by Greg Bear
We’ve gone four klicks. A long chain of explosions ahead of us has halted for the moment and seems to have temporarily put the Antag infantry on pause. Our tires may actually be rolling over some of them in their trenches. I think I see a kind of fountain in a gully, figures scrambling through the morning shadows and the gray and purple-lit dust. More boulders arc out and fall around us from the barrage over the Drifter—bouncing. I can see the Voor wagon off to our right, plunging in and out of drifts of dust and coiling, wind-whipped smoke, and I think I see Antags popping up like arcade cutouts between us, but it’s hard to make out anything real, we’re shivered by one concussion after another. Michelin is driving like a madman, veering right and left, and I barely hear him shouting in his helm, or singing, can’t tell which.
Mustafa and Suleiman cling to each other. Vee-Def is huddled beside them, head down. Michelin and I have temporarily ceased firing the multigauges because we could hit our own vehicles, flying across the rock and dust, escaping from the Drifter.
Five klicks!
By God, we’re going to make it!
And then there’s this black thing right in front of us, so fucking big it blocks the Voor wagon, the Chesty, the Tonka. Like an entire ridge of rock just flew up out of Mars, only it didn’t fly up, it came down. The impact throws us all up off the Red a couple of meters, and now we’re landing hard, bouncing, and Mustafa and Suleiman have been knocked off the Tonka and I’ve been snapped out of my harness. I’m clinging to the barrel of the cannon, which is still hot, and my gloved fingers are starting to burn so I let go, drop slowly off to the side, land on my feet, just stand there, fighting spasmodic chest muscles to get my breath back.
A hundred meters of Drifter, a shard from the half-buried swimmer, the deep homunculus, has been lofted by the concussions and dropped almost upon us, and something in me feels utterly lost, such a turnaround from the exaltation of believing we might have actually made it—
All finished, ended, done with—after billions of years!
I don’t know how long it’s been, I’m rattled, but Vee-Def is beside me and amazingly he has his shit together.
“Sidearms, ladies!” he shouts.
And then the Antag infantry is up and coming at us.
I see two Skyrines running from the Chesty, which has landed on its side, and just behind them, a smoky wave of Antags, recovered enough to search around this side of the fallen ridge, and the dust storm has been completely interrupted by the rockfall, and I’m on one knee, aiming at Antags, hoping I’m seeing them clearly, not aiming at Skyrines in dust-covered skintights.
They’re returning fire, moving in to clean us out. It’s going to be close.
We’re suddenly silent in our helms. No more words. Coordinated fire. I look left, cringing, just as Vee-Def’s head flies off, right beside me, and the bolt that took it whangs and fries and sizzles against the side of the Tonka. All those bad jokes, those movies, now hot pink mist. At leisure, his body begins to slump.
My pistol is getting off bolt after bolt, and then, just as an Antag weaves to within a few meters, it runs out of charge—of course—
And I’m down to bullets, and then they’re gone, and I’m down to waiting for one of the Antags to build up the courage to come in and grapple. Why not just shoot me?
Because the Antag has dropped its weapon or I can’t see a weapon. Maybe they long for hand-to-hand or claw-to-hand or whatever, for honor, for glory. And then it’s on me. God, it is strong! Those long, flapping arms and three-fingered gloves wrap around my chest, lift me up, and I see another Antag stand atop the Tonka, firing blindly down at Michelin, but Michelin is firing back, and that one topples, and I’ve got my own gloves straight on the Antag’s helm, and I’m digging in my fingers, trying to grab and grip and rip, and I can see its face through the wide, narrow plate, above the long jutting of the helm, the nose, the beak, but mostly just its eyes, looking up at me, as it lifts me, my ribs starting to give.
I look right into its eyes. It has four of them, a smaller central pair, red and shiny, between two large outboard eyes, staring expressionless, but I’ve brought my pistol up and am using the butt like a hammer repeatedly on the plate, and then it lets go, but too late, I’ve cracked the plate—it has other issues to deal with.
