Lockstep

Three

TOBY LOOKED AT HIS feet and tried to convince himself that the last time he’d worn these shoes was thirty years ago. He’d gone to bed on Lowdown and when he woke the gravity was different. They were on another world. Despite having been in hibernation before, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. It all seemed too easy.

After breakfast in what looked like a windowless airport lounge, he and his new friends had walked a few short corridors and come to a glass-walled elevator. Along with Ammond and Persea and the usual crowd of household bots, he was now descending in this. Their plunge into the depths seemed endless, but he knew this is what you had to do on the coldest worlds: dig deep.

“I don’t feel any different,” he said to Persea. “I mean, I feel like I just slept an ordinary night. Cold sleep—when we did it before, waking up was like getting over a dose of the flu.”

Persea nodded. “What’s the flu? —Never mind. We’ve had a little time to perfect cold sleep. But … I don’t know, should we tell him?” Free of Lowdown’s strange air, her voice was a soft soprano. Toby was having trouble getting used to that, too.

Ammond shrugged. There was light below; they were coming to some destination, and he was leaning down to try to see it. “He’ll find out eventually.”

Persea sighed. “One of the ways we improved on the old cold sleep was to implant half the hibernation system in our bodies. When we went to wake you up, we found out you didn’t have those. That’s … kind of shocking to anybody from a lockstep world. So before we revived you we, well, we put them in.”

“You what?”

She looked down, apparently embarrassed. “It’s perfectly normal. And you didn’t feel a thing, did you? Anyway, it’s just a mix of artificial organs and nanotech—we call them blue blood cells—oh, and all your cells have a kind of artificial mitochondria in them, too, that can shut down your cellular machinery nearly instantly and start it up again at an external signal. All this stuff works with the cicada beds to make the whole process easier on us. That’s why you feel so normal even though we’ve been asleep for thirty years.”

“Ah, right.” The cicada beds on the ship had certainly been very different from the pods his parents had designed. Those looked ominously like covered operating tables. The one last night had been a simple bed really, with a hard plastic canopy.

Somebody had spoken to him through that canopy. He’d tried to remember what that had been about, but the memory was elusive.

Thinking about implanted organs, he couldn’t help patting his chest and sides. Where had they stuck those things? He didn’t have any scars.

“Yeah, but…” He forgot what he was going to ask, because just below them the stone walls around the elevator swept back, becoming a ceiling that receded above them. Persea was watching with a half smile when Toby turned his attention downward; he couldn’t help the grin of delight that came over him. “It works! Ammond, Persea, this is what we wanted to do on Sedna!”

He’d glimpsed the surface of Little Auriga through a small window at the docks. Deep crimson plains under a star-spattered sky: it could have been Sedna, and he’d idly wondered whether the similarities were more than skin-deep. Apparently, they were.

The Sedna colonists had known there was an ocean somewhere under the frozen surface of the little world. If they could get there, they’d figure out some way to terraform it—that was the plan. Here on Little Auriga, they’d made that plan a reality.

The elevator was descending from the roof of a cavern floored by black water. As they descended, he could see that the space wasn’t a single cavern but more of an uneasy interface between ice and water—an undulating realm of air pockets that rose above the waves and bellies of pale white that plunged deep beneath it. It was a kind of frozen maze whose ceiling varied from impossibly high to just skimming the waves. Brilliant lamps shone deep into the blue-green walls and slanting ceilings. Directly below, the lamps revealed a city.

Persea was nodding. “Auriga’s a true water world. This ocean’s not just a thin layer under the ice. It goes all the way down.”

“Of course it stops being water at some point,” Ammond said with a laugh. “Down at the bottom, it’ll crush diamond. So don’t fall in.”

The peekaboo interplay of walls and slopes, deeper cavern spaces and green cavities, was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. This was not what he’d imagined the ocean under Sedna would look like, and Toby desperately wanted to be able to share what he was seeing with his parents, with Evayne or Peter.

He glanced up at his benefactors while they chatted together and pointed out sights in the rising city. They weren’t laborers, these two. They had the easy confidence of executives, and Ammond had said he owned orbital tugs and other worker bots. Also, they weren’t married—at least, they didn’t act like it. They never touched.

They were being awfully good to him, and he still didn’t know why. He remembered them arguing, and the sudden decision to travel.

