Take Back the Sky Read online

  “You won’t be using them,” Kumar observes.

  “Anyway, we hitched a ride on one of those railcars going aft,” Joe says. “About three klicks from here, past where the squid ponds used to be, the rest of the Antags have got four ships in an outboard hangar. They seem to think they’re enough to get all of them down to the surface. They want the hell off this hulk.”

  “Can’t blame them, if they’re home,” Ishida says.

  “Have you seen the surface?” I ask.

  DJ says, “Sort of, in the big star dish. There aren’t any squids there now, either. Whole ship seems empty.”

  “Could they all be dead?” Ishida asks.

  “They could have withdrawn. No way of knowing.”

  “Maybe they’re going to be shipped home as well,” Borden says. “Evacuating.”

  “Optimistic appraisal, at best.” Kumar says.

  “Is Ulyanova ours or the ship’s?” Joe asks. “I really need to know.”

  “She’s putting everything she’s got into staying human, and Vera is helping where she can,” I say. “But I’m thinking we gave her a fucking impossible task.”

  Litvinov curses under his breath and looks ghostly pale. He’s contemplating the loss of almost every soldier he trained and fought with, one way or another. And we’re no consolation. After all, we might have helped Sudbury become our worst enemy.

  “Focus on what we need to know!” Borden insists.

  “We’re orbiting a big dark planet,” Joe says. “That much we can confirm.”

  “But how can we be sure we’re actually there?” Borden asks.

  “The Antags should know, right?” Jacobi asks.

  “Sun-Planet!” DJ says in wonder. “Planet X.”

  “There are a lot of Planet X’s out around the Kuiper belt,” I say. “Big and small. Maybe warm, maybe cold—in the hundreds. I don’t know how many are as large as Bird Girl’s world, or how many were tinkered with by the bugs, but they and the Gurus have been playing with extrasolar planets for a long, long time.”

  “And that Christmas ornament, too,” DJ says. “Moving shit around.”

  Joe shakes his head. “I’m not even going to think about that.”

  Borden says, “Job one, we have to put together something like weapons, go back in force, and kill the rest of the cage fighters. And we have to make sure the Antags are happy to leave without killing us—or Ulyanova.”

  “Might be walking into a hornet’s nest,” Jacobi says.

  DJ observes that Sudbury never did have leadership skills. “He could barely understand orders.”

  “Maybe so, but since then he’s gone through a whole new level of fight club,” I say.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Joe says. He’s trying to pare the mission down to something we can all understand. Borden seems to approve. “I assume what Ulyanova told you is that the mice are loose in the cheese shop and the cats don’t fucking care. Happy to watch us all fight it out.”

  Long pause. I tongue the gaps where my teeth used to be. Wonder if they’re floating around here somewhere …

  Without warning, the ribbons begin to glow, then to alternate between lighting the darkness and giving us a look outside. Instinctively, we rotate and crane to get a full view of where we are—above and below.

  Above is another terrific view of stars, including the ever-glorious Milky Way. Again, parallax unchanged. Below—

  A great suggestive curve of shadow, dark brown and pewter, wreathed like a Christmas tree with flickering aurorae strung between hovering, glowing spheres. Too big to see all at once, the likely equator is divided by a thick belt of what could be ice, green or blue under the spheres, pale gray beneath the aurora.

  Out here, tens of thousands of millions of klicks from the sun, there’s no sunlight, just the illumination from those rippling, ever-refreshing aurorae, moving like ocean breakers above the surface, defining segments of bright and dark—a twilight-only version of night and day.

  As described.

  Sun-Planet.

  “It’s split in half,” Jacobi says.

  DJ looks caught up in it all, smug at the confirmation. His mind is absorbing the new details. As is mine. It’s beautiful and strange down there. “Divided planet,” he says. “Antags grew up in the northern hemisphere, searchers in the southern. Separated by thousands of klicks of ice! Brilliant. Bugs had a hand in this, right? Two species separated until they were ready.”

