Protectors of Earth

by Felix R. Savage

As I gape after them, my phone buzzes in my back pocket, but I ignore it. Then something bumps my leg. It’s Aardie, of course. That’s why they backed down. I ought to feel triumphant, but honestly, I wouldn’t want to mess with a guy who’s got a robot aardvark, either.

  “You fucking dumbass, Scatter,” Patrick says.

  He’s gazing after them, stricken. Now he switches his focus back to me. Furious.

  “You can’t say shit like that to the cavalry!”

  “Ca … cavalry?”

  Their voices tumble over one another as they school clueless me. I thought the guys were infantry, but no, they were obviously cavalry. The cyborg eye, for one thing, and another of them had a Fu Manchu mustache. Apparently these are dead giveaways. The clincher is that one of them had a 44th Mechanized Horse tattoo on his backside. Patrick saw it when he knocked him down. That’s why he started being nice to them. Because if you are a mere sapper, you must never, ever say boo to a cavalryman. This isn’t some kind of false humility. It’s just The Way It Is, a pecking order that’s in the blood of all grunts, which I never even knew about, much less imbibed with my bug juice back in basic, because technical support guys aren’t real soldiers. A fact I have never been more conscious of.

  “But we aren’t in the army anymore,” I say feebly.

  “It doesn’t matter! It’s about respect.”

  “Respect means Huifang taking off her clothes?”

  “It would’ve been a laugh,” she says, although there was no laughter on her face when she was raising the hem of her tank top up to her breasts. It is now tightly tucked into her jeans again, by the way.

  “There’s no way they could tell you guys ever used to be sappers …”

  “That’s right,” says Patrick. “We used to be sappers, now we ain’t shit. Got it in one, Scatter.”

  I give up. I should have asked Elsa to give me a job on Ceres. I would have been outstanding at sweeping the floors of the labs and taking out the recycling.

  For want of any better ideas, I check my phone. I have an email from Aardie.

  She is sitting right here at my feet, but she can only communicate with me by phone since she has no voicebox and I have no field radio.

  Hello, Jay! We have a potential positive. I’ve detected traces of ringwoodite. Do you want me to dig and see what we find?

  “Oh my God.” I show the message to the others.

  “Ringwoodite?” says Milosz.

  “It’s a polymorphic mineral. It looks like blue diamonds. It’s extremely rare. Found in the mantle of the Earth, and in some meteorites, and, um … there’s a lot of it in Pinkie Pie’s shell.” Technically, the mineral in Pinkie Pie’s shell isn’t blue, so it’s probably forsterite, another member of the olivine solid solution series. I just added the whole series to Aardie’s scan parameters. “So she’s telling us that she may have found an egg.”

  Silence.

  “Where?”

  I think back to when the notification hit my phone. I was nose to nose with the cyborg-eyed cavalryman. Aardie was beside me. She stands 90 cm high. “Don’t shoot me if I’m wrong,” I say, “but I think the traces of ringwoodite were on those guys’ trousers.”

  7

  “Quick!” Patrick hardly pauses to grab his coat. “We gotta catch up with them!”

  Outside, the Christmas Eve chaos is ramping up. It is 0515 in the morning. A troupe of carollers wends its way down the main concourse.

  “Shit. We’ll never find them.”

  “Well, we know where they went,” Huifang says.

  “We do?”

  “Sure. Back to their camp, or barracks, or whatever it is.”

  “Did they say where it was?”

  “Yeah. Guy was trying to get my phone number. He gave me his address …” She checks her phone. “Oekel.”

  Oekel. Oekel. We disembark from The Moveable Feast at its next stop, and snowmobile it back to Amsterdam Centraal, which is in the same massive building as the Museum of Terror.

  Oekel. It’s on the Belgian border. The local’s leaving in ten minutes. We cram ourselves aboard.

  As the train whirs smoothly across the snowy wastes of the southern Netherlands, I start to fall asleep. It’s not that I’m not excited about possibly finding an egg, but I’ve been through a lot today, and I already have an egg. Had one. I have Tancred. Had Tancred. Is he getting along OK without me? I’m so worried about him. In the steamy, drowsy warmth of the carriage, a tear squeezes out of my left eye and tickles down my cheek.

