by Greg Bear
“It would be my honor.”
“She’s ugly as sin.”
“Sin rhymes with Venn, sir.”
“Fuck you.”
Outside, the dust is clearing, revealing night-dark sand and an amazing starry sky. We spin around and I scan the opposite line through my faceplate magnifier. The movement of Antags has stopped, but a few bolts are still being thrown out from the trundle to a largely quiet and unmoving line. They’re just sitting and taking it, waiting, like a row of wolves curious as to why the rabbits have turned and bared their teeth.
Not scared. Just curious.
“It’s a big drive,” I say. “What are they hauling?”
“Major hurt, we assume. No time to stop and peek under their skirts.”
The settling dust opens a space between us and the Antags. They have big black Millies, long and segmented like millipedes, little round wheels reaching out on a hundred legs. Haven’t seen Millies that big before—at least fifty meters long and ten meters wide. Each looks like it can carry a couple of platoons, and there are lots. Plenty of parallel rollers as well, like big massage wheels on a rope—some supporting hooks to anchor the aeros, which float a couple of hundred meters above the hardpan like fat, shadowy jellyfish. Weapon mounts squat on flatbeds very like our Trundles, ready to deploy tuned relaxers, neural exciters—cause us fits. We call them shit-rays. Could be used to ease capture. But mostly they’re prelude to unbridled bouts of execution—converting paralyzed, befouled humans to stain on the Red.
“We ain’t paid enough,” Joe concludes, a sentiment so universal it doesn’t even register.
I see one of our bigger bolts has carved a Millie right down the middle, lengthwise. At that distance, I can more imagine than actually see movement of the injured, the dying. Hope and imagination combine forces. Die, die. Breathe out and boil whatever you have for lungs.
“Why aren’t they shooting?” I ask. It’s unnatural, not returning heat.
“Patience,” Joe says, shaking his head. He does not know, does not believe our luck, if luck it is and not a pregnant pause. The Antags have us right where they want us. Why not just blast away?
Are they afraid of damaging the Drifter?
“Two more Tonkas around the left,” Joe says after the first pair have vanished beyond the left shoulder. They are followed by the General Puller—the Chesty. The big Trundle has stopped firing and is soon kicking up a plume behind the Chesty. If I were Joe, I’d station the Trundle and a couple of Deuces just around the northern slope of the Drifter.
And so he does.
But there’s still no Antag response.
“I know just what they’re going to do,” Joe says. “They’re going to wait until we’re all inside, then they’re going to nuke us from orbit and boil us like lobsters.”
“Don’t think that will work, Joe, sir,” I say.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because it’s big and deep.”
And because they want the Drifter as much as we do?
“But nukes would seal us in, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe.”
I ask myself what it would be like to live like moles forever, breathing green dust, struggling to raise crops in the faded glimmer of hydroelectric power from a hobo that’s mostly drained away. What’ll that give us, a couple of months before we start dining on raw Voor and I fight for Teal’s honor, or the Antags dig us out—
Joe sees my pensive gaze. “Stop thinking, shithead,” he says. “Sorry to engage your fucking intellect.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there food in there?”
“Some.”
There’ve been no shots since our last platform-mounted bolt cutters. But now an aerostat is on the move above the northwestern horizon, like a small black cloud covering the stars. It will be over us in a few minutes.
Joe looks at me. The vehicles have no doubt piled up behind the lava ridge, at the northern gate. I very much doubt they can all cycle through before the aerostat rains needles.
“Tell them to abandon the last vehicles,” I say to Joe. “Tell them to run to the lock and pack in like Vienna sausages. And do the same at the southern gate.”
“Right,” Joe says.
If the Antags can hear and understand, this will be fun. For them, this will be a rollicking slaughter of frantic little rats. Needles will do the trick—no need to waste energy or big ordnance. Then they can perch on the Drifter and wait out the survivors.
“Our turn, Vinnie,” Joe says. We quickly round the clenched fist of the lava arm and come up on the Skells and Tonkas. Skyrines are leaping out and jogging toward the rusty gate. A quick glance behind shows the aero looming, no more than a few hundred meters until it can loose the first curtain of needles.
