by Stephen Moss
Remy:
“They have? Where?” said Peter, seated in the Congressional Hall where the representatives had gathered in emergency session. He spoke in that offhand tone all present recognized, it was the way you just seemed to speak when talking to one of the ever-present, ever-watchful minds.
As Peter spoke, the gathered international leaders and diplomats heard something else in his voice as well, panic.
In response to the Russian’s question, an image appeared in their minds, an image of an awakening beast.
Remy:
The view zoomed in, a view relayed from Þalía’s squadron as they now struggled to reverse their headlong momentum toward the Yallan life raft and the looming threat now revealing itself behind it.
“What,” said General Abashell, “is their number? And how did they come to be here? So early!”
Remy:
Minnie:
There was no one who did not want to hear something … anything that would explain this sudden change, and so Minnie spoke to them.
Minnie:
“You knew about this!” shouted the Pakistani general.
Minnie:
“Worth mentioning! If there was even the slightest possibility that this could happen I would have thought that would have been worth bloody mentioning!” said the Pakistani.
Minnie:
There was a pause while they waited for some rationale, but none came. Eventually, Peter said quietly, but with a dose of his own, cooler brand of bile, “And why might it ‘not necessarily’ have been worth mentioning, Minnie?”
Minnie:
“And you don’t think we could have done anything more?” said the Japanese ambassador, stunned by the machine’s detachment.
Minnie:
The room looked to the ambassador, and then to themselves, as the brutal honesty of the AM’s statement hit home. No one present could have been called apathetic, but if any might feel they could have done more, could have sacrificed more, but had chosen not to, they did not mention it now, and nor would they in the future.
“So …” said Peter, trying to wrap his head around the situation, “you lied to us? Because …” the pause drew out, and when it became clear that the Russian was not going to finish his sentence, Minnie said:
Minnie:
Chances of victory. It was not much of a sugarcoating, but it was something, because what Minnie really meant was chances of survival.
Quiet sat like a pall on the room for a while, then, slowly, leadership instincts began to kick in. They could try to blame the AMs for not saying something sooner, but that would be just as futile as having known about this for a few more days or weeks would have been. They had done all they could, Minnie and Mynd had seen to that. They had built as many space-capable fighting craft as possible. They had constructed their defense platforms. They had trained their pilots.
Now it was time for them to help humanity brace for impact.
Now was the time let loose the dogs of war.
- - -
Banu walked along the broad beach. A group of boys walking from the main building at the beach’s end came into view. She went to call out to them, then thought better of it, forcing back a ridiculous blush where none should come. She didn’t even know these boys, they were from another group. She awkwardly tried to look out to sea, then, stumbling slightly in the hot sand, she looked down at her feet, then tried to stop looking down, as she seemed to always be doing, then didn’t know where the hell to look.
She glanced back at them. It was not that she was taller than most of them, or even that she now had some reason to wear the bikini top she found herself reaching back to adjust. It was that she just didn’t know what they thought of her anymore. What little experience she’d had in her strange, often isolated life had been first of a simple equality between boys and girls, then a baseless hostility, and now a strange merging of the two, where they were alternately rude and kind without reason or apology.
Minnie had been of little help on the matter, her father had been absolutely none, and she had not talked to Neal or Jennifer in years. But amongst the crowd of jocular youths, she now picked out one she did recognize and flashed him a smile of genuine affection.
His responding toothy grin was equally unabashed, and they naturally began gravitating toward each other, as the larger group left him, muttering, giggling, and gawking as they went.
But as she approached the boy she knew as Wednesday, she saw something new in his face. It was worry, and more than his usual proclivity toward pensiveness.
“Banu, how are you?” he said in his halting but proficient English.
“I am good, Suyoil, and you?” she replied, working hard to pronounce his Korean name correctly, even though he, like so many of the lost children of his nation, had barely been named at all, that cruel system labeling them as but days, months, or numbers, little more than an inconvenient truth.
But his suffering had not just been at the hands of the Great Leader. When her father had told her about the discovery of the orphan pilots, her kin in so many ways, she had demanded in ever more strident tones to be able to meet them, to help them in any way she could, as the Agent named Quavoce had helped and supported her over the years.
And so she now stood face to face with one of them, perhaps her favorite of them all, the thoughtful and quick-to-smile Wednesday God. She crooked her head with a motherly concern beyond her years and said, “Suyoil, are you okay? You seem … worried.”
“Hasn’t anyone told you, yet?”
