TWENTY-THREE

BERUTHI’S HEAD JERKED around. He crossed to his desk in two strides, rounded it, and swept his hand over its surface. He stared down at a glowing screen, frowning. “Provosts,” he said. “At the gate to my Estate.”

“They know we went there to catch the transport?” Danyl asked.

Beruthi shook his head. “No. They can’t. They’re probably conducting a routine Estate-to-Estate search. They’ll see my security is intact and be on their—”

A new alarm sounded. Beruthi’s eyes widened, and he suddenly went pale. “They just blew the gate. They’re storming the house.” He spun toward Danyl and Alania. “That means they’re already on their way here. You have to go. Now. I can talk my way out of whatever has brought this on, but not if they actually find you on my property.”

Danyl stared at him. “Go where? How? If they’ve linked you to all this, the transport I’m taking will be intercepted before we can get anywhere near the City!” It’s all falling apart, a part of him whispered with shameful relief. You won’t have to be Captain. You won’t have to plug yourself into the City . . .

“There’s another option. Come with me.” Beruthi almost ran to the front door. Danyl exchanged one glance with Alania, and then they hurried after him together.

It wasn’t as dark outside as it had seemed when they were looking out from the bright office; the west still glowed pink, though a few stars were beginning to prick the sky. Beruthi strode swiftly across the stones of the compound to a side gate in the wall, made of the same golden wood as the beams of the house bound in black iron. He slapped his palm against a plate in the rock, and the gate swung open. A dirt path stretched away beyond it. “Follow that path,” he said. “To the River.”

“The River?” Danyl said. He blinked. “You mean, the River?” Considering that their last experience on the River had involved being swept over a waterfall and netted like fish, he didn’t like the sound of that.

“There’s a boat. A contingency vessel, in case I ever had to flee the Retreat and make my way to the City by a more secretive route. It will take you down to the Middens. You know your way around down there. Get up into the City however you can. If I had more time, I could arrange safe passage, but . . . you’ll have to manage it on your own. Find an access port in the Undercity; the key will get you through it. Get up to First and go to Bertel’s as planned. I’ll meet you there once I’ve smoothed everything out.”

“What if you can’t?” Alania demanded.

“I can,” Beruthi said, and if he felt any doubt, he didn’t let it into his voice. “Kranz trusts me completely. There’s no way he ordered this. I’ll go back to the City with the Provosts when they arrive and straighten it out once I’m there, then find you at Bertel’s. Now hurry up—they’ll be sending ’copters, and that means we don’t have much time.”

He twisted around to look out over the Heartland. “It’s almost dark. There’s no reason for them to go to the River, but even if they do, they won’t be able to see you. The Canyon isn’t very deep this far north, but it’s deep enough, and the boat is designed to be hard to see—and stealthed against radar and infrared sensors. But you have to go now.”

With that, he shoved them both through the gate with such sudden force that Danyl had no time to react. He spun, only to see the gate slam shut. He tried the latch, but the gate wouldn’t budge, and it ignored his palm against the lockplate.

“Another boat?” Alania said from behind him. “The last one almost killed us.”

“At least the water should be clean on this side of the City,” Danyl said. He stepped back from the gate and looked up at the towering peaks, now just black silhouettes against the brightening stars, remembering the glaciers that topped them. “And very, very cold. But what choice do we have?”

His head jerked to the left as he heard the sound of rotors, far off in the distance but rapidly growing closer.

“That answers that,” Alania said.

They hurried along the trail, which at first climbed up into the woods on the arm of the mountain embracing the house to the east. At the top of the ridge, breathing hard, Alania panting beside him, Danyl turned and looked back, just as the helicopters thundering toward Retreat Beruthi turned on their nose lights. A harsh white glare pinned the house and its fenced compound to the mountainside.

Beruthi stood in the open, hands behind his back, clearly nonthreatening. Danyl glanced around the compound. No sentry robots were in sight. He’s doing his best to defuse the situation. “He seems awfully confident he can talk his way out of being arrested,” he said out loud.

“He probably can,” Alania said. “A friend of Kranz’s, recently promoted to Lieutenant Commander? He’s got every reason to be confident.” She shook her head. “I’ve never met any Officer who wasn’t supremely self-confident. You might even say arrogant.”

Danyl glanced at his . . . sister? The word seemed as unreal as everything else that was happening.

We’re Cityborn. Not even fully human. Special genetic makeup . . . nanobots . . . literally bred to be what we are, like prize cattle.

But still. She was his sister, and he felt a surge of protectiveness as he looked at her. Erl had been the only member of his family, and he was . . . missing. Now he had another, and he vowed there and then that he wouldn’t lose her, too. If the only way to keep her safe was to become Captain, he would do it. No matter what it meant for him. No matter how terrifying it might be . . . and it sounded supremely terrifying.

“We should push on toward the River,” Alania said. “If things go badly, we need to be as far away from here as possible.” But she made no move to follow her own advice. Instead she waited, like Danyl, to see what would happen next.

