Take Back the Sky Read online

  She smiles.

  Something inside me smiles back. Goddamn.

  Joe taps his helm and looks around his sling at me, eyes flicking, examining. Can he tell? I work to recover.

  Ulyanova’s turned away again.

  “I’m not sure our fellow warriors are going along,” Joe says. I do not want to fall into another instauration, another Guru moment—not here and not now. But how could the starshina be connected with all that?

  As we watch the serrated falcons maneuver in the deep ice-pudding, banking fore and aft to block any escape, the best scenario I can imagine is that the Antags are being really, really cautious. No surprise given our history and the strangeness of this new relationship. They’re doing everything they can to discourage us from responding defensively or mounting our own assault. With twelve big Antag ships against our five, how can we put on any sort of offense? By acting like we’ve surrendered, perhaps—catching them with their guard down. Who knows what happened on Titan before the stand-down and reboot? Traps and stratagems aplenty, no doubt.

  “What the fuck are they waiting for?” Jacobi cries out. My concern exactly. We’re not resisting. How will they carry us out of here, take care of us? Wasn’t that the deal? How long can any of us afford to stick around?

  What do they think about the fresh human ships dropping from the surface, no doubt to wreak total destruction?

  I finally detect a jumble of thoughts from my Antag opposite. Their ships in orbit are under attack. Just like on Mars, all of us are being targeted. Those who support the Gurus want to find and obliterate us—fellow humans included. On Mars, we saw ample evidence that the Antags were similarly divided.

  Inquire.

  Again the voice of bug steward. It usually pops up when decision points are reached. However, I’m not sure I can formulate any relevant questions, and bug memory isn’t about current situations or possible outcomes. Or is it? There’s a kind of urgency in the voice. Maybe it knows something, or has been tapping deep into my thoughts and has enough of its own smarts to guess.

  Inquire.

  About what? I pick something out of my own jumble of questions. If we lose Titan—

  “Are there other archives like this one?” I ask, and feel DJ’s approval.

  Unknown. Accessing what you know, it is probable that massive force will soon be deployed to destroy this entire moon.

  Inquire.

  “Do we already know enough to survive on our own?”

  Unknown.

  “Where are the archives you know about?”

  Nothing is certain. Some could remain out on cold moons in the dusty reaches, or on larger worlds far from the sun, completed by our engineers before our own wars nearly destroyed us.

  Aha, I think. “The Antag female gave us a glimpse of something she called ‘Sun-Planet.’ Is that what you’re talking about?”

  Possibly. It may have been the last world where our kind lived before we passed into extinction. Many hundreds of millions of solar cycles have gone by, but that world may have preserved its own archives. Still, the connections are broken or at best incomplete. There could be much that is new and different. And it is possible the ones you call Gurus have found and destroyed them already.

  A long answer. We have no idea what’s being planned for us. No way to survive if we stay where we are. We’ll soon be overwhelmed, or caught in one amazing shit-storm of high-tech combat.

  And to add to the tension, my liaison may be what she says she is, a sympathetic presence arguing for our survival, but she’s still grieving for her dead. She still hates our guts, as do her fellow warriors. Most of us feel the same about Antags. They don’t trust any of us and we won’t trust them even if they give us a chance, even if the tea and bug memory say we should.

  In a communication colored by apprehension, she informs me that the process is moving slowly. Not every Antag in her force believes human captives can be of use. She’s in a minority, and there’s a bitter argument under way. She’s defending the present plan—defending our survival. If the opposing faction on those waiting ships wins the debate, we could all be gathered up and rescued only to be dumped naked into the frozen sea—or worse, tortured and summarily executed.

  Just a heads-up, she assures me. She’s working hard to convince the others they’re wrong, arguing on the basis of Antag honor and loyalty to the ancient ones, whose inheritance runs through all our veins.

  The bugs.

  Antag honor?

  Christ, what have I gotten us into? What if it’s all a sham? How could we expect any better?

  In the round cabin, Starshina Ulyanova is shouting in Russian, trying to get Litvinov to order us to fight, to do something!