  Milosz shakes my elbow. “C’mon Scatter, we’re getting off.”

  We tumble out onto an exposed platform. The frigid wind wakes me up. There is snow on the platform. The train leaves. No one else got off. The cavalrymen must have taken an earlier train, or else they’re still in Amsterdam.

  Dawn pinkens the sky. The air is as fresh as Perrier. In every direction but one, we can see nothing but snow, broken by sparse lines of trees. The other direction is behind the station, where there are some houses with steep-pitched, snow-covered roofs that come right down to the ground.

  This is not a walking town. It is not a town at all. It is a non-walking, regular old village.

  We meander down the one and only street. One of the houses is a café, open early. In the garage next door, half a dozen robotic horses stand plugged into chargers.

  Huifang gasps, “Look at the horses! Those are just like the ones we rode in Brussels.”

  “Uh huh,” Patrick says. “’Cept these are cavalry horses. Look at their markings.”

  As for me, I’m drooling. When I was a kid I wanted to build mechas when I grew up, and horses were my first love. I’ve rarely seen them in the flesh, as it were. The mighty titanium-alloy steeds, with their curved necks and graceful legs and undoubtedly amazing locomotion algos, fill me with inspiration. Then I look down at Aardie, and feel disloyal to her. Anyway, Patrick’s right. These horses have serial numbers stenciled on their chests, military style.

  Patrick strides into the café. We follow. It’s warm and smells deliciously of chocolate. “Are the horses for rent?” he asks, despite having seen the serial numbers.

  “Goedemorgen. Yes, we have for rent. You want?”

  Patrick hesitates. Then he beckons us into a huddle. “Huifang, Milosz. You guys head back to Brussels. You’ve already missed too many days of work. Scatter and I haven’t missed any yet.” He states this not as an accusation, but as a simple fact. “We’ll just hang out for a while. If anything happens we’ll call you.”

  Huifang rolls her shoulders as if they ache. They probably do. She works in the sweet potato fields. You have to crawl. “I hate picking,” she says. “It’s for normies.”

  “All the same,” Milosz says, “I like the nineteenth century better than Amsterdam. The work is hard, but it is real.”

  Huifang nods. I would say Francie was right. Her plan to run away to Italy is not going to get much traction with these two.

  “So go on,” Patrick says. “If you leave now, you’ll be in time for work.”

  Still they hesitate. We all buy pastries. Not exactly pastries: more like slices of thick toast covered with butter and chocolate sprinkles.

  “Actually,” Huifang remembers, “we have a rehearsal for the Christmas pageant today.”

  “That’s right,” Patrick says. “You wouldn’t want to miss that. Quick march. We’ll call you.”

  “OK,” Milosz and Huifang say dubiously. Munching, they return to the station to await the next train.

  “What are these called?” Patrick asks the lady behind the counter. “They’re tres bon.”

  Wrong language, but she doesn’t correct him. “Muizenstrontjes. In English, this is mice shit.”

  “Mice shit?!? OK. I’ll have another.”

  With our mice shit toast and tulip mugs of coffee, Patrick and I sit by the window. We watch nothing happening in the street.

  “They’ve got to be back by six thirty-ish,” Patrick says. “If sick call is really
at seven.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mice shit, huh?”

  “My mom used to make these fried dough things called elephant ears,” I say with my mouth full.

  “No shit? My mom made those, too.”

  I think about how many of the ingredients for this slab of bliss were grown in farms like Brussels Sprouts, and I don’t feel so bad about the hours I have put in on my knees. Milosz was right. Picking is real. As real as chocolate-sprinkled toast crunching between your teeth.

  I lick my fingers and bend over to undo my boots. The foilpacks of soup aren’t warm anymore, so I take them out and lay them neatly on the side of the table. When I straighten up, Patrick’s watching me with amusement. “Hey, Scatter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry I yelled at you back there. There was no way you could have known.”

  “About the cavalrymen?”

  “Yeah.”