Everyone seemed to assume that because she was daughter to the well-known Lord Mantil that she enjoyed some special privilege, some greater access, but the truth was that beyond the truly very special protection and love he afforded her, he took no great pains to inform her of what was happening in the outside world; quite the opposite.
Now that she thought about it, though, she did have a message to call him in her inbox.
“Told me what?” she said, curious.
He paused a moment. His eyes seemed to flicker, and Banu was reminded for a moment that they were the only visible part of him that was, in fact, really him. He had come last month from the latest of a series of annual upgrades that each of the orp
hans went through to simulate an aging process that they would never naturally endure. An unnecessary punishment in her opinion, but one deemed necessary by the powers that be to give them as natural a childhood as possible.
Those of them that had even wanted a physical body, that is. But that was not her concern now as Wednesday said, “You should hear it from him.”
“Hear what from him?”
He looked pained for a moment, his synthetic face almost perfectly recreating the simple yet subtle emotion, but not quite, then said, “Something has happened. They’re coming … they’re coming earlier than we expected. It is to be days, not months, until …”
She looked at him, confusion crowding her brow.
“Come, let’s sit,” he said, as he began leading her to the shade of a palm tree. “I have to go anyway. I have to make sure Friday knows as well. You can come too, if you like.”
She allowed herself to be pulled gently into the cool shelter of the wafting tree. He sat and leant his back against its lazily tilted trunk and she slowly lowered herself to join him. They made themselves comfortable and then closed their eyes, opening new eyes as they did so, into a second world as familiar to them as the real one, maybe even more so.
They found Friday not on the wing, but on the ground, in the darkness, prowling. They could not see him immediately. Wednesday had requested to be taken to whatever sim his friend was currently in, and so they now stood in a dark, foreboding forest and looked around.
“Friday?” called out Suyoil, the word now instantly translated into both the native Korean of the boy’s first years and the soft Persian of Banu’s, such was the magic of this place.
“Friday, where are you?” he said again, peering into the gloominess.
There was no reply for a moment, but then, noiselessly, a form began to appear in the shadowy gap between two thick tree trunks. Slowly the form took shape and the two children fought an instinctive fear as the big cat emerged from the shadows, its gentle footfalls belying its massive strength.
Unlike Wednesday and many of the others, Friday had refused the proffered body that Mother had come bearing once their existence had been revealed. The real world, such as it was, had never done anything for him. Even once they had discovered that this place was a lie, it was still a lie that pretended at caring a damn, and now that he knew the truth behind the curtain, he could ask the wizard that lived there to do the most amazing things.
Things like turning him into this awesome beast, he thought, as he stepped gracefully up to his two friends, one old, one new. He still had blood on his lips from the feast they had disturbed, its carcass lying but a few meters away, hidden to them, but so clear to his green, piercing, nocturnal eyes.
“Wednesday, Banu. If you have come to join me then you should know that those forms will only qualify you as prey in this place.” He smiled a toothy grin of his own, knowing that he still wore his bloody lipstick.
But these were no ordinary pubescent teens. They had seen far greater horrors than this big pussycat, and to break the tension, and the pall she felt hanging over her, Banu walked up and neatly slapped the big black panther across his big furry face. He laughed in the form of a cat’s rolling roar and lashed out at her, but this was as much her world as his, and she darted away, then around him, leaping eventually onto his back and grabbing two great fistfuls of his thick mane so she could hold on as he began writhing and twisting to get at her.
They could not, they both knew, hurt each other here, and Wednesday laughed at the sight of this seemingly imbalanced fight, enjoying the respite from his building worry, for this boy, unnaturally aged by circumstance, had seen the full depth of their predicament.
In the aftermath of the revelation of the orphaned flight school, Wednesday had, in fact, demanded only one thing as recompense. Not the body, that was a pleasant distraction, silly almost when you thought about it. And not vengeance either. He did not claim to understand the greater world he had suddenly found himself thrust into, and certainly nothing in his upbringing had taught him the inherent value of life, something that his saviors now told him was his unclaimed birthright.
He had asked only for honesty, and as the AM he had once called Mother had tried to help him adjust to yet another reality, Mynd had seen the simple justice in that. So when Suyoil had asked for details of the discovery of the alien strike force, closer now, impending, Mynd had given it to the boy, without redaction, as was his due.
“When you two are done …” said Wednesday, as Friday managed to get his claws on his slippery rider and pulled her to the ground. Pinning her, he went to bite her, his huge jaw opening, but when it closed on her neck the teeth did not penetrate, as he had known they wouldn’t, but they did tickle, and when he then drew his big, leathery tongue across her face while she struggled under his weight, she howled.
