Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  He installed them directly to the unnamed planet, gratified that the altitude where they’d decided to work matched the model within a couple of inches.

  It was that sensitive, but so far, everything looked good.

  He checked in on Cassie a few times, but the siren just looked up at him each time without speaking.

  Finally the machine was done. He got Cassie out of the shower and dried her hair. He could transfer her without the bulk of the water around her, but her hair was particularly tricky. That and he was buying time.

  There was a good chance the siren wasn’t going to make it through the jump. Knowing what he did, learning what he had, he didn’t expect it would be something so simple as leaving her here, beached and quickly evaporating. She would hold on, in bits and pieces of lonely, cold, angry awareness, and she would tear Cassie into similarly-sized bits.

  He needed to be prepared to act quickly, when it happened. He’d done a little bit of digging, while he’d been scouting equipment, and he’d found several stories that looked an awful lot like siren possessions, elsewhere in the universe. No one survived them. The sirens didn’t have the self-awareness to let go in time to save either themselves or their hosts.

  He wasn’t going to let it happen to Cassie.

  Wasn’t on the list of options.

  He was killing too many other creatures, too many other potentials today. He wasn’t going to let her die, too.

  He put a small backpack over his shoulder and he went to look into the siren’s face.

  “Don’t kill her,” he said. “I won’t let you, but you shouldn’t do it, anyway. You are a sentient species, even if you are displaced and confused, and you need to choose not to do it.”

  “I am alone,” she whispered.

  “You are,” he said. “There aren’t many species out there who have any other existence. We are all alone, our entire lives.”

  “How?” she asked.

  He paused, looking into those quiet, watery eyes.

  “You have yourself,” he said. “You need to know your self, and you need to embrace it. It may kill you, but that’s the only way to survive being alone.”

  “I miss…” she said. “I miss my people. My… Sisters?”

  “Yes,” Jesse said. “I think that’s the best word for them, now.”

  “I will never be,” she whispered. He knew Cassie would have felt for her, but he was frankly a bit busy, and still moody that she’d chosen Cassie for her possession death sentence.

  “No,” he said. “You volunteered for this, or they chose you and banished you. You are going to save your species, but you aren’t ever going to be one of them the way you were, before.”

  “You… How will you save them?” she asked.

  “I’m going to drive them away from their home,” Jesse said, taking her hand and triggering the point-to-point transfer. They stood on a mountain well out of sight of any ocean, with a staggered array of equipment going down the slope off to their left. She staggered and fell, and he let her slide to the ground, checking her pulse and her temperature, then looking into her eyes.

  It was still the siren there, still sentient, but she was almost gone.

  “I know Cassie would have wanted to see it, but do you want to watch me save your kind?” Jesse asked. She nodded numbly, and he rolled her, shivering, so that she could see the equipment.

  “It’s going to be noisy,” he said. “And I’d offer you a blanket or something, but I don’t think it would change anything.”

  She pressed her face against the ground, then pushed herself up, finding her elbow and watching as Jesse made his careful way down the side of the mountain.

  It was steep up here, and while it had had a full growth of loam at one point, it was dead and brittle, not so much organic as simply not-rock under his feet. He worked his way down one machine to the next, using them for leverage to make sure he didn’t fall, sliding between them. They were designed to build their own feet, either by digging in or by building up underneath them, so they were stable. Mining dealt with the worst of the worst for foundations, and they were good at this.

  He got to the bottom machine, getting in and checking the power. It needed to last for at least a couple of days, to start the reaction, but he could change out the batteries if he needed to, halfway through. He just needed to know about it in advance.

  The pressurization machine was made for working on atmosphere-less asteroids, capturing stray gas from the universe around and turning it into useful air, making it possible to expand the mining colony without importing new air.

  It was an odd optimization, but apparently it worked for them.

  He was using it in a full atmosphere, which meant he couldn’t use it at full power, but it was going to create quite a volume of air for the next machine on the chain. The other upside of how it was designed was that it assumed it was going to operate in the dark and the cold full time, and it came with honking big batteries.

  He started it up, listening to it run for a few minutes to make sure that there weren’t any signs of odd mechanical behaviors, then he got out and carefully hiked up to the next machine, checking power, stability, connection, and prep. Mixed-gas distillation. It used a complex series of sorting technologies to separate one gas from another and pipe them out separately at pressure. You could use it as a filter, to just get the mix of atmospheric gases that you wanted for a contained space - excise everything but N2, O2, and H20, for instance - or you could use it to industrially generate a specific gas, releasing the rest of them back to the wild. Jesse needed a specific mix, but that was for uphill machines to manage.

  The water machine fused hydrogen to oxygen and combined them into the air to create a water cycle on planets that didn’t have one. Mostly they’d just use it for very small planets, moons, or contained systems inside an asteroid, but it worked the same way everywhere. Where there wasn’t water, now there was. He needed the excess pressure from the atmosphere generator to get enough volume through, and he had had to do some clever splicing to get the right fractions through. The air was seriously dry, and he could have just imported water, but the volume of water he was going to need was pretty significant, and this was the easiest way to procure a steady supply.