Kranz barely slept the night after the raid on the River People; he sat up anxiously and waited for word—which never came—of Alania’s and Danyl’s recapture. Earlier than usual the following morning, he plunged back into routine work.

How did it come to this? he thought as he slogged through yet another report of failing infrastructure. How had the life of the City—the City the Kranzes had devoted their lives to since before it was a City, the City they had given everything over almost five centuries of selfless service—come to depend on two young people on the run?

He blamed his predecessors. Had his grandclone done his duty a century ago, when the replacement should have taken place, long before the cloning unit finally broke down, there would have been no need for his desperate Cityborn Project. Even if cloning the Captain had failed and his forerunner had hit upon the same scheme he had, there would have been many more viable eggs remaining, frozen when the Captain became the Captain, long before the founding of the City. There would’ve been more opportunities to get things right, more redundancy in case things went wrong.

But the uncertainty of the replacement process, which had never been attempted, had stayed his grandclone’s hand and Kranz’s own “father’s.” And the Captain’s decline had been slow at first, almost imperceptible. The signals of it—temperature controls run amok, ventilation failures, computer malfunctions, blackouts, other breakdowns, too many to enumerate—were impossible to untangle from the general decline of the City, which, after all, had never been intended to remain intact this long. Every First Officer Kranz knew that the Captain would eventually wear out and have to be replaced, because Thomas Kranz himself had known it. It was the great doom hanging over them all, passed down from Kranz to Kranz. Cloning the Captain, with her peculiar genetic makeup and even more advanced nanobots, had seemed a different order of magnitude from simply cloning another Kranz. None of them had wanted to act. The uncertainties were too great, the risks almost unthinkable.

Yet procrastination could go on only so long, and it had been Kranz’s misfortune to be the First Officer who could procrastinate no longer. When the cloning unit had finally and irreparably failed after Falkin’s creation, he had realized that he could not carry out the long-planned procedure for replacing the Captain, the one crystal-clear in the memories he carried from Thomas Kranz. He could not clone the Captain.

Making the blow even more devastating, he knew that with the failure of the cloning unit, Falkin would be the last First Officer Kranz. And he knew that would have been true even if the cloning unit hadn’t failed, because the nanobots that turned each generation’s clone into a new First Officer Kranz were also failing. Science Officer Prentis had made that clear. Kranz had been forced to accept that his Thomas Kranz memories were faulty because his nanobots had been degraded by too much copying.

It would be years before Falkin’s nanobots were fully activated and Kranz would learn just how faulty they were. But the moment Prentis had proven to him that the line of First Officer Kranzes would end with them, he had set his mind to figure out how to salvage the situation, how to ensure that both the Kranz memories and the Captain’s unique ability to become the brain and nervous system of the City were preserved.

And that had led to the Cityborn. He had decided that the only hope was to merge Captain and First Officer into one person, to create a Captain who would be conscious and aware, able to both control the City and to govern it the way the Kranzes had always governed it.

That had, after all, been the original intention for the Captain. She was supposed to have been conscious and aware. But Thomas Kranz had discovered that it could not work; the Captain had been unstable, and the City had been fatally damaged because of her instability. He had made the difficult but necessary choice to keep the Captain less than fully functional while taking operational control himself. Kranz remembered that choice as clearly as if he had made it himself, which in some ways he had. That memory of the Captain’s instability was another reason his ancestors had put off the replacement process too long. If that instability were somehow inherent in the Captain’s genetic makeup, then the new Captain might endanger the City all over again, just like the original had.

His more recent choice had been no less difficult than his original’s, but also no less necessary. And so he had donated his sperm to fertilize the Captain’s eggs, the embryos were implanted into the artificial wombs, and at the appropriate time, the Cityborn had come into the world: seven babies with the potential to save the City from collapse.

The genetics had been hit or miss, as he had feared. The initial tests showed that only three of the seven children had the genes both to become Captain and accept the Kranz memories. Three infants on whose tiny shoulders rested the future of everything.

Then . . . that night. Kranz’s teeth clenched as he thought about it. The supposedly secure Twelfth Tier had been infiltrated. One of the precious Cityborn had been killed as she lay in her crib. Another—Danyl, he knew now—had been spirited away by the thrice-damned Ensign Erlkin Orillia, who was now lying in that same hospital, critically wounded and unconscious but heavily guarded all the same. Only the fact Alania had been taken out of the ward by one of the carebots because of a slight fever, placing her safely out of reach of the child-murderer, had prevented total disaster.

Yet now total disaster might have come upon Kranz anyway. Danyl and Alania had spent a night in the open. They might have been seriously injured when the helicopter had crashed. The nanobots Alania had been injected with at birth should have protected her, since they had been carefully programmed (oh, so carefully programmed!) and maintained throughout her life. Danyl’s had surely deteriorated to uselessness by now, since he’d been living in the Middens without access to proper care. But in truth, Kranz couldn’t even be sure Alania was safe. Her nanobots were not fully activated yet, and they could be overwhelmed by severe enough trauma.

Just after lunch, which he took at his desk, he at last heard a chime. His heart jumped. He glanced at the comm panel and felt a flicker of annoyance that it wasn’t the call he was waiting for from Commander Havelin. He touched the Accept button. “Yes, Science Officer Prentis?” he said, trying not to sound peevish and almost succeeding.