  From many klicks behind our vessels and the Antag ships comes a deep, visceral thump. Heavy overpressure passes, making the Oscar squeal at its joints. Then the pressure fades, leaving us all with headaches—caught with our helms open. We close and seal and immerse in the display.

  “There they go!” Joe says. The fourth and fifth transports, with their Russian crews, have had enough. They’re trying to turn and head back to what they seem to hope is salvation—the human forces descending behind us.

  The Antag falcons have passed over and beneath us and stand between the fleeing vessels and the deep night of Titan’s inner sea. The transports try to respond with weapons—

  But Joe has locked firepower to our own centipede. The others can’t fight unless we do.

  Suddenly, the wayward vessels are wrapped in a brilliant balls of glowing vapor, followed by another slam and more overpressure. Our hull is struck by whirling bits of debris, like a hard, hard rain.

  “Who the hell did that?” Litvinov shouts. “Sanchez! Unlock weapons!”

  “It wasn’t Antags,” Joe says. He sounds sick, as if none of this is worth it, life has passed way beyond what can be borne. I have to agree. We’re down by two. How many seconds before we all sizzle?

  “We’re seeing long-range bolts from one of Box’s machines,” Borden says, and Ishida confirms. “They’re getting closer.”

  Friendly fire, as the shitheads say.

  No time left, I tell my Antag female.

  From beyond the walls of the stony labyrinth, bolts pass around us, almost brushing the centipede, into the shadows behind—Antags returning fire. Something far back there lights up, refracting through a cloud of slushy ice like fiery diamonds and throwing a weird sunrise glow across the solid gray ceiling.

  The wide-winged falcons swarm our remaining Oscars, pods thrusting forward and fanning out tools. Here it comes.

  “Antags moving in to recover,” Borden says, her voice strangely calm. Is this what we’re all hoping for? Is this our only chance?

  A cutting blade spins into our cabin space, narrowly missing Ishida. Our helms suck down hard at the loss of cabin pressure. My fellow Skyrines cry out like kittens at the roaring flood of subzero liquid. But our suits keep us alive.

  Once the cutting is done, with banshee screams, torches provoke scarlet bouquets of superheated steam that bleb around inside the cabin until the cold sucks them back. From superchill to steam heat and back again in seconds—and still, our suits maintain.

  In my display, I see more and bigger bolts rise from behind the walls of Bug Karnak, penetrate electrical gradients, make the entire frigid sea around us fluoresce brilliant green—followed by more sunrises behind. Strangely, I feel justified. Wanted. The Antags are defending us. But they’re also killing humans. My guts twist.

  From the first rank of falcons, steely gray clamps fan out and jam in through the wedge made by the cutting blades and torches. The Oscar’s head is pried opened by main force. Spiked tentacles shoot from the nearest falcon and insert into the ruined carapace, where they cut through our straps and shuck us like peas from a pod. We’re jerked up and over, bouncing from the edges, dragged through darkness punctuated by more blinding, blue-white flares to an even bigger machine rising over the walls like a monstrous catfis
h, its head dozens of meters wide. A dark mouth swallows us whole.

  Three minutes of tumbling, blind darkness. The seawater around us swirls and drains. We’re in the catfish’s belly.

  A little light flicks on below, then left and right, and the tentacles suck down around our limbs, grab us up again, then drop us through an oval door into a narrow tank filled with cold, silty liquid. Soon we’re joined by other plunging, squirming shapes—the crews from the other Oscars. Most of the outside lights switch off. It’s too dark in the tank to recognize one another, but I’m pretty sure one of the suited shapes is DJ. Another might be Jacobi, another, Tak. Then Borden. I hope I’m right that they’re both here. Another, slightly smaller, could be Kumar or maybe Mushran. I try to count but we keep getting swirled around. Rude.

  Where’s Joe? Where’s Ishida, Ishikawa, Litvinov, Ulyanova? Then the tank’s sloshing subsides and we drift to a gritty, murky bottom, settling in stunned piles like sardines waiting to be canned.