And then there was that other thing Persea had said to him this morning. Toby couldn’t believe it at first; he’d laughed, then stared at her when he realized she was serious.

“I’m supposed to be using an alias, now?”

“Yes,” she’d said, “but just if you talk to strangers. You’re Garren Morton, remember that. I’ll explain later.”

She’d tried to be casual about it, but he could see she was nervous. “And just for now. Okay?”

He should have been alert for signs that something was wrong, but he’d been so sunk in his own misery since waking, he couldn’t summon the energy. That had been foolish.

“Are you guys married?” he blurted.

They stared at him, then both laughed. “We’re business partners,” said Persea. “Didn’t we tell you that?”

“So what are we doing here? —I mean, not that it isn’t amazing.”

“More business, I’m afraid,” said Ammond with a sigh. “Maybe we could have conducted it by dispatch, but you’re a good excuse to come out here in person. I’ve always liked Auriga.”

But what kind of excuse am I? He bit his lip and looked down at the glass-and-steel towers. That wasn’t the right question, but he wasn’t exactly sure what the right question was. He’d have to figure that out, and soon.

THEY CHECKED INTO AN expensive-looking hotel. The hotel, and the city around it, was just like Earth or Mars, with broad vehicle-choked streets, crowds of pedestrians, and bright light from the sky. You had to look up and squint to notice that there were multiple suns up there—powerful lamps, actually—and that the “sky” behind them was a ceiling of ice.

Standing at the window of their suite, Toby shook his head and said, “Why would a world like this shut itself down for thirty years at a time? I mean, it’s obviously rich.”

Ammond had changed into an old-fashioned business suit and was adjusting his tie in front of the mirror. “If this city were awake all the time, the other worlds in the lockstep wouldn’t be next door anymore, would they? They’d be ten, twenty, thirty years away, instead of just overnight. How do I look?” he asked Persea.

“Fine.” She hadn’t had to change, but always dressed well.

Toby thought about Ammond’s logic, but he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “When will you be back?” he asked instead of pursuing the matter. This sort of day, at least, was something he was used to, from the many business meetings his parents had attended in the run-up to their settling Sedna.

To his surprise Ammond said, “Oh, no, you’re coming, too. We need you for this one,” and Persea said, “You don’t have to dress up. Just be yourself.” For some reason this last comment struck Ammond as funny, and he kept bursting into laughter as they left the room and went downstairs to hail a botcab.

The cab took them along the waterfront. The city was built into the lower slopes of the cavern wall. Where the floor should be there was a flat plain of black water, turned emerald green here and there by subsurface lights. There were many boats out there, and seeing them added to Toby’s homesickness. He longed for Earth as much as he longed for his family.

Way out there, something dark emerged from the water, just a roll of black against the glittering waves. Then a white spout of vapor shot into the air. “Ho!” he shouted. “Did you see that?”

Persea nodded. “Whales.”

Whales? With a sudden ache in his heart Toby remembered all the life of Earth he’d left behind: robins and crows, squirrels and horses, circling hawks and darting fish. “How can there be whales?”

“Well, they do go into hibernation with the rest of the place,” said Ammond in a reasonable tone. “Takes thirty years for enough plankton and krill to accumulate for a month’s meal for ’em, or so I hear. Always wondered what a whale cicada bed looked like, though…”

Toby had no idea if he was kidding, but just then the cab pulled in at a long green-glass building that extended like a dock out over the water. “Come on, then.” Ammond and Persea hopped out, and Toby followed. The air was cold and fresh.

Household bots let them through the glass doors into a wide foyer. With its pebble garden in the corner, individually spotlit paintings, and low leather couches, the place was either an architect’s office or a mansion; Toby couldn’t tell, though he knew he could never be comfortable living in such a sterile setting.

Three men approached and shook Ammond’s and Persea’s hands with much enthusiasm and backslapping. They were like Ammond: older, graying, and obviously used to getting their own way. One turned to Toby and stuck out his hand. “Naim M’boto.”

Toby glanced at Ammond as he returned the crushing handshake. Ammond smiled and said, “We’re among friends. You can tell him your real name.”

“Toby Wyatt McGonigal,” said Toby.

“Yes…” The man squinted at him. “Yes … well, we’ll see about that.” He turned to Ammond. “Any sign of trackers?”

