by Ken Liu
That he hadn’t stopped thinking about her.
Ruan focused on routine checks. Gun, ammunition, safety, scope, batteries. His helmet, his breathing kit. He had already made sure all his gear was working and properly calibrated, but there was solace in repetition. He liked the predictability of the outcome.
He walked with a calm, sure step. Technicians and mechanics hardly paid him any attention. Ruan watched them carefully, though. Most of all, he watched their faces, their noses and mouths, covered with breathing masks like his own. Despite the purity of gases he was inhaling, Ruan felt a shortness of breath in his throat. Maybe he was just excited.
Inside the controlled space of the hangar, Ruan took his breathing kit off. He stepped toward the helicopter. He handed the orders pad to the flight officer. The man pursed his lips, golden moustache dancing. “Hey, long time no see. How do you feel, Ruan?”
“Eager,” Ruan replied.
The flight officer frowned. “Just you? Won’t it be risky?”
Ruan smiled. “That is why I will have you to extract me, if needed.”
“So what are you going to do exactly?”
“It is a covert operation. Infiltration and reconnaissance.”
The flight officer shrugged. “Let’s take you in.”
“How do you feel, Ruan?”
“Better.”
“Do you still have those skepticisms?”
“No, I am rehabilitated. The three months spent in the mind purification center have helped me understand the error of my ways. I believe it was the shock of my first military engagement. I feel strong and focused again, and I am eager to resume my service and protect our world.”
“Wonderful. Well, your sheet does show some significant improvement. We can reduce your dosage, and I shall write to your commanding officer to reinstate you to full combat duty.”
“Thank you, I appreciate it, doctor.”
“You are welcome. That is why we are here, to help.”
It was early summer. The snow had melted, withdrawn, leaving behind a carpet of bright green and violet and ocher, colors that never seemed so vibrant inside the sealed zones back home. So, yes, maybe the plants were exposed to extra radiation and heavy metals, but he liked them better this way.
“No enemy in sight,” the intercom buzzed.”Let’s find a soft spot to land.”
There were no incidents this time.
“Good luck.”
Ruan stepped out of the cabin. With the sound of rotor blades fading into the distance, he walked into the nearest woods. Shafts of golden sun dappled the crystal shade, stabbing through the branches and needles. A picture of bliss and beauty.
Carefully, Ruan removed his rifle and put it on the ground. He turned off the comms, turned off the positioning system, and disconnected the air unit. He removed his helmet.
He inhaled the smells of Chaos. Not so bad.
Not bad at all.
Years and years of selective training and indoctrination, undone in just one moment. Well, not quite true. It had taken the specialists, analysts and the rest of the uncaring, single-minded staff some four months to methodically, calmly, scientifically destroy his conviction. Or so they believed.
What offended him the most was that it wasn’t personal. He had never seen the same doctor twice.
Ruan did not feel angry. Or bitter. He did not feel violated for having been administered all those medications, forced to undergo all those workshops and questioning. He felt... relieved. After so many years of worrying, the illusion was gone, and the giant wall of fear that had besieged his heart had been shattered. It didn’t make him happy, he didn’t suddenly hate anyone. He just wanted to get away, to forget.
And yes, there was the other thing.
Arms spread wide, he walked through the woods, waiting, knowing they would show up eventually. They did. Men and women in camouflage, looking like nature itself, hair sprouting branches and leaves. Mia was among them, her beautiful features striped with brown paint. She was smiling, and he couldn’t help but smile back.
“You again, pretty face?”
She did remember him. “Yes, me.”
“What are you doing here? No support, unarmed. Do you have a death wish, Ruan?”
His name, too! “On the contrary.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to tell you something.”He tried to ignore the grim faces of the men around her. For him, only Mia mattered now. “That I liked that kiss.”
She chortled. “Of course you did.”
Ruan approached, and no one challenged him. “I was wondering...”
“Yes?”
