by Kelly Robson
“You time travel because you can, like the plague babies who climb mountains. Because it’s there,” Kiki said. “Fine. I’m not saying don’t do it. But there’s got to be a better way than dropping skips on people’s heads.”
The next snake struck at Minh’s leg. She tossed it into a patch of purple irises. A sample wasp buzzed its cloaca.
“Using skips to transfer project teams from safe bases to hot spots is the best strategy we’ve found,” Fabian said. “If you find a better approach, let me know. I won’t hold my breath.”
Minh could almost smell the smugness oozing off him.
“If you could see the long-term consequences of your actions, you wouldn’t be so casual about it.” Kiki slipped a palm-sized moth into a petri dish.
“TERN’s actions have no consequences for past population members. But their actions have consequences for us.”
“I’m not sure the timeline-collapse theory isn’t a convenient excuse for doing whatever you want.”
Fabian laughed. “If I could do anything I wanted, I wouldn’t be sorting through a bag of maggots right now.”
“I’m serious.”
“Unless you want to go to the other side of the curve and spend the next twenty years as a physics apprentice, you’ll have to take my word for it.”
“I might do that, if I got the chance,” Kiki said. “It sounds like important work.”
Minh fumed. How could Kiki stand it? How could any of the fat babies stand it? Going back underground, living together like ants, everyone in each other’s business, never seeing another horizon, another sunrise or sunset?
Minh tipped over the last three baskets. The snakes coiled into striking positions. She splashed through the river and ran back to camp.
She’d shake sense into Kiki, even if she had to wring her neck to do it.
Minh lunged up the tent platform steps, breathing heavily, ready to start bellowing. But Kiki was waiting, her face dark and pitiless as a thunderhead.
Kiki handed Minh a sample jar. A huge grasshopper was propped diagonally inside the cylinder, scraping its stridulatory file and beating its wings.
“I want to do important work,” Kiki said, and the light that shone from those clear, bright eyes was too intense. Minh looked away.
“That’s all any of us want. To not go to waste,” Kiki said.
-19-
KIKI-NO, THE MONSTER SOBBED. Where-are-you.
It sounded like a real person as it cried.
The soldiers were close. Shulgi slid into the ditch, crouched in front of the egg, and peered inside. It was half-filled with sea-foam. From one of the walls protruded a white cocoon-like chair. A small man dangled from it, unconscious, his hips and legs embedded in pebbly white material. Or at least, he looked like a man. He might well be a monster. In any case, he was diseased—a massive tumor bulged under his jaw.
* * *
Minh swam downstream, trailed by a train of floats. The setting sun turned the brown river into a molten stream of gold. She’d spent the afternoon taking benthic samples. Hours alone, unobserved, except for the raptor circling overhead.
At least the bird couldn’t listen in on her thoughts.
The cool water soothed her aching shoulders and back. She was already getting stiff, her range of movement restricted, so she reached into her biom and dialed up a general anti-inflammatory. A hit of serotonin-norepinephrine would take care of the ache deep below her breastbone, too, but she’d never relied on the happy hormones, and she wasn’t going to start now.
Besides, she deserved that pain. She’d failed. They’d all failed—all the plague babies, her entire generation. They’d tried to make a better world, but forgotten who they were making it for.
No wonder Kiki couldn’t forgive her.
After stowing her samples in the Peach, she joined her team at the campfire and opened her supper container. Kiki and Fabian sat on cushions they’d dragged from the tent. Evening stars glinted overhead.
Hamid appeared in the distance, a dark shape looming beside him. Four legs. It tossed its head.
Minh jumped up. “Shit.”
“Did you see Hamid got himself a pet?” Fabian asked.
“The horse didn’t get here by itself,” she snapped.
“A kid brought it,” said Fabian. “They’ve run off now, back home.”
Minh pulled up Hamid’s feed. He crouched at the horse’s chest, reins in one hand, running his other hand over its slender foreleg.
Hamid, this wasn’t in the work breakdown.
He kicked her off his feed. The window blinked out.
“Shit,” she said.
