Protectors of Earth

by Felix R. Savage

  I notice that the angle of the leaning trees changes as we go. That is, they’re always leaning at right angles to the fence.

  And after half an hour of walking, we come to a place where the fence has a big old hole at the bottom. A tunnel has been dug underneath it and disguised with brush. We only find it because Patrick steps in it.

  Tufts of brown hair are caught in the wire where it passes over the tunnel.

  “Wolves,” Patrick murmurs.

  Nervously, I say, “You think they’re still around?”

  Patrick grins. “I think they just did us a favor.”

  He drops to the ground and wriggles through the tunnel.

  “Stay,” I mutter to Aardie, and follow him.

  Inside the fence, we only have to crawl a short distance before we come to the end of the trees.

  Well, not quite.

  The trees in front of us are lying down. Flattened. Their branches shivered to pieces. New snow has coated them since they fell, so the broken boughs sticking up look like a field of brambles.

  A circular field, almost a kilometer across, ringed by leaning trees.

  And in the middle of this field sits an enormous beached whale the size of a three-storey building, with its tail buried in the ground, which has risen in ripples, but the ripples are snow-covered berms of discarded soil, dumped there by the army-gray earth-movers which are digging the object out. The engines growl as their blades bite into the hard earth.

  The sun is now all the way up. It reflects off the upper surfaces of the alien object. Distended curves are heat-blistered, their thermal skin flaking off. But we can still see that the object used to be pearly white. The reflections hang above it in little prismatic rainbows, a strikingly weird effect.

  “That can’t be …” Patrick breathes.

  But it is.

  It is an Offense spaceship.

  8

  The Offense ship looming in the sunlight is a Pulverizer class fast cruiser. The same type of ship as the one that nearly killed us near the asteroid Beachy Head. The one Tancred ate.

  The 44th Mechanized Horse are encamped at the edge of the field—that is, the impact zone—at four o’clock to us, in a mess of tents and horseboxes and catering wagons. They are wandering around in the morning sun, brushing their teeth and sipping coffee. I can see the steam rising from their cups. More people stand around the Pulverizer, directing the earth-movers. They seem to be taking it very slowly and carefully, but not because they fear the Pulverizer. It has been trashed by its fall through Earth’s atmosphere, and is obviously not capable of pulverizing anything anymore.

  And yet the very sight of the thing liquefies my guts. Mentally, I’m back in deep space, floating helplessly as that thing frowns over us like a fat man selecting from a tray of canapés. Tancred will save us. No, he won’t, because I left Tancred on Ceres. My heart races and my palms sweat inside my gloves, and it’s a good thing we are already kneeling on the ground because otherwise I would have had to sit down.

  Patrick makes just the tiniest sound, not a normal sound, a soft low moan.

  Then he gets hold of himself. Pulls me down lower behind a fan of branches that should be horizontal and are now vertical. “The big thump,” he says.

  “What?”

  “The guys in the club. They mentioned a big thump. Said that’s why they’re here.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Clearly, the big thump was caused by an Offense ship crash-landing in Belgium.”

  “We’re still in the Netherlands.”

  “Fine, the Netherlands.” He’s tense as a loaded gun, peering between the branches. “This never happens!”

  “That’s what we thought about Offense attacks on Ceres, too,” I mumble. I want to get away from here and go back to Brussels and hide in the cruciferous vegetable fields. I suddenly remember those traces of ringwoodite. “Maybe … the Offense was looking for the same egg we’re after?”

  Patrick gives me a pitying glance. “So they crashed their ship and killed themselves?”

  He’s right, of course. Offense ships are not built to land anywhere with significant gravity and / or an atmosphere. They usually sally forth from their horrible arkships, whack a few of our assets, and then go straight back home. They have attacked Earth and the Moon in the past, but now we have orbital defense platforms out the wazoo, known as the Constellations, so they don’t do that anymore. “Maybe the Constellations shot it down,” I say.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s a possibility. But why would it have been in range of the Constellations in the first place?”

