9: FLORIDA

Myra got Bisesa out of the Hibernaculum and took her to Florida.

They flew in a fat-bodied, stub-winged plane. It was driven by a kind of air-breathing rocket called a scramjet. Bisesa still felt frail, but she used to ride helicopters in the army, and she studied this new generation of craft—new to a sleeper like her, anyhow—with curiosity. A jaunt across the continent, from Arizona to Florida, was nothing; this sturdy vessel really came into its own on very long-haul flights when it had the chance to leap up out of the atmosphere altogether, like a metallic salmon.

But the security was ferocious. They even had to submit to searches and scans in flight. This paranoia was a legacy not just of the sunstorm but of incidents when planes and spaceplanes had been used as missiles, including the destruction of Rome a couple of years before the storm.

Security was in fact an issue from the beginning. Bisesa had come out of her Hibernaculum pod without the latest ident tattoos. There was an office of the FBI maintained on site at the Hibernaculum to process patients like her, refugees from slightly more innocent days—and to make sure no fugitives from justice had tried to flee through time. But Myra had come to Bisesa’s room with a boxy piece of equipment that stamped a tattoo onto Bisesa’s face, and she gave her an injection she described as “gene therapy.” Then they had slipped out of the Hibernaculum through a goods entrance without going anywhere near that FBI office.

Since then they had passed every check.

Bisesa felt faintly disturbed. Whoever Myra had hooked up with evidently had significant resources. But she trusted Myra implicitly, even though this was a strange new Myra, suddenly aged and embittered, a new person with whom she was, tentatively, building a new relationship. Really, she had no choice.

They deplaned at Orlando and spent a night at a cheap tourist hotel downtown.

Bisesa was faintly surprised that people still shuttled around the world to destinations like this. Myra said it was mostly nostalgic. The latest virtual reality systems, by interfacing directly with the central nervous system, were capable even of simulating the sensation of motion, acceleration. You could ride a roller coaster around the moons of Jupiter, if you wanted. What theme park could compete with that? When the last of the pre-sunstorm generations gave up chasing their childhood dreams and died off, it seemed likely that most people would rarely venture far from the safety of their bunker-like homes.

They ate room service food and drank minibar wine, and slept badly.

The next morning, a driverless car was waiting outside the hotel for them. It was of an odd, chunky design that Bisesa didn’t recognize.

Cocooned, they were driven off at what felt like a terrific speed to Bisesa, with the traffic a hairsbreadth close. She wasn’t sorry when the windows silvered over, and she and Myra sat in a humming near-silence, with only the faintest of surges to tell them that they were speeding out of the city.

When they drew to a halt the doors slid back, allowing bright sunlight to flood into the car, and Bisesa heard the cries of gulls, and smelled the unmistakable tang of salt.

“Come on.” Myra clambered out of the car, and helped her mother follow stiffly.

It was March, but even so the heat hammered down on Bisesa. They were on a stretch of tarmac—not a road or a parking lot, it looked more like a runway, stretching off into the distance, lined with blockhouses. On the horizon she saw gantries, some of them orange with rust, so remote they were misted with distance. To the north—it had to be that way, judging from the wind blowing off the sea—she saw something glimmering, a kind of line scratched onto the sky, tilted a little away from the vertical. Hard to see, elusive, perhaps it was some kind of contrail.

There couldn’t be any doubt where she was. “Cape Canaveral, right?”

Myra grinned. “Where else? Remember you brought me here on a tourist trip when I was six?”

“I expect it’s changed a bit since then. This is turning into quite a ride, Myra.”

“Then welcome back to Canaveral.” A young man approached them; a smart suitcase trundled after him. Ident-tattooed, he was sweating inside a padded orange jumpsuit plastered with NASA logos.

“What are you, a tourist guide?”

“Hi, Alexei,” Myra said. “Don’t mind my mother. After nineteen years she got out of bed on the wrong side.”

He stuck out his hand. “Alexei Carel. Good to meet you, Ms. Dutt. I suppose I am your guide for the day—sort of.”

Twenty-five or twenty-six, he was a good-looking boy, Bisesa thought, with an open face under a scalp that was shaven close, though black hair sprouted thickly, like a five o’clock shadow. He looked oddly uncomfortable, though, as if he wasn’t used to being outdoors. Bisesa felt like an ambassador from the past, and wanted to make a good impression on this sunstorm boomer. She gripped his warm hand. “Call me Bisesa.”

“We don’t have much time.” He snapped his fingers and the suitcase opened. It contained two more orange suits, neatly folded, and more gear: blankets, water bottles, packets of dried food, what might have been an assembly-kit chemical toilet, a water purifying kit, oxygen masks.

Bisesa looked at this junk with apprehension. “It’s like the gear we used to take on field hikes in Afghanistan. We’re taking a ride, are we?”

“That we are.” Alexei hauled the jumpsuits out of the suitcase. “Put these on, please. This corner of the facility is low on surveillance, but the sooner we’re in camouflage the better.”

“Right here?”

“Come on, Mum.” Myra was already unzipping her blouse.

The jumpsuit was easy to put on; it seemed to wriggle into place, and Bisesa wondered if it had some limited smartness of its own. Alexei handed her boots, and she found gloves and a kind of balaclava helmet in a pocket.

In the Florida sun, once she was zipped up she was hot. But evidently she was headed somewhere much colder.

Myra bundled their clothes into a smaller pack she took from the car, which also contained their spare underwear and toiletries. She threw the pack into the suitcase, which folded closed. Then she patted the car. Empty, it closed itself up and rolled away.

Alexei grinned. “All set?”

“As we’ll ever be,” Myra said.

Alexei snapped his fingers again. The tarmac under Bisesa’s feet shuddered.

And a great slab of it dropped precipitately, taking the three of them and the suitcase down into darkness. A metal lid closed over them with a clang.

“Shit,” Bisesa said.

“Sorry,” Alexei said. “Meant for cargo, not people.”

Fluorescents lit up, revealing a concrete corridor.