“You’re not. You’re brave,” Isla said.
Dru laughed, a sound Fergus had not heard in a very long time or expected to ever hear again. “Do you know what the very best cure is for being so afraid of dying that you can’t bring yourself to live? Learning that you are dying anyway.”
“Dru—” Fergus started.
She tapped her head. “Tumors. Not the kind they can fix. So, fuck it all, fuck the MCA and the Alliance and being afraid, I want to be a hero again, one last time before I die. What better way than to help save the solar system? So, I’m going, Fergus, and you’ll have to kill me to stop me.”
“Dru,” Fergus said again.
“You have a problem with that?” she asked, her voice full of warning.
“With you dying? Hell, yes,” he said. “But I guess I can’t make that choice for you. I really missed you, and I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “We were so young.”
“We were,” he agreed. He embraced her, and they stood there with their arms wrapped around each other for a long, long moment, as long as they dared. He’d missed her friendship so much, the hurt almost as unfathomable as what lay ahead.
And yet, they had to go.
“If I run through the door, the connecting tunnel should collapse in on itself behind me as I go, following the doorkey, like being inside a sock turning itself inside out,” Fergus said. “At the far end, at the Vraet’s door, I need only carry the doorkey through to their side. Even if they open it again, it will only ever lead them to themselves.”
“When the interdimensional tunnel fully forms between the two doors, the Vraet will be ready,” Ignatio said. “They will cross their interface into the tunnel as well. You will have to fight through them to reach the far side.”
Dru unzipped her bags and pulled out a small arsenal of weapons. “Flamethrower, plasma cannon, and a pair of fully charged energy pistols,” she said. “And a knife.”
The knife she pulled out was almost more sword than knife, Fergus thought. “Can we breathe the air in there?” he asked Ignatio.
Ignatio wiggled eir legs. “For some of it? It should match the air from here, at least part of the way. I do not know for certain what the air mix, if there is any, will be from the Vraet side.”
Fergus looked down at his exosuit, with its Wheel Collective patch on the back of the neck from his time in Cernee. “I don’t want to wreck my suit,” he said. “It’s a one-way trip either way.” He took it off and folded it carefully on the ground. He had his Drowned Lad T-shirt and shorts, his goggles and his best boots, and he could run a lot easier and faster unencumbered by the rest of it.
Isla was staring at him, biting her lip, and he walked over and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” she answered, bitterly.
“For being the family I needed. Tell Gav I love him, and if he makes a face at that, punch him for me. Please take care of Mister Feefs? Ignatio will get you both home safe.”
“I will, yes, I will,” Ignatio said.
“And you,” Fergus said. “Remember me?”
“I will have your reflection in all my eyes, for all my days,” Ignatio said. “Also nights.”
“You ready?” Fergus asked Dru.
She had slung the flamethrower over one shoulder, the pistols at her side, and the plasma cannon in her arms. “I admit I’m very unclear on what it is we are going to do, but I’m ready to shoot anything that gets in our way.”
“Good,” Fergus said. He picked up the doorkey from where he’d set it down while taking his suit off, and spoke to it, sang its song until it forgot again he wasn’t a part of it. The doorkey vibrated in happiness to be whole, and his bees vibrated with it, tied together, songs merged. He turned the doorkey over in his hands, and instead, the universe tilted around them, as if they were now the only fixed point.
Okay, he told himself, don’t do that as you’re running. It’ll make you dizzy.
He looked back at the others. Ignatio looked worried. Isla was trying not to cry and failing. Dru’s expression was serene, as if long patience were finally paying off. Somewhere, through the cube, he could feel an aching, terrible hunger.
“Time’s up,” he said, and stepped up to the wall of nothingness and held up the cube, singing its song instead of his own, letting himself become a part of it.
Dru stepped up next to him. “On the count of three,” Fergus said. “Three, two, one . . . Run!”
Fergus clasped the cube to his chest, pulled his goggles down, and leapt through.
