by Greg Bear
DJ rises and lets out a shuddering breath, then brushes past us, wiping his face, leaving green streaks across his cheeks, and stands with the others back beyond the maze of bridges.
Stands and waits, arms at his side like a chastened little kid in this old, old Church.
Far above, a hideous, shuddering slam drops onto our world like the stomp of a giant boot. The high pillar vibrates, making the supports flex and squeak; bits of crystal shatter away and strike the upper galleries, plash into the lake, scatter in bright pieces across the maze of stone bridges.
“Right,” Joe says. “We’re done here.”
And that’s it, we’re off.
LARGER ISSUES
Out on the Red, surrounded by Antags, in a dust storm and in your pajamas,” Alice says. “And yet… here you are. Un-fucking-believable.”
“Yeah,” I say, still not back from the last of Captain Coyle.
We’re driving north on 5, ten lanes, crossing wide new bridges, between wide farm fields and lumber yards and casinos and outlet malls, stuff that’s been here for decades, not looking very futuristic, looking damned old and traditional in fact.
Alice adds, “I believe almost anything nowadays. Like, I can almost believe you and Teal will get together and she’ll pup out a litter of lobsters.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say.
“Really?” She watches me.
“Not the way it works.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re gone. They’re dead… billions of years gone. They aren’t coming back, not like that.”
“What do you feel now?” Alice asks. “Still having visions?”
I wonder whether all this talk has done either of us any good. And why she’s indulged me. I could not possibly explain most of it to her.
“No,” I say. “Not strong ones, anyway. It just messes with me in general. I don’t know where I am, so I don’t know who I am.”
“What was their plan, then? For third gen?”
“Knowledge. Wisdom. I don’t know.”
“What if somebody does know but doesn’t want it to happen? Doesn’t want us to know the bigger picture—to get smart that way?”
I watch her closely. “We’re not going to meet Joe, are we?”
“We are,” she insists.
“But we’re going to Canada. Why not just stop this thing and let me off,” I say. Cold, calm. I’ve known, I’ve felt, I’ve suspected, but I’m still not decided, I’m still stuck between more than two worlds.
“He’s in Canada,” Alice says.
“Canada isn’t signatory.”
“True enough.”
The driver, up front behind his plastic partition, looks back, checking up on us, making sure we’re still okay. That I’m still keeping my shit together.
I am. God knows how.
“What’s Joe doing in Canada?”
“Getting away from the bullshit,” she says. “Must have been interesting coming back in Cosmoline. Sleeping one place… then another. I can’t imagine what that was like. Thinking you were an ugly, shelly thing, out under the ice of an old moon. Wow. What happens when you get away from the green dust? Does it all fade?”
I’m feeling less and less at liberty to go on. I’m thinking of Captain Coyle and our sisters, those who were part of her special ops team, and how only two of them returned with us, with me, but not on the same space frames.
Joe and DJ and Tak and Kazak and Vee-Def, also on another frame.
Michelin and Brom and Ackerly and so many of the others…
“We’ve got half an hour before we reach Blaine,” Alice says. “Canadian authorities will meet us there. If they haven’t figured out it was you on that returning hawk. If someone hasn’t alerted border security on this side. And if you want to follow through. Do you want me to explain what happens after that?”
“I’m no longer in the Skyrines?”
“In any case, you won’t return to your previous life. But you knew that. You’re smart.”
“Captain Coyle… different orders. She was willing to kill us all. And die herself. Why?”
“I went through special ops training before I switched to medical,” Alice says. “I remember Captain Coyle. A great lady, maybe the finest I ever knew in the Corps. There was a time when I would have done the same thing she did, followed the same orders. But then… I met Joe. He took the scales from off my eyes, so to speak. Not to cast any aspersion on scales, shells, crab eyes, whatever. Whatever you feel you are now.”
Is this odd and variable and now crude and insulting woman playing with me? Testing me? Making sure I know my own mind?
Or have a mind, any mind, to know?