And then I see two Skyrines come around the sides of the Tonka. One is Tak; the other is Joe. Tak is hefting a power supply that must mass two hundred kilos, and Joe’s got the rail gun, wrenched from the Chesty, and they’re laying down fire, clearing the area around the fallen ridge, the rock, which must have landed on a whole battalion of Antags, clearing a way, because they toss the heavy shit aside, grab me, grab Mustafa, who’s still alive—Suleiman nowhere in sight—and we join Michelin and run, leap, around the right of the sizzling ridge of rock—crackling and splitting and powdering from all the energy unleashed by the blast that tossed it here—around to open dust and lava, familiar Red stretching out before us, air clear like there was never a storm.
We keep running. Running forever. I think Kazak may have joined us, can’t be sure, because there’s six of us running in a line.
And then we stop. We all fall over.
Into a gully just deep enough to cover us.
Instinctively, I roll and start to check integrity, first on my suit, then on the skintight of the Skyrine next to me, Kazak, and then I’m up over to Joe, who pulls me and shouts, “Keep fucking down,” but I check him anyway, picking nits, social as shit in a chute, my eyes sliding into narrowing tunnels.
Joe grabs my shoulders.
“Hang on, Vinnie,” he says.
“Sure!” I cry out. “Love this shit! Love it!”
We’re all crying in our helms.
“The wagon,” I say.
“It was up ahead,” Joe says. “I think the rock missed it.”
“Chesty got wiped,” Kazak says.
“Sure as shit that rock took out the Antag line!” Tak says. We eyeball each other for a long moment, too tired to say anything. Then we flop back in the gully, studying the bands of dust that flow overhead like pink and gray rivers, and we jerk in unison as a stray bolt draws a sparking trail to the north, perk up as our angels try to come back online—flickering displays and crackling comm, voices out there, so few, far away—maybe from where we all go when our heads get vaporized.
We’re back where we started. Before Lieutenant Colonel Roost, before the ranch wife in her buggy, before so many saviors—and who can expect another such round of saviors?
We’ve worked through our supply.
Power low. Maybe ten minutes of air.
If I slow my lungs down. Stop gasping.
Stop crying.
INVALUABLE
Alice and the driver have stepped outside. I’m still strapped into the bench seat, best place to be, because it’s quiet in the van.
Seven men and women from the hover-squares approach us, weaving through the other stalled vehicles: cars, trucks. They aren’t cops, they aren’t MPs—the hover-squares are unmarked.
And now the seven are interested in the van.
COMING HOME AGAIN
Joe pulls off my blaze, grabs my helm, smashes the angel with a rock. He reaches into his pack and hands me the helm from a dead Voor, tells me to switch it out, put it on in the pop-up, discard mine—then get back to Earth as best I can.
“For God’s sake, after all that’s happened, stay away from MHAT,” he says.
“Pop-up being delivered right now,” Kazak says.
Joe gives me Gamecock’s blaze and pins me with his own broken silver leaf.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I ask him.
“Right behind you. Second pop-up. I’m going with DJ.”
“He made it?”
“As much as DJ will ever make it,” Joe says.
So I’ll come back with no ID or the wrong ID, which is not a problem, because the pop-up crew will pack us in and hoist us all to orbit, to the return frames, and the orbital crew will
soak us in Cosmoline and send us back to Earth; that’s what we can count on.
I’m going in and out when I feel a breath of fresh oxygen. My eyes stay open. I can hardly credit what I’ve seen, what Joe has done, but new Skyrines in beautiful fresh skintights are tending to all of us, to Tak and Kazak and DJ.
One sister leans over me—a lieutenant named Shirmerhorn. “Where the hell have you been, Lieutenant Colonel Roost?” she asks me.
“Mismatch on the DNA,” says a tech with a very young voice. He lifts a bio-wand and shakes it by his ear, as if it might rattle.
“Screw the bookkeeping,” Shirmerhorn says. “They won’t notice. Rack ’em and pop ’em.”
And so they do.
I’ve come through all this shit relatively unscathed. Broken ribs, a greenstick fracture of my tibia, a concussion, oxydep-burned lungs. A long session in Cosmoline is called for. Most of it will knit just fine on the way home.