  I suddenly remember something else. “Could it be the same one that attacked the Bohemond? We were pretty close to Earth when that happened.”

  “A survey ship kiling a Pulverizer? Does not happen, Scatter.”

  “Well, something stopped it from killing us. Maybe one of our patrol ships got it.”

  “I guess. But then how did it end up crashing into Earth?”

  I have no idea. We crouch in the snow, breathing into our collars so that our breath doesn’t rise in clouds that will be visible from the cavalry camp. Patrick takes out his phone and taps around. I try to decide how I will persuade him to leave. We definitely, definitely shouldn’t be here. The 44th’s security is not great, but their intention of excluding all but need-to-know personnel from the impact zone is clear.

  Patrick shows me his phone. The screen is mostly white. “I always knew they could fuck with the sat maps if they wanted to,” he says, and I realize what I’m looking at: a high-res satellite image of this very forest, Voorst Bos as it is apparently called, with no Offense ship in it. The army has looped the imaging data for this tiny corner of the Netherlands to erase the ship’s existence from the public record. Staring at the screen, I feel a stupid wash of relief—I was just imagining it! Then I look up. The ship’s still there.

  “They’re digging it out,” says Patrick. “They’re probably going to take it apart right here, then truck the pieces away.”

  They went to the extraordinary lengths of twisting UNGov’s arm to alter the satellite data. They really don’t want people to know about this. And no wonder. All our fragile confidence rests on the assumption that the Offense cannot reach the surface of Earth. That belief is the only thing keeping our dairy farms and our cafés and our walking towns and our minds intact. If it were known that a Pulverizer—even a crashed wreck—were sitting in the Netherlands … people would just lose it.

  “I’m not sure we’ve ever captured an Offense ship,” Patrick whispers. “Even if it is totaled, I bet they can’t wait to take it apart and analyze it.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. We shouldn’t be here.”

  “Heck with that, Scatter.”

  “We could wind up in jail.” I would be letting Elsa down in the worst way. I’d never see Tancred again! I begin to edge backwards, desperate to get out of here before we’re seen.

  Patrick’s hand clamps on my arm. “Don’t move, they might see us.”

  “If we don’t move they will see us.”

  “No, they won’t. They aren’t even looking this way.” Patrick’s gaze is fixed on the ship. “We can’t leave without at least searching for that egg,” he murmurs.

  He sounds reasonable. Virtuous, even. Like we’re just doing our job. But I know that he has been doing our job pretty much by himself ever since we got here, making up for our apathy and laziness. And now even he has ceased to care about Void Dragon eggs. It’s the Offense ship he’s thinking about. He wants to … to what? To know what’s being hidden from us, and why.

  Oh, screw it all.

  My one consolation is that at least Francie isn’t here.

  *

  “Call Francie,” Patrick says. We have returned to where our horses are waiting in the forest. “Tell her we need back-up.”

  “You call her.”

  “Scatter, you may not have noticed, but she’s not speaking to me.”

  I swallow. “
So let’s call Paul.”

  “I just did. He’s not picking up.”

  I fiddle with my phone, reluctant.

  “What’s the problem? Call her. She likes you.”

  That is news to me. All the same, it stupidly cheers me up. I dial.

  “Yo,” Francie says.

  “Francie, um, did you talk to Paul?”

  “No. Should I have? He’s rehearsing.”

  “All right. Listen, we may have found an egg.” I fill her in, conscious of the increasingly electric silence on her end. “So we need you to come out. Bring food, energy drinks, water, um, what else …” I lost my flashlight during the wolf attack. “If you could go in my cell and get my miniature flashlight—”

  Francie cuts me off. “Did you tell him what I said?”

  My silence is a no.

  “I knew you wouldn’t. You have a chronic case of ballless-ness. Well, fuck it. Tell him I am not coming to the Netherlands. I’m going to the States.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “You heard me. I have a ticket for the subsonic red-eye tonight.”