  From there, things moved faster. Centrifuges, laminar flow, ramping, ionizing, one machine after the next, he turned on, waiting until the supply of fluids into it was ready and then engaging it. Everything worked just the way Cassie had designed it, speeding up and in ever greater volumes of material, everything worked its way up the hill until the last machine, which took the ionized laminar air and nozzled it once more, a speed that would have turned a bird - if the planet had had any - into dust particles as it hit the air stream. It was deafening.

  He got out, putting his hands over his ears and going back to crouch next to Song.

  “You’re up next,” he said.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t,” he said. “But I’m going to take you back down to the sea, and you’re going to tell them to follow you.”

  “How?” she asked.

  He looked up at the sky.

  “You’re going to show them your new home,” he said.

  “We always come home,” she whispered, staring at the invisible flow of air, the noise of it, the vibration of the ground. Jesse shook his head.

  “There will be no home here, anymore,” Jesse said. “You will show them where to go instead.”

  She stared, blank, blinking twice.

  “I… will show…”

  She frowned.

  He wasn’t sure this was going to work.

  He wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to have to wipe her out and leave them all to their own devices.

  But this was the plan and he was going to go for it.

  He just wasn’t going to let Cassie die, in an excess of devotion to that plan.

  “Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet once more. “This is g
oing to work, either way, but your people have a much better chance of surviving it, if you can tell them what’s going on.”

  Her head lolled onto his shoulder and he put his arm around her waist. Cassie wasn’t wasting away - not this quickly - but she felt light, to him.

  “I’m not one of them,” she breathed. “Not anymore.”

  “You are your own self,” he said. “And that’s either going to be okay, or it’s going to kill you. You pick.”

  She laughed.

  It was a very soft, very gentle shaking motion, but it was a laugh all the same.

  “I choose,” she said. “Is that how you work? You choose life or you choose inexistence?”

  He looked down at the top of her head.

  “Mostly, yeah.”

  “Then you are more powerful than I.”

  “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that’s a Palta body you’re wandering around in, there,” Jesse said. “Not for much longer, but you should use it while you’ve got it.”

  “Palta,” she breathed, settling in with a gentle sigh against his shoulder.

  “Two more, babe,” he said, pulling her in a bit tighter, as if that was going to help anything. He initiated the transfer, landing them both in the water. The tide was out, and the ash along the water was shallow, lots of room to stand. Cassie’s head dropped and he checked her. She wasn’t that much warmer than the air around them.

  “Cassie,” he said gently. She lifted her head, blinked.

  “Palta,” she said. “She knows that word, but I don’t.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “It’s what she is.”

  “She’s many things,” the siren said. “That is one of them.”

  He smiled.

  “Yeah. Now she’s you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. And I’m her.”

  Jesse frowned, not sure where this was coming from. The siren strengthening concerned him, and he needed to do a lot more tests and checks to make sure that it wasn’t at Cassie’s expense, but he heard a stir in the water behind him, electric.

  He turned as the choir came up out of the water, checking that Cassie was sound on her feet, but the siren appeared to be keeping it together for the time being.

  The sirens began to sing, and Jesse frowned, wondering if communication with them was possible at all.

  And then Cassie was walking past him.

  “I am,” Song said. It was for his benefit alone, but it was powerful, all the same. “And she is with me. Trust her and thus trust me.”

  She looked over and there was a wink. Nothing else, nothing, would have convinced him not to stop her, but his hand froze mid-air as she continued past, shin-high in the water, knee-high, waist-high, dozens of yards away, as the siren song changed. It wasn’t communication. He would have recognized that. It was awareness. Song wasn’t singing, nor was Cassie, but they formed a loop around her, and then motion quickened. Cassie dove into the water, disappearing under the murky gray, and the sirens dipped lower, one by one, disappearing with her.

  Jesse waited, but she didn’t resurface.

  Didn’t resurface.

  He started to follow.

  Song had abducted her.

  Was going to drown her.

  He was up to his chest in the cold ocean when her head broke above the water again, tipping back easily, without the sense of desperation of the drowning.

  She’d figured out water.

  One of them had.

  She grabbed hold of him, tipping her entire body back and letting it lay on top of the water.

  “I am spent,” she said. “You’re gonna have to float me back in.”

  “Did she know where she was going?” Jesse asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  He smiled.

  There was Cassie.

  “You saved her,” he said. “How did you do that?”

  She breathed, her chest rising and falling in the water as he walked her back in toward shore.

  “I woke up,” she said. “It wasn’t one of us. It was both.”

  That wasn’t supposed to be possible, Jesse knew. Two awarenesses controlling a single mind, but she’d done it before, with Midas, and his own daughter had managed with three of them. Song hadn’t ever been that malicious.

