“Yeah,” Oliver said. “But not with the real compound. I was supposed to have switched it out.”
“Did you?”
“No, I forgot. There was this whole government cover-up thing, where I ended up being a fugitive because of what I found out about Lot Forty-Two. I was thinking maybe in the third act I’d turn to the only person I knew I could trust. The whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing.”
“That’s a lot of story.”
“Well it would have been. I didn’t write any of it; I was just running it through my head when his first helicopter crash happened.”
“Excuse me,” Koestler said. “Why are you talking like this?”
He was pointing the gun at them, but in a way that made it seem less like a threat than like a way to make sure someone spoke back.
“You’re in a story,” Wilson said.
“You weren’t supposed to crash,” Oliver added. “Putting you in two helicopter crashes in the same story would have been ridiculous.”
“You could have just killed him on the roof instead,” Wilson said.
“Yeah I guess, but I needed him for the third act. Probably should have added someone with the… right, so maybe the government still has a secret program, and one person left from the original tests. I would need help facing him and he could be the big villain. Or she.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“EXCUSE ME!” Koestler said, somewhat louder this time. “What do you mean, a story?”
“I mean, you’re a character,” Wilson said. “In his story.”
“I am a man with my own agency, and I am holding a gun right now, so I would caution you to temper your words.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t a man, you’re just a man in a story.”
“Meaning, I am not real.”
“If you’re real, there’s no reason to get violent over someone suggesting otherwise, wouldn’t you say? My opinion should have no bearing on your reality.”
“I am real, and the pain in my leg is very real, and so are the bullets in this gun.”
He leveled the barrel at Wilson’s head, to underline the point he was making.
“Well all right, but you can be both,” Wilson said. “Real, but in a story, I mean. We have been all night, and we’re also real. Right, Oliver?”
“Call me Orson,” Oliver said. “Around him. Just so he’s not confused. But sure, probably.”
“I will shoot…” but Koestler didn’t finish the threat, as at that moment something loud and awful started taking place in the middle of Club Street.
There were eight probes. They split up into two sets of four and began performing a complicated rotation around one another that was reminiscent of the cup-and-ball movements of a street grifter. There were only four colors in each set: blue, purple, yellow and black, with the latter being the most confounding to the eye. It looked like an emanation of the absence of light, which made no sense and hurt Oliver’s eyes.
In conjunction with the rotating colors, they were making a horrible rumbling noise that sounded like something mechanical sliding on a track: a train, almost, but with all the sound coming from the engagement of the wheels to the rails.
“What are they doing?” Wilson asked.
“I cannot see,” Koestler said. “Help me.”
They helped him up onto his one good leg, and led him around to the front of the wreckage. He ended up propped on his elbows atop the helicopter’s tail.
“All right,” he said. “Aliens, then. Orson, I have a rifle in that cockpit, would you look for it?”
“Stay put,” Wilson said. “I’ll find it, if you promise not to use it on me.”
“For you I have the handgun. For them, the rifle.”
“They’re moving too fast to shoot,” Oliver said.
“As long as the winds keep the smoke away, I have an opportunity. Perhaps when they slow and present a more amenable target. Can you tell me why the world has stopped making sense?”
Oliver sat down next to him and leaned up against the wrecked fuselage.
“I don’t think so. I’ve just been going from crisis to crisis all afternoon, you know? Acting and reacting. When the whole world goes crazy at the same time sometimes it’s just the best idea to deal with what’s in front of you and keep moving.”
“Da. A footsoldier in a ground war. You and I… we see ourselves as special. Make the system work for us, and not the converse. We would rise above the ground war. Be our own generals. But there is always someone to answer to, is there not? We are always cogs. We think the mechanism cannot work without us and this is true. But all cogs look the same and we can be replaced with another cog at any time. Our mistake has always been in thinking the machine runs because we turn. You speak of a world gone mad and worrying only about what is before you, and this I understand. This has been my entire life. And yours.”
“I’m accustomed to a more metaphorical madness.”
“As am I. But, if life gives you something to shoot at, shoot at it.”
It was hard to describe exactly what Oliver was seeing happen with the probes. Each set of four was starting to form a… tear in the fabric of the world. The night sky in the space in the center of their aeronautic weaving had become fuzzy, and then fog started pouring out. The sky in the middle of the tear looked like a peek into another place entirely.
Wilson returned, with the rifle, and a box of ammunition.
“Glad you didn’t have this when we were on approach,” he said, handing it to Koestler.
“My leg was pinned or I would have,” he said, calmly checking the gun for damage. “Would you like for me to try and shoot them out of the sky?”
“No,” Oliver said. “You’ll have better targets soon. I just realized what I’m looking at.”
“You break the code?” Wilson asked.
“Sort of. CMYK.”
Wilson laughed.
“Of course,” he said.
“Is this a coded message?” Koestler asked.
“CMYK,” Oliver repeated. “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK.”
“Printer ink,” Wilson clarified.