  “I—I thought you were going to Italy.”

  Patrick, on his knees in the snow, looks up.

  “Changed my mind,” Francie says.

  “Aren’t you scared they’ll—get you?”

  “They’ll get me anywhere, if they want to. But I’d still rather be home when they get me than crawling around in some freezing Dutch forest, searching for something that is evil. Yeah, Scatter. That’s the thing about Void Dragons, remember? They eat stars. So if there is one out there, my advice is dig a hole and bury it deeper.” Pause. “Tell Patrick … oh, never mind. I already tried.”

  She hangs up.

  Patrick’s face is strangely blank. He rubs his gloves together distractedly.

  “She’s leaving,” I say.

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “She thinks we’re being set up.”

  “Yeah, she always thinks that.”

  “Are you going to …”

  I trail off. This conversation is clearly over. And Francie is going to the United States. I’ll never see her again.

  Patrick has gotten our horses to lie down. Real horses don’t do that, but these are mechas. He has laid both saddles across their backs, like a roof, and heaped dead branches on top of the whole arrangement. Now he piles snow over the branches, hiding the horses, so it just looks like a large bush with a hole at the bottom.

  “The wilderness survival course pays off again, huh?” I say.

  He grins. “You know it.”

  Then we must crawl inside the hide and wait until the darkness returns.

  It is just as well we won’t be getting any backup. There’s barely room in here for the two of us plus Aardie. In the semi-dark, I sit with my back against one horse and Patrick sits with his back against the other. Our heads brush against the undersides of the saddles. Our knees are bent. We’re like sardines in a can. The chill of the ground seeps through my snowpants. There’s a stone digging into my ass, and there isn’t room for me to move so it doesn’t stick into me.

  Despite all this, I immediately fall asleep.

  Patrick wakes me at noon. It’s amazing what a little sleep can do. I feel much better, even optimistic. We share the last foilpack of soup and my second slice of muizenstrontjes—I’m glad I bought another one.

  “When I was little,” I say, “I built a secret hideout in the back garden.” Well, I never finished building it, but it was going to be great. That’s when I found Tancred’s egg, but I don’t mention that. “This is kind of like that.”

  Patrick laughs. “We had a secret hideout, too! Me and my brothers, we built a genuine treehouse. Took shit from the house, like nails, an old carpet, candles. My dad whipped us good when he found out.”

  I can’t imagine having a dad, much less a dad who whipped me. But Patrick doesn’t sound resentful. It’s more like: yeah, those were the good old days.

  “I didn’t know you had brothers and sisters,” I say.

  “Just brothers. Both younger.”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “Jacob was killed in action last year, on Callisto.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, horrified.

  Patrick shrugs. “Barney’s getting his degree in biotech. He’s gonna be the one who supports Mom and Dad in their old age.”

  “Where do they live? Your parents.”

  “Vermont. That’s where I grew up. Wayyyy out in the woods. Dad hunted, Mom grew everything else we needed in the greenhouse. So picking zucchini is nothing to me,” he adds, fiercely. “See, Dad was in the army, and when he got out … he didn’t want to have anything more to do with the human race. So it was just us. I never even went to school until I was ten.”

  I have heard of people like this. Off-gridders. They reject civilization in favor of self-sufficiency. I never imagined Patrick came from that kind of background, but now his Boy Scout qualities make perfect sense. “How was your dad about you joining the army?” I say tentatively.

  “Me and Jacob. God alive, was he pissed. When he finds out I got shit-canned …” Patrick actually shudders.

  “I never knew my dad,” I say, rashly opening up.

  But Patrick is still absorbed in his own story. He leans forward, with a pained twist to his face. “Scatter, there was no wilderness survival course.”

  “Huh?”

  “I told you we went on a wilderness survival course, right? But we didn’t. Everything I know about surviving in the wilderness I learned from my dad.” He sighs. “I don’t know why I lied to you. You could’ve just asked one of the others and they would have said there was no such course.”