  “Is she going to survive?” he asked.

  “She’s going to be the rootstock for an entire new branch of sirens,” Cassie said. “You heard her. She’s her own unit. She’ll split and she’ll split again, and even if none of the rest of the sirens in the universe ever find a safe place to procreate again, she’ll do it.”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “You’re amazing.”

  “Did we burn down this home?” she asked.

  “Is it still necessary?” he asked.

  “It is. If we hope for any of the rest of them to survive, we can’t let them come back here. I could feel it, the way everything runs downhill to here. If there’s water left, they’ll come.”

  Jesse looked up at the sky.

  It wouldn’t take long, if their math was right. And he was pretty sure it was.

  The stir of wet atmospheric air would mix with the ash cloud and send it raining back down onto the planet. There were various models from there for what would happen, whether it would be a cascading event that would pull the ash out of the upper atmosphere everywhere, or if it would just put a hole in it, but either way, sunlight would come through and hit the surface of the planet again.

  And if that’s all there were to it, the planet would be saved. It had taken a feat of Palta logic, and a lot of luck about the shape of the surface of the planet, but they would have done it.

  The problem was the magnetic field protecting that surface. Without the dust cloud or the magnetic field protecting the planet from solar radiation, it would be a matter of weeks to boil off all of the water on the planet, then the atmosphere, and then it would go cold and freeze.

  Permanently.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  She nodded, gray matting on her face like clay.

  “Where to next?” he asked.

  She opened her eyes, looking up at the sky.

  “She was so alone,” she said.

  “We all are,” he answered. She smiled.

  “She said you said that. We need one more night.”

  He nodded.

  “It was a pleasure to watch you work,” he answered, sliding her closer to him across the surface of the water, then doing the math and programming in the coordinates to his electronics. He took her hand, moving his arm across his body to push the execute button.

  *********

  “Oh!” Olivia said, a new thought occurring to her. “Oh, oh, oh.” She patted the table with her palm, just hard enough to make the drinks sway in their glasses. She leaned across the table. “It’s a carnivore,” she hissed.

  “It’s what?” Troy asked. She nodded, eyes wide.

  “Celeste says she’s going to get a spiked collar fabbed for it, now that we know.”

  “They put a two-inch link chain on that thing, and it eats meat?” Troy asked. She nodded, a smile spreading across her mouth.

  “How?” Troy asked. “How is that possible? It couldn’t possibly catch something.”

  “Leading theories,” Olivia said, holding up her fingers. She touched the first one. “Everything on the planet it comes from is absolutely monstrous, and it’s the fastest thing there.”

  “Okay,” Troy said, grinning despite himself. He discovered that he trusted Conrad and Celeste enough to keep themselves safe, even in light of this.

  “Two,” Olivia said, “that it’s been bred that big and has been in captivity for so many generations that it no longer has any idea how to hunt.”

  “I could see that,” Troy said. “Would explain why we thought to buy one as a novelty.”

  She nodded.

  “I like that one, too. Three. That it’s a de
posed god, and it eats sacrifices to get as big as it is.”

  “Benji,” Troy said, and she nodded quickly, covering her mouth with her hand. Of course it was. “Why is that a leading theory?” Troy asked, and she shrugged.

  “Four. That their herbivorous material doesn’t digest the way that we anticipate, and it confused the measurements.”

  “We got this off manure?” Troy asked. She nodded.

  “We still can’t get a good picture of its teeth.”

  Troy narrowed his eyes.

  “That one’s yours, isn’t it?” she asked. She gave him a little shrug. “But you think it’s the bred-in-captivity thing, anyway?”

  “Conrad’s makes more sense than mine,” she said. “So?”

  He grinned.

  “Five,” she said. “That it’s an opportunistic scavenger and it runs off all of the original predators by sheer bully-force.”

  “That’s Celeste,” he said.

  “Celeste was that everything else was just gargantuan,” Olivia said, and he shook his head.

  “Tricky,” he said, “but they’re both hers. She reserves the right to have two opinions.”

  Olivia grinned, hiding behind her straw for a moment.

  “They all miss you.”

  “That was the best job in the world,” Troy said.

  “Better than jumping?” she asked, looking at him through her eyebrows.

  “Jumping isn’t a job,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She gave him a soft smile and turned her attention back to her soda.

  “Conrad won’t tell anyone what happened when he disappeared. Just that he was with you.”

  “Which time?” Troy asked. She laughed quietly.

  “Before we went to… that place.”

  He nodded.

  “No. It’s one of those portal things that’s really… you just can’t tell anyone.”

  “Even the rest of us?” Olivia asked. Troy nodded.

  “No, he’s making the right call. Frustrating as it is.”

  “Not even a hint?” she asked. He sighed.

  “Jesse was involved,” he said. She pressed her lips, and he nodded. “That’s all I can tell you, but, yeah, it was… I didn’t see it coming.”