“Gross! So … gross!” they were all laughing now, hers a high-pitched wail as Friday released her and she wiped the spittle with her sleeve, adding a few Persian idioms that defied translation. Friday laughed too, a fuller, deeper base, echoing outward in the otherwise ghostly silence of his erstwhile hunting ground.
They sobered up, slowly, brought back to ground by Wednesday’s inability to hide his concern.
“We have to talk, Fri,” he said. “There is news from Mother. You need to hear it.”
Chapter 59: Stepping Into the Fray
Birgit and Rob stood upright for the first time in four years. They stood and they could not resist the urge to giggle, more than a little giddy at the alien sensation. Subliminally enforced exercises had slowed their muscles degradation in the years in zero gravity, but had not halted it, and Rob felt the strain as he bent his knees slightly, his muscles groaning under even this fraction of his returned weight.
“Well, this is certainly different,” said Birgit, a laugh laden with pleasant surprise escaping her lips. She was not surprised at the gravity, as such, not completely anyway. Her lengthy discussions with Minnie and Moira had predicted something like this. As the recent revelation had forced her to accelerate their work to access the IST core, the breaching of its outer housing had opened up a gravitational paradox. The pressure needed to contain the subspace singularity created, as a by-product, a localized gravitational field that now bled out into the IST’s central cavity.
Her surprise lay in the fact that the effect was so localized that even though Birgit and Rob were standing only a meter apart around their improvised hole, the shielding, they were at nearly forty-five degrees to each other, so that each looked to the other to be below them, and standing on the side of a wall.
It was a strange sight, to say the least. They grinned stupidly at each other, and Rob made to step around the hole, but only managed to lose his balance again, as they had several times so far, and trip backward so that he once again got to enjoy the unpleasant sensation of feeling like the world was pulling him into a ball, his head and his feet now in different gravitational orientations as he came to ground.
He landed, such as it was, on the core again, now upside-down relative to Birgit, and she was about to laugh at the sight of his upended derriere when the IST’s carapace groaned once more.
They both glanced outward, their amusement quickly banished.
“I don’t like the sound of that, at all,” said Birgit. The IST had been designed to withstand far greater pressures than this, despite its eventual home on a virtually gravity-less moon, but they had done much to undermine its once dense interior, and now Minnie’s estimates on that interior’s structural integrity were being put to the test.
“It’s fine,” said Rob, with feigned confidence. “I’m sure it’s just settling. Adjusting to this new weight.”
“Well, hopefully it is better at it than you are,” she said, grinning, and he raised his hand, shaking as he over-emphasized the strain of its weight and then, slowly, as if fighting valiantly, raised his middle finger at her.
She laughed, then slowly lowered herself to
her hands and knees so she could stare into the opened central space once more.
He repositioned himself so he could look into the hole as well. The shielding upon which they now crouched was itself three meters across, and they had sacrificed a lot to get at this space, but the next stage would be exponentially more dangerous. They had wanted to wait to do this until a rescue mission could reasonably be dispatched should something go wrong, but the choice had just been taken from them. The endgame had arrived, and now they had to get ready to cut into the inner sanctum, breaching the actual subspace event horizon, so they could manipulate its isolated controls directly.
It was an incredibly complex machine, but between them, Minnie and Birgit felt confident they now understood it. But this machine had never been designed for direct control, certainly not by the enemies of its creators, and certainly not to do what Birgit planned to do with it. To jury-rig it, she needed to get at the core machinery itself, and if they thought this new gravity was fun, the forces that would be unleashed once they tapped into this immensely potent core would be something altogether more powerful.
What it would do to the superstructure, to the battered crew module grafted to its exterior, and to them, they did not exactly know.
It wouldn’t be fun, they could surmise that, at least, but Birgit’s arguments that Rob should return to the module for this final step had fallen on deaf ears. She would need to subsume herself into the machine once they managed to connect to it, and she would be all but unconscious, as she had been during the birth of New Moon One and then the first Skalm, Banu’s Skalm, during the last hours before their exile. While the IST reacted in whatever ways it was going to react, Rob intended to be here to do what he had to in order to protect her.
She looked at him, at her man, clad in his black suit but still so familiar to her. He nodded at her. She nodded back, running a final check of the mechanical and diagnostics tools they had managed to drag into this inner-sanctum, this heart of the machine.
After a prolonged pause, Birgit shrugged.