Beneath the Gated Sky

by Robert Reed

  “Then how about this? The earth and moon share tens of thousands of intrusions. The agency hasn’t found any yet, but that’s not surprising. The universe is a baffling maze. And why would you want to find such a thing? Because if you can identify just one intrusion that’s in easy reach, and it reaches to an inhabited part of the moon, then a person doesn’t need an expensive spaceship. Just step through the intrusion, neat and quick. Step through and your soul is transported, and a new body is built around it. But instead of being jarrtee or some other alien, you become human. Again. Because there is exactly one sentient organism living today on the moon, and it’s human. And since your human soul has very clear expectations, you actually become the same person that you are at home.”

  She paused, smiling beneath her mask.

  “A neat little trick. Do you agree?”

  Latrobe responded by glancing at Trinidad.

  Before he could ask his question, her cousin said, “As far as it goes, she’s telling the truth.”

  Latrobe turned back to Porsche, admitting, “I’m tired. I don’t understand. Going from the earth to the moon might have uses. But how do we get the solar system out of this?”

  “Send a team of humans and robots to Mars. A few humans and a lot of robots.” She gestured, promising him, “Your country can easily manage that trick. Set down at a known intrusion that leads to the earth, then guide the robots as they build a city out of the native rock and ores. Teaching an intrusion about a local species is easy. I can tell you how to do it. When the Martian city is finished, your pioneers can step through and claim their apartments and houses. No long voyages in fancy ships required.”

  The audience wasn’t an idiot. For a long while, Latrobe said nothing, obviously wrestling with the possibilities.

  “The same trick works on asteroids,” promised Porsche. “On the moons of Jupiter. Even with the gas giants themselves.”

  “Nonetheless,” sang Trinidad, “it’s difficult, difficult work.”

  Latrobe waved at both of them with his good arm, then demanded to know, “What happened to the Few’s taboo about giving away technology?”

  “This isn’t new technology,” she pointed out. “You know how to use the intrusions. And I guarantee you, the theory isn’t going to surprise your scientists. Their problem has been that they don’t have enough experience with intrusions. They don’t know the geometry of things. But with help, we can revolutionize space travel in one little hour.”

  “The Few can,” said Latrobe. “Or is it just you?”

  “It’s just me. For now, this is my offer, although I’m sure I’ll get help.”

  “And the price?”

  She was ready. “Release the jarrtees. Retreat off this world immediately. And give me my cousin as a token of gratitude.”

  Latrobe was staring at her, saying nothing.

  She could guess the flow of his thoughts, then his next essential question.

  Turning toward her cousin, he asked, “Is any of this bullshit? Is it?”

  Trinidad shook his head, replying, “We’ve both seen solar systems that are tied together this way. It’s not uncommon, no.”

  Which led Latrobe to the next obvious question:

  “Why didn’t you offer this before?”

  In an instant, without hesitation, Trinidad assured him, “First of all, it’s small slow potatoes that she’s giving you. And secondly, I told Farrah about using local, short-distance intrusions, and the troubles involved, and we decided to wait until after this mission to discuss terms.”

  Was he lying? Porsche guessed that he was lying, and Latrobe was smart enough to see the possibilities.

  “But you can give all of this to us, too?” asked Latrobe.

  “Gladly. Easily.”

  “Because if you don’t…” the man began.

  “No,” said Trinidad, one hand rising, and the index finger pointing skyward. “Threats don’t impress me.”

  Latrobe took another half-moment to make his decision, then said, “All right. We continue as we planned it. Nothing changes.”

  To Alvarez, he said, “Take our guest back into custody, please.”

  With a rip-gun brushing against the back of her head, Porsche remained motionless, trying to keep a loose hold on her fear.

  Trinidad seemed to float up to her, examining her insides with a Few-made sensor. The same tool signaled to her internal devices, deactivating each of them in turn; then a smiling, genuinely carefree voice said, “Nice try, Po-lee-een.”

  I know all about you, Porsche was thinking.