We seal helms and exit the buggy’s rear lock together. The run is a blur—feet barely touching sand and dust and rock, skipping, stumbling, rolling and jouncing on the upswing, zigging by abandoned Skells and a Tonka, almost catching up with our fellows, around the rough point of the ridge, into the rocky harbor of the northern gate.
Get in line, except there is no line. Skyrines are bunched up waiting to cycle through. DJ must be crazy, I think, not opening the vehicle lock, the big gate—but then I see it yawn wide, the first crowd has cycled through, and another group packs in—all but twenty making it before there’s absolutely no way to add more without crushing bone or getting caught in the hatch.
The lock closes.
Joe and I stay back. Eighteen others pace, cringing, in the embrace of the ridge.
“Find cover in the rocks!” I call over suit-to-suit.
Seven guys try to fit into one cubby large enough for two. Joe and I have found low ridges we can hide under, if we dig out some sand. I can see him across the harbor, not far from the gate.
Ten left out in the open.
The aero is at zenith. Three or four minutes at minimum until DJ can cycle and open a lock again.
We’ve done our best.
Puffs in the sand. Dozens of little plumes shoot up and fall back quick. The ten out in the open are running around like rats in a dog pit. I can barely hear their screaming. Then I can hardly see for all the needles, a gray haze of falling death. Our stragglers cover their heads with arms and groping hands, but it doesn’t matter—one needle and you go crazy and then, at leisure, twitching on the dust, puff up until your skintight splits its seams.
I can’t bear to watch.
Four gang up to yank two Skyrines from cover, but get kicked off, then give up and just stand slouched under the deluge, heads bowed, hands stiff by their sides. Needles make them flinch.
They look like hedgehogs.
Then they begin that slow, awful dance.
Four more flail out from cover, plucking needles that have swooped in and found them.
Big gate still sealed.
I close my eyes and pray.
LAST EXIT TO HELL
The apartment is cool, almost cold, and sunset outside the window is a faint gray-yellow over the Olympics beyond the sound. I’ve changed out of my robe into civvies, Hawaiian shirt, and jeans. Alice Harper stands by the big window, arms crossed. “Wherever man goes,” she says, and clenches herself tighter, “history sucks.”
Can’t disagree. The bad shit builds as I resurrect these awful memories. I say, “Do you think Green Camp actually wanted to flush Teal out on the Red?” I want, I need, to change the subject.
“Absolutely,” she says. “Rationals believe in tight intellectual order, total logic, everything determined, DNA is fate, blue-blooded pedigree is your only hope—Asians beat whites beat blacks and Hispanics. Like a bloody-minded religion, only don’t tell them that. Everything statistical, mathematically sound… Atheists by law, strict dogmatists, reductionists… Techno-racists. Libertarianism pushed to the ultimate extreme.” She lowers her arms.
I watch her, fascinated by her calm, her weird enthusiasm. I wish I could be like that, feel as she feels right no
w. Anything not to be me. I say, “Just doesn’t make sense.”
“Use your head. Someone like Teal who apparently insists on one man at a time… no sharesies… She’s baggage. The top bitch would shove her out soon as spit.”
That would be Ally Pecqua, I’m guessing. “Pretty harsh.”
Alice Harper shrugs. “It only got worse when Earth cut the data and stopped sending supplies. Mars not making anybody money, couldn’t pay their bills. Time to slice the umbilical. Might drive anyone over the edge.”
“What in hell are we fighting for, then? If we don’t give a shit about the Red, why not just leave it to the Antags?”
“Because Gurus…” She gives me a stern look. “Rhetorical question, right?”
My turn to shrug. “I’m still out there. In my head. I have to sort it out or I’ll never come home.”
“So tell me more. Tell me what happened with you and Teal,” Alice says.
That’s not easy. I’m having a hard time moving on, still locked on the image of my fellow Skyrines dancing under that curtain of darts, until the aero passes over, circling at the end of its dragline, and the rain stops.
