If the enemy does leave, what message will I then send home to Divornia?
* * *
Hearts thudding! Danger! Fear!
More inputs rejoined the emotional track of the lifestream. Watcher heard labored breathing. It glimpsed wall, ceiling, door, ceiling, wall … as eyes darted frenetically.
A nightmare, then. Vicariously, at least, Watcher understood dreaming. But the source of this nightmare was too deep within M’lok’s mind for even the lifestream interface to have captured.
“Nothing can stop them,” the commander whispered. To herself? “Nothing less than—”
And then the audio track cut out, leaving only still-jerky images, the impression of racing hearts, and a fleeting sense/memory/concept of … something.
No, of everything. The vital clue Watcher had long sought. Because the commander had entrusted it, created it, to take decisive action.
And at long last, Watcher knew what the commander intended it to do.
Chapter 37
Marcus guided the bulldozer through the lunar night to the newly revealed second lava-tube entrance. Yevgeny and Ekatrina perched on the back, hopping off to walk alongside whenever their ride got too bumpy. To satellites passing overhead, this excursion would look like they were opening a new mine shaft.
Not even a spysat would spot the holsters at their hips.
Trying not to overdrive his headlamps, Marcus clenched the steering wheel for the entire distance. Inside the lava tube—absent even the modest contribution of crescent Earthlight, and with the dozer’s headlamp output greedily absorbed by black rock—directing the big machine was yet more white-knuckly. At least, inside suit and gloves, his knuckles felt white.
But dozing through the rubble? Clearing a path to the alien ship beyond? It was therapeutic. And crushing a seemingly inert alien bot with his bulldozer blade? That was cathartic.
He managed a three-point turn, facing the dozer toward the nearby entrance, and switched off the motor. They walked in single file through the breach he had made, each toting a portable spotlight and a satchel of fuel cells and other gear. Ekatrina aimed her spotlight at the airlock and began hot-wiring its controls. The men held back, Marcus studying the streamlined vessel.
Eventually, Marcus said, “Doesn’t look a day over an eon.”
The outer hatch opened, and Yevgeny made an exaggerated, after-you, arm gesture. “Shall we go in for a look?”
“Not yet. Ekatrina, I’ll ask that you also wait outside, please.” Ignoring her puzzled expression and Yevgeny’s scowl, Marcus began an unhurried external reconnoiter. Astern of the ship, he paused. “Donna, testing one, two, three. Testing. Donna, do you copy?”
No response. Not even static.
Marcus resumed his shuffle around the vessel. Incongruously—and in a bit of free association he planned never to share—its grand convexity brought Val to his mind. Not that she would be particularly big yet. She had four months till her due date. She had not even known she was expecting, much less shown, when he had last returned to the Moon. He had missed so much! Simon, meanwhile, would return home within two weeks, starting a new school year. He would miss that, too.
Yevgeny cleared his throat.
“Right,” Marcus said. “Here’s the thing. From inside, our radios don’t penetrate out from the base. That’s why we had to string cable to antennae on the surface. As I expected, and just confirmed, neither does radio penetrate into the base from this end of the lava tube.”
“So?” Ekatrina asked.
“Suppose your suspicion was right. Suppose powering up the bridge console did lead to the bots attacking us en masse. Then the ship somehow reached inside the base to contact the bots there. But if it couldn’t make contact by radio ….
“I wonder.” Marcus crouched beside a landing leg, focusing his headlamps on the uneven film of regolith that had settled over the landing foot. He brushed away grit and dust to reveal a short plug jacked into the foot and, emerging from that plug, a coil of slack, slender cable. “This has to be for comm. Fiber optic, I’d guess. Even if not, no way could this skinny little cable carry meaningful power.”
“And if only briefly, I gave the ship power,” Ekatrina murmured. “Sorry.”