Koestler looked back and forth between them, for a sign that a better explanation would be forthcoming. None was.
“All right, fine,” he said. “What is it that is being printed?”
“Aliens, of course,” Oliver said.
With that, the gaps in the sky widened suddenly, pushed open by the things passing through.
Those things were aliens, of the previously-encountered flying-bug variety. A dozen had just been ‘birthed’ into the middle of Club Street.
“It’s a transport mechanism,” Oliver said. “Probably why half the time these guys are everywhere, and the other half they’re nowhere. They go home.”
“Where’s home?” Wilson asked.
Oliver laughed, and picked up the metal stick he’d used to free Koestler from the wreckage. A sorcerer needed a staff. A wood one would be better, but he would have to make do with what was available.
“Koestler,” he said, “cover me as well as you can. It’s time to wrap up this story. Wilson, are you coming?”
Chapter Fourteen
Here There Be Dragons
The twelve aliens took defensive positions along the street, while another five or six passed through the breach overhead. It was hard to keep a running total, because they all looked alike, and none of them were interested in staying still long enough for a head-count.
“So this is what we’re doing,” Wilson said, matter-of-factly. His voice was tinged with fear, but it didn’t stop him from walking along with Oliver. This was definitely an improvement over his historical behavior.
“We have to get to Pallas, right? This is what you guys have been telling me all day. Let’s go clubbing, it’ll be fun.”
The walk was slightly downhill, but only slightly. The various clubs on both sides turned the street into something akin to a canyon, as if they were walking a particularly risky section of the Silk
Road. There was no ambush here, though, not when the enemy wasn’t bothering to hide. The bugs took up positions along the rooftops and in the street, with a couple more circling overhead. There was no logical explanation for why they had failed to attack already, which Oliver thought might be a good sign: perhaps they were afraid of him.
“Are they guarding the club?” Wilson asked.
“They’re guarding something. Not sure what. Minerva said they’re here to keep us from reaching Pallas, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense in context.”
“Which context?”
“The context of their story.”
“All right, Oliver, I’ll bite: what is the context of their story?”
They’d reached a point on the street where they were parallel with the first set of clubs. Paradise was on their left, and Little Big Country on the right. The clubs had velvet ropes out front for crowd control, but of course there were no crowds. As was true for all the clubs, they had rotating lights flashing in time with music that could only be heard if the doors were open.
The nightclubs had no windows, because there was an active interest in keeping the people inside from being fully aware of the existence of an outside world, and/or possibly for safety reasons.
“They’re inside,” Oliver realized.
“Who is?”
“The people. The city. All the missing.”
Wilson did a slow turn.
“How do you figure?” he asked. “There’s no way the entire city can fit into these buildings, you know that, right? On top of which, you can’t even see inside.”
“Maybe not the whole city, then. Maybe just some of them. But the clubs are full, and I think the aliens put them there.”
“This is how your story was going to work out? They’re keeping the people in a zoo?”
“I didn’t know how it was going to work out, remember? That’s always been my problem. You said it yourself. I don’t know the ending until I get to the ending, and I never seem to get to the ending.”
“This is why I told you to outline, Oliver. So we knew about…”
A rifle shot rang out. Koestler was firing at something. Ollie looked up.
One of the overhead aliens had decided it was time to commence with a dive-bomb attack, and it didn’t look like the bullet had had any impact on its decision.
“Maybe we should fall back,” Wilson said.
“No, we’re fine here.”
Oliver held up the staff the way one would if one were expecting some sort of attack to erupt from the tip of it. That didn’t happen, but what did was that Koestler took a second shot. This appeared to find home, because the alien reacted as if it had been hit in the side of the head by a particularly annoying mosquito. Not a lethal shot, but enough to cause it to veer off and circle skyward again.
“I don’t think the rifle is enough,” Wilson said. “We could use one of those blasters. Unless you’ve figured out a weakness, and that weakness is the stick in your hands.”
“It’s not, but I have,” Oliver said. He continued walking. The alien would be dive-bombing again shortly, but he saw no reason to let that keep him.
“Great. What is it?”
“The weakness is that they aren’t the aliens in the story. We are.”
Wilson laughed.
“On Earth?”
“No, no, on Hockspit.”
“We’re not on Hockspit,” Wilson rightly pointed out.
“Tell them that. Look, remember in the story: we changed the planet to make it hospitable to life, but left the oceans alone because they were highly acidic. What we didn’t know was that there was an intelligent species living in that ocean.”
The bug was coming back in for another dive-bomb attack, which hadn’t escaped Wilson’s attention.
“Cute twist. So, you were thinking, what? A colonialism allegory?”
“Maybe, yeah. But this has always been my point, these stories are never just about aliens or whatever, sometimes…”
“I would love to get into another argument about the relevance of genre stories, Oliver, but we’re still about to die. How does knowing this help us?”
“You have to ask yourself: why did they bother to attack at all? We had the land and they had the sea. What’s their motivation?”
