“I hate how they just don’t get mad!” Jacobi says.
“Let them be,” Tak says. “They’re not hurting anyone.”
“They’re fucking squids, goddammit!” Jacobi says. We’ve all gone so far from discipline and training that anything can happen to us, around us, and we wouldn’t know how to react.
Ishida holds up her metal hand, covered with little bright points. We watch them fade. After the sparkling dust evaporates, leaving only a cool tingle, we wonder if it was ever there at all.
“Anybody want to swear off having kids?” Ishikawa asks.
“Solemnly,” Ishida says.
DELIVERY AND REJECTION
Ornament is gone, but something else is out there,” Borden says, kicking off a ribbon, rotating around her abdominal axis to search what she can see of the sky. “Not the mover. Don’t see that anymore.”
We can barely make out a dim pair of gray fans, subtending several degrees of the big sky. Ship is either very close, or the fans are very large.
“That must be the transmitter,” Kumar says.
“What are those?” Borden asks.
Possibly even more surprising, smaller vessels have departed from our monster ship and move toward the gray fans. They’re too far away already and too small to make out details.
“Are those Antag ships?” Ishikawa asks.
“Don’t think so,” Borden says.
“This thing can make other ships?” Ishikawa asks, almost hopeful.
“No surprise,” Tak says. “They taught us how to build Spook and the centipedes, right?”
“Are they doing maintenance or dropping off supplies?” Jacobi asks.
“Maybe they’re delivering tapes for broadcast,” DJ says. Bilyk, who regards Ulyanova and Vera, when they’re around, as if they inhabit some sort of movable nightmare—friends he no longer knows—goggles at this.
“You still don’t get it, do you, man?” DJ chides him.
Bilyk shakes his head. “We are for movies?” he asks.
“Yeah, for movies,” DJ says.
“Anybody notice we’re no longer necessary for anything?” Ishida asks, her voice small. She’s keeping close to me, as if I can supply some sort of comfort, or at least a solid center.
I wish.
Kumar joins Borden and they almost touch the crowns of their heads as they spread out along a ribbon, trying to survey everything that can be seen—a long, narrow slice of sky way beyond the sun, the bridge of stars cutting across the slice, cold and steady—just the same as when we departed. Parallax nil despite our journey.
“When are we leaving to find the fighters?” Tak asks Joe as we move off from the ribbons, back to the cubbies.
Joe makes a face. “When we’re through with these fucking leaps and sleeps,” he said.
“We don’t make our own schedule?” Tak asks. “What if they move before we do?”
“You want to go blank, up against a monster?”
Tak kicks away, disgusted.
LEAVE NOTICE AT THE DOOR
A few hours later, the outbound ships have finished their mission. They grow to specks and seem to be trying to return, but one by one blossom into small, brilliant clouds of plasma.
“Jesus!” Borden says and grips a searcher arm as if for assurance. The searcher sighs like a teakettle but otherwise neither moves, resists, or reacts. The clouds flash brilliant colors, then fade to gray—and spread out until they’re gone.
“Expendable?” Litvinov asks.
“Maybe not even real,” Kumar muses.
“What if they tried to deliver something—and somebody interfered?” Borden asks. She’s got a funny look on her face and starts to hand-over to the cubbies.
“What if they tried to deliver… and nobody wanted it?” I ask.
“What are you saying, Venn—we’re no longer A-list?” Jacobi asks.
“Jesus, my scalp again,” Joe says.
The others agree.
“Get ready!”
Again, except for Borden, no time to get to our cubbies. Our Skyrines hug like koalas. They do not want to make the leap while the searchers are touching them. As if we could get jumbled up with a catamaran squid or two and come out looking like a plate of sushi. Who knows?
“Crap!” Jacobi says as the blankness descends.
SUN-PLANET
My mind slowly tries to boot up. I think I remember the ribbons, expect the waking bodies of my squad, three or four of them arranged loosely around me…
But first, there’s a funny, dreamlike state where I’m back at Hawthorne, in the bar, listening to Joe half-drunkenly try to explain his views about the giant F-bomb reserves kept stored in tanks near Los Angeles and New York.
The other grunts and soldiers in the bar are skeptical.
“Sure, it’s true,” Joe says. “Before the war—the Second World War—F-bombs were strictly limited to military use. Illegal to use them in print or in movies, or in public—unless you were a criminal and didn’t care.”
“Didn’t fucking care,” says one of our fellow recruits. Might be DJ, but I can’t see him clearly.
“Right,” Joe says. “But the reservoirs holding the F-bombs were badly constructed. They were porous. Some leaked out into the water supply in New York, and then in Los Angeles. The plume of F-words didn’t get very far, but by the 1960s it was too late—everyone was drinking that water and dropping F-bombs twenty-four/seven. The military couldn’t stop it. So now, not just soldiers—everybody uses them.”
“But what was the point?” asks another grunt I don’t really want to think about—Grover Sudbury. We’re back before he did his awful thing and we did ours, and then Joe did his. He’s just another grunt in this bar, no better or worse than any other.
“Soldiers use F-bombs to keep themselves grounded, to remind themselves they’re human, to remind them what they give up when they fight and die,” Joe says. “Helps blow off some of the violence and weird crap that violence shoves into our brains. We use them, and we become better at managing a shitty situation.”
Sudbury is still skeptical.
“Now everybody uses them, and look where we are,” Joe says.
“Where the fuck we are,” says the other soldier.
I linger on Sudbury’s face. I want to talk to him, to warn him not to act out being a cruel asshole, but the memory-state, dream-state fragments into glassy shards of pain in my jaw, my arms, my chest.
Now I’m awake, but I don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe. I’ve been dragged from the others and tangled in a cane wall. A few of the canes have penetrated my pajamas and pin me like an insect in a museum. I hurt all over. Worse, my arms and legs, my hands, look lumpy. My entire skin feels hot and bruised.
I extricate myself from the brake, pull out the canes that poke through my clothes, and after a few minutes, float free—but my confusion is total. I don’t see anyone else. I think I’m alone, but then, I make a half turn and see a searcher a few meters away, slowly rotating in the half dark. It’s been butchered—arms hacked away and hanging by the outer plates, midsection almost cut in half, eyes gouged out. More than one attacker, I think—the squid may be peaceful, but they’re also strong.
It’s taking me much longer than before to assemble my conscious self, and it’s all tangled with memories I can’t place, like dreams being edited and erased.
Then a voice rises from a buzzing pool of memory. It’s the first thing I’m absolutely sure about—harsh, hoarse, angry, and putting an emphasis on every single thump I’m receiving. “Never… thought… I’d find… YOU, did you? After what you guys… DID to me.”