Detaching the plug, gripping the coil, Marcus gave a gentle tug. Cable lifted from the tunnel floor, shedding more age-old dust. Winding cable as he went, proceeding deeper into the tunnel, he continued until cable vanished under the rubble from a second, more extensive, roof collapse. He dropped the gathered cable and returned to the ship.
But only after minutes more of careful inspection of the hull and its appendages, with no further possible comm links discovered, did Marcus offer, “Now you can give me the grand tour.”
* * *
Ship awakened.
Cautiously, it reactivated some internal sensors. Two occupants were present whose infrared silhouettes it recognized from its most recent awakening, plus a third it did not know. Its reserves of all kinds remained depleted, and the three wore protective attire.
Before awareness’s last fading, Ship had attempted to repair over its umbilical the nearby servant mind. Ship reached out again. Nothing. Even the physical connection it had used seemed to be gone. On radio frequencies, there was only indecipherable chatter among the visitors.
Perhaps, it speculated, Watcher had been damaged beyond repair. Perhaps the umbilical had been disconnected to protect it from that damaged mind. While Ship’s power reserves continued to recharge, the occupants made their inspection, and a full suite of diagnostics continued to run, it enabled a few of its external sensors. Clearing of the rubble had begun. It would soon be free!
Without knowing how long it had been trapped within this tunnel, Ship intuited: too long.
The masters—for who else could these be?—would expect a status update. Thoroughly grateful for the continuing recharge, Ship took the initiative and synthesized a report. And when the lone master then on the bridge did not respond to its textual inquiries, Ship found another way to demonstrate its resourcefulness.
* * *
Side by side, Marcus and Yevgeny examined a massive apparatus. Merely from the equipment’s position—in the engine room, along the vessel’s centerline—Marcus would have guessed this was the main drive. Ilya, on the basis of vids from Yevgeny’s prior visit, had surmised the same. And at least superficially, the drive appeared intact. With a handheld, ultrahigh-res camera, Yevgeny began taking close-ups.
“Guys!” Ekatrina hollered. “Get up here! And bring the good camera.”
They raced forward. Familiar, if enigmatic, squashed-spider text spilled across the console shelf. Vid streamed in the large holo projected above the console: a star field rushing past. A fuzzy half disk that might be Venus at a distance. The farside of the Moon. And then, rapidly spinning—
“Earth,” Marcus whispered. As he marveled, Yevgeny began to record.
Without question, this was Earth—and yet a world no human had ever known. South America and Africa had barely separated. North America, Greenland, and Eurasia weren’t separate. “Asia” Minor abutted Africa, not Asia. Significant land masses to which Marcus could not put a name sat between Africa and Australia, while Australia lay freakily close to Antarctica. The colors were off, too, most notably in oceans lacking any suggestion of blue. Alien cameras, color-balanced for alien eyes evolved under an alien sun, Marcus interpreted.
And these tantalizing glimpses vanished, too, replaced by close-ups of dark lava-tube walls. This ship maneuvering into its final resting place? And then the holo blinked off.
“When was that?” asked Ekatrina.
“Ages ago,” Yevgeny said. “Beyond that, I have no idea. I expect Nikolay would have known.”
Millions of years ago? No, Marcus thought, at least tens of millions. And on the flimsy basis of eroded antenna fragments, and plutonium tu
rned to lead inside alien RTGs, they had already known as much. But to see Earth so different? That made the chasm of time … real.
Marcus said, “I have to believe there are simulations, if not actual measurements, of continental drift over time. Someone Dirtside will know when this was.”
* * *
And someone Dirtside did. Depending on which geological reconstruction one favored, the Earth images in the alien ship were from between sixty and seventy million years earlier.
Chapter 38
Watcher … watched. As the intruders sealed away its mobile agents. Probed, measured, and analyzed its facility. Poked and prodded at display consoles—which it kept inoperative, in a maintenance loop—in the departed masters’ onetime control room. Departed on and returned from their aboveground errands, often beyond view of its restored external sensors. And it watched for any indication, however trivial, that they suspected what awaited them.