“One question you should ask,” Teal said in the southern garage; her face was suddenly thoughtful, sympathetic and distant at once. “How t’is strong tea, as you call it, knows to fit humans? A just snap inna our tissues, our genes?”
“You tell me,” I murmur.
“First, finish your story,” Alice Harper says. “Make it clear, cement it down. Then I’ll try to tell you the rest. All that Joe has told me. All that I’ve learned. I need perspective, and I’m sure you can provide some of that.”
MEETINGS, PARTINGS, SWEET SORROW
In the southern garage, Michelin and Kazak have run the troops through final prep for our sortie, our breakout maneuver. Mustafa and Suleiman, from Coyle’s team, have wandered back, in shock—and been accepted, because I suppose nobody knows the whole story, or their story, and we’re all Skyrines.
Or maybe it was because after they managed to recover some of their wits, they volunteered to go out through the gate, scope out the rocky harbor, and assess the fitness of the vehicles that didn’t make it inside the garage. They rigged a kind of broom of old wire and used it to brush off the germ needles scattered out there, brush a clear trail; they did this by themselves, Brodsky and Neemie say.
After the special ops sisters returned, Neemie and Beringer stepped through the lock next and tried to establish a satlink. Nothing going. We’re still on our own.
And so now we know. The northern gate is blocked by rubble. There’s been substantial bombardment. Outside the southern gate all of the deuces have been destroyed. The Trundle was hit but there’s a possibility one of the disruptors is still functional. Another Skell-Jeep seems to have survived and might still run, and two more Tonkas appear intact and not booby-trapped. The vehicles outside the harbor can’t be seen through the blowing dust, which is still heavy enough it darkens the dawn skies.
Inside the garage there’s the Tonka, with two fixed disruptors and a rear-firing multigauge cannon, the Chesty with its four Aegis 7 cannons and chain-bolt ballista, and two lightly armed Skell-Jeeps—kinetic rifles only.
Joe and Gamecock confer, tapping the lieutenant colonel’s remaining energy to figure out how to move the platform’s disruptor and its power supply onto the General Puller. The Chesty was designed to fight but also to tow and haul and do light repair. It has a folding crane behind the cabin and its own weapons that might transfer a disruptor.
Simca and Vee-Def think they can take the guts out of a Deuce’s triple-rail bolt gun and mount it to the carriage of a…
I’m losing all that. Everybody’s yakking. I listen, but I’m not getting it. Tak and Kazak are working hard and I’m doing hardly nothing.
Then Joe walks by and says, “We’re all going to die out there. I’ll make sure you mount some heavy shit before you expire.”
“Outstanding,” I say.
Teal watches this interchange with that same strange, beautiful calm. Second gen and now more days breathing the strong tea. Ice moon tea. Where does she live from now on? I mean, in her head, but maybe I also mean, on Mars as well.
Where does she go if she lives?
OUR WOUNDED—VOOR AND Skyrine—have been loaded in the Chesty’s enclosed cabin, including Gamecock. Joe and Vee-Def and Rafe have made one last survey from the western watchtower and report the sky i
s still thick with dust and winds are up to two hundred knots.
Tak has taken a third turn around the rocky harbor outside the garage.
The Voors are quiet.
Teal: utterly still as she stands in the middle of the garage along with DJ and me. I hear the reports with half my head, half my self. I realize I’m standing beside Teal, not being helpful, and DJ is sticking close, like we’re all separated out, quarantined; we are still smeared with green dust and after the reports of what happened to some of Coyle’s team, nobody’s at ease being around us. They think we’ve gone over, whatever that could mean.
“I miss my weird-looking parasite,” DJ whispers, and looks at me with a smirk. “The one that sat up here.” He touches the back of his neck. “Don’t you?”
Maybe we do.
De Groot and Rafe tend to Gamecock but he’s fading, getting worse, and his eyes show he knows it. Typically a mortally wounded Skyrine will not be allowed to fill a slot in a jump-up. Not be allowed to take up space in a returning frame, if there is one up there waiting for us. Cosmoline doesn’t work on major injuries and there are no hospitals in orbit.