This tunnel did not feel substantially different from the previous one they’d walked through, and seemed content to just pull him forward like the others, but he needed as much speed as he could get. Trying to run, he found the tunnel shifted to allow him to do so, because suddenly he had traction, if no great sense of up or down, and Dru was right on his heels as he headed toward the dark dot where the tunnel vanished into invisibility ahead.
He glanced back once, to see the tunnel deforming, bending and twisting and shrinking, the locus of the collapse barely a few steps behind them, and decided not to look back ever again.
“This is weird shit,” Dru said. “What’s that ahead?”
Fergus zoomed in with his goggles as he ran, and could see something moving, like the end of the tunnel was breaking up in a flurry of static. The Vraet. “That’s trouble,” he said. “This is gonna hurt.”
“Damn right it is,” Dru said, and she pulled ahead of him, running fast as she unshouldered the flamethrower.
At first, it was like running into sleet, sharp, cold pinpricks against his skin becoming more and more frequent, until he watched a shining metallic gnat hit his goggles and stick, and a tiny hole opened and began rasping against the goggle glass, rapidly abrading it. Against his skin, the pinpricks now hurt, and he glanced down to see small tears in his clothing that were coated now with accumulating Vraet, and thin streaks of blood were already seeping from his arms and legs.
Dru gave an inarticulate shout of anger and fired up the flamethrower, and Fergus’s goggle auto-dimmed in the sudden brilliant glare. Wherever the Vraet were directly caught in the bright hot jet, they were incinerated into tiny puffs of smoke, but the swarm quickly learned to dodge and divide, until suddenly the flame guttered and went out. Dru threw it down, where it came to rest half-lost in the invisible tunnel floor. “Clogged it,” she shouted over her shoulder, her cheeks bloodied, as she clicked the safety off on the plasma cannon.
As Fergus, five paces behind her, leapt over the fallen flamethrower, the surface of it was already pitted and beginning to disintegrate, consumed from within. Then the collapsing tunnel reached it, and it fragmented further, turning to inert dust, and was carried forward as the end of the tunnel followed behind them, chasing its doorkey.
Shit, I looked again, he thought.
“Okay, don’t stop, and don’t fall behind me,” Fergus called out to Dru, having to yell to be heard over the noise of the swarm. “And don’t look back. Trust me on that.”
The Vraet had become a sandstorm, a stinging, howling blizzard aimed right into their faces, and he could no longer see much past them. It felt as if they were running standing still, except he could feel the other end of the tunnel, the other doorkey, slowly getting closer.
Dru powered up the cannon, and the brilliance of the plasma as it danced and scattered ahead of her was beautiful as it blazed a path through the chittering metallic hail bearing down on them.
One of Fergus’s boots slipped, and he realized he was now running through Dru’s blood, and losing a fair bit of his own. The swarm grew so thick around them that for a moment, he couldn’t see Dru or the cannon light until he stumbled into her on the floor. She was crouching over with her face in her bloodied hands, covered in gnawing, biting Vraet. The cannon was dead and useless on the fl
oor behind her.
“No,” he said, as his own face and body were slowly cut by a thousand tiny mouths, and his fear for himself turned instead to rage that, after everything, this was not the end Dru deserved.
He stuck the doorkey under one armpit and bent down to lift Dru, getting an arm around her and helping her to her feet. “Hold on,” he said, trying to wipe Vraet off her as best he could, only to see them instantly replaced by more as the swarm blasted around them. “We’re not done yet. Remember Nereidum Montes and freezing our asses? We won.”
“We did,” she said. Her voice shook. “I don’t think my pistols will help now.”
“I got this,” he said, and he did. He let the Asiig bees down in his gut loose, feeding them on his own anger, free of any inhibition or restraint. A whirling halo of electricity began to form around them like the one that had struck down Pace, under the ice of Enceladus, except this time, instead of it being a wild thing out of his control, he was wild with it, willingly along for the ride.