Kiki and Fabian exchanged a look. They’d probably been whispering about her all day.
“Have fun camping,” she said. “I’ll sleep in the Peach. Tell Hamid not to fall in love with the horse, because we can’t take it home.”
She reclined her seat, took another hit of anti-inflammatory, and dialed herself asleep.
A few hours before dawn, the local floaters alerted her to a new species. No visuals, not in the murky water and certainly not at night. But they were large—sturgeon, maybe. She batted groggily at the feeds, trying to make sense of them. No, they were mammals, six of them, moving slowly upriver. Finless porpoise, maybe, or river dolphin. She’d look closer in the morning.
Minh’s alarm woke her at first light. She was itchy, her skin gritty. No matter. She’d be back in the river soon enough. Maybe they should all get in the river before they left, or it would be a stinky trip back to Home Beach. Hamid would smell like horse. As usual.
She stretched and checked her feeds. The mammals were still there, six datapoints resting near the surface of the upstream pool. She sent a camera but nothing was visible from the surface, not even in low-lux mode.
Fabian and Kiki were awake. Minh scooped four breakfast packs out of the heat exchange brought them to the fireside. Hamid trotted into camp on horseback. He leaned down, plucked his breakfast out of Minh’s hand, and cantered off.
“I guess everyone’s up,” Minh said.
“Susa’s up, too. She’s on her way,” said Fabian.
“What?” said Minh. She wasn’t sure she’d heard.
“Susa is coming to visit.” He fired a feed onto the horizon.
A narrow barge floated down the dark river. Golden lantern light shimmered on the water, brighter than the dim rays of dawn stretching overhead. The priestess stood in the boat’s prow, gripping the rail, steadying herself as her head swayed from side to side under the weight of her wig. Servants and soldiers clustered behind her.
Ice slid down Minh’s spine.
“No. That’s not in the work plan,” she said.
“It’s in mine,” said Fabian. “I gave up a whole day to wrangle insects. Now I’ve got my own work to do.”
Minh turned to Kiki. “Did you know about this?”
Kiki nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Minh’s voice rose to a screech.
“There’s no reason to worry,” Fabian said around a mouthful of breakfast.
“They’ve got weapons. All of them—even the children.”
“Susa will come alone.”
“Their precious priest? Not a chance.”
“If it gets out of hand, I’ll take care of it.”
“No, you won’t.” Kiki’s voice was soft.
Fabian sighed. “No more fighting over health and safety, Kiki. I’m done.”
“I’m done, too. I’m not letting you kill anyone.”
He glazed over for a moment, then snapped back. His eyes narrowed with menace.
“Where are my drones?”
“Back at Home Beach. I unloaded them before the upskip,” Kiki said. “You’ve been too busy to notice, running multiple streams, chatting with Susa.”
The breakfast container fell from his hand. Beige nutritional mix oozed over his shoe.
Minh’s flesh prickled. Twenty hours they’d been on the ground, unprotected.
They could be dead. Dead. Acid burned the back of her throat. She swallowed. No time to think; time to move.
“We’re leaving.” She kept her voice flat. “Let’s get the samples loaded. How long until Susa’s barge lands?” Fabian didn’t answer. She prodded him in the ribs with a toe. “Set a contact timer.”
Fabian shook his head as if trying to shake off cobwebs.
“Forty minutes. Thirty to be safe.” He shot a countdown onto the horizon, then kicked the food off his foot and rounded on Kiki. “We’re going to talk about this on the way home.”
Kiki bared her teeth. “I thought you were done talking about health and safety.”
Minh wrapped a leg around Kiki’s arm and pulled her toward the tent.
“Argue later,” she said. “We’ve got work to do.”
Kiki wrenched her arm free. “That’s your default reaction to everything, isn’t it, Minh? Do the work. After Fabian killed those soldiers, you were nearly catatonic. And you never woke up, did you? You kept running your program. Like a bot.”
Hamid, we have to leave, Minh whispered. Say goodbye to the horse.