“Um…”
“We’re killing them, that’s what. They had to defend themselves.”
“Ah, colonialism with an environmental message, very nice.”
An arrow arced through the sky from a spot behind them. Atha had arrived. The shot found home in the alien’s underbelly. It shrieked and turned skyward again.
She was running to them, with Cant hard behind her. He looked covered in the gore of his last foe.
“There you are,” Oliver said. “It took that long to kill one alien?”
“Three,” Cant said. “And now you face dozens more with nothing but a tall stick and this useless warrior. Have you gone mad, sorcerer?”
“We were concerned,” Minerva said.
“Well, I’ve got a sniper on my side too.”
“Until he betrays you,” Wilson added. “I mean, if it’s that kind of story.”
The aliens seemed to recognize that the stakes had gone up with the arrival of Cant and Minerva, because now they were making a concerted effort to surround them.
“Maybe you should explain how we’re going to kill them now,” Wilson said.
“We altered the atmosphere into something that’s poisoning them,” Oliver said. “In their mind they’re defending themselves.”
“That’s still not helping us. Unless you can figure out how to get them to wait around for an hour or two to die.”
“Indeed, we could do with a more concrete suggestion,” Cant said.
“It’s the carbon dioxide in our breath,” Oliver said.
Minerva fixed him with an amused look, with those elfish green eyes.
“You mean for us to breathe on them?”
“Well, no, that’s not a great offensive attack. But I do think their goal is just to drive us away. That’s why they’re keeping all the people locked up. If we decided to just leave, they’d be good with that.”
“How?” Wilson asked. “They’ve closed off the sky.”
“Maybe they think we can transport people instantly, like they can.”
One of the healthy aliens—not the one with an arrow sticking out of him—went into a dive.
Koestler fired, and whether it was luck this time or he’d been working out this solution for a while, he discovered the right spot to fire a bullet into. The creature’s head rocked sideways, and it plummeted to a loud death several yards away.
“Did you see?” Cant asked Minerva.
“I saw. Beneath the jaw at the top of the neck. Perhaps their hearts are in their gullets.” She looked at Oliver. “Your man Koestler is precise with that weapon.”
“He’s my arch-enemy. But yes, he is.”
“Regardless, he’s given us something to hit.”
“That will only work for a while, they can keep bringing more through the gap. We have to hit those drones.”
Cant drew his sword and stepped in front of Wilson and Oliver.
“There are already too many for us to kill,” he said. “A few more will not matter.”
“You’re not listening. The air is toxic to them. They can only be in it for a short time. Those rifts in space they’ve opened allow them to go back. If we close it they’ll die where they stand. Like holding a diver underwater until the air in his tank runs out.”
“Then you figure out how to destroy the drones with your magic while we face them on the ground, sorcerer.”
Oliver had already figured that part out too, but didn’t really have time to say anything because then the attack was underway. Three bugs landed directly in front of Cant, cutting off their forward progress. Two attacked from above, while three landed behind and two on each side. They were going for an attack that appeared to be calculated to a
nticipate one of the humans being armed with a pulse cannon they didn’t actually have.
He wondered, if he thought hard enough, whether he could transform the metal stick in his hand into a blaster. Perhaps it would happen, via some combination of his supposed magical abilities and the fact that the entire night was being dictated by the whims of his imagination. But no amount of concentration, or wishing, or utterance of ‘magic’ words seemed to change anything. All that did change was that now, he felt a little foolish.
Meanwhile, the three actual warriors on-hand were doing their best to keep him alive. Minerva was firing arrows skyward, and Cant swung his heavy sword so rapidly it was a blur. It was all he could do to keep the three bugs from landing a mortal blow, but at the same time he couldn’t do anything permanent to them. Koestler continued to fire from his sniper’s nest. Inevitably, one of the aliens was going to figure out where he was settled and take the attack to him, but that hadn’t happened yet.
One of the free aliens from the side pounced, perhaps realizing that the two in the middle—Wilson and Oliver—didn’t pose nearly as much of a threat as the others. He knocked Wilson onto his back and screeched into his face.
Wilson exhaled back, which didn’t exactly kill the bug, but it did make it wince for a half second, which was long enough for Oliver to club him in the side of the head with his staff. The creature fell backwards, regained its feet, and prepared to launch itself again.
They were probably about to die. Oliver came to this thought calmly, because as much as this all felt real to him, he’d reached a point where ideas like his own death no longer seemed really feasible. This was all very much real: he could feel the pain, and his adrenaline spikes as his body dealt with the fight-or-flight impulses that had been running through him all day. He could hear the horrible noise being made by the drones overhead, and still smell the acrid smoke from the helicopter crash up the road. If the next thing the alien did was to close those sharp teeth around Oliver’s arm, he was quite sure he would feel the sensation of having a limb severed. Yet despite all of those things being true, he was confident there was no way this story could end with him dying.
It wasn’t a story, he told himself. It was real. But it also wasn’t.
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