It’s coming back to me now in full force, that awfulness. I’m sweating heavy. I stink like a gymnasium full of wrestlers.
JOE BREAKS COVER and makes a run for the personnel lock gate. He starts pounding on it. Me and four guys join him, we’re all pounding. I can’t hear my fist hitting the hatch. I can’t hear anything. I’m too busy looking down at my arms, my legs, too busy inspecting myself.
Then I stop. My heart stops.
There’s a dart on my forearm.
Jesus.
Joe sees it, too. He doesn’t pull it out, doesn’t touch it, neither do I, because I’m not going crazy, it’s only just pierced the skintight, might not have touched my skin, it was a ricochet, maybe, and hasn’t yet pumped its poison.
Or it has, and adrenaline is just holding back the symptoms. Medics say that can happen.
My fingers reach down. Can’t just leave it there.
Joe grabs my hand, then pushes his head in close to mine and looks through our faceplates straight into my eyes. “Don’t,” he says.
The smaller gate begins to grind open. We squeeze through the opening as it grows. The survivors are packed tight inside the lock by the time the aero is guided back over the shoulders of the Drifter. Everyone jostles, trying to get to the far side while the outer door closes. Joe makes a fence with his arms around me so nothing and nobody can jam the dart home.
My ears and throat feel pressure return.
The inner door opens and we spill out. Joe holds my clean arm, still gripping my hand, and we slowly spin like we’re waltzing, because I’m trying to reach for the dart, and he’s stopping me from doing that.
Pressure reaches Drifter max.
The other Skyrines see I’m darted. They stand clear of us, pushing at the inner door, which cracks open, slides slowly into the wall, and Skyrines exit, move through, but Joe still holds my hand, and I stop us spinning.
Hold out my darted arm.
“I’m not going to touch it,” Joe says. “You know why.”
“Up and down,” I say, hardly able to draw breath. That’s what the darts can do. Push up a second needle through the fletches and stick a would-be rescuer.
I’m on the couch with Alice.
I’m in the inner lock with Joe, my arm hurts, my muscles burn like fury.
I want to cry, on the couch.
I am crying, in the lock, in my helm. Sobbing like a baby.
We’re through.
We’re in the garage.
One of the Skyrines hands Joe a small needle-nose pliers. Good name. Part of someone’s drop kit, maybe the gift of a relative before his transvac, use this, son, to pull out those sonofabitching things. Joe holds my arm steady, the tips of the pliers hover, he’s shaking, I’m shaking, dear God don’t push it down.
Jesus don’t even touch it.
Then, he’s got it. He lifts. He doesn’t start shaking until the needle is out. He doesn’t fling it aside. He doesn’t drop it. Training kicks in after the near panic. Another Skyrine holds open a small silver bag. Joe deposits the dart into the bag and pats my shoulder. “We can’t go back that way, not on foot,” he says matter-of-factly.
The rocky harbor is littered with active darts.
ALICE LISTENS AND says nothing.
“I stink,” I say.
“Please go on. Tell me what you can, what you feel like telling.”
Christ, I really want Joe to walk through the apartment door. Jesus and God and Mary and Buddha and St. Emil Kapaun, I want that. If Joe doesn’t come home, maybe I never will.
SKY BASIC
To go from an infant race of ground huggers to a force capable of fighting on other worlds, humans were handed a decent selection of Guru gifts, including of course spent matter technology, but also a thorough understanding of our own biology, chemistry, and psychology.
I suppose the Gurus knew us better than we knew ourselves. I’ve never met one—never met anyone who has—but I imagine them as wizened, wise, tall, and graceful, but tough sons of bitches to have survived their own long voyage across the awesome distances between the stars.
They knew our limits, political, biological, psychological. And so they helped us formulate Cosmoline, that greenish gel in which we are all packed and preserved like fruits in a can, not awake, not asleep, but not cold—not frozen—just quiet and contented while the space frames carry us to where we’re going.