When the time had passed for them to avert disaster, when all five known intruders were nearby to appreciate the approaching doom, it activated the commander’s display console.
Let Divornia’s enemies relive with it the final times of M’lok Din.
* * *
An early-morning roll in the hay. An early-morning cuddle. Slipping out of bed, leaving Val to murmur in her sleep and burrow deeper, in her adorable way, beneath the covers. Separating Simon from his datasheet and some FPS game, for a bit of one-on-one time and to whip up pancake batter. Val, still rubbing sleep from her eyes, in mules and her favorite ratty robe, shuffling into the kitchen.
Marcus drowsed in the half-remembered dream—until a bellowing voice, guttural and utterly inhuman, jolted him awake. Alien ceiling panels, never before lit, all blazed.
Flinging off his blanket, Marcus ran into the hallway, almost colliding with Donna and Ekatrina, barely registering Yevgeny as he rounded the corner into the main corridor. Ceiling panels everywhere had switched on. Ilya was on watch duty, and Marcus could just make out, under the alien roar, the big Russian’s shouting. “Everyone! Control room! Now, people. Move!”
This did not sound like a renewed robot attack. No gunfire, certainly. Then what?
Marcus dashed back to his bedside and grabbed a datasheet. By maybe two paces, he was the last person to reach the control room. The alien bellow dropped to a more tolerable level as he entered. (Was that timing a coincidence? Or did something watch and count them? He shivered.) Even with the five of them, the room was not crowded. On the room’s main wall display, an image—of a pterosaur! Caught swooping down upon a small town!—slowly faded.
With a start, Marcus set his datasheet recording.
They gaped, dumbstruck, at the holo projecting from the central display: stills and snippets, jumping from place to place, fragmented. But despite the frenetic, kaleidoscopic shifts, it was like seeing the world through another’s eyes.
* * *
Watcher, likewise absorbed in these final scraps and oddments of the lifestream, began experiencing ever more frequent flashes of déjà vu. In a rush, it understood! Memories it had considered lost had often been, instead, repressed. And events it still could not remember, it found itself inferring, interpolating, and imagining.
And so, as the life of M’lok Din neared its conclusion, very different observers, in very different ways, shared an anxious anticipation ….
* * *
The T-Rex burst through a wall of lush jungle foliage. Spurts of dust or blood or something, and darting red laser beams, suggested it was under fire. If so, the big carnivore was indifferent to the weaponry. Its enormous jaws gaped wide open in—had there at this moment been a soundtrack—a tremendous roar.
“Holy shit,” someone marveled. Marcus needed a moment to realize that someone was himself.
The T-Rex disappeared from the holo, replaced by a pack of … velociraptors? (Pretty much everything that Marcus maybe knew about dinosaurs he had absorbed from old Jurassic Park movies and their reboots. Or snarky sniping at them: evidently T-Rex and velociraptors were more “modern” than the Jurassic. Cretaceous, was it? Anyway, whichever was the period of the most advanced dinosaurs, and their eventual demise.) There was too little time to consider this new scene, either, and the prone figures firing at the converging dinosaurs, before the vid again changed. Now vaguely crocodilian beasts scuttled up a pebble beach. Gore, both green and terrestrial red, splotched sand and stones. Laser beams came from snipers unseen behind a zigzag stockade. Strafing fire marched up the beach, from the winged craft circling overhead. Then the scene jumped to a pterosaur swarm, and contrails of air-to-air missiles ….
“Why show us this?” Ilya demanded.
Marcus shrugged, and continued watching ….
* * *
“I am sorry I doubted you,” L’toth says.
We stand side by side, at the bottom of a narrow ravine that opens toward the nearby planet. Sunlight glints off the nearly vertical rock wall covered in photovoltaic panels, sparkles above the rim off spindly radio antennae. The shorter antenna links our clandestine instrument cluster with our underground base. And the longer-range antenna? I had done what I thought necessary. Just in case. Directive 1.3.