Ammond shook his head. “We’re clean, I swear. Though, even so, we should hurry things along…”

“Right.” M’boto led the group down a flight of stairs. The glass walls on this level looked into hazy green water; the mirrored undersides of waves danced overhead. Fish darted about just out of reach; their exuberance captivated Toby and for a moment he forgot everything else.

“Toby? Over here.” Persea was gesturing from the middle of the main room, which was as wide as the building and so looked into the water on two sides. This was a lounge or living room, with stone flooring, hidden lights, and just a single round white shag carpet in the middle. Four black couches were arranged around this, and clearly the space in the middle usually had low glass tables in it, but these had been pulled aside into a jumble near one wall. Between the couches was—

“Hey, that’s a twentier!” Toby ran up to it.

Twentiers were mining bots, very tough, capable of independent action, and cheap. They were called twentiers because they were the twentieth version of something or other. This one looked kind of like a waist-high metal crab, its hard back scuffed and scratched to the point where you could barely make out the original yellow and black chevrons painted there. At its back end, under the carapace, there was an oval sample container, which was as tough as the rest of the bot.

“You know what this is?” said M’boto.

“Sure, we use –I mean, used … lots of these back on Sedna.” He knelt down and checked the stamped serial numbers on the crab’s side. “Actually, this looks like it is one of ours.”

“These bots were locked to their owners’ biocryptography,” said M’boto. He was telling this to Ammond and Persea. Persea was chewing a fingernail, her eyes darting about as she listened. “DNA alone wouldn’t unlock one,” M’boto continued. “You needed a combination of that and voice, gait analysis, retinal scans, fingerprints, and so on, before it would accept you.”

“Just like the differential encryption,” said Ammond.

“This is the basis of Cicada Corp’s power,” said M’boto. “And this is an original twentier. We found it ourselves, fifteen years ago.” He stepped up beside Toby. “Mr. McGonigal, you might be able to help us. We’ve been able to recharge this unit, but we can’t get it to recognize our commands. I’ve tried, and so have Perdi and Rustoka, here.” He indicated the other two men. “It just ignores us. Could you give it a go?”

Puzzled, Toby shrugged. “All right.” He knelt in front of the bot, looking for its biometrics plates. There was one on either side of its blocklike head. He put his hands on the plates and looked into the deep black of its lenses. “Wake up, bot.”

Nothing happened.

Then the twentier shook, just as Toby was pulling his hands back. It swayed from side to side, thrusting several legs out and curling them back in again. It raised itself its full half meter in height and said, “Ready,” in a perfectly ordinary twentier voice.

Toby stood up. “There you go,” he said, dusting his hands as he turned to his hosts.

They stood absolutely frozen, wide-eyed, and gaping at the bot in … was it fear? “What the—”

Ammond was the first to recover his poise. He stepped forward and clapped Toby on the shoulder. “Well done, son,” he said in a low tone.

“I … I can’t believe it,” said Perdi. Rustoka just kept pulling at his collar, as if it was suddenly too tight.

Toby crossed his arms and glared at them all. “All right,” he said in annoyance. “What’s this all about?”

M’boto came unfrozen. He glanced at Ammond. “He doesn’t know?”

Ammond shook his head. “But now’s as good a time as any.”

“Well.” M’boto turned to Toby. Son, I think you should—”

“I’ll do it,” interrupted Ammond. He took Toby’s arm and tugged him in the direction of the black couches. Suddenly nervous, Toby sat, and Ammond lowered himself opposite. The others stood in a tight knot, watching silently.

“You didn’t wake me up and take care of me out of the goodness of your hearts, did you?” said Toby.

Ammond bobbed his head back and forth, neither admitting nor denying it. “We would have rescued anybody in your position. We’re not monsters. But you, Toby, have a particular value nobody else could have.” He nodded at the twentier, which had thumped back on its metal haunches and was scraping its carapace with a side leg. “Nobody else in the universe could have legitimately unlocked that bot. Only a McGonigal. You were right, Toby—it’s one of yours.”

He shook his head. “But that would make it—”

“Fourteen thousand years old. Sure—but it’s been frozen in the ice, at nearly absolute zero, for that whole time. Preserved, just as you were. If it’s from Sedna, as these men said—and if it’s yours—then you really are a McGonigal.”

Toby shook his head. “So what?”

“So what?” burst out M’boto. “Why, that makes you—”

“—The rightful owner of Sedna.” Ammond glared at M’boto, who opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and closed it again.