I see Kazak and Tak and Joe and DJ lying beside me in their plastic tents, peeled out of their skintights.
Joe lolls his head. “You’ll touch Earth at SBLM,” he says. “Seattle was Gamecock’s town.” He tells me to go to the Seattle apartment, reminds me of the address—makes me repeat it. “Stay out of trouble. I’ll join you as soon as I can. Lots to tell.”
“What?”
“What it all means, asshole.”
Tak’s listening, lying almost on his side.
Kazak rises up behind him. “What the fuck are you two whispering about?” he says.
Joe smiles. “We’re going home.”
“If they don’t pump bolts into our frames,” Kazak says, falling back, ever the optimist.
“Vee-Def got it,” I say, that image still searing. “He got it quick but bad.”
“Listen close, Vinnie,” Joe says. “This is important. It’s why Coyle was out there, and why all the brass was out there, and I was out there, and why the Antags were out there, chasing us all. There’s a bigger picture, and now you’re part of it, get me? Lie low and just relax for a while, until we can all sit down, private-like, and talk about it. Lots more to come. I’ll be back when I can.”
“Back to the world where we can’t say ‘fuck,’ ” Tak says.
Joe has a funny story about that, and so, while we’re waiting to be delivered to the pop-ups, he tells us. Maybe someday I’ll tell it to somebody else. If there’s time.
If I’m in the mood.
My moods are getting stranger and stranger lately.
OOPS
Alice and the driver are in custody by the side of the road, and the civvies in the other cars are watching, critical, irritated, thinking we must be smugglers.
“Did you bring anything back with you, soldier?” one of the plainclothes guys asks as he helps me down, very carefully, from the back of the van. “Any crystals—black crystals, white crystals—diamonds or whatever?”
“No, sir. No crystals.”
They have a kind of plastic bag they want me to wear, so I oblige them and put it on. Upper baglike torso encloses my arms, no sleeves, but the lower half fits around my legs so I can walk. Even has a separate breathing apparatus. They load me carefully onto the back of a hover-square. The pilot looks back from the cockpit as I’m loaded and secured, then looks forward, touches his mike, and reports, “Fugitive retrieved. ETA twenty-seven minutes. Prepare Madigan.”
Fucking Madigan. I don’t care who hears me. I do not want to be laid up with doctors and needles and idiots who think I’m carrying something contagious.
Even if I am.
Joe had arranged that I come home as a different man. Relying on typical Corps inefficiency. Thinking I might have some time before the docs found out somebody came back who shouldn’t have, who wasn’t on the list. Who should have died up there, if Captain Coyle and her team had done their job.
No matter.
It was always a long shot.
I had a weird time in Cosmoline on the way back. Unlike most trips, I didn’t just sleep it through. I did some heavy-duty thinking, and not always with my own, difficult brain.
With a new, strange, and friendlier brain.
THE FOUR WIDE blades on the corners whir their dusty lift, and we’re abruptly up and out, flying over the farmland, away from the border.
My plastic bag-suit crackles as I move.
“Welcome home, Skyrine,” says the guy sitting next to me, in his forties, graying, hard-muscled but bulky, eyes darting, fatalistic. Could have been a Skyrine himself once.
Inside the plastic sack, I reach into my pocket. Finger the coin, my Precious. They haven’t frisked me yet. Teal also had a coin, given to her by her father—a kind of key to the Drifter. And now here’s another key. Maybe that means there’s more than one Drifter. Makes sense.
Lots of chunks of old moon fell on Mars way back when.
I HATE TRANSITIONS. Borders in time, in space, the thin lines between one state and another are the most dangerous. We cross two big borders in life, both equally difficult—being born and dying.
Darkness on either side.