“Can I have another one?”
Paolo, Friend Paolo
Kurt Hunt
Born in the Great Lakes region before drifting southward to become a lawyer, marry, and raise two home-schooled sons, Kurt Hunt has little time for hobbies after writing. On good days he dreams of cross-country family road trips. On bad days, of moving them all to a cabin in the woods and never seeing anyone else again. His fiction recently appeared in Fantasy Scroll magazine and is forthcoming in Strange Horizons and Kaleidotrope.
This collection began with a story of first contact, and now we come full circle to end with another. This time the ecotone is the line between the deathly cold of space and a planet's protective atmosphere—and crossing it proves disastrous...
The stars were wrong.
The Navigator emerged into the grip of an unexpected gravity well. Everything behind the first narrowed pinch of her wasp-like body was numb and unresponsive.
She was their link to new worlds, bred and engineered to carry the Seed—but this was not her destination, not the dull brown ashen planet targeted for reformation. Instead, her guidance whips trailed limp into an exosphere overwhelming with vivid compounds and colors. Even from this distance, the continents spreading like stains beneath her black armor, it smelled of water and oxygen. A rich home, however unplanned.
The Navigator tried to orient herself, but her neural pathways had burned in transit. She tried to swing into orbit, the same instinctive and graceful swoop she had performed thousands of times, but her thin, ebon limbs hung paralyzed beneath her as she lurched closer to the stink of ozone.
The Sisterhood had prepared her for this. We often break, they sang, and instilled in her a love of the hard victory. But the reality of glorious exile exhumed thoughts of a familiar sun. She stretched toward empty space as if mere proximity could return to her the sounds and smells of land, the faces lost to her, the feel of wind on unarmored skin.
But home was far. Duty remained. Falling toward the planet, she sang the paean—We Bring Life, Even In Death—and exulted. Only the best of them were sent into the dark. And she was not yet broken.
She prepared the Seed to complete its task without her.
The ocean spit salt against the boat, fanning huge arcs over the heads of its two passengers. The first man—whom everyone thought of as “Friend” Paolo, if they thought of him at all—squinted and turned away from the primal churn of foam and spray. His suit was soaked through, warping until the pinstripes resembled ocean swells.
He wrung the water from his tie and held it in front of him like a clump of hair pulled from a drain. “I either need Kiton to make me a wetsuit,” he said, “or I need a heads up on these inspections, so I can stop playing Jacques Cousteau in hand-stitched wool.”
The other man—simply called Paolo—only stared ahead, the dusking sun reflected white on his narrow spectacles. He leaned forward, rigid as an owl preparing to drop onto its prey.
“Look at it,” said Paolo.
A few kilometers ahead, a sliver of gray cut through the mist just above the horizon. The beginnings of a floating city, brick and steel perched like mountains atop an abandoned oil platform—the core of an alternative energy research facility—planted against the winds and whitecaps of the Pacific.
As usual, the scale of Paolo’s plan was unprecedented.
The press called the project “audacious” and, in light of Paolo’s (and Friend Paolo’s) track record, declared the promised results an imminent disruption of the energy sector. Friend Paolo smiled and agreed—“Paolo is a visionary; I’m proud to work for him”—but silently he gnawed on logistics.
Details were his domain. Paolo envisaged the untapped potential of an off-shore location for solar, wind, and kinetic tidal energy, but it was Friend Paolo who found a viable site and navigated international bureaucracies. Paolo identified his “dream team” of researchers and engineers; Friend Paolo recruited them, got contracts signed, kept them invested in the project. Where Paolo saw concept, Friend Paolo saw construction. Complication.
It had taken two months to reinforce and stabilize the platform, another six weeks to install the panels that concealed its exposed steel skeleton. Two weeks ago, the north pylon cracked; three days later, the south. At every step: delay, disaster, death. Yesterday, two welders fell from their perch after a rogue wave reached up from the froth and swatted them like insects. They were fished out, swollen and gray, but had lost all their equipment. And today, the waves had grown sharp like teeth.