  I notice he hasn’t admitted I was right. He’s just forgiving me for my ‘misunderstanding.’ All the same, I shrug. “It’s forgotten.”

  After that, we talk trash about Maxime and argue about whether picking zucchini is worse than planting or vice versa, and 0600 becomes 0700, and I still haven’t told him that Francie is planning to run away to Italy, and there’s still no sign of Cyborg Eye and friends …

  Wait.

  The street outside has become busier, if six people counts as busy. I am standing at the counter, about to buy another slab of muizenstrontjes from the nice lady, when I recognize Cyborg Eye’s face in the depths of a pink fleece cagoule.

  I slam my phone on the payment terminal, grab my muizenstrontjes and dash back to Patrick. “There they are.”

  “Yup,” says Patrick, not moving. Watching.

  “Aren’t we going to follow them?”

  “Wait.”

  The cavalrymen come towards the café. For a heartstopping moment I think they’re coming in. But they’re just collecting their horses from the garage. They ride away in single file, slumping in their saddles and looking green. If they weren’t sick before, they are now. Ha, ha!

  Patrick goes up to the counter. “If you don’t mind, ma’am, we would like to rent those horses after all …”

  *

  The rental horses are not titanium-alloy stallions with hooves of steel. Mine is gray. Patrick’s is dappled. Their metal bones jut through worn hi-impact polymer skin, and they have baggage platforms on their withers. Still, they go. Ten minutes later we are trotting along a road that would be impassable were the snow not packed solid by the treads of tanks.

  Or maybe farm machinery.

  The countryside isn’t as empty as it looked at first glance. Lots of the humps in the snow are actually houses or barns. When we pass them, the smell says dairy farms, and once we get mixed up with a herd of cows—shaggy, rhino-sized, gene-modded with the same cold-tolerance techology that the wolves stole for their own use. The cows are being driven out to the fields by a woman on a horse identical to Patrick’s. She touches her woolly hat in greeting.

  So we aren’t too egregiously out of place, except for the fact that we cannot ride. My childhood dreams of galloping over snowy plains have suffered a literally bruising collision with reality. My horse kept telling me off until I muted it—the sound of its kind Dutch voice was too embarrassing. I have Aardie on the howdah-like baggage platform behind me. Patrick, ahead, thumps up and down in the saddle.

  Far ahead, the cavalrymen disappear into some trees.

  “Oh, not another park,” I moan.

  “Nope,” Patrick says excitedly. He’s got his phone out and is looking at the map. “This is a forest.”

  The road goes into it.

  So do we.

  It’s a mystery to me how all these spruce and fir trees ended up here, where there were birches and elms before. These trees belong in Siberia, whose climate closely resembles that of the Netherlands now. I’m sure no one went around planting them. Did their seeds float down south on the wind as the atmosphere cooled, and settle into the cold ground as naturally as a circuit closing? Must’ve, the same way as the penguins came north and coral reefs formed in the Mediterranean. Earth is really an amazing planet. Any other planet, I’m sure, would have lain down and quit after being towed 600 million kilometers and plugged into orbit around a new sun. But not ours. Earth just kept on spinning, and held on for dear life to all the creatures that it could.

  I’ll be damned if we let the Offense have it.

  I am still thinking these thoughts when my horse stops—

  —because Patrick’s horse has stopped—

  —because we have reached a roadblock.

  Two snowproof Hummers sit slantwise on the road, and a cavalryman, this one unmistakable in the bumfreezer jacket and bearskin cap of the Mechanized Horse regiments, is saying to Patrick, “Doorlopen, het is hier off limits.”

  “What?”

  The cavalryman registers that Patrick is speaking English, but repeats anyway, “Doorlopen, het is hier off limits.”

  “Can’t understand you,” Patrick growls.

  “Sir, here is off limits. You must detour.”

  “Fine.” Patrick turns his horse around. “Hope they freeze their nuts off,” he mutters. I follow him back the way we came. Out of sight of the roadblock, he guides his horse into the trees.

  I hunch over in my saddle. Branches brush my hood and spill snow over me and Aardie. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re detouring.” Patrick flashes a grin. “Around that roadblock.”

