The screen didn’t have maps, of course. There wasn’t a survey of any of this to draw from, and even if there was, she didn’t have a connection to the Israel, if the Israel was still in orbit and hadn’t fallen into the atmosphere and burned and killed everyone to death and —
She couldn’t feel that now. She needed to think. The structure, ruins, whatever they were had to be at least seven or eight square kilometers. They’d entered the ruins near Holden’s last live signal, but there was still a lot of territory to cover. The locator on the hand terminal screen showed only the local nodes. The other two were Fayez and Murtry, and they were grayed out. No line of sight, which was good because it meant that wherever Murtry was, he couldn’t see her, and bad because she didn’t know where he was. It was a low-level diagnostic. The kind that built ad hoc routing networks on the fly. She’d set it to ask for a renewed route anytime it made a connection and alert her when it did. It wasn’t much, but it would give her a little warning when Murtry was close. When he had line of sight. When he could shoot her the way he had Amos and probably Fayez and they were dead now and she couldn’t feel that. She had to think. How to find Holden. She had to find him. Warn him. Keep Murtry from stopping him. She took a deep breath and looked up. Line of sight was a hard thing to manage on the ground, but the space above her was vast and open. If she could find a vantage point, the hand terminal would point Murtry out to her. And if she couldn’t find her friend, at least she could locate her enemy. Basic problem solving. If you don’t have the data you need, play with the data you have, see if something comes out of it. She’d made it through three semesters of combinatorics that way. All right.
Her body was still shaking. Still weak. Her mind felt fuzzy. Adrenaline and hunger and Fayez was probably dead and she couldn’t feel that. She stuffed the hand terminal in her pocket and looked around for a way up. Nothing here was built for a human form. There weren’t any ladders or walkways, no catwalks with convenient handrails. It was like a vast body. Or a vast body that had turned halfway into a machine. She ran quietly, making as little noise as she could with every footfall. An upwelling of conduits rose from the floor to her right, and she clambered up them, wedging her feet and fists into the narrow spaces between the tubes and hauling up and up and up. There were so many other people who would have done better. Fayez was stronger than she was. Sudyam used to climb mountains back on Earth. Elvi didn’t particularly enjoy climbing trees, much less strange alien webworks. She went up, not looking back, not looking down.
The structure was vast, and the soft glow that permeated everything made the space seem strange. Dreamlike. She perched in the crevice where two conduits or arteries met, wedging her leg into the gap. She pulled out her hand terminal. Twice on her way up, the ad hoc network alert had sounded and she hadn’t noticed. Twice, Murtry had been in line of sight. The thought made her throat feel tight. She looked at the reply times. Two thousandths of a second? That couldn’t be right. Radio waves moved at light speed, but they were in air, so that made it… what? Three times ten to the eighth? Something like that. Close enough as to make no difference. That’d put him something like half a million meters away. There had to be some kind of processing lag in the terminals that was swamping…
A new entry popped into the log, and her heart lept to her throat. Connection refused. She blinked at it. Why would Murtry’s terminal accept connections when she was climbing up and reject them when she’d paused? That didn’t make sense. Another line. Connection refused. Something like hope bloomed in her. It wasn’t Murtry. It was someone else. Someone who wasn’t in the charmed circle of RCE trusted networks.
It was Holden.
She craned her neck, as if by just looking she could find him. The structure was too big. She thought of calling out, but there was no reason to think he’d hear. And even if he did, Murtry would be closer.
Murtry. There was a thought. She opened the hand terminal’s routing interface again. It had been years since she’d played with network protocols. Most of what she did was about signaling proteins in cells and protein regulation. Her leg was starting to tingle where her weight pressed it into the tube. There was a way to get a copy of Murtry’s logs too. She just had to remember how to set up distributed logging.
Something in the structure clanged, the echoes reverberating through the space like a scream in a cathedral. She wondered if Murtry looked up whether he would see the light of her screen, up here in her crow’s nest. She waited. Waited. The alert sounded. Murtry connected. She closed her eyes. Okay, she thought. Go away now. Just go away.
The alert dropped, and she pulled up the logs, and Murtry’s records were there now too, and one – one – line of them was a refused connection. It was like being in maths again. Posit a frightened exobiologist four meters off the ground and a violent, predatory security man in a direct line from her at points a, b, and c. At point d, the predator had a refused connection with a lag time just under two-tenths of a second because the goddam fucking processing lag was swamping the signal time and making the whole thing…
Only it would be the same lag, wouldn’t it? So if she could pull out the difference…
The world fell away. Her fingers tapped the screen, shifting to the calculation displays, pulling numbers from the logs, setting up the diagrams. The fear and sorrow and raw, animal terror were all still there, but they were just messages and she could ignore them. Her leg started to hurt and then go numb. She shifted a few centimeters until it hurt again.
Holden had been a hundred and ten meters from her. He’d been a hundred and fifty meters from Murtry. She could estimate where Murtry had been based on the contacts he’d made with her. It was like basic trigonometry where a wrong answer meant death. Holden was – approximately, roughly, assuming she hadn’t biffed the equations and that the hand terminal’s processing lags were identical – in the complex junctions at the center right of the structure where the conduits joined together into something like a massive black wing. Elvi turned off her hand terminal and started back down. When she reached a surface she could walk on, her leg screamed. Pins and needles. She ignored it and started limping as quickly as she could toward the landmark she’d found. She didn’t care about Murtry now. She had something to focus on.
It was less like making her way through an industrial complex than tramping through a vast forest without a machete. She squeezed through the cracks between dark structures as much growth as machine, ducked and climbed and once got down on her belly and crawled. She was sure she was making progress, sure that she would get there and find out at least whether her figures had been right, when she stepped out across a flat ledge and almost fell into a chasm.