Maybe it should have taken a moment for this to sink in, but really, Toby understood instantly. It was this exact sort of thing that had made his parents decide to flee the solar system to begin with.

“All the worlds are owned,” he said. “Is that it?” Nobody answered.

“The trillionaires,” he went on. “They owned everything on Earth, on Mars. They owned the moon, Mercury, Europa, and Titan. Either you owned a world, or you worked for those who did. It’s like that here, isn’t it?”

“Not as bad,” Persea said hurriedly. “There’s a lot more freedom in 360. But still … Toby, you have to realize. You own a world.”

“Your parents’ title to Sedna is still legal,” Ammond explained. “The way the lockstep worlds skip forward through time, laws have to be recognized for thousands of years of realtime. Since you’re the direct heir of the family that claimed the planet, Sedna is legally yours.”

Toby sat back, crossing his arms. “And I suppose there’s a lot there, now?” Somehow, all he felt right now was disappointment.

Ammond was nodding eagerly. “Cities, mines, launch facilities, bot factories, a whole ring of captured comets … it’s the oldest of the lockstep worlds. Toby, you’re one of the richest people in the lockstep.”

For a while he just sat there, seething. They all watched him nervously. Then: “When were you planning on telling me?”

Persea came and sat down next to him. “Well, you tell me this,” she said gently. “When would have been the proper time?”

She had him there, he had to admit. Still. He half turned away from her. “What’s the catch? Why do we need them?” He looked at M’boto and his friends.

Ammond seemed relieved that Toby hadn’t fainted or stormed off. “Two reasons,” he said eagerly. “First of all, there’s going to be resistance when you announce yourself. A lot of resistance. I mean, after all, there’re layers of history on Sedna now; it’s got its own hereditary ruling families, and feuds and disputes and land settlement claims going back … well, all the way. You may have legal title to the planet, Toby, but you’re going to need powerful allies to make it stick.

“Secondly … well, you’re not legally of age yet. Biologically, I mean, which is how we have to judge it. That means you’ve got two choices at this point: become a ward of the state or … let someone adopt you.”

Toby stared at him. Then he laughed. “And that someone would just happen to be you?”

Ammond looked away. “I can’t say I didn’t think about the possibility,” he mumbled, “but it’s your choice, ultimately.”

“So that’s why you’ve been so nice to me. Because I’m your ticket to the trillionaires’ club!” He jumped to his feet.

Ammond jumped up, too. “Now, Toby, don’t be like that—”

M’boto made a motion with his chin, and Perdi and Rustoka fanned out as if they meant to block Toby’s exit. At some point the domestic bots had followed them downstairs, and one stood right in front of the stairway.

Toby assessed the situation. Then he snapped, “Twentier! Heel!”

The mining bot clattered over to crouch at his side. Chips flew from the tile floor with every step it took. It was more than a match for anything in this house and M’boto had to know it. “Come on,” Toby said to it. “We’re leaving.”

“Oh, sit down!” It was Persea, but she wasn’t talking to Toby. She stood between him and the others, and was glaring at them. “You, you stupid … boys!”

Toby hesitated. “This young man knows nothing about us,” she went on. “Nothing! Why should he trust any of us? And if he really is the Owner, then we’re going to need that trust if he’s to help us. Sit down!”

The men sat. Toby had been watching, and now he said, “Help you do what?”

Persea put a hand to her brow. She wasn’t looking at Toby but out the glass wall at the blue infinity there. “It’s … political. A matter of injustice and rights that need to be wronged. You probably won’t care. But it’s important to us.” Now she did look at him. “I know you think Ammond and I are well-off. We are, I suppose, but we’re the only ones in our families who can say that. Same’s true for M’boto and these others. But our families—our communities—are suffering, and they’ll keep suffering unless we find a way to free them.

“When Ammond and I found you, and realized who you might be … well, the temptation was just too much. Maybe, we thought, we could appeal to your better nature … but you have the right to do whatever you want. It’s just … like Ammond said, it won’t be easy to regain your birthright.”

Toby glared at her. “Who says I want it?”

She came to stand in front of him, though she was wary of the twentier. “Toby, the one thing you have to get through your head is that certain people will never believe that you don’t want it. As long as you’re alive, you’ll be a threat to them. That’s why we’ve been sheltering you, not letting you say too much to people on the street … Just the knowledge that you exist is going to cause ripples through the whole lockstep.”