“It’s beautiful,” said Friend Paolo.
“It’s shit!” Paolo’s hands were clutched together in front of him and turning white. In this wide expanse, his voice sounded thinner than normal. “Look at the scarring! I’m trying to birth a child and you give me a crew of ax-fisted monsters to play midwife.”
Through the hammering saltspray, Friend Paolo saw a cluster of seams curving across the custom-tempered, maraging steel. It was Frankensteinian; not at all the smooth, easy aesthetic that Paolo required.
Material costs and repair times wheeled through Friend Paolo’s head, an impossible arithmetic. And he remembered, not for the first time, what the general contractor had told them, just before Paolo fired him: “It can’t be done; the ocean will eat it.”
He wilted against the side of the boat, but said only, “We can fix this. It’ll destroy the budget, but we can fix it.”
Paolo snorted. “The money’s not the problem.”
And Friend Paolo knew that was true. Everyone knew that was true.
Paolo’s great-grandfather had made a fortune building telegraph cables like spiderwebs between the coastal cities. Paolo’s grandfather, impatient and impulsive and consequently cut out of the family business, had made more fortunes tapping his father’s lines and blackmailing almost every moneyed family in Baja and Southern California. Paolo’s father did nothing of note, but he spent little and risked less, and as a result he did not lose those great fortunes before he died of a heart attack, alone in his walk-in closet. Now, with the help of the friend he had overshadowed since childhood, Paolo was determined to use that money to make the world remember him.
They arrived at the docking floats, which constantly adjusted to the surface swell. High above them, subcontractors clung to the sides of the oil platform like moss, welding, hammering, cutting.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Friend Paolo.
“Of course you will.” Paolo stared at him, his glasses mirrors. “Clean slate.”
Wind sucked the air from Friend Paolo’s lungs. A clean slate meant a new team, from the GC down. His mental timetables crumbled. Money might not be a problem, but time... Paolo was always very strict about time. “Let me talk to them. Maybe—”
“I get it. This is the good cop, bad cop routine? I keep you around because you’re ballast?” Paolo stepped onto the dock, his back to the boat, and shook his head. “That’s not it at all. You’re the mortar. I’m the pestle.”
Friend Paolo bit his upper lip, looked down, and waited.
The steady thump of the boat against the dock counted out the seconds as Paolo walked to the access ladder. “Gather everyone,” he said, not bothering to look back. “Fire everyone. Erase everyone. Build the fucking thing already.” He climbed, and as he climbed he grew smaller, blurrier, and finally disappeared over the top.
Friend Paolo sat and listened to the foreign sounds of the sea, lost in numbers and dates, internalizing his friend’s directions, and working as always to discern how to bend the world to their needs.
Between the white noise pulse of waves, men’s voices drifted up like kites.
The strange planet grew larger.
The Navigator tried to cry out, to sing, but she could no longer feel others like herself. Instead of the constant neutrino-chatter of her sisters calling out their discoveries from distant stars, silence. Instead of the calm of a dead system waiting for the life she carried, the howl and shriek of radio waves.
Instead of the freeze of space, the burn of re-entry.
One moment, the platform swarmed with workers. Then, against the sunset, a coiling blackness fell and the world erupted. Paolo and Friend Paolo crouched like animals before it.
The detonation seemed to hang forever, a fortress of water and shadow so tall it consumed the sky, its movement betrayed only by the spit and froth playing along the top. But deep within, Friend Paolo saw—whether imagination or lightplay—a dark monstrosity, like an enormous insect, and ebon whips lashing against the sides of the wave, again and again and again—until it broke and fell like Jericho.
Friend Paolo returned to the world embryonic—curled and weightless. He tried to breathe but instead sucked saltwater, felt it burn down his throat and into his lungs. He flailed and kicked and clawed until, somehow, he broke out and rediscovered air. And blackness.