  “Bad news for the searchers,” I say. “At first.”

  “Yeah … But then they learned how to get along.” His voice trails off at these strange, impersonal memories of Antag history, exploitation. They behaved so much like humans.

  The mention of bugs provokes a weird sensation inside me of yet again being examined by an outside interest—curious in a fixed way, insistent but gentle. Something very old and disturbingly familiar is rummaging through my head and picking out words, maybe trying to learn my language—but then it comes upon fragments of my interactions with the archives on Mars and on Titan. Bug memories. I contain history I never lived, history I couldn’t possibly know, along with the serial numbers, the identifying marks left by those archives.

  DJ isn’t looking smug now. “It’s back!” he says.

  “What?” Ishida asks.

  “There’s an archive nearby,” I say.

  “It’s fucking huge,” DJ says. “Bigger than anything we’ve found so far.”

  I confirm he’s correct.

  The others absorb this with their own weary familiarity. We’ve been jerked around by history and by our ugly ancestors too many times to take great cheer at this news, but at least it gets us moving. At least it could promise more interesting developments.

  “Let’s go,” Joe says.

  Bilyk suddenly doesn’t look good. His arms and legs hang limp, his skin is pale, and his eyes have rolled back. Ishida intervenes and Litvinov doesn’t object. She carefully rotates him to show us the spreading bruise along his neck and the back of his head. Our attackers must have sapped him, cracking his spine.

  “Is he alive?” Ishikawa asks.

  “Barely,” Ishida says.

  He didn’t complain at first. Now he can’t.

  Litvinov looks at all of us as if this is the last straw and escorts the efreitor back to their nest. DJ tries to go with Bilyk, but Litvinov blocks him. “He must heal himself,” Litvinov murmurs. “He is strong.”

  “And what if the fighters return?”

  “I am staying here,” Litvinov says. “I am old and too slow to matter back there. We will watch and try to protect curtain, Bilyk—last of my soldiers. I ask Kumar to stay with us.”

  Kumar agrees with a nod, then looks at the rest of us, as if he will soon be a dead man.

  “We don’t have real weapons,” Borden says.

  DJ and Tak brandish their canes, rather pitifully—though the tips are sharp, if they’re used correctly.

  “And by now,” she continues, “I presume they know the territory better than we do. They might just play with us until we’re all dead. Or they could capture and torture us one by one.”

  “If the Gurus stocked the cages with Sudbury’s type,” Joe says, “from all sorts of species, we’re not dealing with soldiers but with homicidal maniacs. They may not have any strategy. They may not care how many of their own they lose.”

  “Where would they go? Where would they hide—back in the hamster balls?” Ishikawa asks, looking at me as if I know.

  “Too obvious and exposed,” Joe says. “We started this. We have to finish it.”

  “Would the Gurus have given them bolt weapons?” Jacobi asks.

  “In the cages? I doubt it,” Tak says. “Not a good show, and besides, they could blast their way out.”

  “What I’m asking,” Jacobi continues, “is whether they’ve captured weapons since they got loose.”

  “Antag bolt weapons have ID locks,” Tak says. “I doubt humans of any sort could fire them.”

&nb
sp; “What if the fighters include Antags?”

  “ID’d to the owner,” Tak says.

  “So probably not,” Joe says.

  “Antags may have recovered our weapons from the Oscars,” DJ says.

  “We don’t know that, and I don’t want to think they’d hand them over to cage fighters,” Joe says, with a glance my direction: Would they?

  “Then we might be evenly matched, up to a point,” Borden concludes. “Question is, have they ever had the run of the ship before?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “This is just the sort of thing Gurus would do to stir the pot.”

  “But Ulyanova doesn’t say that, does she?” Tak asks.

  I shake my head.

  “What’s she think we should do?”

  For the third time, I explain what she told me—that the Antags are about to get the shock of their lives, and that Earth could be next. I don’t get into the balancing act she’s involved in with the ship. She’s not worried about the cage fighters. She has bigger issues.

