigerator doors.
Nedd seemed to have caught on, because he twisted his own boot toward the grate on his side of the unit and kept Ivy talking. “Why train the gladiators on Blightfall against scions?” he asked. “With light-whips and shock spears?”
“I’ve trained warriors in all specialties,” Ivy said.
“Even I, who can predict probabilities down to a hundredth of a percent, don’t know exactly which possibilities will become a reality.
So I planned for them all! Do you know how much coordination that required?
How much effort? How much loving care? And I had only varvax to help me!
So many times they almost revealed my plans to the Superiority.
They must have found out about us a month ago, because one day, half our taynix disappeared, just like that!
All we had left were the ones under my protection in here. ”
Ah, that was how Ivy had held on to the taynix. The ones under her control had been in the nowhere when the delvers liberated the Superiority’s captive slugs.
Yes, the grate was definitely moving under my toes now. I tried to push against the numbness, to rotate my foot as much as I could.
The grate slid off, leaning against my leg, and I carefully nudged it against the wall, where it stood upright, still mostly covering the compartment within.
Through the open slit along the top of the compartment, I could see hoses inside, attached to cartridges containing various liquids, all labeled in a language I couldn’t read.
“How do you hide from the delvers in here?” Nedd asked. He had his toe under the grate on that side now, wiggling it.
“Oh, them?” Ivy asked. “They never leave the center of the realm. This realm shouldn’t even have a center, did you know?
There is no center to infinite space. Still, here on the edges, it’s only a matter of bending the infinite curve of time a little, and poof!
A pocket where no one will find you. Certainly not them.
It’s not like they’re going to dig their heads out of the infinite sands of space-time to come looking. ”
“Right,” Nedd said. “That clears that right up.”
“But the varvax!” Ivy continued. “I’ve had to watch them every minute, just to keep them from bungling the whole thing! Can you imagine how much I’ve suffered?”
“Yeah,” Nedd said. “Sounds awful.”
Nedd nudged the cover off the compartment on his side, and the humming sound of the unit grew louder.
There were electronic parts in there, parts that made the unit function.
If we could damage what was inside, we might be able to stop the operation of the entire thing, which should also release our light-line restraints.
But I couldn’t lift my foot high enough to kick inside the grate, and my hands were still bound tight.
“Not that it’s a burden to watch,” Ivy said. “I have subroutines to handle that. It barely touches my processing power; the effort is so small as to be almost immeasurable. But to have to interact with varvax with their petty concerns and their frail bodies? It’s almost insulting.”
I was no fan of varvax, given what they’d done to Detritus, but even I felt a little offended on their behalf.
“What are you going to do with the people,” Nedd asked, “now that you’ve saved them?”
The avatar of Ivy gave him a look of consternation, like a mother annoyed at a child who’d asked the same question for the hundredth time. She spoke slowly, as if we might be having a hard time understanding her words. “I’m going to protect them,” she said. “I thought I said that already.”
“You did,” Nedd said.
“I know I did,” Ivy said. “I have a databank that records everything. I’m making a note of this particular dialogue, so if you feel the need to ask this again, I can simply replay it for you. Because I care.”
“She’s not going to let us go,” I said. “We’re going to die here.”
As I took stock of our options, I became aware that the entire unit was beginning to cool.
Goose bumps broke out on my flesh beneath my flightsuit.
Every breath irritated my lungs—I could only imagine the gas contained some compound that would prevent our cells from expanding and being destroyed as we froze, but it didn’t feel good.
“We’re not here to attack you,” Nedd said. “We only fired on your ships because they attacked us first. We lied about being from the Superiority. We’re only here to find other humans, and we did! So you don’t need to worry about us. You can let us go. We don’t have to fight each other.”
I didn’t have a weapon to shoot out the compartment, and I couldn’t punch or kick it.
The only tool I had available to me was the grate I’d already knocked loose.
