No bugs were involved in this round of planetary evolution. Here is quite a different style. This world, part of a new initiative, was quickened by Gurus, and now its children have been carried to Sun-Planet, where they have done their very best to destroy the Antags, the searchers, and everything they value. All the current fashion in Guru-supplied entertainment. The couch potatoes out there have grown old and thirsty, in cruel need of newer, more ironic, angrier forms of destruction and apocalypse…
What we and the Antags provided for a time is now old-fashioned, no longer interesting. Betrayal and sabotage may be just what the audiences are expecting.
Time catches up.
I brush over the battles, all the wars on Sun-Planet, with dreamlike speed and precision—not just visual, but with snips of agony, flesh rending and bones splintering, wings shredded—feeling the anguish as the Antags lose cohesion when big males are gathered up and executed by ant-thick hordes of these single-eyed monsters…
The monsters then move on to the southern hemisphere and work to turn the archives into a library without readers.
I participate in the destruction of the crèches that support Antag eggs, each the size of a soccer ball and capable of hatching to produce multiple offspring—a male, several females, the necessary components for a seed-family that can also be integrated into other seed-families and raised as their own…
When the dream collapses and fades to a violent end, I roll up in the bedsheets, and through my tears, can barely make out Ulyanova, still standing in the doorway. I am horrified and blasted by the waft of her Guru psychology, her mask—but also the sad, almost hopeful presence of the starshina I first met on Mars, not so long ago. Protecting as she must. Challenging as she must to keep the ship from killing us.
No hope of anything more.
“This is what brain knows, what ghosts tell me,” Ulyanova says. “I will speak to you one more time, but not as Guru. All your Guru bombs are removed. Even so, you are not out of danger, Vinnie. Ghosts and brain demand interest. If I do not oblige…”
She doesn’t need to finish.
The room at Madigan vanishes like a soap bubble, and I’m back in the decay and rubble of the old chambers that once contained many of the violent, one-eyed race even now awaiting our Antags down on Sun-Planet.
The great seed-pod chamber begins to split and crack, closing down, being recycled. The spikes join with their opposites and pull.
“We should get out of here,” Borden says.
But we can’t just go back the way we came. Four silhouettes appear briefly along our return route, difficult to see against the central shadows, the spinal tree’s spin of growing branches, moving weapons, and vessels.
Ishida and Borden spot them first, Joe and I last. By this time, they’re upon us, brandishing bladed weapons, canes, and nightmare faces—the two that have faces.
One kicks around the chamber, grabbing and tossing canes and other debris to keep itself pinned to the curve, until it’s tangled with Ishida. A blade clangs on Ishida’s metal arm, another silhouette moves in from another direction, swinging for her flesh half—
But I’m there with a clutch of canes wrapped in rotten fabric, something I’ve assembled in a fraction of a second, and my own trajectory as I kick puts that bundle between the blade and Ishida, soundly thunking her, but not carving.
I have the blade wielder in my hands now, groping up along a skinny chest for something like a neck, as I’m kicked and clawed by anatomy out of a seafood dinner, and then I wrench a tough outer shell almost half-circle below a rim of eyes, and acrid fluid shoots past my ear—
But this thing is almost impossible to get hold of. It’s cutting at my hands when Joe recovers the wrapped canes and swings them over to Borden, who wedges her back against a curved wall, kicks down against Joe’s body, and shoves the tip of the bundle between a scurry of legs and arms…
Prying loose the blade, the pike, or whatever it is, which Borden has used, apparently, in another form, to some effect in training—
She swings it around, still propped against Joe, who’s sliding up a wall, about to fly free, when she passes the blade through the scurry and severs all the grasping legs, then somehow brings herself around as Ishida replaces Joe for prop and ballast—
The commander brings the pike down hard, starting to rise as she does so—and connects with the part I was trying, ineffectually, to strangle. Something flies free. I do not know what it is, because I’ve turned to take a barrage of twisting buck-kicks and sharp fist blows from a serpentine thing with a rippling haze of arms or legs, over three meters long, getting purchase by wrapping its hind portion around a spike growing from the wall. Thus anchored, it rises, long head of six eyes rotating in dismay, into Ishida’s crunching metal grip. I hear but don’t see what happens after that. Joe and I have wrapped our legs around the fourth silhouette, which is humanoid—is it Sudbury? More like a powerful ape with red and orange hair and tremendous hands, hands even now trying to rip off my arm, my legs, but without my cooperation, not quite managing to get a grip. I push in with thumbs and go for the eyes—two only—and rip at the flaps of the cheeks. It’s amazing how much strength you have when you still care, and death is upon you—when Ishida and Joe and Borden are at stake—and where the fuck is Jacobi? The whole melee comes to an astonished, quivering, bloody halt when a bolt carves the serpent’s half-crushed head away, and does double duty with the arm of the ape. The mass separates. Borden is on one side, Ishida and Joe on the other.
Jacobi is three meters away, clutching the pistol we recovered earlier—
And firing three more times before it whines that the charge is gone.
We stare at her in astonishment.
“Somebody made a mistake,” she says. “Thought I’d make sure.”
We push back from the corpses, surrounded not just by their main masses, but by twirling gobbets of flesh, revolving and rotating limbs, strings of internal organs.
None of them belong to us.
We’ve just engaged and taken down four cage fighters, and cannot believe that we’re all intact and alive.
“Any more?” Ishida asks.
“None I can see,” Joe says.
“Where’s Sudbury?”
No sign. Maybe one more.
Jacobi and Borden do brief examinations of our opponents. They’re all dead, but worse, are absolutely painted by old scars. The ape is missing fingers and a lower leg from a previous encounter, and every one of them looks as if they were once much stronger, more capable.
Before the cage matches.
Perhaps before they were all released.
No satisfaction comes with this victory. No glory, nothing but the chance to return to the spinning, fruiting branches and hitch on another car—completing our horror-train ride aft.
What a prize.
We feel barely alive when the car stops with a jerk and the limbs fold away, threatening to pinch our hands. We let loose and hear, then see, Antags. They’re drafting away from the ships in the hangar to intercept us. But they are hardly any sort of welcoming committee.
The air around us flashes with wings, grasping hands, bolt rifles, and pistols. The Antags take quick control of our group. Jacobi offers them our weapons. A bat intervenes to take them and moves off to join the busy mix around the interior of the hangar, where the big male is directing the loading of passengers and cargo. Preparing for departure. Two searchers move between the ships, interacting with the bats, helping carry cargo from one transport to another. Other Antags perch nearby, like a string of crows on a power line, wings folded, waiting. Looks as if they’re packing to return to the planet. What’s left of their home to return to?