The swarm of Vraet broke apart again, flowing around them as he pushed forward, and they were either caught by the collapsing tunnel or forced to fall in behind him, trying to reach him but dying by the hundreds, thousands, every time they got too close. But still they tried, and each tiny zap was another drain on his energy, and he was getting tired and so, so thirsty. He and Dru were both covered in blood, their clothes in tatters, their skin gouged and pitted and, in places, chewed down deep into the flesh, and the swarm seemed an endless tide flowing into the tunnel, packing it ever more tightly, making it harder and harder to move forward.
He hurt so much but didn’t dare let himself acknowledge it. He wasn’t sure Dru was still conscious, but he refused to let her go. He was moving on adrenaline and fury and grief, and they would keep him a little longer.
“How . . .” he heard her say, and leaned his head close to hers to hear better. “How are you doing that?”
“Long story. Aliens,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it if we get out of here, I promise.”
“Okay,” she said. “How many toes? For Sentinel? I’ve forgotten.”
“Three,” he said.
“Told you to wear better socks,” she said.
“I’ve always been terrible at listening to good advice,” he said. He couldn’t even see now, between the swarm thickening like cement in his path and the deep scratches and pitting on his goggles, so he closed his eyes and felt the energies of the tunnel, despairing for how much was left ahead.
To his surprise, they were close. “We can make it,” he said.
“Leave me. You can go faster without me.”
“Not a chance,” he said, holding her to himself more tightly. He was so tired, and it would be so easy to just stop there and die with her, but he refused to quit. The job wasn’t done. “We’re heroes, right? You and I.”
“We were stupid,” she said.
He laughed. “And this isn’t? Come on! Fight with me! Another ten meters. Help me!”
She got her feet under her more solidly, and clinging together, they shoved their way forward. His energy was faltering, and more and more of the scavengers began to get through, taking another little chunk from his flesh before he swatted them away or fried them right on his ravaged skin, until at last they were at the end, standing in the face of a tidal wave of Vraet pouring into the tunnel like a hailstorm of ice knives driven straight into their faces.
Fergus let go of Dru, and she slumped against him but did not fall. Taking out the doorkey from his armpit, the only thing undamaged they had left, he whispered to it, sang it their song, then shoved it with both hands into the maelstrom, crying out as his fingers were shredded and cut down to the bone. Just as he could not push any farther, it was as if the cube was pulled forward on its own, out of his hands, and all of a sudden, the entrance was gone, and the tunnel was collapsing now from both ends, with him and Dru in the center.
Trying not to cry, nor to look at what was left of either of them, he wrapped himself around Dru, sheltering her what little he could in his arms, his heart breaking that this was all he could do for her, so little at the end. He let the last of his Asiig energy go, one fantastic final blast that incinerated the Vraet still trapped with them, swirling like dark snow around and over them, the accumulated debris of everything destroyed in the tunnel pressing in, suffocating and crushing. They were being buried alive by the corpses of the scavengers.
At least I did it, Fergus thought. I did one thing right, at last.
And then his bees gave one more cry, engulfing them both in a ball of energy, singing the lost doorkey song as it merged with the collapsing tunnel and became one.
When it gave out, they were floating in space, and a large black triangle was waiting for them.
Chapter 23
Fergus awoke standing upright, as best as he could determine, given that he seemed oriented and stable with the familiar tug of gravity beneath his feet, though he felt no solid surface there. The space around him was bathed in yellow light that seemed to end, like a box, about three meters above and to all sides. Somewhere in the crisp darkness beyond he could hear crickets.
He had been in this place before, though his memories of it were muddled, ill-defined. “Hey!” he called out, and there was no echo at all.
It was not a surprise when the Asiig agent walked into the light, only that he did it perpendicular to Fergus’s own orientation, as if the wall was his floor.
“Ah,” the agent said, and stopped once he was fully in the light. “Here we are again.”