One major difference between Skyrines and ground pounders. Helps define us. Not that any of us likes it.
We have four who may not make it, including Gamecock, but we’ll take them with us as far as we can. We owe them that much.
The Voors, of course, will not find a slot in any of our jump-ups. Even if we offered—and we won’t—they wouldn’t take them. Joe says they’re getting their wagons back, those that still work; enough to carry their survivors to wherever they can go. Another camp, another settlement, if any will have them. De Groot works like a sonofabitch along with Rafe and two others, hauling and tending.
SNKRAZ.
Our plan is simple enough. We don’t know what will happen when we break through the Antag lines, but attempt to break through we will—and dispose of as many of the enemy as we can. The Voors will follow.
Joe approaches Teal and then me and then DJ.
“I’m handing Teal over to de Groot,” he says. “She can’t come to Earth; they’d never accept her. The Voors will take her with them to a settlement. Rafe seems to think there’s a chance Amazonia will take them all, if it’s still there. If they can make it that far.”
Teal doesn’t react to this news. When Joe walks away to help patch skintights using Voor repair kits, she turns to me and says, “Come back if you can.”
“What about me?” DJ asks hopefully.
“All of you… if you brush te ot’er life.”
I can’t stand that anymore, just so fucking weird and confusing, and so I walk away to join the others while Teal stands there watching us, beautiful, calm, scary as hell. De Groot can have her, I think, but I don’t mean it. I just can’t stand the thought of never feeling that touch again—that beautiful connection to something utterly beautiful and strange.
Teal.
Ice moon tea.
“We’re not going to make it anyway, Master Sergeant,” DJ says, noting my gloom as he walks beside me across the garage to our Skell-Jeep. “Question I have is, which heaven will we go to? Crab heaven or pearly gates?”
Our teams have assembled. We mount our vehicles.
The little side lock opens, Neemie enters and nobody bothers to brush him down because we’re going to immediately shove out anyway.
But then he shouts, “I got satlink! There’s lots of fresh orbital. Our orbital. Don’t know disposition or tactics, but it’s up there! Want to see what I got?”
We share, those of us who can. Some of our angels are still working but for most of us, the skintight charges are too far down, the suits too damaged, some of us now wear Voor helms, and so…
“Push out!” Joe calls. Vee-Def will operate the locks and run to join us when we’ve all exited.
Teal climbs up behind Rafe into a Voor wagon.
That’s the last I see of her.
I’m on my Tonka and true to his word, Joe has assigned me to a multigauge cannon. DJ is on the second cannon. Michelin pilots. We have eight passengers, including Beringer, Brodsky, Mustafa, and Suleiman.
Vee-Def in the garage booth fuses a safety circuit and the main lock gates slide open together—inside and out. Air rushes by with a lion’s roar. We’re blown around for a few seconds, my skintight fabric ripples—our vehicles rev and lurch and roll. The engines all around grow quieter in the thinning air, but the Tonka’s rumble still comes up through our asses.
And then we’re outside, blind—flooded with the barely tactile whisper of a Martian dust storm. Mustafa grabs my arm, I reach over to Michelin, he slows the Tonka for just a moment—and Vee-Def runs out of the obscurity, leaps up onto the vehicle, and squeezes between Mustafa and Beringer.
The Chesty immediately starts laying down barrages right and left. Nobody pauses at the platform to transfer shit; we’re already taking incoming fire, bolts, shells, and then a lancing disruptor beam plows the stone beside us, rises like an electric cobra, and shaves a curved blade from our right rear tire, which immediately digs into the dirt and starts to heave us around.
Michelin ejects the bad tire and it flies off into the swirling murk. Five tires is still enough. Four is enough, though the tail will drag. Three and we’re stalled.