I didn’t want to do anything to draw Ivy’s attention to the fact that I’d opened it, so I scooted my foot ever so slowly backward, allowing the grate to slide farther along the floor inch by inch, revealing more of the compartment behind it.
“I want to believe you,” Ivy said, “but your friends flew a starfighter through the wall of my incubatorium. Do you know how valuable walls are?”
“Um,” Nedd said, “that wall was made of brick, right? So…not very?”
There, near the top of the compartment, I could see a panel with a number of buttons and switches.
If I shuffled the grate cover slightly off-kilter, I might be able to angle the top corner of it to press some of the buttons.
I had no way to know which ones did what, and any abrupt change might draw the varvax down on us.
But I didn’t know what else to do, so I had to try. I shifted my foot back, angling the grate cover, trying to get the top corner in place.
“It depends on how rare bricks are in your current environment!” Ivy said.
“Supply and demand! But even if I forgive you the destruction of my wall, there’s the fact that you’ve essentially come into my home and assaulted my children with a weapon of war.
That’s hardly friendly behavior, now is it?
Do you know what that behavior tells me about you? ”
Nedd and I exchanged a glance. “What?” Nedd said.
“It tells me you are exactly the sort of people who need my protection! Humans face so many threats. There’s the Superiority, of course, but do you know what the greatest threat is?”
“Our puny little brains?” Nedd suggested.
“Close, but your brains aren’t the only part of you that fails itself.”
“Good thing we have you to take care of us,” I said.
There. The corner of the grate now pointed at the panel. Since I didn’t know what any of the buttons did, I didn’t care which ones I hit. I slipped my toes on top of the bottom part of the grate and applied pressure, so the top corner slowly bore down on the button panel.
“Yes, it is,” Ivy said. “A very good thing.”
Out the window, the varvax teams moved through the warehouse, waking up banks of humans and equipping them for battle.
“Are they really ready to fight?” I asked. “They look a little confused.”
One of the buttons depressed, but nothing seemed to happen. I shifted my foot, sliding the grate an inch to the side.
“The disorientation will wear off shortly,” Ivy said.
“It’s natural for them to feel a bit out of sorts when they wake.
Some of them have been unconscious for centuries!
And the disorientation helps them to understand their instructions.
They’re less likely to question their task if it’s given to them in the first few minutes after they awaken. ”
Ivy might not respond well to pandering, but she sure did like to talk about herself and her brilliant plans.
I heard a slight scraping sound on the other side of the refrigerator.
Nedd froze, and I stared forward until he began talking again.
“You say you want to protect humans, and that we need you to save us. But you’re treating those people down there like cogs in a machine, and using them to destroy other humans.
That’s a betrayal of everything you claim to represent. ”
I snuck a glance down at the grate on Nedd’s side. He’d maneuvered his similarly to mine and was working to get the corner of it angled into a mass of wires, right at the point where they connected to the electrical panel.
I wanted to congratulate him, but that would obviously have to wait.
“My army is not a machine,” Ivy snapped. For the first time, she sounded angry. He’d clearly hit a nerve.
“It was a metaphor,” I said. “You know what a metaphor is, right?”
“I could recite an alphabetical list of eleven million five hundred and ninety-eight of your species’ most commonly used metaphors,” Ivy said. “You think you’re so original, but some of those metaphors have been recorded in use tens of millions of times!”
That was a dodge of the question. I was pretty sure Ivy was just spitting facts to sound smart, which was a classic diversion. If we hadn’t needed to stay on her good side, I might have pointed that out.
I pressed up on the panel, pushing another button, and this time, the gas coming out of the vent stopped.
That bought us some time, at least. Now we needed to figure out how to disable the restraints and the cooling mechanism so we didn’t freeze to death.
I shifted my hips, wiggling the radio at my belt and extending my fingers until my bound hand could reach the response button on my radio.
If we couldn’t disable the cryogenic unit in time, at least we’d be ready when Arturo tried to contact us again.