The rotund, apple-cheeked, gray-haired woman on the screen was the very image of a cheerful grandmother—and one of the brightest minds in the City. “We found something strange among Erlkin Orillia’s effects, sir,” she said. Her voice had a cold note that belied her appearance. Her image vanished, replaced by that of a metallic sphere on three spindly legs. Kranz recognized it at once as a docbot, though it was practically an antique; there’d been one like it at Retreat Kranz when he and his late “brothers” had been children. It had always terrified him. More recent models were egg-shaped and had four legs instead of three. They also tended to be white or pale blue or green instead of shining chrome. The one at Retreat Kranz had been special, of course, designed to check on and maintain the nanobots that would eventually. . . .

Wait. Is it possible . . . ?

“It’s an old docbot,” Kranz said. He wouldn’t jump to conclusions—let Prentis tell him what she had found. “Not surprising that Orillia would have an obsolete model, if he scavenged it from—”

Prentis’s face reappeared. “This wasn’t scavenged, sir,” she said.

That alone told him that what he suspected was true, as did the fact she had dared to interrupt him, so rather than bite her head off for the breach of protocol, he leaned back and said, “Explain.”

“It looks old, but both its hardware and software have been extensively upgraded.” Her face was replaced by the docbot again, this time exploded so that its interior could be seen. A green arrow appeared, pointing to a trio of gleaming hair-like needles folded up inside a small compartment. “These are nanoprobes, sir. They’re used to remove, program, and reinject nanobots.”

Kranz already knew that, of course. He stared at the probes. So much for his assumption that Danyl’s nanobots would have failed by now. On the one hand, the fact that Danyl’s nanobots had been maintained made it somewhat more likely that the boy had survived whatever had happened on the Rim. But on the other hand . . .

He felt like gears were engaging in his head, clicking into place, making connections. But he didn’t like the connections they made. “All docbots are manufactured by Beruthi Enterprises, are they not?” Kranz asked slowly.

The Science Officer nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Including this one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how easy are they to modify?” he asked, even though he already knew.

“That’s just it, sir,” Prentis said. “They can’t be modified unless you have the correct encryption codes. Any maintenance work on a docbot must be done by a Beruthi Enterprises technician. And even they couldn’t go out and modify one. That would have to be authorized by someone at the highest levels of the company, and it would have to be done right in the Beruthi Enterprises factory.”

A bubble of anger rose inside Kranz, hot as lava. “Beruthi.”

Prentis said nothing.

“Thank you, Science Officer. You’ve been . . . most helpful.”

“My pleasure, sir.” The screen blanked.

Science Officer Prentis had no doubt been very pleased to be able to attach Lieutenant Commander Beruthi’s name to the modified docbot. Her own family had a robot manufactory as well, but their bots were limited to street-sweeping and window-washing. Acquiring Beruthi Enterprises after its owner’s arrest for treason would be of huge benefit to the Prentis clan. But even allowing for that personal animus and ambition—something Kranz was used to, since personal animus and ambition drove every aspect of Officer interaction, each Officer eager to increase his or her own standing in the centuries-old hierarchy—Kranz did not doubt Prentis’s claim. It was too specific and too easy to check to be a lie.

Someone at Beruthi Enterprises had had a hand in the abduction of Danyl and the murder of the other Cityborn twenty years before. Add that to the mysterious knowledge Alania’s would-be kidnappers had had of her movements when she was being escorted to Quarters Kranz, and Kranz suddenly had no doubt at all who the traitor among the Officers was, despite the years of Kranz memories within him telling him the Beruthis were the most loyal of all.

“I trusted the bastard,” he snarled out loud. “Hell, I promoted him.”

He called up a map. Estate Beruthi was just a few kilometers from the City—easily accessible on foot from the very spot where the helicopter had crashed on the Rim.

But that wasn’t Beruthi’s only property. Like Kranz himself, like many of the wealthier Officers, the Lieutenant—Lieutenant Commander, Kranz thought with another surge of anger—maintained a Retreat. His was located in the northern foothills of the Iron Ring. Kranz’s eyes traced the transport roads: Estate Beruthi and Retreat Beruthi were directly linked. He frowned. It was unlikely Beruthi would have taken them up there when his Estate was so close, but just to be sure . . .

He activated the communicator panel again and issued orders.

This ends tonight, he thought with grim satisfaction as he sat back in his chair. And then his eyes strayed to that other display.

The Captain’s vital signs had continued to deteriorate. More green symbols had slipped to yellow. A couple of yellow ones had turned red. The Captain’s ancient heart still beat, but slowly . . . so slowly . . . and unsteadily, too.

Kranz’s satisfaction ebbed. This has cost me too much time. If Alania had come to me when she was supposed to, we would already have a new Captain, and together she and I would be working to save the City.

The minute the girl was back in his possession, he would take her to Thirteenth Tier. He shifted his gaze to the Elevator. The City would have a new Captain, and new life.

And so would he.