“I have to,” she says. “I’d go nuts being inside all the time. Now stop being commander in chief for a minute, because I’ve got something to show you.”
She leads the way up a black pile of—what do they call it—scoria? Broken lava chunks the sea will turn into black sand, and—
I only need a glance. “Go back and tell Jamal and Anna to join us.”
“If Jamal’s busy he’ll want to know why.”
“The reason is I want him now.”
“Yes, sir,” she says, and goes.
When the others arrive, I don’t even have to point. There’s only one thing to see.
A pod of the sea creatures is approaching, maybe twenty, maybe more. They’re gray, and close enough now that we can see irregular crusty white patches on their backs and tails—I guess the local version of barnacles. They’re a ballet of monsters, rhythmically rising and sinking like the waves, all together.
“They can’t come ashore, can they?” asks Eloise, hopefully.
Jamal and I look at each other. We’re remembering the one that got Antonelli. The way it rose up on its flippers, the way it tossed its head back, the barking noise. Remembering the inevitable smell of lions. Sea lions. These things are pinnipeds that feed in the sea but drag themselves up on beaches to rest and fight and mate.
“Look,” says Anna, pointing in another direction. “It took her a while, but she got it running. Clever lady.”
Way, way off, a gray dot in the gray clouds darkens, takes shape, and turns into the last flyer, repaired and functional and heading our way.
ITEM (19) From Dr. Li’s Report
Since we had no option but to resist or die, it was unnecessary to encourage the troops—we could rely on our enemies to do that.
As for myself, I put my hardcopy notes in order, wrapped them in plastic and hid them under loose ice in the freezer. Even if we are all killed, I thought, people sooner or later will come here looking for us, and with luck they may find this record. The last corpse that remained uneaten seemed to be watching me, and I came out shivering for more reasons than the cold.
Yet I continued speaking into my notebook, hoping to transcribe the rest of the story later.
Robert had deployed eight people, which was the number of weapons we had. Adding the shuttleport stock to our own slim armory, we had one hundred and eighty rounds, which was enough to do much damage, though not to drive off all our enemies.
I set up an aid station at the foot of the heap of scoria we had taken to calling the Black Hill, and filled a medical kit with M2, tourniquets, a few antibiotics, etc.
Then I climbed the hill to see exactly what was happening. The sea lions (as Robert called them) had vanished under the waves, meaning that they could reappear anyplace. The flyer had turned and was circling, perhaps a kilometer out. It passed over the shoreline, swung back. Wisely, Robert ordered his people to hold their fire.
I noticed that Eloise was standing beside Jamal. I called her over to help me at the aid station, and she had begun to approach with slow steps when in the corner of my eye I caught a flash from the flyer.
I shouted, “Down!” and she dropped to the ground just as the missile struck the Black Hill and exploded. The sound was loud enough to leave my head ringing. Then the sound Aa! Aa! Aa! from behind us warned that the sea lions were coming ashore. At the same moment the flyer veered and from an amplifier came a burst of birdsong so loud that it might have been the giant mythical Roc calling to its mate. At that, the margin of the jungle trembled and something roared in reply.
ITEM (20) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook
I can’t say I ever liked Julia Mack. But I always respected her, never more so than now. She’s got a very weird army, but she’s doing first-rate command and control.
She’s got an Arkie sitting beside her with an amplifier and she’s got her goddamn launcher. Must be awkward—leaning out the pilot’s port to fire it, so the backflash doesn’t fry her. But she manages. A managing gal.
Okay, here come the lions from the sea.
Okay, here come the bearpigs from the jungle. There’s more birdsong, this time from the line of trees, so Arkies are in the jungle as well, leading the troops.
The Cousins are closing in. If we make every single shot count, they’ll still win. If panicking was any use, I’d panic.
Since it isn’t, I’ll have to try something else.
I cross over to Jamal and hand him my notebook. “Take care of this.”
He raises black arched eyebrows.
“I have something to do. You’re in command till I get back. If we live through today, you can sock me good and hard on the jaw.”
That’s sort of a good-bye.
ITEM (21) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook (continued by Jamal al-Sba’a)
Kohn leaves the field of battle. Much as I dislike him, I don’t think he is running away. He is a brave Jew.
May the Ever-Living One preserve him, for I hope to collect on his offer at the end of this day.
It’s strange, I’ve never seen him talk into this notebook, yet he always has it with him. The idiot light goes on when I speak, so I suppose it’s picking my voice up. I have no notebook of my own — all my stuff except my weapon was lost in the flight from Main Base.
All right, we have only eight weapons. We will soon be assailed from two sides. Do we fight out here in the open, or withdraw to the dome and try to defend it? This is the kind of decision a commander must make, and if he’s wrong, everyone is lost. I’ve always longed for power, now I feel its crushing weight.
I decide that we’ll retreat, for two reasons: first, Captain Mack and her goddamn missiles. She can kill many of us and we can’t afford losses. Second, the Cousins can afford losses, so the damage we do to them is beside the point. The only strategy is to resist as long as possible and then accept our fate. I call Doctor Li and instruct her to move the aid station inside the dome. Eloise gathers up the medical kit and heads back, while Li waits to see if we take any casualties on the retreat. The Chinese woman appears perfectly calm.