Toby sat down heavily on the lowest step of the stairway. “You’ve got a deal for me, huh.”

She glanced back at the men. “We’ve got some possibilities we can explore together, once you understand your situation a bit better. But clearly we’ve done too much today. Why don’t we head back to the hotel and sort out how we all feel?”

Toby put his hand on the mining bot. “I’m taking this.”

M’boto threw up his hands with an angry laugh. “You can’t take that to a hotel! What, are you going to hide it in your luggage?”

Toby glared at him. “I’m not leaving it.”

Ammond and M’boto held a quick whispering discussion, then M’boto turned back, nodding. “Well, why don’t you stay here, then? For tonight, anyway. Maybe we do need to work on this ‘trust’ thing, like Persea said.”

Toby thought about it. With the twentier as his guard, he had little to fear from these men. And he was determined not to let it out of his sight. “Okay,” he said reluctantly.

Persea clapped her hands together, beaming. “It’s a start,” she said. “That’s all we can ask.”

HE’D PULLED AN ARMCHAIR in front of the glass wall of the underwater bedroom they’d given him. Toby had hoped that watching the fish would soothe him into sleep; he hadn’t even tried the bed. Sleep wouldn’t come, though, and much as he was trying to keep his sense of wonder about the silvery visions that slid by just a meter away, their darting movements were becoming more annoying than lulling.

Ammond and M’boto had done a lot more talking after Toby agreed to stay the night. There was stuff about the politics of the empire—a tyrant was mentioned, and more stuff about worlds cut off and other worlds forced to live on different frequencies, whatever that meant. Toby hadn’t been able to keep it straight, though he knew it was important.

Now his mind refused to settle. He thought about Sedna; about Earth; about his family. What was he now, king of Sedna? That was weird, and ultimately meaningless. He just wanted to go home.

He reached around and patted the scuffed yellow dome of the twentier. “You’re all I’ve got, boy.”

It angled its lenses up at him. For a second Toby thought he was going to burst into tears.

He hopped up and paced, windmilling his arms. Every time he got near the room’s one door, he glanced at it and frowned. Finally he reached out and pulled it open.

Two of M’boto’s household bots stood just outside. “Is there anything you require, sir?” one asked.

“No, no, that’s fine.” So he really was a prisoner. Toby made to close the door but then noticed something.

The house was a long rectangle, and this room was at its offshore end. From here he had a good view down a hallway to the stairs and the lounge beyond it.

Ammond, Persea, M’boto, and six or seven other people were sitting there, discussing something. Hands were waving, heads were shaking and nodding. It looked important.

Now seriously uneasy, Toby listened carefully but couldn’t make out what anybody was saying. Carefully, he closed the door and went to sit on the bed.

“I think we’re in trouble,” he said to the twentier.

Again, it just looked at him. He looked back, wondering now what it was really capable of. It wasn’t a fighting machine. In fact, it probably had multiple layers of programming to keep it from harming anybody. Not three laws, but twenty or thirty. And no real weaponry, just its digging arms.

He knelt to examine it more closely. According to M’boto, it had been locked in a block of frozen nitrogen for fourteen thousand years. Time pretty much stopped at such temperatures. He ran his fingers along its carapace, and they stopped at a narrow, almost invisible seam at its back end.

If you didn’t know this was here, you’d probably never notice it. “Hey, twentier,” he said softly, “could you open your CPU maintenance hatch for me?”

There was a clank, and the container’s lid popped up. “Huh.” He reached inside and felt something squarish and hard. What he brought out was a flat data block, about two hand spans long. Gingerly, he pulled it out of the sample container and turned it over, looking for a label. It looked like standard backup drive, not at all surprising to find one of these things. But it could contain a record of all that the twentier had seen and done since the block was installed.

Something bumped against the glass wall.

Toby nearly dropped the block. Somehow he’d jumped from the floor to the bed without thinking. He blinked at the dark mirror of the wall. It was night now and the few fish he’d seen in the past minutes had only been dimly lit by the lamps in the room.

“Twentier, can you shine a light out there?”

He’d forgotten that the twentier’s “light” was an incredibly powerful spotlight, which instantly dazzled Toby and created a hazy cone through the water outside. A couple of minnows swam through it, but there was nothing else.

That bump must have been his imagination. “Turn it off,” he said. Then he thought of something.