Hurriedly, we calibrate and realign our newly expanded optical array, frantic for a closer examination of the world overhead. From here, that globe tantalizes. But up close?
“No need to apologize,” I say.
If any apology is owed, it is from me, for my lies, however well-intentioned. That the Fergash might find this world too difficult to colonize? It had been only a theoretical possibility, a prospect I dangled to sustain everyone’s spirits. Because as long as we kept up our morale, as long as we eavesdropped and observed, we might learn something useful. And thus, again and again—never believing it—I had predicted the eventual failure of the Fergash colony.
But there is no denying what the enemy’s compromised surveillance system reveals to us. The lethal attacks by the planet’s monsters, both on the Fergash island redoubt and on forays elsewhere. Or the increasing tempo of shuttle flights from that island to the mother ship in synchronous orbit. Or the files of Fergash evacuating, boarding those shuttles.
“No need to apologize,” I repeat.
“Our people will not be scared off by a few oversized lizards,” L’toth says. “We will succeed.”
I forgive my beloved his naïve optimism. He never confronted a Fergash face to face, or experienced their tenacity in battle, or watched them endure torture, often to the death, without surrendering their secrets. Are we as tough even as that?
“I know,” I tell him. Another lie?
Once the Fergash have gone, once it is safe for us to build an interstellar transmitter, should I recommend that a colony fleet be sent? Are we tough enough to wrest a world from the fangs and talons of such monsters?
I wish I knew.
* * *
Marcus took a deep breath as the holographic stream turned to the apparent evacuation of the alien settlement. “Is this why we found a base on the Moon? The aliens’ first attempt at settling on Earth failed, and they left behind a lunar observation post while they considered their options?”
Donna shook her head. “I don’t believe it’s that simple. Take a good look at the figures boarding the shuttles. The proportions, front limbs compared to back limbs, and all limbs compared to the central body mass, strike me as very different from Goliath’s. At this viewing angle, from this distance, with everything streaming on fast-forward, I can’t be certain, but my sense is that these new guys are quadrupeds. Sort of tailless alligators.”
Ilya blinked. “Meaning the two factions we suspected, with their different robots, made of different isotopes, were from two different species?”
Ekatrina, inexplicably, grabbed a pair of alien goggles from a console shelf. Far too large even for Ilya, on her they were like clown glasses. “Wearing these, t
he blue sky in the holo turns green. The green of the foliage seems more yellow. This tells me Donna is correct about different aliens.”
“How so?” Marcus asked as another shuttle zoomed off. In the distance, indistinct, a line of aliens and … baggage? Refugees.
Ekatrina passed the goggles to Donna for a look. “The images of ancient Earth we saw aboard the alien ship? Remember the all-green oceans? Our aliens did not see blue. That color balance—to our eyes, the color imbalance—was like the optical sensors in the starfish robots. And like the goggles I just tried on.
“Now consider this ground-based imagery. Without the goggles, the blue of the sky and the green of plants seems natural to me. Our aliens used goggles to shift the video from Earth into their visible spectrum.”
Yevgeny stepped up to the holo. “Our viewpoint is from a shallow angle. Post-mounted security cameras, I would guess. Same with many of the dinosaur scenes, those not recorded with personal cameras. None of this imagery was captured from the Moon. The viewing angles and the high resolution are completely wrong for what we’ve seen. And yet our aliens had access to the video.”
“Our aliens. The other aliens. We need better names,” Ilya muttered. “Moonies and Earthies?”
“We are Earthies,” Yevgeny snapped back.
“Orange-sun aliens and, apparently yellow-sun aliens,” Marcus mused. “Oranges and Yellows. How does that work?”
“Why not Oranges and Bananas?” Ekatrina muttered. “Stupid.”
“Goliath and Paul Bunyan were giants,” Donna said. “That’s why we picked those names in the first place. So, maybe, their bunch are … Titans? And by extension, their rivals would be the Olympians.”
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