Minh ran into the tent and loaded sample trays onto the floats. Fast. She could move fast. Two floats held them all. Outside the tent, Fabian and Kiki were toe-to-toe. She was taller than him, triple-jointed legs fully extended for the advantage of height. He balanced on the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent, shoulders low, hands loose. A fighter’s stance.
“If you think you’re joining TERN after this, you’re wrong.” His voice was deadly calm.
“I should walk away,” Kiki said. “But no, I’ll join TERN and work toward changing your health and safety protocol.”
He laughed. “We won’t take you. Not after this.”
“Oh, you’ll take me.” Kiki smiled down at him. “If you don’t, I’ll tell the world TERN kills people and pretends it doesn’t matter.”
“You signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
“A huge fine. More debt. Who cares?”
“The Bank of Calgary would care. Multiple zeroes in the debit column. You understand what that means, right?”
Kiki didn’t answer.
“Minh knows what it means,” Fabian said. “Don’t you, Minh?”
“No time to waste,” Minh said as she stumbled down the tent platform. “We have to pack up. Kiki, can you go get Hamid?”
“Tell Kiki what would happen to Calgary if she broke her NDA.”
“We’d never dig out from under that much debt,” Minh said. “It would kill us.”
“Nobody would die. It would just ruin Calgary’s economy,” Kiki said. “There’s a difference.”
“Enough,” said Minh. “Go get Hamid off that horse.”
Kiki didn’t move. “Maybe going broke would be good for the plague babies. It’d force you to stop playing the banking game and make hard decisions about the future.” She turned back to Fabian. “I’m not scared of your NDA, so TERN can choose. Deal fairly with me, or everyone in the world will know what you are.”
Fabian balled his fists. Before he could lash out, Minh grabbed Kiki around the waist and pulled her backward. Kiki’s hooves drummed the dirt.
Don’t be stupid. If you think he’s a killer—
He is!
—why are you antagonizing him? Do you think he wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, too?
Kiki’s stopped struggling.
“Go get Hamid.”
Kiki nodded and galloped off at full speed.
Fabian’s expression was murderous, brow contracted, jaw muscles bulging. Minh needed to talk him down. Say something. Anything.
“Kiki’s been playing with her hormonal mix,” Minh lied, voice silky. “If she doesn’t calm down, Hamid will lock her biom.”
“You can keep your research assistant,” he said, and stalked into the tent.
Minh raised her hands to her throat. Her pulse hammered through her jugular, a few thin layers of muscle and connective tissue below her skin. She dialed herself down. Way down.
Time. They still had time. She clung to the side of the Peach, using four legs to stow the samples while keeping the countdown at the top of her visual field. When she was done, sixteen minutes were left on the clock. Hamid and Kiki were walking slowly toward camp, talking. He was still on horseback—of course he would keep the animal around for as long as possible.
Fabian was still in the tent. He probably needed more time to cool down. The skip was too small for fighting.
Sixteen minutes was enough time for a final look at the river. It might be her last chance. If Fabian grounded them for the rest of the project, she wouldn’t blame him.
The sun was a thin neon fingernail reaching over the indigo hills. A deer splayed its spindly legs and stooped to drink from the river. The pool’s surface was smooth, but the six mammals were on the move, their datapoints heading toward the shallows. The physiology data was showing odd numbers. Probably a glitch caused by the sediment load.
Minh dropped to her belly ten meters from the river. Aquatic mammals had excellent eyesight, and she didn’t want to risk scaring them off. She held her breath. There. A round head and broad back appeared, rippling the dark water as it wriggled toward the bank.
It crawled out of the river.
Minh could barely make sense of what she was seeing. Long limbs. Supple skin, lighter in the middle of the body, darker at the ends. An unknown species, but how could that be? The size of a human.
It was human.
-20-
THE OCTOPUS-WOMAN LUNGED TOWARD him, reaching with two legs. Shulgi stepped back into a defensive posture, but it didn’t attack. Its body slammed against the inside of the egg, its flesh meeting the wall with a muffled thunk. An object whooshed behind Shulgi’s head. He lunged sideways.