  But she didn’t say a word, except to whisper, “Your father wanted me to deliver a message: He says that he’s running out of patience with you.”

  Trinidad didn’t react.

  She could see him not reacting, holding himself motionless. Then the same smiling voice said, “Nice try. Again.”

  4

  Porsche sat in the battered little car, one hand cuffed to her seat, accompanied by a silent, pensive Alvarez, both watching helplessly as the enemy approached.

  What began as pools of ink huddling beneath the burly leaves of a dusk-demon plant gradually grew into a linked body of seamless black. When the sun began to plunge behind the mountains, tendrils of blackness reached out, probing the wet gray light for weakness and a failure of will. When the storm clouds collided with the mountain ridge, the light fell to a thin late-dusk glow, and the enemy was emboldened, lifting itself off the ground, filling the drenched woods and lapping against the car itself. Porsche could almost feel it beneath the floor, a little cool and extraordinarily impatient, and with a voice that spoke to glands and hormones, she heard it say:

  “Night. I am. Night. It is.”

  The jarrtees were sure to come now, and Latrobe’s vaunted relief troops, coming all the way from New Mexico, were obviously late.

  Corrosive worries ate at Porsche. She worried about her family. Were they still estivating safely at the base camp, innocent of the danger? And what about Cornell? She imagined him sitting beside her, and with a secret voice, she told him nothing of importance. Pure small talk; that’s what she hungered for. Then she found herself thinking of Uncle Ka-ceen, and she felt something that wasn’t exactly worry but was closer to pity, sickly sweet one moment, wrenchingly painful the next.

  Where was Trinidad?

  Looking out at the gathering night, she called his name.

  Twice, she called for him. Her tone was angry and insistent; the soldier beside her pretended not to hear. Then as she opened her mouth again, there came a sudden clean roar that she didn’t hear so much as she felt in her bones. A roar, then a crack. Then, a misleading silence. The silence lasted an instant, if that. A peacefulness held sway over the world. The night-girdled forest looked calm and confidently expectant, and then, with absolutely no warning, a piercing light came from everywhere, slaughtering the blackness, chasing the last tattered relics of night into the crannies and the soil and into bodies of men.

  Like an enormous hand, the explosion flowed down the mountainside, uprooting trees and consuming the leaves and branches left exposed.

  The concussion drove the little car backward. Suddenly its windows were pitch-black, trying to choke off the light, and Porsche’s mask did the same, leaving her blinded by too much brilliance, and then, by none.

  A second blast was more distant, and if anything, louder.

  She could barely hear the wrenching squeak of a door opening. A familiar voice said, “In,” and a second voice said, “In.” Two men had climbed into the front seats, and while they secured their door, the rear door opened wide, allowing two more voices to say, “In,” and, “In.” Then the last voice screamed, “Go! Punch it!”

  Latrobe was laughing giddily as he said, “Go.”

  Blinking her wide eyes, Porsche fought to retrieve her vision. Blurred figures emerged from the fuzz, sitting beside her—Alvarez, still—and in front of her, and behind, and she turned just enough to see Trinidad, just enough t
o make certain that he would notice when she ignored him.

  “Go!” Latrobe roared once more.

  The drivers, in a chorus, screamed, “We’re trying!”

  The forest in front of them was burning, the soggy wood exploding into smoke and sloppy flames. For an instant, Porsche assumed that it was the City, that it had grown bored of waiting and had finally attacked. But Latrobe just kept laughing, the moment relentlessly funny, one of his big hands eventually patting her on the shoulder, something very fond and horrible about his touch.

  “Our cavalry is here,” he told her.

  Then, speaking to everyone:

  “We’re almost home.”

  The blast had pushed over the timber in the same direction, mostly. The float car was leading the convoy, driving at an astonishing pace, using smoke for cover and the smoldering tree trunks as a kind of roadway. There was the steady angry sound of gunfire. Explosives detonated in the distance, then, nearby. Latrobe spoke to the heavy vehicles behind them, and after the close booms, he turned to Trinidad, snapping, “I thought they couldn’t see us. You said!”

