Sleeping Giants (Themis Files #1)(18)

—You can give me a tour later. I assume you found the opening.

—Yes, there’s a hatch at the top of her back, right between her shoulder blades. You can barely notice it, but there is a handprint carved into the door that responds to body heat. When you press your hand onto the handprint, the door slides in. Of course, you know all this since your men already went in.

—I sense a bit of frustration in your tone.

—I don’t know if you want to call it frustration, but I was told I was in charge of this project. Then you tell me you had teams searching the Arctic without my knowledge, using my formula. So, no, I’m not entirely happy, and I’m wondering what else you haven’t told me.

—I wanted to let you finish the search on US soil. I suppose I could have told you before. I am telling you now. You are no longer in charge of the search effort. Everything else is your domain.

I want you to focus on making it work. It is much closer to your area of expertise and it is where you have excelled in the past. I hate to have to remind you, but you are not a military strategist. You almost lost your pilot when you hit your first road bump. Believe me, things are going to get very unpleasant once we take this search onto foreign territory.

—Look, I really don’t care if I run the search or not. I just want you to be straight with me. I’ve never asked for anything since we started all of this. I’m asking now. Don’t go behind my back.

—I will keep that in mind. Now tell me about the torso.

—Behind the hatch, there’s a small tunnel, about four feet across that leads to another small door with a similar handprint—it’s made of a material I can’t identify. This one leads to a spherical chamber, about nine meters wide. That’s about thirty feet.

—I am familiar with the metric system. Thank you.

—The chamber rotates inside the torso based on its incline. Basically, it’s a big gyroscope. The concept is beautifully simple. The sphere is heavier at the bottom, and it floats in some sort of liquid. Gravity does the rest. If you tilt the body, the inner sphere stays level. The sphere appears to be translucent. You can see the dark metal through the milky substance it floats in. The interior is dimly lit though there is no apparent light source. There are no windows of any kind.

The floor of the chamber is flat, split into two crescent-shaped decks. The rear one is raised about three feet, with two steps on each side to get down to the front section. It seems designed to accommodate two people, two pilots. I call them animators. I like the puppet analogy better since it’s not really a ship.

The upper deck is very minimalist. There is a beam that descends from the ceiling about halfway through. Attached to the end of it is a black helmet—like a scooter helmet, with a dark, opaque visor—and what looks like an armored straitjacket. It has metal braces that close over the forearms and upper arms and it’s articulated at the shoulders and elbows. It also has a wide brace that wraps around the chest. There are glove-like devices at the end of each arm. Standing right in front of it is a small metallic round column, about three feet high.

—Have you determined its purpose?

—We have no idea what it does, but we really haven’t tried anything yet.

The bottom deck is much more elaborate. There’s a crescent-shaped console, about two meters wide, with maybe two dozen symbols carved onto it. Some of them are the same curvy ones we found on the panels in the hand chamber, others we haven’t seen before. In front of the console, where you’d expect a chair, there is a round circle. I wouldn’t call it a pool because it’s only half an inch deep, but it’s filled with some milky liquid. It’s very smooth, very silky, like liquid Teflon. Rising from the floor, right in the middle of it, is a shaft, about three feet high. There is another black helmet attached to that shaft, and a matching set of leg braces with stirrups hanging about an inch from the liquid floor.

It would appear that one person operates the arms and trunk, while another controls the legs, plus whatever else one can do from the console. That’s where it gets interesting.

—Before you go on, have you decided who will control the upper body and who will work the legs?

—I haven’t decided yet. The leg station is the one that controls locomotion and every other function on the console so there’s an argument for Kara sitting there, standing there, whatever. On the other hand, I believe it may be physically harder to move the legs and Ryan is a very strong man. We’ll probably try both and see what feels more natural.

—So what is it?

—What is what?

—You said: “This is where it gets interesting.” Irony is not one of my favorite modes of communication, but I can still recognize it. I assume you were about to serve me with some bad news.

—The leg braces are not suited for human anatomy. They were clearly designed for someone with leg articulations like that of the robot itself. I always assumed that the people who built this at least looked like us. If they weren’t human, that is.

—Will that be a problem for the pilot?

—Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. The knees are backward! So yes, it’s a problem, unless we can get a really smart ostrich to control the legs. We’ll have to find a way to adapt the controls to fit our anatomy.

—What about the console? Are you making any progress deciphering the symbols?