Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “No,” Britt said. “Jesse’s right. Maddox is by the book, but she’s a human being, too. And she’s scared. That’s what we got from that dinner, just how scared she is. Maybe she was hedging her bet without the government’s approval.”

  “Then your sign isn’t as good,” Shane said to Killius. “Maybe we’ve come up against good old-fashioned stupidity.”

  Killius shook her head. “Nope. I hold to my opinion. The fact that they’re hiding information like this means someone thinks we can win this thing. And if that’s the case, that means someone above us is optimistic. I see that as good news.”

  “If that’s what you need,” Shane said. “But I’ve been in this too long. I have the hunch it’s just a case of business as usual.” “We haven’t been doing business as usual on anything else,” Cross said, “even to the extent of sharing information about military equipment. I can’t believe we’d do it here. I vote with Jesse. I see something good in all of this.”

  Shane’s eyes twinkled. “Well, if far-seeing Dr. Cross believes that we’ll survive, that’s good enough for me.”

  Cross grinned. “Sometimes, Shane, I wonder how you made it this far in this business.”

  “Usually,” Shane said, “I keep my mouth shut and my head low. I have no idea what was wrong with me today.”

  “Too many donut holes,” Britt said, grabbing the last one. “And me, I’ve got to get to work.”

  The others agreed, and followed Britt out of the room. Cross lingered for a moment and stared at the now-blank screen. Optimism. Hope. No one was using those words. Maybe Conrad was right. Maybe the fear came from the sudden, new knowledge that not only were humans not alone in the universe, but that the new race was so superior it’d been kicking our ass for generations.

  When you got down to the survival level, people became completely unpredictable.

  Even he had. He hadn’t said a word about Portia’s idea to create new nanomachines, machines that would attack the nanoharvesters. Because he didn’t believe in the plan? Or because he was protecting Portia? Or because he wanted to hide information from Maddox?

  He liked to think it was none of the above. If he were rationalizing, he would say it was because he hadn’t decided it was worth pursuing.

  But somewhere, in that long and tense meeting, he had decided. He was going to tell Portia to go ahead with the new plan. If he could trust Maddox—and he wasn’t sure he could— then the military was working on the same path as NanTech. If that was the case, then Portia was free to work on the new nanomachines.

  He wished he could find out for certain, but he would lose too much time trying to crack the military’s secrecy policies.

  Survival took risks. Calculated risks, but risks to be sure. Portia wanted to deal with human technology. She felt more comfortable with it. And he knew that a scientist working in a realm she felt comfortable in made more progress than a scientist who worked in an unfamiliar place.

  “You coming, Leo?” Britt asked from the door.

  “Yeah,” he said. He had a lot to do. And the first thing on his list was contacting Portia Groopman.

  May 25, 2018

  5:47 a.m. Central Daylight Time

  142 Days Until Second Harvest

  Vivian Hartlein leaned against a tree three blocks off Union Street in Memphis, watching. The morning air still had a damp chill, but she knew the summer heat would fall, thick and heavy, by noon. She hoped to be on her way north in that little truck she’d had Jake buy her. Forty-year-old Ford— rebuilt, of course—but not with none of them electronic parts. No tracers, no nothing. Simple, old-fashioned combustion engine, just like God intended.

  But she couldn’t leave yet, not without knowing that her plan was started right.

  From this morning on there’d be no turning back.

  This morning the government would start paying for the deaths of her family. And for all the other millions of people it had killed. And this time they wouldn’t be able to blame it on no aliens.

  The street in front of her was tree lined and landscaped. A full two blocks away stood the Internal Revenue Service. It was in a four-story older building, made of granite, looking gray and solid and mean.

  She studied the building one last time, taking in all the pictures of what it looked like. She wanted to remember every detail. The tall windows, the columns, the stairs leading in, the stone foyer beyond.

  She’d never been in the building. She never paid no taxes, and Dale didn’t neither. They got by. Government didn’t even seem to notice they wasn’t in the system. That was because they made sure they was as outside it as possible: no ID, no bank accounts, no active social security number. No way she’d give money to a corrupt and evil government. Especially now, now that they done killed her family.

  Even as she was planning this, she never went inside. Two blocks away was as close as she had ever gotten. But she’d seen the plans, helped in guiding those who was going to help her do right. She had convinced them all.

  Now she wanted to remember.

  This morning was only the beginning.

  She glanced at her watch as two cars, both sedans, moved down the street toward her. She pretended to be looking the other way as they passed.

  There was less than two minutes left.

  Another car pulled up in front of the IRS building and stopped. Even from two blocks away she could see a man in the passenger seat and a woman driving. Two kids was strapped in safety seats in the back. Vivian remembered when she’d driven her daughter around like that. And how she’d never gotten the chance to drive her grandbabies anywhere.

  And she never would now. Thanks to the government and all their lies.

  The man kissed the woman in the car lightly, said something to the children, then opened the door. That was as far as he got, half in, half out of the car, his head turned to look at his children.