Silver stones circled his head—five, now six. They moved in unison, whirling, dipping like dancers, as if they were puppets dangling from threads in the hands of an invisible performer. The monster’s allies were trying to distract him.
He ignored them and tried to lift the egg. It wasn’t heavy, just awkward. He’d need the help of his soldiers to flip it.
* * *
Minh scrambled backward as two more people climbed up the bank. Her legs tangled and she fell, hard. Then she got control of her legs and ran. Proximity alarms blasted. Fabian emerged from the tent and raced toward the Peach. Kiki and Hamid were already inside, waiting in the open hatch.
“Get in, what are you waiting for?” Minh screamed at Fabian.
Kiki hauled him up by the elbows. Minh launched herself at the hatch and dragged herself inside.
“Go go go go go go go,” she yelled.
Hamid slammed the hatch. Fabian hit the launch workflow. Kiki fired the feeds onto the bulkhead.
The overhead satellite showed six people running toward them. They were naked and dripping wet, but with weapons in their hands, they were soldiers now. Two carried pairs of heavy-hafted lances with huge blades the shape of olive leaves. Two had bows and heavy bundles of arrows with bulky projectile tips. One brandished a net weighted with spikes.
The sixth—the one with the round head and broad back who’d crawled out of the mud like a primordial creature—he carried two weapons. A gleaming sword, the vicious blade kinked and curved like a scythe, and a flail, a drooping leather bouquet with flowers made of metal thorns.
Minh crouched over her seat, clutching the headrest and staring at the feeds. She’d seen no metal in the river. The sonar would have picked it up.
“Where did they get those weapons?” she said.
“Buried,” said Fabian.
He copied the satellite feed, ran it back, and zoomed in. The tilt shift distorted the perspective: Minh in the background warped out of true, stumbling and falling, splayed on the ground. She struggled to stand, then fell again in a tangle of legs as five men dug in the sand at the edge of the bank. The sixth stood over them, shoulders square, bald head high, watching down his long nose as she tur
ned and ran.
“That’s Shulgi,” said Kiki. “I recognize his face.”
One of Shulgi’s men put the sword in his hand, the flail in the other, like a medical tech handing instruments to a surgeon. Shulgi leapt up the bank and sprinted after her.
Minh’s stomach flipped and she killed the feed. Didn’t want to see how close he’d gotten to catching her. But she was safe in the Peach now, safe from six naked soldiers with Bronze Age weapons. Safe. And leaving.
Shulgi barked an order. A soldier swung his net overhead twice and released it. The weight of the spikes stretched the web tight as it flew through the air. It clattered on the fuselage. On the feed, the noise of forged bronze hitting the skip sounded like chattering birds, but the noise didn’t penetrate inside the Peach.
“Where’s the upskip, already?” Minh said. “Can we leave?”
“Minh,” said Hamid calmly, “you have to fasten your harness.”
She was still kneeling backward on her seat. She pulled herself around and clipped her harness, spine rigid with stress.
The two archers stood shoulder to shoulder, bows pointed down, hands loose. When the Peach lifted off, they raised their weapons in unison and let fly two thick-headed arrows. A dull thud resounded through the cabin.
“Lucky shot,” said Fabian. “But we’re out of range now.”
“Did they even hit us?” Kiki asked. “At most they glanced off.”
Fabian didn’t answer. The upskip accelerated, momentum building smoothly, but at five hundred meters, the cabin shuddered and the fuselage groaned. Minh’s harness vibrated. As the Peach spiraled out of control, overhead safety canisters blasted foam into the cabin. The last thing Minh heard before the foam covered her ears was Kiki’s voice.
“They didn’t hit us. They didn’t—”
Immobilized, blinded, deafened, Minh’s biom flooded her with hemostatics, anti-inflammatories, anti-spasmodics. Time stretched. When they crashed, she was mummified in foam, doped up, barely conscious. The concussion reverberated through the Peach’s skin. Minh felt it rip through the flesh-and-blood legs she’d left behind with her childhood. That flesh knew how it felt when the world tore apart. They remembered what apocalypse felt like.