  “But he said it was off limits …” to civilians, I finish silently. In Patrick’s mind, we are not civilians.

  “That’s the point. There’s something weird going on here.” We are now far enough into the forest to be hidden from the road. Patrick gets out his phone. “Paul,” he says to it. Ring, ring. “Hey, yeah. Are Huifang and Milosz back yet? No, well, OK. We’re on the trail of an egg.” I hear an exclamation from Paul. “Yup. All we have to do now is make sure the 44th Mechanized Horse don’t find it first.”

  *

  I know this was my idea in the first place. But having seen the lay of the land, my opinion is that there is no egg. “If someone had found one in this forest,” I say, cold and grumpy, “the authorities would have just taken it away. They wouldn’t have called in the cavalry to set up a cordon around the whole area.” And maybe there was never an egg in the first place. Those traces of ringwoodite might have come from … from … well, I can’t think of any plausible origin for a mineral that is expensive to synthesize, has no practical applications that diamond can’t do better, and only forms 500 km deep in planetary mantles. However, I can think of another explanation for the scan result: Aardie was wrong. It was me who programmed her, after all.

  But I can’t quite bring myself to dump on Aardie out loud, and the possibility of a false reading doesn’t occur to Patrick. He has a non-techie’s faith in my skills. In support of the egg theory, he shows me the Eggfall map again—sure enough, Oekel is also shaded deep red, meaning that the model predicts with high confidence that an egg or eggs fell in this area—and I can’t bear to point out that it is just a model, created by ARES programmers working with limited historical data.

  Leaving the horses switched off, we yomp through the trees, parallel to the road. Birds twitter and bounce over our heads, flashes of color in the two-tone maze of white snow and evergreen boughs. I get hot from walking and unzip my parka. My fingers automatically slip into the inner pocket to make sure Tancred’s blankie is still there. I’m paranoid about it now.

  Patrick, hunched, intent, places his feet as carefully as a cat. But even he is not as quiet as Aardie, whose clawed feet slide into snowy crevices as neatly as she once navigated the surfaces of asteroids.

  Suddenly, Patrick halts. “Did you hear that?”

  Engines grind and whine, not very far ahead.

  We proceed even more cautiously than before, and now we notice that the trees are leaning towards
us, like spectators at a concert craning back to see the big screen. I whisper, “Drunken trees.”

  “What?”

  “When the permafrost melts, they end up toppling over. Their roots aren’t deep enough.”

  “It melted in the middle of winter?”

  “Um …”

  As I’m searching for an explanation, we come to a fence. It winds between the leaning trees, seven-foot chicken wire looped around steel posts two meters apart.

  Patrick kicks a post. It doesn’t budge.

  “So, the ground melted,” he says sarcastically. “That’s why they had to drill holes for these.”

  “Whatever’s in there, they really don’t want us to see it,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Patrick comes up close to me. He’s got a strange expression on his face, thoughtful and excited at once. In a low voice, he says, “Remember the attacks on the ARES dome?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did the Offense know we were there?”

  “Elsa said—”

  “Let’s just consider an alternative explanation, Scatter. I like Elsa, too. Hell, I trust her. And there’s damn few officers I would say that about.”

  Technically, my aunt is a major, so she counts as a military officer.

  “However, you have to figure she’s not telling us everything. That’s just how it is. And I think there’s something hinky going on.”

  I’m cold. I haven’t slept for 24 hours. I want to go home. And now I remember Francie’s paranoid-seeming theory. “What if they’re trying to get rid of us?”

  Patrick’s expression turns even more contemplative. “When we were stationed on Leda,” he says, “whenever shit went wrong, people used to blame it on traitors. Spies for the Offense.”

  “Those rumors are pretty old.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”

  “What could spies have to do with this?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe nothing. But I want to find out what this is, because where weird shit is going on, it tends to be connected.” He pauses. “You can go back if you like.”

  So of course I follow him.

  We walk along the fence, among the leaning trees. Aardie ascertains for us that there are no motion sensors. They clearly only put this thing up a few days ago. You can tell by the raw look of the undergrowth they chopped back to make room for it.