Waking Gods (Themis Files #2)(31)

—What are you saying?

—I’m saying there is a ten-year-old girl in Puerto Rico with b … beautiful green eyes who might just be able to pilot that gi … giant robot of yours. Of course, you’ll never find out if you don’t g … give me what I want.

—And what is that?

—A full pardon. And I want to be back on the research team.

—You are insane. Puerto Rico is about one hundred miles across. How long do you think it will take me to find a ten-year-old girl?

—I don’t know. P … probably a few weeks without records to help. She’ll be gone by the time you find her. I was on my way to retrieve her, bring her to Russia so they can s … start training her. They’ll know I didn’t make my flight. They’ll go after her.

—What makes you think I will not simply have you killed after you help us find her?

—Oh, I tr … trust you. You would find it … unbecoming.





FILE NO. 1534

RESEARCH LOG—VINCENT COUTURE, CONSULTANT, EARTH DEFENSE CORPS

Location: Unknown

This is Vincent Couture recording aboard Themis. I’m … I have no idea where I am. I can’t see outside. It’s pitch-black all around. I don’t think I’m in space. There aren’t any stars. I can shift the weight between Themis’s feet, so we’re definitely standing on solid ground. I can hear … something. It’s a … a very low hum. Like a lightsaber that’s not moving, if that means anything. My best guess at this point is that I’m in the ocean somewhere and that’s the sound of water moving against the hull.

I don’t know exactly how I got here, but I have a pretty good idea. I was trying to figure out if Themis could … teleport herself when it happened. Rose and I had been talking about it since London. We thought it would make sense for her to move that way. Well, more sense than having little rockets under her feet, or wings that spring out her back. She weighs seventy-two hundred tons, after all.

It was all wishful thinking really, because we were hoping for something quite different from what we saw in London. It came from outer space, so no matter what it used to get here, it must have worked in a three-dimensional space. That would be almost impossible for us to use here on Earth. The planet’s surface is curved, there is terrain to consider. Traveling farther than what you can see would be really complicated. You could end up inside a mountain, miles deep into the Earth’s crust, or a few kilometers up in the air. What Rose and I wanted was … something user-friendly. Something Apple would make: a gizmo that lets you treat the planet as a flat surface and does all the work for you. Just push a button and end up where you want to go, with both feet on the ground, not inside or above it. Anyway, I went to the lab early to try a few things on the console before Kara got there—she gets angry when she can’t help. At some point, I hit a key. Everything went white, silent. Then I was here. So, the good news is: Themis can travel anywhere!

The bad news is I think I’m gonna die here before I can tell anyone.

By my watch, I’ve been here a little more than two days. I don’t have any supplies. I only had a bottle of water with me, which is now empty, and I could really go for a cheeseburger right about now. Extra cheese, with bacon … A large poutine … At least, air’s not a problem, I think. The sphere is about fourteen thousand cubic feet, so I’ll die of thirst long before the CO2 kills me.

If I’m right and I’m in the ocean—I’d most likely be in the Atlantic—there’s just no way anyone will find me here. I can probably last a few more days, but I’m having a hard time concentrating already, so if I’m gonna try anything, I think today’s the day. I wish I could just walk in any direction, but I can’t keep the balance on a flat surface without Kara. Plus I can’t see anything, so I’ll just end up throwing Themis flat on her face if I try moving.

I listened to the log I made that morning and I took some notes. I’ll walk you through them in case this doesn’t work. There’s a button on the top right of the console, looks like an “M” with a bar across. That’s what I started with—we hadn’t found any use for it and it looked … move-y—and all the sequences I tried were a combination of that, some numbers and “go.”

Rose thought we might try something like longitude and latitude, but Themis wasn’t made here, and it’s hard to imagine a two-coordinate system that would work like that on different planets. Even if you assume all planets rotate on a relatively stable axis, that’ll only give you a natural starting point for one of the coordinates, either a pole or the equator, but there’s no natural starting point perpendicular to that. Longitude is based on a completely random spot on the east–west axis. I don’t think the aliens we’re dealing with ever heard of Greenwich Mean Time.

If they were to use a two-coordinate system, it would make much more sense to use Themis herself as a reference point. Coordinates zero, zero would be where she is, and you could go from there. The problem then, if you used something like longitude and latitude, is that the numbers would mean different things depending on what planet you’re on. Longitude and latitude measure an angle from the center of the planet, so the distance on the surface for, say, one degree would be greater on a larger planet, a lot smaller on a tiny one. The bigger the planet, the less precise the navigation system would be.