  A dim glow filters through the tank’s walls—translucent, frosted. Sudden quiet. Very little sloshing. My sense of integral motion might be telling me we’re rising, retreating, but I can’t be sure. Nobody’s making a sound.

  Why are we here, being treated like this? Haven’t we been told to become partners, to solve a larger riddle? How did we end up so thoroughly screwed, and what did Joe do to get us here? Joe has gotten me into and out of more scrapes than I can number. But our first encounter, I was the one causing real trouble—or reacting the only way I could. Now we’re both here, and I’m not sure what Joe means to me, to us, anymore.

  Has he sold us out? Is he even alive?

  Thinking you’ve fit all the pieces into a puzzle, then having it picked up, shaken, and dumped—being forced to start all over again—they can’t teach you how to react to that in boot camp or OCS or the war colleges. That’s a challenge you have to learn from experience. And mostly at this level of confusion and weirdness, you don’t learn. You just die.

  Bumping and bobbing along the bottom of the tank, listening to my suit creak and click, listening to the distant twang of wires working through my flesh—a never-ending process—I try to keep it together, try to remind myself that the Antags may be connected to the wisdom of bug memory but still have every reason to hate us.

  Judging from the contortions and soft moans, the suits are still causing everyone pain. If you don’t move they hurt less. But still, they keep us warm.

  There’s ten or twelve left. Way down from our contingent on Spook. Were some dumped? Did the Antags select us out like breeders on a puppy farm?

  After a time, everything in the shadows becomes part of a sharp, awful relaxation. I can still think, mostly, but want to slide into old, safe memories, then dreams. Dreams of better days and nights. Of places where there are days and nights. I don’t think or feel that I’m about to die, but how can I be sure? When you die, you become a child again. I’ve seen it, felt it through the return of Captain Coyle. She introduced me to a little girl’s bedroom and her comic books. But I don’t feel like a child just yet, though young memories, memories acquired when I was younger, even bad memories, are more and more desirable, if only to block out the pain. I can’t just give up. Not after all the shit I’ve put others through.

  Then, despite my focused concentration, I experience my own moment of panic. I start to scream and thrash. Everything in this fucking tank is entirely too fuzzy and I’m not ready to accept whatever dark nullity is on the menu because I really want to see what’s next, I want to be there, be out there, I want to learn more about what our enemies are up to and who they really are, which ones are our enemies, I mean—learn more about how the Earth was screwed over by the Gurus. When you die, you stop learning, stop playing the game. Is that true? I’m not sure it’s always true. It may not have been strictly true for Captain Coyle. But she turned glass. Maybe that’s a different sort of death, like becoming a book that others can read but not you. And now I don’t hear her in my head because her settling in has finished, the ink in her book is dry and she’s part of the memory banks of our ancient ancestors.

  Is that any different from real death?

  I just want to keep on making a difference.

  To that end, and because my throat really hurts and thrashing around is pointless, I stop. I keep bumping into the others and I don’t want to hurt them.

  And I’m worn-out.

  I roll left and try to see through gummy eyes. Through the murk and foggy walls, I make out blurred outlines of Antags flapping their wings like penguins or seabirds, swimming or flying by the tank. Checking on us. Are they actually flying, or are they in liquid like us? I grasp at this problem like a sailor grabbing at a life preserver. I say to myself, out loud, like I’m a professor back in school, “Their ships may be filled with oxygen-bearing fluid, like Freon—which allows a different relationship to the pressures outside. Maybe we’re being subjected to the same dousing. Or maybe it’s just warmer water, seawater. Maybe they come from an ocean world. I don’t know. I have no fucking idea what’s what, I’m just making shit up.”

  So much for the professor.

  I try once more to retreat into better times, better history, but I can’t find my way back to the sunset beach at Del Mar, to wearing shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops, to hitchhiking and walking with Joe before we ever enlisted, hoping we could pick up girls or girls would pick us up. I was fifteen and Joe was sixteen and given the age of the girls who might have been driving those cars that flared their lights and rumbled or hummed by in the night, that wasn’t likely.