Some of us call it Warm Sleep. Old-timers will remember that Cosmoline was a patented petroleum-based product that helped keep rifles and guns and equipment from rusting. Not at all the same; a clever marketing wizard simply transferred the name and it stuck.
The chemistry behind our version of Cosmoline helped foster a thousand medical advances, of course. So it was one of those Guru swords that were already plowshares. In space, nobody had to rust or corrupt—not if they were wrapped in Cosmoline.
I’ve already described some of the side effects, but there are others, much worse. About one time in a hundred thousand, Cosmoline induces a complicated cascade of negative reactions. I’ve only seen it once. A space frame delivered a platoon of healthy Skyrines to orbit around the Red—along with one tube filled with corrupt Jell-O. Did the occupant die on impact? During the journey? Nobody explained, nobody asked questions. War is hell. We are all grateful not to remember the months we spend in the long rise to Mars.
Of far more concern to the usual breed of ecological worrywarts is spent matter tech. The Gurus knew how to suck all the life, if not quite all the energy, out of elements heavier than carbon and calcium. By reaching down to their inner electron shells and messing with a few quantum constants, atoms can be induced to give up a startling amount of nonnuclear energy. No neutrons, no deadly radiation, just remarkable amounts of pure power—but the resulting dead, spent mass is incredibly toxic. It’s still matter, still behaves something like what it used to be, but that behavior is deceptive. Deadly. It’s gone zombie. Spent matter waste has to be disposed of thoroughly and completely—in secure orbit. It should not be stockpiled on Earth or stored on Mars, and it should just not be shot willy-nilly into space.
Some have said that at the end of its energy draw, spent matter is toxic in terms of physics as well as chemistry. Dropped into the sun, into any star, spent matter might start a nasty chain reaction—literally slowing and then killing the sun’s pulsing fusion heart. I don’t know about that. But I do know that war is messy, and there are canisters of spent matter all over Mars, and probably in orbit as well, so the long-term consequences of Guru tech are still unknown. We should all hope the worrywarts are wrong and nothing will happen to the sun. But for the last couple of hundred years, some of those worrywarts have been spot-on.
Still, Gurus seemed delighted to help us recover from our own ignorance and greed… providing free visions of a boundless and bright future.
BACKING UP NOW
I thought I’d leap over to the good stuff, the easy stuff, all technical and shit, but that’s not how it’s going to be.
I just have to tough it out.
I cannot escape the burn from what happened in that embracing arm of sand-blasted lava, that little harbor of shelter outside the Drifter’s western gate, filled with Joe’s buddies. That may be the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen—Skyrines trying to pull each other out of cover to avoid the rippling curtains of plunging, swooping, seeking germ needles.
Fear is a drug you need to survive. Without fear, you die quicker; that’s part of basic, that’s what the old guys instill in us when we’re fledglings waiting and eager to fly; fear is your friend, but only in controlled doses, never in such flooding waves that you panic. Panic kills you quicker than bullets. Panic turns you into doomed animals.
We panicked, all of us, in the embrace of that drowning giant’s thick lava arm: those under cover, those out in the open, didn’t matter. We would have killed each other rather than face the goddamned needles, and now that stokes my rage, the rage that eats me inside, that makes me less than a human being forever after, not just because I’ve seen my fellow Skyrines die horribly, but because I was forced to want them to die instead of me. I felt that little exultation that no needle was going to hit me, that I’d live to fuck again, maybe fuck their girlfriends, sympathy call, howdy, reporting to duty, sorry, ma’am, he’s not coming back, but I’m here…
Fuck it! Fuck it all. I have so much rage at myself, at the Antags, at everything that made me grow up to be a Skyrine, a fighter across the stars, a heroic asshole coward who gave up being a sappy, naïve kid to fight in so many battles, only to finally panic on the Red, and then, like God is wagging His stony white finger at me, shit, that needle on my arm, just waiting to plunge in, you did not escape, you piss-scared little fuckwad, it’s still here, and it’s going to get you and eat you and you’ll bloat up and burst, but only after you go crazy and somebody has to shoot you to keep you from hurting everyone.