  “We’ve done reconnaissance many times,” Tak says, clearly ready, even eager, to go on a mission to search and destroy. “We practiced at Hawthorne. We ran multiple exercises on Socotra, and we did it for real on Mars—first season.”

  “Against Antags,” I say.

  “Antags caught in a bad drop of their own,” Joe reminds. “But we’re definitely prime in tough situations, in strange territory.”

  “Doesn’t make it easier,” Borden says.

  “Commander, have you had that sort of training?” Tak asks, forthright as always.

  “Similar,” she says. “Twenty weeks of SEAL training in Cuba.”

  “Jesus!” DJ says.

  “Not many sandy beaches here,” Borden says.

  “Borden’s in charge,” Jacobi says. Nobody disagrees. Everyone falls in behind her.

  We work our way back along the ribbons and the spiraling cane bridges. Without the searchers to grow and maintain them, the canes are already decaying. There are fragments everywhere, and dust, getting into our lungs, our throats, our eyes.

  Borden, DJ, Jacobi, and Tak stick close to me, forming a kind of arrowhead. Joe, Ishida, and Ishikawa take up the rear.

  The ship ahead of the bulge is very different from when we moved forward. There’s that long, thick central tree DJ and Joe saw, made of the same featureless hard stuff as the rest of the ship, stretching back over the leaf lake (now dry and cracked) and producing strange fruit. War fruit—weapons and ships, nascent, nasty, ready to fill out for new recruits on the other side of the solar system.

  Then—there’s another tug on our ancient string telephone.

  “Feel that?” DJ says to me. “Think they’ll let us in?”

  As if in answer, the probing presence tempts me with a nugget of information. I see through a deep eye, an eye that temporarily blocks everything around me, a more personal panorama of Sun-Planet, as if I’ve lived there a very long time—broad, icy regions decked in low, scudding clouds, great sheets and glaciers stretching tens of thousands of klicks to a livid glowing horizon—and on the margin, the border between the southern hemisphere and the belt of ice: a swirling black ocean filled with searchers, feeding, diving like whales—millions of them.

  The archives are in the southern hemisphere, under kilometers of ocean. The searchers dive deep and touch them, access them. That’s why they’re called searchers. They’re more important to the archives than the Antags, even. Searchers are wiser. Smarter.

  And no goddamned good for war.

  And then this glorious nugget of history and insight is supplemented by a permission, a demand—another offering.

  Inquire.

  ANCIENT OF DAYS

  I ask, “How old are you?”

  DJ agrees that’s a good place to start. We seem to sit beside each other in a steady stream of give-and-take, sensual exploration, study. The rest are momentarily irrelevant. I don’t see them. I feel a nudge, hear a word, but do not respond.

  I’m deep.

  How old are you?

  “Not very old,” I answer, along with DJ.

  Inquire.

  “Do you recognize where we got our education, our training?”

  Down near the sun. An old planet or moon.

  Inquire.

  “Are you older than the archives on that moon?”

  Probably not older. Perhaps more complete. Was there damage to those archives?

  “We think they’ve been destroyed. Archives on a planet even closer to the sun have either been destroyed or severely damaged.”

  Who is responsible for this damage?

  “We are, partly. But we’ve been influenced, instructed, by the Gurus.”

  We see that. Here they are called Keepers.

  “You let them take control of the Antags?”

  Follows a search through our memories for associations. Apparently we aren’t going to have any privacy, and that could save a lot of time.

  Until recent time, the Antagonists, as you call them, were not aware of the existence of these archives. The Antagonists are from the northern hemisphere. They are the only ones to be infested with Keepers. The searchers are from the southern hemisphere, mostly around the polar regions. They are scholars and aware of the archives, of our history, but neither the Antagonists nor the Keepers have enlisted them as fighters because they are not suited.

  They resemble animals familiar to you?

  “Yes. Squid.”