  But I can’t reach back to good times. I keep snagging on the first time I needed Joe, the first time we met, before we became friends.

  THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

  A warm, dry California night. I was dragging a rug filled with my mother’s dead boyfriend down a concrete culvert, trying to find a patch of brush, a ditch, any place where I could hide what I had been forced to do just an hour before. I looked up and stopped blubbering long enough to see a tall, skinny kid rise up at the opposite end of the culvert. Bare-chested, he was wearing cutoffs, carrying a long stick, and smoking a pipe. The bowl of the pipe lit up his face when he puffed.

  “Hey there,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said, and wet my pants. Why I hadn’t done that earlier I didn’t know.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing the pipe at the rug.

  “My mom’s boyfriend,” I said.

  “Dead?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Tried to kill us.”

  “For real?”

  I was crying so hard I could not answer.

  “Okay,” said the shirtless boy with the pipe, and ran off into the dark. I thought he was going to tell the cops and so I resumed dragging the body in earnest farther down the culvert. Then the shirtless boy returned minus pipe and with a camping shovel. He unfolded the shovel and pointed into the eucalyptus woods. “I’m Joe,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “There’s fill dirt about twenty yards north. Soft digging. What’s his name?”

  “Harry.”

  “Anybody going to miss him?”

  I said I did not know. Maybe not.

  Joe took one corner of the rug. “How did it happen?” he asked as we dragged the body between the trees, over the dry leaves.

  “He broke down the door to my mom’s room.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She didn’t wake up. She’s stoned.”

  “And?”

  “When he saw me, he swung a big hunting knife. He said he was going to gut my mom, then me. I had one of his pistols.”

  “Just as a precaution?” Joe asked.

  “I guess. He’d beaten her before. He taught me to shoot.” That seemed unnecessary, but it was true.

  “Then?”

  “I threw a glass at him, to get him out of her bedroom. He followed me down the hall and I shot
him three times.”

  “Shit! Suicide by kid. Anybody hear the shots?”

  “I don’t think so. He fell on an old rug. I rolled him up and dragged him here.”

  “Convenient.”

  No more questions, for the time being. We dragged the body together and in an hour or so had dug a not-so-shallow grave and rolled him into it, down beyond the reach of coyotes.

  Then we filled it in and spread a layer of topsoil and dry brown eucalyptus leaves over the patch.

  “I’m Joe,” he said again.

  “I remember. I’m Michael,” I said, and we shook hands. “No one’s going to know about this, right?”

  “Right,” Joe said. “Our secret.”

  I was thirteen. Joe was fourteen. Hell of a way to meet up. But Joe had judged me and I had judged him. In the next few months, he blocked my downhill run to drugs and crime. He even talked to my mom and got her into a program, for a while. He seemed to know a lot about human beings. But for all that, he wasn’t any sort of angel. He always managed to get us into new and improved trouble—upgrades, he called them, like that time on the railroad bridge, or in Chihuahua when we found the mummy and brought it home.

  Matter-of-factly, over the next year, Joe assured me that he and I were a team. By being associated with him, with his crazy self-assurance, even his tendency to vanish for weeks, then pop up with plans for another outlandish adventure, I began to feel I was special, too—a capable survivor. As we crisscrossed Southern California and Mexico, hitchhiking or getting our older friends to drive, we kept nearly getting killed, but more than once he saved me from other sorts of grisly death—and together, we helped each other grow up.

  The police never did find my mom’s crazy boyfriend. He might still be out there in those woods. And my mother never asked about him, never mentioned him again. She was probably just as glad he wasn’t around to beat on her. Good riddance to one miserably screwed-up bastard.

  Most of that shit isn’t worth going back to. My whole life has been a parade of crazy hopes. Hardly any rest. Joe was part of it from that time on. And now we’re stuck here, waiting to be canned. Sardines waiting to be packed in oil.