Mack is coming round again in her flyer. The noise of the engine is lost in the volume of sound rising on all sides—the roaring, the warbling, the barking of the creatures from the sea.
And — Inshallah! — another flyer is rising to meet her! So this is why Kohn left us!
ITEM (22) From Doctor Li’s Report
All my life I had struggled to attain the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment—maybe out of cowardice, because I feared the pain of loss.
Maybe this is why I fled from life into the laboratory—from the knowledge of passion to a passion for knowledge. Why, until Robert came to Bela, I was so much alone.
When I saw our one fully functional flyer take off, I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the heart with an icicle. Then I told myself that if Robert intended to crash into the other flyer, he would have said good-bye to me first.
So I comforted myself, thinking that, yes, he intended a dangerous game — to distract and alarm Mack, make her fire and waste her remaining missiles. He went, I decided, to court danger, not to seek death. Yet the flyer shot straight at her, moving far too fast for safety, and she must have been startled, for her craft yawed and for a wonderful moment I thought it would spin out of control and crash. But then she mastered the controls and the two aircraft began a twisting, turning ballet that I can only compare to the mating dance of mayflies.
Then our craft turned and fled, with Mack in pursuit.
I found myself again atop the Black Hill without any sense of how I got there. Looking down for a moment, I saw an incredible sight, the creatures of two worlds paralyzed by shared amazement and staring upward.
A sea lion had crashed through a barrier of stunted trees, and it rested propped on immense flippers with its tusked face in the air. Without the support of the sea its own weight oppressed it, and its great scarred sides heaved with the effort of breathing.
On the landward side, bearpigs standing
on their hind legs moved their heads from side to side, following the action above like entranced listeners following the music at a concert. Arkies were pointing with their bronze weapons and exchanging wild and strangely sweet snatches of song.
I saw the launcher emerge from the pilot’s port of Mack’s ship, and an instant later came the blinding backflash. The missile burned a long twisting trail, and my heart stopped because I realized that it was homing in, that it was too swift for its target to escape, and then it struck our flyer, which exploded in a great orb of flame like an opening peony. Dark fragments floated downward like gull’s feathers into the sea. From our enemies came a crescendo of sound that I can never describe—one world triumphant over another, howling its victory.
Next I felt a grip on my arm; it was Jamal and he said, “Come on, we’re retreating to the dome. Save yourself.”
I answered, “Why?” wishing only for my life to be over.
ITEM (23) From a Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother
We’re all inside the dome together. There was one real shocker when it turned out the door to the hangar had been left open.
Something forced its way in, I didn’t see what, but I heard an impact weapon cough and then a couple of guys slammed the door, I think pushing a body out. End of Crisis One.
I was looking for Doctor Li. I’d brought in the medical kit, but to be any good it had to be married to the one person who knew how to use it.
I found her looking awful and I said in alarm, “Are you wounded?” She said, “No, only dead,” which I took to be some kind of weird joke—meaning, like, aren’t we all?
Jamal was yelling orders, and I said to him, “Colonel Kohn won’t like you taking his job away from him.”
To my amazement, Jamal said, “Kohn’s dead.”
“No, he’s not.”
He ran off, saying he had to check the rest of the doors, especially the loading doors onto the pad, because they were big enough to let in an army if they’d been left open too.
Paying, of course, no attention to me whatever.
I went back to Anna Li, and she was preparing our hospital for new casualties. Her movements were strange, jerky like a marionette, and she hardly seemed to see what she was doing.
I said, “Anna, what’s wrong? I mean, aside from the fact that we’re all going to be killed, what’s the matter?”
She said, “Robert’s dead.”
Second one in five minutes. Patiently I told her, “No, he’s not, he’s up on one of the catwalks under the dome, checking the air intakes.”
She stopped and looked at me steadily. “I saw him die,” she said.
“Well, he must’ve died very recently, because I saw him climbing a ladder when I was bringing in the medical kit.”
“Inside the dome?”
“Of course inside the dome. He’d have to be nuts to be climbing an exterior ladder.”
At that her face turned to parchment and she fainted. I caught her going down and laid her on an empty cot. The blind woman, Mbasa, was demanding to know what was going on, so I led her over and sat her down and gave her Anna’s hand to hold.
Then I went looking for Colonel Kohn. As I pushed through the people milling around in the main lobby area, most of them were talking about his death. Apparently everybody had seen him die, and only I had seen him alive.
I suppose I should say I doubted my own sanity, but I didn’t. What I doubted was everybody else’s.
I found a metal ladder with its supports embedded in the duroplast and started climbing. I really don’t like heights, but pretty soon I was twenty meters in the air and running along a metal catwalk, wondering where the damp warm air was coming from until I realized it was everybody’s breath, rising and collecting up there.
I spotted him standing at the main air intake. He’d pulled off the housing and shoved back the big flexible duct and he was aiming his pistol between the metal louvers. He fired the way real marksmen do, touching the stud so gently that I could hardly see his fingertip move. The pistol coughed and something outside roared.