Once again, the dust goes purple all around with ghostly lightning, heavy, dull thumps vibrate us in our seats—something bright green and throwing out curling threads of plasma screams overhead like a ghastly firework, then abruptly descends. It misses us but the Skell-Jeep to our right takes the direct bolt hit and leaps in flaming pieces, bodies and blood soaring into the storm—
We’re keeping to our course, DJ and I are laying down blind cannon bursts—taking opposite arcs right and left—the Martian wind is rising, buffeting like an angry, dusty ghost…
I’m definitely focused. On the Red now and nowhere else, in combat mode, stuck in this all-too-mortal and coldly frightened body, hanging on to the multigauge and my seat, knocked around by rough terrain, wind, concussions. Michelin’s head jerks from side to side in the pilot’s seat. He looks up over his shoulder in disbelief.
Still here!
We’ve managed to push about a kilometer from the Drifter. We can barely make out the Voor wagon ahead of us, can’t see a thing in front, and then—
Air, dust, rock—all lift up behind and cast shadows as it flies over. There are four more bursts just like that in rapid succession. Rocks fall around—meters wide, bouncing and rolling, throwing up great gouts of shattered basalt and sand—and a Millie plummets out of nowhere directly in front of our Tonka, outlined in molten glow, tumbling end over end, cracking open, spilling dozens of weird dolls in jumbles of arms and legs all in the wrong places, all twisting wrong—Antags!
Michelin’s arms wheel as he almost casually steers our Tonka around the wreckage and broken bodies.
Joe takes the comm: “Ants at nine o’clock! Prep sidearms—they’re on foot, fast and close!”
Now we’re going to have our chance to engage the enemy at close quarters. Pity it won’t get reported, pity it won’t get out, what we’ll see.
What we’ve already seen.
BIRDS
What do they look like?” Alice asks.
We’re about fifteen miles from the border. Traffic is backed up; lots of folks heading north for vacation. Cheerful crowding. Canada’s not signatory, but still prosperous, nobody’s retaliating, Gurus don’t want discord. Gurus want political stability while they dole out their technological gifts, so that we can head out to the Red and fight.
“Like birds,” I tell her. “They were pretty thickly suited up. Long in the neck, wide helms, with a long nose—thick bodies, really long, strong arms, a kind of hanging sack below the arms.”
“Like where wing feathers would hang,” Alice says.
“Yeah. Maybe. But the eyes…”
I hear something above the light electric hum of the traffic. All these electric cars and it’s so
soft, so quiet, you might think you were out on a meadow with the wind blowing through the grass, that’s what it sounds like on the road to the border, to Blaine.
But I’m hearing something more powerful, louder.
Higher.
Alice hears it next, and the driver notices as well. He turns around, and we can’t understand what he’s saying through the plastic barrier until he switches on an intercom.
“What should I do?” he asks Alice. “We can get off at the next exit, we could go inland, there’s a—”
“Quiet,” she says. She puts her palm to her chin and taps her nose with a manicured finger.
I’m looking up through the side window, straining on my seat belt, and I see them first. Four hover-squares, quadcopters in civvy parlance. Coming low over the countryside, the fields, the freeway, slowly swaying side to side, searching for something.
“Are they looking for us?” the driver asks.
Alice shoots me a querulous look. “Who knows you made it back?” she asks.
“Nobody, I think.”
“The apartment’s clear. Joe made sure of that,” she says, more to herself, then back to me. “Did you walk from the mob center?”
“I walked. Hitchhiked, actually. A lady in—”
“Crap,” Alice says.
“Nobody told me to walk all the way to Seattle,” I say.
“No, that would be silly,” she says in an equally low tone. “The one who picked you up—somebody from the base?”
“She said she was a colonel’s secretary. Older gal.”
Alice looks right at me; she hadn’t heard that part. “Anyone else?”
“A short cab ride.”
“How’d you pay?”
I hold up my finger.
The hover-squares have leveled off about a hundred meters on each side of the freeway and are running north in parallel to the stuck traffic, no doubt scanning everybody through the windows.
I lean back in the seat and close my eyes.
OFF THE RED