  But I didn’t doublecheck his story, of course, because it’s a totally unimportant factoid, and because I trusted Patrick to always tell the truth. And the funny thing is I trust him even more now. Sitting here in the dark with our butts freezing off and chocolate on our lips, just the two of us, feels almost … cozy. When I was little, I had to play in my lame, uncompleted secret hideout all by myself. Now I’m in a real secret hideout with a real friend. Patrick would go through hell for me, I’m sure, and I’d go through hell—correction, I already am going through hell—for him. Maybe it’s not entirely a bad thing that I went into the army, after all ...

  But all good things must come to an end, and just as I’m saying, “The School of Dad is probably better than any crap-ass army course,” Patrick suddenly shushes me.

  Outside, someone says, “What’s that over there?”

  Crunch of feet in snow.

  “Better check it out,” says another voice.

  Of course, of course the 44th are patrolling their exclusion zone. They may be cavalrymen but they’re not amateurs.

  “The snow’s all messed up,” says another voice.

  Yes, because we hid our footprints by scraping branches through the snow.

  “What’s that, some kind of animal’s burrow?”

  Patricks shoves my knees out of the way and crawls silently to the exit of the hide. He crouches between the horses’ immobile metal heads, reaching into the pocket of his parka. I freeze in terror.

  A shadow falls on the snow just outside the hide.

  Thump, thump! One person jumps down from a horse, and then another.

  “Hey, look, there’s something—”

  That is as far as the unseen cavalryman gets, because at that moment Patrick surges to his feet, bearing the roof of the hide up and away on his shoulders. It falls on me. I get a faceful of snow and dead branches. I hear a grunt and a choked-off scream. I desperately claw the branches off me. Standing up in the ruined hide, I see one cavalryman lying on the snow and Patrick wrestling with another one.

  I lunge towards them, and trip over Aardie.

  “Aardie!”

  Phone, phone, where’s my phone?

  Patrick kicks the guy in the knee, but the cavalryman is wearing some kind of armored kneepads under his tight red trous,
and he just grunts and shoves Patrick backwards while he’s off balance. I snap a picture of him. The sound distracts Patrick, and the cavalryman lands a punch on his jaw.

  Send to: Aardie.

  “Sic ‘em!” I hiss into my phone, and Aardie rises. Again, she performs her awesome leap, and this time, unlike with the wolf last night, she doesn’t miss. She head-butts the cavalryman right in the kisser.

  Beneath the bedraggled fur is a headpiece I put together myself from aluminum plates. It’s as hard as, well, metal. The cavalryman goes down like a falling tree.

  Patrick is on his hands and knees, bleeding from his mouth.

  His dagger sticks up from the other cavalryman’s chest.

  I thought we lost it in the park in Brussels. Patrick must’ve picked it up when I wasn’t looking.

  The two cavalrymen’s horses (those big beautiful silver ones) calmly start to walk away.

  “Whoa shit,” Patrick slurs, but I do not respond because I’m ripping my right glove off with my teeth so I can type commands into my phone. I took it apart the other day and installed some extra RF chips, including one for the most common military frequencies … Ha ha! No one’s ever bothered to change the hard-coded firmware settings. I’m in as default user. I command the horses to stop and turn around.

  Patrick stands up, shakily. “Way to go, Scatter!”

  “I wish I had a proper keyboard,” I mutter, stabbing with a claw-like finger at the screen. I load a rootkit into the horses’ memory. This will make them mine for good.

  They come back to us and say in deep voices, “Welcome! Please enter login information.”

  “Did you just hack them?”

  “Military comms are a total joke,” I say. “Hackers use them as chew toys.” And the problem’s getting worse, not better. Some people blame it on the Offense breaking our comms security faster than we can iterate it, so the whole system ends up being a mass of patches and vulnerabilities.

  Patrick pulls his knife out of the first cavalryman’s chest.

  It’s Cyborg Eye.