“One less,” he muttered, and I didn’t know whether he meant one less round or one less enemy, or both. “What are you doing here, Eloise?”
I told him that everybody had seen him die, including Anna, and he’d better show himself alive before she died of grief and before Jamal had time to make everybody hate him.
“You underestimate them both,” he said. “Oh, oh. Step back and open your mouth and cover your ears.”
I did and the catwalk jumped and I felt like I’d had an iron bell over my head and somebody had hit it with a sledgehammer.
“Oh my God,” I was muttering. “Oh my God.” He yelled something at me but I was almost deaf.
He walked me away from the spot. My ears were still ringing, but af ter a little while I could understand him. He talked like a lecturer.
“If that last missile had hit the grille we’d have a big hole in the dome. And it’s accessible to an exterior ladder. But it just occurred to me that we ought to let them come in this way, because they’ll be squeezed together on this goddamn catwalk and we can shoot them like rabbits. Or maybe just pry the catwalk loose and let them fall.”
He told me to go see Jamal and have him order two people with guns up here. “And tell Anna not to wet her pants. I’m alive as I ever was. As soon as my two shooters get here, I’ll be down.”
Before going I asked, “Why does everybody think you’re dead?”
“It’s the flyer. I was going to take it up and harass Mack and see if I could get her to waste her last missiles. But somebody else got there first.”
“Who?”
“Vizbee and Smelt, of course. I guess they figured they were on the menu and the battle gave them a good chance to escape. Though where they hoped to escape to, I don’t know. Idiots. Now, scram.”
ITEM (24) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook (Kohn speaking)
Jamal tells me he’s deferred the punch on the jaw until either the Cousins break in, or else we get away. That way if he knocks out a few teeth I can either have dental care or else not need it.
I’ve had some of the guys loosen the retaining bolts on the upper catwalk. A bearpig tore out the grille and louvers but nothing’s tried to get through yet. I suppose they’ve figured out that it’s like climbing into a bull’s eye.
I wish I knew if Mack’s got any missiles left. Let’s see, there were six in the armory to start with. One fired into Krebs’ quarters. One to blast the power station. One to open up the mess hall. Three fired here. Does that mean she’s out?
I bet not. I bet she had a couple stored away in some secret place, maybe underground. This lady is daring but also careful. If she has more, they’ll soon be hitting a door. Preferably two doors, one on each side. Then the big beasts will break down what’s left, and they’ll be inside.
We’ll kill a lot of them but it won’t make any difference, because, as Anna said, you can’t fight a whole world.
WHAM!
Hear that? Just in case anybody gets to listen to this record. I wish I wasn’t so goddamn right all the time. I wish I was dumber, so I couldn’t see things coming. I wish Anna and I were anyplace but here.
It’s the door into the hangar again. It’s bent and bulging inward but still standing.
Lots of pressure against the outside. Nerve-shattering squeals of metal grinding on metal. It moves slowly, but it does move. E pur si muove — what Galileo told the Inquisition—but it does move. Meaning the Earth, which probably we’ll never see again.
That noise like a very loud shot was a hinge breaking. If only these things were nuclear steel, but they’re not; they’re strong, but we need something indestructible.
I order four shooters to the threatened door. Order one guy to stand behind each shooter and grab his weapon if he’s killed or wounded. Yell for the shooters on the catwalk to come down. Order one to join Jamal, the other to blow off the loosened retaining bolts if something comes thr
ough the intake, as of course something will. Order everybody to stay away from the area underneath. Order Jamal to watch the double doors that open onto the shuttlepad. If the Cousins break in there, we’re seriously screwed.
Finally stop giving orders. I’ve done the best I can, now we’ll fight it out and they’ll win, as possibly they deserve to do. As Eloise said, it is their world.
On the way to her hospital, Anna gives me a blissful smile. She’s actually happy to be dying with me—compared to living without me. In all my long life, nobody ever looked at me that way before.
ITEM (25) From the Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother
I feel like such an idiot, talking, talking to you across the light years at a time like this. But what else can I do?
It’ll hurt you to know exactly how I died, but not as much as not knowing. And I want you to know my last thoughts are with you.
The expected blast just hit the double doors to the pad right in the middle and the metal snapped and bent. Then steady, unrelenting pressure.
All the usual sounds from outside. Warbling, roaring, barking. I hardly hear them, I’m listening to the outcry of the metal as it bends. A lot of muscle out there. An arm reaches through, one of the bearpigs, long claws scratching at the metal. Jamal yells Hold your fire!
And of course he’s right, that would’ve been a waste of ammo. There’s scrabbling around outside, more singing, more roaring, and then the pressure suddenly gets much, much worse. You can see the strong metal bulge, something snaps, something else snaps. Whatever’s pushing is breathing in huge gasps.
We have to wait until the doors collapse, then shoot whatever’s on the other side. Its body will block the opening, but not for long.
Mama, when I close my eyes for an instant I see your face.
ITEM (26) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 60