A long pause. Nobody can answer—but I tuck the question away.
“Heads up,” Tak says, looking to the curtain.
Without warning, Vera has passed through. She moves in the spooky fashion she and Ulyanova have mastered, then clambers down the canes to the ribbons, very like a spider, to where we are.
“From now, take searcher if you go aft,” she cautions. “They know how to return. Never try to go near or pass through puzzle gate. During next leap, it will be very bad back there. We leave Pluto soon. Next stop, transmitter.”
She turns to Litvinov. “Polkovnik, gardens on screws are how we move so quick through space. Some plants on Earth plot ahead, all together, to maximize quantum chemistry and bind sunlight. But now they plot, think ahead, to change how slippery space is.” She slices her hand out. “Whoosh! Why we sleep. You and me, at least. Where plants go, is difficult for us, since we cannot follow.”
“What about the starshina?” Litvinov asks.
“Brain needs Queen awake.” Vera makes a face and kicks away before we can ask follow-up. A searcher slings itself out from between the clock faces and firmly but politely blocks us from any attempt to go after her.
We haven’t been invited. Not yet.
“Servant to ‘Queen,’” Litvinov says, shaking his head. “Crazy scheme. And plants! Crazy idea.”
“Every ship we’ve traveled on is different,” Jacobi says. “Maybe they’re just fucking with us to keep us confused.”
“You don’t use a bicycle to cross the ocean,” Joe says. That’s either profound, or profoundly stupid. “Every ship works on a different scale.”
“What’s that even mean?” Jacobi asks.
Ishikawa and Ishida listen to this back-and-forth with unhappy glances. Bilyk seems fascinated. With nobody to converse with in Russian but Litvinov—who doesn’t seem interested—the efreitor has tried to join our Skyrines, but he’s being frozen out by the sisters, possible payback for his comment about blow jobs.
Or maybe they think he’s ugly.
JACOBI, JOE, MYSELF, and a searcher have ventured aft to see the situation that prevails. Following the cane bridges and with an occasional assist from a helpful searcher, we discover that the Antags have now moved into quarters about a klick behind us, aft and inboard of the nearest screw gardens. We aren’t invited to inspect, and make contact with only one or two of them, both armored, both not particularly forthcoming—and after these sentinels send us back, with obvious irritation, our report to the rest of the squad brings up crude speculation, or extended wish fulfillment, that the birds are all engaged in a prolonged, wild orgy.
“Yeah, feathers everywhere,” DJ says.
Bilyk laughs too loudly, which brings scorn from Ishikawa and Jacobi. I’m starting to like Bilyk.
Joe and I, with Kumar’s tacit approval, say we think it’s more likely the Antags are reassembling the social structure they once enjoyed on Mars and Titan, and maybe back home as well. How many males there once were, I don’t know. How important the males are to military planning and discipline, I also don’t know. Maybe the male is reasserting an aggressive posture and they’re planning to come forward and take control of Ulyanova. Her crucial importance is no doubt a sore point with Budgie.
Of course, they could be preparing defenses against the remaining fighters—but we haven’t seen any signs of them, either. Bird Girl is being remarkably thorough at staying offline. Maybe they want to keep our channels clear so we can listen for Ulyanova.
Would that mean we’re still essential, even to Budgie?
REMEMBRANCE PAST
More hours, more days—more weeks.
Really hard to track.
Vera wasn’t being straight with us. Or maybe her Queen wasn’t being straight with her.
I’ve retreated from the cubby, where I now reside alone, to the ribbons, moving aimlessly from ribbon to ribbon. Only about half are illuminated and showing images I can understand—Pluto and occasionally its big moon, Charon. Forward, still visible in the quincunx, the asterisk—there’s our mystery ornament, still blocking stars, and otherwise doing nothing.
I keep trying to find refuge in nerding out, but that part of my intellect has become very thin. Bilyk says he once read an article in a Russian science magazine about the quantum capabilities of plants—choosing chemical pathways, planning ahead based on some sort of botanical intuition, a quantum double-down on their chances of fixing photons… So how much weirder is it that the screw gardens can also look ahead and double down on making space slippery?
Yeah, it’s weirder. Past is no preparation for present. When you keep stepping off the edge of the page and skipping over to another book, it’s hard to keep track of the story.
How many months until we take the leap and push the plants in the screw gardens to their limits?
How long until the cage fighters decide to reappear?
I’m just around the corner from stir crazy when DJ and Kumar echo up near. I hide behind a twisted, dark ribbon. I do not want company, not now—certainly not Wait Staff.
They’re quietly discussing Planet X—DJ’s favorite topic. Another from our squad spiders from the cubbies along the canes to the ribbons, where I recognize him; it’s the lonely Russian efreitor. Like DJ, Bilyk seems to be a fount of knowledge about science, about astronomy. His English is poor, but they manage to make themselves understood, and I envy them.
They murmur ideas and theories like kids, discussing the surface of our former ninth planet. Kumar listens quietly. Kumar rarely says anything since the Gurus were slaughtered.
Russian scientists (according to Bilyk) tried to figure out what had happened to Pluto, and what might still be happening—tried to understand what smoothed and rearranged those features even into modern geologic times. Pluto had either been subjected to tidal stress or had substantial sources of internal heat—radioactive thorium, possibly, which still keeps Earth warm. One of our Socotra professors described thorium as the atomic battery of creation.
Some speculated that maybe the planet and its moons had swung close to Neptune during one of Pluto’s inward passes—too close, on the edge of the Roche limit, below which the bodies would have broken up completely, joining another set of rings. The grazing orbit would definitely have stressed Pluto, and could have added or subtracted moons for both worlds.
Something had definitely messed with Neptune’s big moon Triton, the only satellite in our system with a retrograde orbit. Physically, Triton looks a lot like Pluto—with a supercold nitrogen surface. Could have been imported from the Kuiper belt, just like Pluto.
And whatever pushed Triton around might have tilted Neptune itself into its weird orientation, pole aligned with the planet’s orbit. But was Pluto responsible for these disruptions?
Not likely.
Something even larger, farther out—
Big enough to rearrange everything.
Bilyk insists that Russian scientists had long suspected a massive world with an eccentric orbit, way out beyond the edge of the solar system.
DJ enthusiastically agrees.
“Yeah, I’ll bet on it—Bird Girl’s planet could have made a pass through our system,” he says. “It really is Planet X, rolling around the big old billiard table!”
WINTER DREAMS