Fergus looked down at his bare arms, whole again but his skin crisscrossed with a dense web of fine, almost silvery lines. It felt like a dream. “Where’s Dru?” he asked.
“Elsewhere,” the agent said. “Alive, if that’s your simplistic human concern. You did make quite a mess of yourselves, you know.”
Fergus held out his hands, palms up. “Yeah, my bad,” he said. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Get us out of the collapsing tunnel,” Fergus said.
“Ah!” the agent said. “Now, that was interesting.”
There was movement, on the fringes of the shadows, and three Asiig moved silently into view, none along the same plane in space. They were tall and shining black, with a jointed, armored carapace under which a many-eyed body hung, walking on six multi-jointed legs and a long, forked tail. The three Asiig spoke, a sound like dueling crickets, and the agent listened patiently for several minutes as Fergus stared and found the fear that had been there, last time, was now resignation. Relief? Something less unsettling.
“There is consensus that no one is sure how you ejected yourself from the multidimensional tunnel,” the agent said.
“But surely, you must now how it works, this thing you stuck inside me,” Fergus said, gesturing angrily toward his abdomen where the Dr. Diagnosis booth, a lifetime ago, had shown him their handiwork.
His bees were barely awake, but he could feel them again, deep inside, and he could feel the tenuous touch of signal, like golden threads, stretching between him and the three Asiig, as if the thing in him wasn’t so much a thing the Asiig made as a part of the Asiig themselves.
“There is no you and it. There is only you,” the agent said, interrupting whatever uncomfortable realization he felt he was on the verge of. “If we had given you an extra finger on your hand, and you learned to stick that finger out at me, would you believe that the finger was rude on its own, despite having become your flesh and blood and will?”
“So, you’re saying I did it myself?”
“To put it in your limited vernacular: duh, yes,” the agent said. “We were all very surprised.”
“Then how did you know to pick us up or where?”
The agent smiled and reached out, and dropped the tiny red capsule in Fergus’s hand that he had first given
him on the Pan-African train. He remembered it now, that he’d put in his pocket without quite understanding why he would, and every time he’d changed clothes, he’d transferred it to a new pocket, always with him, and despite his perfect memory, he had not remembered doing any of that until this very instant.
“We were near Ijto, since we knew the doorkey had come from there,” the agent said. “When you returned to normal space, we were able to locate you instantly. Perhaps next time, you should aim for appearing inside a ship, though. Oh, the work it took to repair you!”
“And these scars?”
The agent shrugged.
Around him, the Asiig chittered and chirped, to each other and back and forth with the agent, little golden threads in his mind’s eye everywhere. “Uh,” Fergus said, after it had gone on for a while and he was starting to feel forgotten. “Excuse me?”
“Yes?” the agent asked.
“What happens next?”
“We were just discussing that,” the agent said, almost a chastisement. “Many things are in flux, and you have left a significant wake of activity behind you.”
“Sorry if I’ve inconvenienced you,” Fergus said, feeling not sorry at all.
“Oh, no, not at all!” the agent said, as if there had been no sarcasm in Fergus’s words. “Chaos is a delight. Without it, nothing new would ever be born, or learnt, or dreamt. But it must be considered. Not by you, I mean; it’s all way over your head.”
“Can you at least tell me if my friends are okay?” he asked.
“They have just been intercepted leaving Neptune’s atmosphere,” the agent said. “There were several Earth ships waiting for them. Your Alliance, as you might have anticipated, feels it has some urgent concerns.”
“Shit,” Fergus said. “Shit, shit. None of this is their fault.”
More chirping, and then the agent sighed. “Very well,” he said, and snapped his fingers. A circle appeared above him and spread, resolving into a view of stars, and then suddenly, it was all white like a flash, and when it resolved again the stars were in different places. In front of them were Ignatio’s tiny flyer and the Alliance ships August Moon and Blue Ivory. August Moon, where Whiro had planted their mug full of evidence against DM what felt like months before, had a boarding tube fastened to Ignatio’s ship.
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