  The front of the IRS building blew outward directly at the car.

  Every window in the building exploded as a massive black cloud covered everything.

  Vivian stared, making sure she would remember.

  Even two blocks away the concussion of the blast knocked Vivian to one knee.

  The ground shook under her.

  Windows smashed in the buildings near her, raining glass on the streets and sidewalks.

  The rumbling, roaring sound smothered everything.

  She never took her gaze off where the government building had been.

  Slowly, she climbed to her feet. She’d expected a feeling of joy. Or maybe excitement.

  But she felt nothing.

  She stared down the street of destruction in front of her.

  The IRS building was gone, covered in a cloud of rolling smoke. Car and building sirens was screaming from all directions.

  The IRS employee’s car had been smashed into the wall of the building across the street and was burning. She couldn’t see the little family at all.

  She thought about the children and felt nothing. She had cried all her tears for her babies. Now, everyone else would know what she’d been through.

  War meant sacrifice. The Bible said an eye for an eye. A child for a child. Two grandchildren for her grandchildren. A daughter for her daughter. A father for Jake’s father.

  With one more look at the building, she turned away. Around her, people were running toward the destruction. But she walked quickly in the other direction.

  She’d planned other shots in this war, and she was going to make sure they were done right.

  7

  June 5, 2018

  10:22 Universal Time

  131 Days Until Second Harvest

  The command chamber inside the warship was large and round, a perfect circle. Cicoi stood at the entrance, his upper tentacles rising in astonishment as they had every time he had entered this chamber.

  The command positions, circles built onto the walls and extended so that the officers seem to float by ranks, had all been repaired. The Commander�
��s circle was in the middle on the only real floor. Before it were half a dozen round balls, all of which represented a different information feed about the third planet.

  A cone-shaped command center encircled the Commander’s position, with ten spots built into the board to rest upper tentacles during long battles. The entire design, using perfect shapes throughout, would relax a crew that had had a long space voyage or suffered a long tense battle.

  Cicoi didn’t want to think about the battles that had been waged from here. He knew enough of his people’s history to know that those battles had been waged against either the North or the Center. Once upon a time, his people battled themselves.

  Now they had a truce, built by circumstance and need. It was no longer as fragile as it had been when the Elders decided to save the planet, but there was still talk that if the survival situation ever eased, Malmur would separate itself into three distinct sections once more.

  Cicoi wasn’t here as Commander of the South. He was here as leader of the fleet. He had come to customize the command center for himself. This ship, the first warship to be fully repaired, would be the flagship for the new battle. His experience gained him the position of leader of the fleet. His youth had raised him above the other two contenders: the Commanders of the North and Center. The Elders believed that Cicoi had the reflexes, both mental and physical, to withstand a long battle. Since no one except the Elders had ever used this warship, true battle experience did not exist, and Cicoi had a hunch that the Elders were lying about the real reason they wanted him to lead.

  They did think him more physically able: that was true. But they also thought him more malleable than the others, more willing to do their bidding.

  And he was. Cicoi had always bowed to experience. He did not know the history of these ships well enough to know when the Elders had used them, but he knew from his Elder’s sharp commands, barked to Cicoi from inside his own brain, that the Elder had once commanded the flagship himself.

  Against whom or what Cicoi could not imagine—and was not even sure he wanted to.

  The rungs leading to the command circle were built into the wall, and Cicoi had fallen in love with them immediately. He could wrap a tentacle around one and hold himself in place, while placing another tentacle above to pull himself up, or another tentacle below to ease himself down. After only a few weeks, he had already become so accustomed to this design that he moved along it rapidly, sometimes choosing to hang from the rungs while he gave orders to his repair crews.

  They had looked at him with a mixture of fright and awe. The Elder had told him that the rungs had once been the latest design, the newest technology—the last new technology invented before the great move through the darkness of space— and there had been no time to implement it planetwide.

  Cicoi wished their sun still existed. He wished he had seen the light and the plant life, and the waters Malmur once had. He wished all the buildings he frequented had had rungs instead of glide paths that broke down, or ramps that strained the tentacles, or even the awkward steps that had been cut into rock and tangled tentacles into awful messes.

  The Elders had the wisdom of technology. Cicoi wished he had seen what other things their fertile brains could have created.

  Even though the Elders had saved all of their lives— indeed, made it possible for Cicoi to be hatched.

  And now, they made it possible for Cicoi to lead a fleet that would rescue his planet once again.

  Cicoi grabbed a rung with his tenth upper tentacle and pulled himself upward, working his tentacles as the Elder had taught him: tenth, ninth, eighth, and so on, until it became time to repeat. His lower tentacles did not mirror, but floated free.

  In space, the Elder warned him, gravity was sometimes lost on the warships—destroyed—or the energy from the gravity controls was moved to weapons or propulsion. The rungs made it possible for any command staff who were knocked loose or in the wrong place to return to their stations.