  “Lucky shots,” her cousin replied, his voice tight and a little slow. “Just a few lucky shots.”

  They reached the epicenter of the first blast, charred stumps sticking up out of the ashes, slowing their progress for a moment.

  Using his eavesdroppers, Trinidad found the most perfect course, then shouted crisp instructions up at the drivers.

  The drivers obeyed.

  Watching the two men, Porsche saw none of the old jauntiness. Even with the help of the onboard AI, they were at the brink of their talent. The car was bouncing off burning logs, embers scattered by the force field, flaring up like bombs. The cabin temperature had passed scalding, stressing even a jarrtee’s love of heat. The drivers were hunched forward. They were utterly silent. Every gram of their courage had been spent, nothing left now but a nervous, lizard-simple management of a thousand impossible jobs at once.

  Porsche tested her cuffs.

  Just for a moment, on the sly.

  Then she almost looked at Alvarez, his attentions fused on the mayhem directly ahead of them.

  The gunfire fell away to a distant, forgettable sound.

  “See?” sang Trinidad. “Everything’s fine.”

  They were climbing the long battered slope of a mountain, passing from one blast zone to the next. And the ground responded by growing steeper, the uprooted trees sometimes sliding loose in the muddy goo, one great old twanya tree falling past them, missing them by what seemed like, in that compression of time and emotion, the width of a hand.

  “Reach the crest, and we’re safe,” Latrobe promised, his voice small. Almost vulnerable. “We’ve got several hundred friends waiting up there.”

  Porsche didn’t allow herself to speak, or think.

  Without warning, they emerged from the firestorm, the ground suddenly flat and the air brilliant. A ragged hole in the clouds exposed the sun. They seemed to be driving straight into the clean gold brilliance. Porsche squinted, stared. Two orblike shapes flanked the sun, mimicking its brilliance, and too late, she realized they were jarrtee airships waiting for this moment, half a dozen tiny missiles launched from each, each aimed at the minuscule command car.

  Surgical doses of laser light evaporated the missiles.

  A fusillade of light and explosives rose from the forest to the west, gutting the airships in the same instant, vacuum chambers imploding and the sparkling remnants of the aerogel armor falling, turning in the wind.

  Latrobe shouted instructions, encouragements.

  Trinidad was talking to eavesdroppers and other helpers, begging for every possible favor.

  The forest was straight ahead, a wall of half-downed trees forcing them to turn and move parallel to the tangled mess, searching for any gap. Porsche glanced over her shoulder. The convoy stretched out behind them, each heavy truck making the same turn, following, gouts of earth and splintered wood proving that someone with a rip-gun was close enough to just miss.

  A jarring turn, left.

  Suddenly they were among trees, and an instant later, they were half-flying, the sinking sensation of a carnival ride lifting stomachs, hearts.

  “Another two miles,” Latrobe reported. To whom? “Go, go!” But their car didn’t need urging. Skating on its force field, following the track of a recent mudflow, it was instantly moving too fast for jarrtee eyes to focus on anything. Darkness made them lift their masks. A blurring tunnel, black and oiled, sucked them down and down, and the pitch of the slope only grew steeper, the mudflow suddenly covered with a brown torrent of rainwater.

  Finally, Latrobe said, “Slow.”

  But not too much. Porsche thought. Hoped.

  The heavy trucks hurtled after them, braking in turn, geysers of filthy goo taking away their momentum.

  Porsche turned to watch, feeling the pressure of the cuffs and mostly ignoring the armored truck that roared up to within inches of their ass.

  She was watching her cousin, taking his measure.

  Having no way of knowing if this was close to the right place—Trinidad had stolen her skills—she acted out of simple hope. This was a logical route, hope cried. And buoyed up by nothing more, she called to him. Twice. Loud, then louder. And when Trinidad didn’t respond, she simply said it.

  “I know all about you,” she promised.

  Nothing.

  “What you are!” Porsche cried out. “I know.”

  The face turned toward her, the mouth opening, hesitating.