I’m afraid, always afraid, of such thoughts, because I do not slide well between states—war and peace, happiness and grief, friends alive, friends dead. I watched a cat die once. It had been hit by a truck backing out of a driveway. It zipped one way, scared by the motor noise, then suddenly, panicking, turned around—dashed right under a tire. I kneeled beside it after the truck had gone. Last few seconds of life, it looked up at me in greater pain than I wanted to imagine, and then it just shivered and closed its eyes. That cat made the grade. It knew all about borders and transitions.
It crossed over without a sound.
I can only hope I will do the same.
For the time being I’m in Madigan, in a secure facility, with no prospect of going anywhere. But at least I’m getting three squares of hospital food, which is better than I expected, and there’s lots of air and lots of water and no smell of pickle, and I don’t have to wear a skintight, so that’s good.
I don’t know what happened to Alice. Maybe she’s here, too, somewhere—in quarantine because she spent so much time with me. I still hope Joe will come for me, but that’s crazy thinking.
Been doing a lot of crazy thinking since I was put into orbit and fell home. But Earth isn’t really my only home now. I dream and think a lot of crazy things.
CAESURA
Okay, I’m ready to spill some conclusions.
Listen close. Tell this to Joe. He probably knows already, but maybe not.
DJ’s strong tea, the green powder, isn’t spores, isn’t an infection of any sort we understand—it’s memory. It’s what the intelligences from the old ice moon designed their crystals to leave behind when the water runs out, so that kobolds can pick up the work later, when water returns.
But the memory dust affects humans, too. It slips into our cells, into our heads. We begin to remember things we never lived. And there’s only one explanation for that.
When the old moon collided with Mars, eons ago, it must have dropped trillions of tons of ice and rock—its icy shell, inner oceans, and deep, rocky core—onto a previously lifeless Mars. The old moon seeded Mars. Rain and snow fell all over the Red until oceans covered the young beds of lava, and Mars came alive for a few tens of millions of years.
But some of that debris blasted back from the impact, far out into space, and drifted downsun.
To Earth. On rebound from Mars, the living things within the ice moon also seeded Earth. In part at least, we’re their descendants… Open to the history carried in the green dust, heirs to all that ancient knowledge, if we know how to decode and restore what the kobolds have been trying to preserve for so many millions of years. The secrets of another kind of history. Knowledge, perception, judgment—primordial wisdom.
And the Gurus know it. They must have ordered command to send in Coyle and her sappers. That means they’ll do everything they can to stop us. But why? Aren’t they here to help? Maybe not; they�
��re not from around here, this is all separate from them, counter to whatever they’ve planned.
What is it they don’t want us to learn?
And I’m thinking, if the Antags came here strapped to an old chunk of Oort ice—what the hell does that mean in our big picture?
The massive Antag buildup, decimating the Koreans and the Euros and the Russians, then fidging our drop, tracking and chasing Joe’s platoon—and meanwhile, slinging comets—maybe hoping to take out anyone who’s been subjected to ice moon tea?
Settlers and warriors.
Is it possible everybody wanted to erase the Drifter and all it contained?
IN STIR
Got most of it down, including the stuff I told Alice. Packing it all away, sending it out. Along with the platinum coin. Madigan was reluctant to do a cavity search on a contaminated man, and when they got around to it… too late. Won’t tell you how or where. But suffice it to say, somebody here at Madigan knows someone who knows Joe, and Joe is still out there.
Joe is legendary here.
A trio of doctors came to visit last Monday—Moon Day—and talked to me through my room’s big, thick window. They told me I’m going to spend a few more weeks in quarantine, and when that’s finished, they’ll hand me over to the capable hands of the Wait Staff.
That could mean I’ll be dead soon. Or I’ll get to meet Gurus. If I live, I hope they don’t mess with my memories of either world. But if they do, or I’m gone, and this is all I leave behind, think on this:
Titan. Out around Saturn, more than one and a half billion kilometers from Earth. Some of us have already become heroes out there. What kind of suits do we wear? Nitrogen and methane atmosphere, mostly, with traces of acetylene and propane helping shape a billowing, yellow-orange haze over a plasticky, oily geology rich with long-chain hydrocarbons—sitting on deep ice and an ocean way beneath that, flowing over a weirdly uneven, stony core.