  The stations were also models of innovation. In the harvester vessels, the circles were marks on the floors, as they were in the buildings planetwide. In the warship, there were tentacle hooks in the circles as well, so no matter what happened to the ship, the staff could remain in place.

  Cicoi’s upper tentacles twitched with anticipation. He longed to get this vessel spaceward. He longed already for the fight.

  He glided across the floor and stood in the command circle. From this place, he could see all the other stations, above and below. Around him, if he needed it, the entire inside of the command chamber would become a viewer that would show him the vastness of space. He would see in three dimensions, pointing his eyestalks in all ten directions, including the lesser directions of above and below.

  The Elder had told Cicoi to practice this maneuver so that he would not become dizzy at crucial parts in the battle. Cicoi had promised he would, and he had also ordered his team to do the same.

  They would be ready. He would not underestimate the creatures of the third planet again.

  Cicoi straightened all his tentacles and streamlined his body. He slowly raised his eyestalks, as he would before the formal order to launch the ship, and he turned them in the proper ten directions, feeling that half moment of dizziness as stalks two and seven went above and below simultaneously. Then he extended his upper tentacles, resting them on the console in the designated areas. His lower tentacles wrapped the rungs inside his command circle.

  Never before had his body been fully utilized like this. He understood now why the Elder wanted him to practice.

  Cicoi examined, from his post, all areas of his command chamber. This was the first time he had ever been inside it alone. First he had come with his Elder, and the command chamber had been a mess of collapsed circles, shattered rungs, and dust. The Elder had been distressed by this, his tentacles wrapped around his body, all but one of his eyestalks protruding as if he couldn’t stand the sight of the destruction time had wrought.

  All the other visits Cicoi had made had been to check on the progress of his repair team, and to learn how to run this command chamber. As the Elder taught him the tricks of the command circle, repair workers floated around them, tentacles clinging to rungs, or stations, or suspending them above work areas.

  It had seemed like a pod-hive to him then, a child’s pod-hive, safe and full of countless bodies learning how to move tentacles without tangling them.

  Until now Cicoi had no idea this chamber was so vast. Or how much power it seemed to have in its glistening parts. It made him feel as if he could win anything, anything they faced, just by standing in this circle at this time.

  And that, of course, was how he was supposed to feel. The comfort of circles, the confidence they gave.

  But now the repair crews, trained as the Elder taught them through Cicoi—and in the process giving Cicoi more power than he’d ever had before—had moved on to the other ships. They had to work at full strength. Cicoi spared all the workers he could for this, but even that fell short.

  The warships were so badly neglected, the damage time had caused so terrible, that the amount of work to fix them was tremendous. Even with this repair crew working at full ability, no more than ten warships would be ready by the time Malmur was in position to launch them.

  Cicoi was taking a large risk moving this many workers to warship repair. Malmur needed a new harvester ship. It needed to absorb all the energy it could from this Pass around the sun. It needed to make provisions for the problems that had occurred last Pass.

  And now the Elders were siphoning off more of the workers, making them work on the Sulas. The Elders wanted as many Sulas as possible. Instead of two harvests, the Elders wanted to do three, and that would take millions and millions of additional Sulas to replace the ones lost each harvest. The Elders had programmed the Sulas so that they would eat quicker, which would enable the extra harvest, but it also meant that they would use additional energy.

  Cicoi’s people were working all
the time, with very short rest breaks. As the Elder said, sleep was something that happened in darkness, not light. Still Cicoi knew most of his people would rather have their stalks in their pockets once per decaunit. It kept them fresh. He worried about errors.

  He worried about a thousand things.

  He even considered asking the nonfertile females to leave the pods and come to work, but the training would be terrible. Still, there were easy jobs that even an untrained worker could do. Suggesting such a thing, though, was close to heresy, and he feared doing it.

  If things got much worse, however, he would ask that the females become involved.

  His tentacles were growing tired. His eyestalks were quivering slightly. Holding this position was much more difficult than he had thought.

  He snapped his eyestalks into their pockets and relaxed his lower tentacles. Then he let his upper tentacles rest against his sides.

  He had much to do before he met with the Elder again. Cicoi needed to check the newest batch of Sulas, the ones designed not for the third planet, but for the dead fourth planet. In this last Pass through this particular solar system, the harvester ships would make a stop at the fourth planet as well, and strip it of raw materials.

  Cicoi hoped the materials on the fourth planet would be worth the effort. The loss of energy in this last effort had been tremendous. Workers reassigned. New parts for these warships. New Sulas.

  Cicoi did not know what the plan was. He had tried to ask several times. But the Elder had told him he would learn what he needed to when he needed to.

  Only, Cicoi was beginning to believe he would never learn of the plan. And he feared he was trusting in the wrong place. The Elders had lived in a time of unlimited energy. They hadn’t experienced an entire lifetime of deprivation.

  Cicoi had. And he knew the cost of each bit of energy used. If it wasn’t replaced, then the Malmuria would die off slowly, unable to support new pods, new life, new anything.

  Malmur would be dead.

  And it would be his fault.

  June 5, 2018