“Yeah. Baptiste, he does this, like, every couple of months. People he’s taken get driven here to Bronkal; then they shoot them full of heavy-duty chemicals which put them in this really deep sleep, like a coma. After that they get shipped out again.”
“Why?” Even knowing every second was critical now, Yuri couldn’t help the question. “What for? What are they doing to them?”
“I don’t know what the fuck happens to them, man! I’m not crazy stupid enough to ask. I figure it’s got to be some weird rich dude who’s off-the-scale perverted. I mean, what kind of normal person wants a bunch of unconscious people?”
“That’s a very good question, Joaquin.”
“I don’t know. Really! Please, I don’t. All I do is take care of the vehicles. I arrange new registrations for the vans. That’s it!”
“I’ll accept that for now. Second question. Baptiste snatched a friend of mine yesterday, a decent boy called Horatio Seymore.”
Joaquin started rocking from side to side. “No, no, no. They’ll kill me. Please!”
“We know Horatio arrived here in Bronkal—” Yuri clicked his fingers and turned to Jessika. “When?”
“The van came through the commercial transport hub thirty-one hours ago,” she supplied.
“Thank you. Thirty-one hours ago. The van then drove to the docks. Where in the docks?”
“Please,” Joaquin whimpered.
“Ah, you were making such good progress, too.” Yuri held out his hand, and the paramilitary gave him the Bowie knife.
“Shit. All right. Christ!” Joaquin eyed the blade frantically. “It’s the bioreactor complex.” His shoulders slumped in defeat. “Okay? That’s it. Please, just let me go.”
Yuri slammed the knife down. Joaquin screamed. He looked down in terror to see the blade sticking into the chair, a centimeter from his crotch.
“Oops, missed,” Yuri said. “Let me have another go, see if my aim improves, because that reactor complex is huge, and you fucking know that.”
“Building seven! They’ve got them in building seven!”
—
The docks were the reason Bronkal existed. They sat on the edge of Althaea’s lungs—the expansive sprawl of the plateau that was now a marshland that extended all the way to the cliffs. It was riddled with canals that had a flotilla of dredgers keeping them open, allowing the barges access to the entire area. Every day they would moor at the bioreactor next to the docks and load up with freshly grown algaox. Then they’d chug off down the canals, their powerful pumps squirting out long arcs of blue-green sludge to coat the saturated land. For thirty-eight years the genetically engineered algae had been photosynthesizing the oxygen which made Althaea’s atmosphere breathable for humans. The barges were scheduled to keep going for another fifteen years at least, until the Sol Senate’s climate monitoring board awarded Althaea its final clearance certificate.
A good seventy percent of Bronkal’s working population was employed by the reactor complex or the docks, which is why eight of the town’s twenty-five hubs were sited in the district. Yuri ordered them to be closed down, along with the commercial transport hub, which was also adjacent to the docks.
As soon as Joaquin had given them the location, Lucius and the paramilitaries got back into their vehicles and drove through the deluge of warm rain to the docks. Yuri had to grip the sides of his chair, the vehicles slid and skidded so much on the wet asphalt. He simply wasn’t used to ground transport, and the motion was making him feel queasy.
“The rain is hindering our drones,” Lucius complained. “Especially the microdrone flocks.”
“But on the bright side, it’s covering our approach, too,” Jessika said.
“We need to be certain,” Lucius said. “If Joaquin gave us the wrong information—”
“He didn’t,” Yuri said, recalling just how hard Joaquin had pleaded to be believed at the end.
“Okay,” the tactical squad captain agreed. “We’ll go with it.”
Jessika peered out through the windscreen as the wipers flashed back and forth. “Must be getting closer,” she said. “I can see the hangars.”
Yuri looked out over the inundated road. Squatting on the horizon were four massive airship hangars. As well as maintaining the algaox barges, Bronkal’s docks supported the airships that circled for months at a time over the ocean beyond the plateau’s cliffs. They all had ten-meter portal doors fixed underneath their hulls, which were twinned to portals carried by ice harvesters pushing inexorably across the frozen ocean of Reynolds. At forty-three AUs out, Reynolds was the most distant planet orbiting Pollux—a planet with a Mercury-sized rock core coated in a hundred-kilometer mantle of ice. All of Althaea’s water had come from there, arriving in colossal streams of ice shards that poured out of the airships to splash down and melt into the new seas. He stared at the big gray buildings in bemusement, remembering the first time Connexion had trialed icefalls in the Australian outback—now a lush savannah.
“Wonder what Akkar would make of this,” he murmured.
“What?” Jessika asked.