“Hey, have you got acoustic sensors?”

The twentier laboriously turned its crab body back to face him. “Janus Industries Squatbot Model Twenties are equipped with the latest in acoustic depth-finding and materials-sensing technologies,” it said. “This technology allows us to do sonar exploration of solid rock and ice faces to a depth of—”

“Fine, fine. Can you amplify the sounds coming from the far end of the house?” He jabbed a thumb at the door.

“Yes, sir.” The twentier waddled up to the door and placed two of its metal arms against it. Suddenly voices filled the room.

“Why should we trust you?” He didn’t recognize the voice. It was a woman’s, dry and sarcastic. She reminded Toby of a teacher he’d once had. “You work for the Chairman.”

“We did,” Ammond replied. “So of course we told him the instant we found out who we’d recovered. In hindsight I should have known what that would mean to him. The Chairman himself ordered us to kill the boy.”

Toby sucked in a shocked breath. Kill? Somebody had ordered Ammond to kill him?

“It would be … such a waste.” That was Persea’s voice. “But we didn’t have the resources for the obvious alternative. That’s why we’re here.”

More was said, but Toby couldn’t take it in. Ammond and Persea had been working for somebody else—somebody who wanted Toby dead. They’d refused and, what? Run away? So they weren’t traveling when they’d come here; they were fleeing?

One of the voices penetrated his fog of shock. “… So it comes down to a choice: Ammond’s idea of a fait accompli, where we head straight to Destrier to wake the mother, or Catai’s proposal to build a force from the edges.”

“It’ll never work! The Chairman’ll slap us down faster than we can swap the worlds out.”

“Yes, but under my proposed system—”

“—introduces one more layer of complexity—”

“What about the boy?”

That was M’boto’s voice. Toby felt a prickling along the nape of his neck, and he suddenly had to sit down. He put an arm around the twentier’s carapace for reassurance.

“We’re just putting off the other decision,” M’boto went on. “You most of all, Ammond. I can see you’ve grown attached to him. Is this going to be an issue?”

“No no.” Ammond’s denial came out in a rush. “I’ll accept the will of the majority.”

“He’s a problem,” said M’boto. “Rustoka and Perdi can attest to how defiant and suspicious he is. If he’s like this when he only has part of the truth, what’s he going to be like when he hears all of it?”

“It’s not like we can hide it from him,” somebody else said.

“I still say he can be brought around,” objected Ammond.

“Yes, but can it be done in time? That’s the whole point here. We don’t have the time now the Chairman knows you have him. And Persea said it herself: how are we ever going to trust him?”

“If he’s your legal heir, sir—”

“But that’ll happen anyway. No, I say we put the neuroshackle on him now and be done with it.”

“I don’t think—” Ammond began, but M’boto cut him off. “We can’t have any uncertainties at this stage. We need to be absolutely sure he’ll comply. No more discussion, let’s put it to a vote.”

Toby stood up and backed away. What was a neuroshackle? He’d heard stories about Mars, where slaves’ loyalty was guaranteed by brain surgery. Was this—?

“In favor?” There was a chorus of ayes. “Against?” Ammond, and somebody else, said nay.

“Jax, get the psych bot. If we get it out of the way right now we can move on to other matters.”

Toby found that his back was against the cold glass wall. He’d been swearing, backing away. But there was nowhere left to go, and he heard footsteps now, approaching the door …

Bump.

He shouted and whirled. Something was out there, in the black water. He grabbed one of the oval table lamps next to the bed and held it close to the glass.

Two huge golden eyes reflected the light. They were looking straight at him. The eyes were set in a catlike face, and behind it a lithe, twisting body whose fur was swirling in the currents. It swam back, then darted forward again, bumping against the glass as if it were trying to break through.

He’d seen this creature before, in a courtyard in Lowdown. That time, it hadn’t been alone …

He heard the door behind him sighing open; he was out of time.

“Twentier! I need to get through this wall!”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a shout, calls for help, and feet running up behind him, but Toby had braced his feet against the armchair and pressed his hands against the glossy wall. So when the twentier smashed through the transparent plexi and ice water poured in around him and swept away the men and bots who’d been about to seize him, Toby was able to jump straight into the oncoming surge.

As the twentier tumbled into the bottomless abyss below the city, the cold exploded into Toby from all sides. He choked and it came into his lungs as well.