Night had fallen. Pale light decanted from the moon and stars—so many stars!—to illuminate the sea, his hands—everything—a strange, unvarying silver.
But the boat was gone. Paolo was gone. And before him, the harsh geometry of the platform, the only possible sanctuary, had been defeated. Two pylons had buckled. The outer walls had crumpled, revealing fractured support beams through jagged gaps, like mouths full of broken teeth. The platform itself, built to withstand even the most violent of anticipated natural disasters, had fallen. One side listed down and into the water, and the surface of it—where people had labored, where a city was to be built—was dull and gray and scraped clean.
He was halfway to that poor chance of refuge, wincing with each stroke, when he realized: even the oceanic swell was gone. Only his feeble paddling distorted the surface and its reflection of the ruin.
It was only after he reached the platform and pulled himself from the water that he saw any sign of life, any hint that the world survived. There: a small dark smudge against the gray field of metal emerging from the ocean.
“Paolo!”
The shape didn’t move.
Muscles rubbery from the swim and his ribs still aching from the impact, Friend Paolo called out again, his voice rising in panic. But even as Friend Paolo staggered closer, Paolo sat motionless, halfway up the platform’s incline, transfixed before a smooth, black object. It was small, roughly the size of a bowling ball, but flatter. A rock, maybe, or a shell, unusual only because of its presence on the scoured platform.
Paolo held his hands over the thing, not quite touching it. Friend Paolo rested a shaking hand on his shoulder.
“Did you see it fall?” Paolo’s voice was quiet, strained.
Friend Paolo frowned. Did he see this shell-thing, hidden between the shadows in the water, the curving arcs of the whips? He stared at the sky, the horizon. “I saw something,” he said. “But not this.”
The world around them had stopped. There were no birds. No sounds. No breeze in the air, no ripples in the water. The ocean went on further than he could see, as smooth and hard and flat as the steel of the platform. In the moonlight, Paolo leaned forward and brushed his fingertips against the object, so slowly, so gently…
And the world awoke.
Water churned a heartbeat rhythm against the welding scars of the platform. A bird wheeled its silhouette against the moon. Somewhere very distant, or very deep, Friend Paolo heard something keen, long and low. Above them, clouds labored again
through the sky.
The small, smooth object had unfolded. He hadn’t seen it happen. It still lay on the platform, but geometric panels now emanated from it—not physical, solid things but half-seen tricks of the light.
“What the hell is it?” Friend Paolo hadn’t intended to speak aloud. It seemed almost blasphemous in the presence of this new thing, spreading its illusions like wings.
“These...” Paolo’s glasses shone and he shook his head. He reached out again and stroked his hand against one of the panels. It glowed a deep green, then filled with strange, tesseracting symbols.
The air around them became warm. Friend Paolo could no longer feel the wind, although he could hear it roaring past them.
“These are control panels,” said Paolo, kneeling reverently before the object. “This is an interface.”
Paolo traced a finger through the air, and lines of translucent triangles pursued it. The symbols hung momentarily, fading from green to dark blue as a thin rope of seawater coursed across the platform and into the shell. A small sphere of iron formed in the air—first as a tiny core, then layer upon layer coalesced, spreading over the core like ice on a window.
A few heartbeats after the stream of water stopped, the ball fell, startling them with the loud crack of metal on metal as it struck the platform and rolled to the water, where it vanished, reclaimed.
Friend Paolo backed away. “We need to call somebody,” he whispered.
But Paolo only emitted a crazed, high-pitched laugh and returned his hands to the controls.
Friend Paolo closed his eyes. This wasn’t his decision, he knew. It wasn’t his role. But he saw black whips pressed against the bottom of the platform, strong and vengeful, preparing to wrap around it, to crush it.
“We can’t touch that thing.” His voice sounded hesitant, even to him. “People are missing. And I saw—”