  “There are the Few, and what?” she asked. Then again, she said, “Trinidad,” before asking, “What exactly do you call yourselves?”

  The eyes were incurious. Composed.

  “The Others. That’s what the old Abyssian called you,” she was saying, excitement and fatigue making her mouth dry and clumsy.

  Trinidad interrupted her, simply saying, “No.”

  What did no mean?

  “We aren’t the Others,” he said with a soft gray tone. “You are.”

  Porsche felt herself falling emotionally, the magnitude of that single word—we—at once chilling and galvanizing her. I was right…it’s real…I was right!

  Latrobe spoke next, asking, “What are you chatting about?”

  Granite statues were more animated than Trinidad. He was locked in place, incapable of uttering the simplest sound, his mind racing as he tried to deal with this crashing news.

  Porsche aimed to cripple her opponent, with a single blow.

  “Did you think we didn’t know?” she cackled. “Is that what you thought?”

  He didn’t know what to believe, said his posture. His silence.

  “You know what I’ve wanted to tell you?” she continued. “For so long…do you know what it is?”

  A little voice managed to squeak, “What?”

  “Cousin,” she announced, “you are an arrogant, selfish shit!”

  The arrogant shit suddenly sat forward, and after an instant of confusion, he screamed out, “Slow down! Now!”

  In a single motion, the drivers looked back over their shoulders.

  “Ahead,” Trinidad warned. “Something’s…ahead!”

  Neither reacted.

  It took Latrobe to say, “Do it,” before they reluctantly braked.

  A near-river was beneath the car, flattening where the mountainside became a sudden valley. They had passed into the next mountain’s shadow, back in the embrace of night, and a familiar shape was standing in plain view, standing on their right, his body naked, his white flesh blackened by mud, hands filled with tools. But what Porsche saw was the thick stick that had been shoved into her uncle’s birth-pouch, with obvious pain, the gesture carrying a powerful message recognized instantly by any jarrtee:

  I regret the child whom I bore.

  Beyond, drowned and uprooted timber created twin islands. There was exactly one way through, and the drivers steered for the gap, accelerating out of instinct, reasonabl
y sensing an ambush waiting for them.

  Again, Trinidad shouted for them to slow down.

  Latrobe didn’t echo the order. He was too busy or too uncertain about what was real, gazing at the strange apparition as they passed, the jarrtee face trying to twist itself into a human expression.

  Only when they were between the islands, at the end, did the drivers realize that there was a trap here. Two men with a float car could have built it from the scattered debris. In minutes, with luck.

  The trap itself lay beneath the water.

  Uncle Ka-ceen had searched for the perfect intrusion, then with Cornell’s help, he had anchored one of the diamond statues—a jarrtee hero—on top of it.

  Six people were riding on a churning river, and the next moment, Jarrtee vanished, and they were screaming straight into the heart of a different maelstrom, black and vast, sucking them into its wild maw.

  The habit of momentum continues inside intrusions.

  There was no time to turn and retreat. In an instant, they reached that cleansing point where machinery evaporates, and weapons, and clothes as well as a set of jarrtee wristcuffs. Naked bodies spun wildly through the non-air. A twisting heat warned the flesh that it was dissolving. Porsche flailed with her arms, killing her spin, then reached out with the ghosts of her hands, trying to grapple with her defenseless cousin.

  She meant to kick him, remorselessly kick him, until her feet turned to something else, and then she would make him suffer all the worse.

  Nothing else mattered.

  But Trinidad managed to grab hold of Alvarez, using him as a shield, then shoving the big man straight at her.

  The collision was jarring, numbing.

  An instant later, their limbs turned to tendrils, hundreds of them, and their bodies became masses of living, glowing goo, and the non-air thickened and cooled until it was water, a chill clean black ocean engulfing their newborn selves.

  What they were was nothing like jarrtees, or humans.

  Alvarez was unprepared, in total shock. With a language built of soft light, he made plaintive calls for strength, and please, god, for mercy.

  Porsche ignored Trinidad. For the moment.