  Not closely related to you, these squid—perhaps enigmatic?

  “Yeah. And probably not great scholars.”

  DJ chips in. “We call this world Planet X. What’s your name for it?”

  Too old to be important.

  Inquire.

  “Is this planet natural?”

  You know already it is not.

  “How old is it?”

  Comes a number so vast I stumble around in my head trying to control it. Then I realize the units: vibrations of an atomic particle, maybe an electron in orbit around a proton—a hydrogen atom. Everything in these archives is measured by those beats, those vibrations. Very rational. Could be close to universal. But we’re not that sophisticated.

  “What’s that in years?” DJ asks.

  The steward of the archives digs deeper into our heads and understands. Four and a half billion years.

  “Made by the bugs?” I project my memories of bug appearance and hope for the best.

  They were key. Many species contributed to these archives, but the bugs, as you call them, as you show them to us—we recognize their form—completed and organized them.

  Inquire.

  “Are there any bugs left alive?”

  No.

  “The bugs were plagued by Gurus as well?”

  They were.

  “How did they get rid of them?”

  They did not get rid of them. They cut the ties that existed at that time. It is very difficult to destroy the Keepers, and almost impossible to be rid of them forever.

  “There were accidents, right? Bits of broken moons came down to the inner solar system and seeded Earth and Mars. Does that means that the Gurus, the Keepers, were indirectly responsible for us, as well?”

  The bugs emulated an older force. That mysterious influence moves planets, and little else, and five billion years ago, moved several from the realm of comets downward, beginning life in the outer system.

  After those long-ago acts, the “bugs” contributed by helping seed the inner planets, by accident, through their long wars with one another.

  “Where do the Gurus come from?” DJ asks.

  Not known. The Keepers are always looking for systems to develop and preserve, in their way. You and Antagonists share ancient origins, but “bugs” have nothing to do with the origins of Keepers.

  “Who controls you now?” DJ asks.

  Nobody controls. We work with searchers but they are far fewer now than they once were. And the archives are themselves diminished
.

  “What’s happening on Sun-Planet?”

  Total destruction. We have seen it before. When this time is finished, if the archives still exist, perhaps you can bring scholars back to finish our studies …

  The steward seems to fade in a haze of what might be disappointment—if it can exhibit anything like emotion.

  Can it?

  Or does it echo our own feelings?

  We come out of our reverie and look around us.

  “Time to get the fuck out of here!” DJ says.

  “Amen,” Joe says.

  WE RESUME OUR slow, awkward journey, Joe, DJ, and Jacobi telling us what they know and helping smooth our learning curve. Without searchers, moving through the ship is an involved process of trying to make out an available surface in the twisted architecture behind and between decaying, rickety canes, in deep shadow, then launch out with a kick—sometimes connecting, sometimes painfully colliding. Ishida and Borden fly wide, miss the best gripping points, and get snagged in a crumbling spiral. It takes time to pluck them out.

  THE VIEWING DISH is dark and now the space around it is crowded with dead searchers. The smell is fierce, like ammonia mixed with dead cat.

  We find another Antag, also dead from cutting wounds.

  Not Bird Girl—to my relief.

  “We won’t follow the tree unless we can get on that rail line,” Joe says. “Too much growth, too fast. And the rail is likely already carrying weapons away to stockpile them.”

  “Where’s the line begin?” Borden asks.

  “I thought it was at the tip of the tree,” Joe says. Ishida agrees. “But everything’s still changing.”

  Pretty soon, we’re almost out of options. There’s nothing but darkness, pieces and tangled clumps of canes blowing aft in the steady breeze, and searcher bodies—dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They’re becoming a hazard, rolling aft or forming their own clumps, a hecatomb of astonishing proportions.

  “Cage fighters couldn’t have killed all of them,” Borden says.

  “Who, then? Ulyanova?”

  I’m biting my inner cheek. I don’t want to answer. I don’t know the answer.

  “Is she still human?” Ishikawa asks.