Michelin and Brom and Ackerly and so many of the others…
“We’ve got half an hour before we reach Blaine,” Alice says. “Canadian authorities will meet us there. If they haven’t figured out it was you on that returning hawk. If someone hasn’t alerted border security on this side. And if you want to follow through. Do you want me to explain what happens after that?”
“I’m no longer in the Skyrines?”
“In any case, you won’t return to your previous life. But you knew that. You’re smart.”
“Captain Coyle… different orders. She was willing to kill us all. And die herself. Why?”
“I went through special ops training before I switched to medical,” Alice says. “I remember Captain Coyle. A great lady, maybe the finest I ever knew in the Corps. There was a time when I would have done the same thing she did, followed the same orders. But then… I met Joe. He took the scales from off my eyes, so to speak. Not to cast any aspersion on scales, shells, crab eyes, whatever. Whatever you feel you are now.”
Is this odd and variable and now crude and insulting woman playing with me? Testing me? Making sure I know my own mind?
Or have a mind, any mind, to know?
“One question you should ask,” Teal said in the southern garage; her face was suddenly thoughtful, sympathetic and distant at once. “How t’is strong tea, as you call it, knows to fit humans? A just snap inna our tissues, our genes?”
“You tell me,” I murmur.
“First, finish your story,” Alice Harper says. “Make it clear, cement it down. Then I’ll try to tell you the rest. All that Joe has told me. All that I’ve learned. I need perspective, and I’m sure you can provide some of that.”
MEETINGS, PARTINGS, SWEET SORROW
In the southern garage, Michelin and Kazak have run the troops through final prep for our sortie, our breakout maneuver. Mustafa and Suleiman, from Coyle’s team, have wandered back, in shock—and been accepted, because I suppose nobody knows the whole story, or their story, and we’re all Skyrines.
Or maybe it was because after they managed to recover some of their wits, they volunteered to go out through the gate, scope out the rocky harbor, and assess the fitness of the vehicles that didn’t make it inside the garage. They rigged a kind of broom of old wire and used it to brush off the germ needles scattered out there, brush a clear trail; they did this by themselves, Brodsky and Neemie say.
After the special ops sisters returned, Neemie and Beringer stepped through the lock next and tried to establish a satlink. Nothing going. We’re still on our own.
And so now we know. The northern gate is blocked by rubble. There’s been substantial bombardment. Outside the southern gate all of the deuces have been destroyed. The Trundle was hit but there’s a possibility one of the disruptors is still functional. Another Skell-Jeep seems to have survived and might still run, and two more Tonkas appear intact and not booby-trapped. The vehicles outside the harbor can’t be seen through the blowing dust, which is still heavy enough it darkens the dawn skies.
Inside the garage there’s the Tonka, with two fixed disruptors and a rear-firing multigauge cannon, the Chesty with its four Aegis 7 cannons and chain-bolt ballista, and two lightly armed Skell-Jeeps—kinetic rifles only.
Joe and Gamecock confer, tapping the lieutenant colonel’s remaining energy to figure out how to move the platform’s disruptor and its power supply onto the General Puller. The Chesty was designed to fight but also to tow and haul and do light repair. It has a folding crane behind the cabin and its own weapons that might transfer a disruptor.
Simca and Vee-Def think they can take the guts out of a Deuce’s triple-rail bolt gun and mount it to the carriage of a…
I’m losing all that. Everybody’s yakking. I listen, but I’m not getting it. Tak and Kazak are working hard and I’m doing hardly nothing.
Then Joe walks by and says, “We’re all going to die out there. I’ll make sure you mount some heavy shit before you expire.”
“Outstanding,” I say.
Teal watches this interchange with that same strange, beautiful calm. Second gen and now more days breathing the strong tea. Ice moon tea. Where does she live from now on? I mean, in her head, but maybe I also mean, on Mars as well.
Where does she go if she lives?
OUR WOUNDED—VOOR AND Skyrine—have been loaded in the Chesty’s enclosed cabin, including Gamecock. Joe and Vee-Def and Rafe have made one last survey from the western watchtower and report the sky is still thick with dust and winds are up to two hundred knots.
Tak has taken a third turn around the rocky harbor outside the garage.
The Voors are quiet.
Teaclass="underline" utterly still as she stands in the middle of the garage along with DJ and me. I hear the reports with half my head, half my self. I realize I’m standing beside Teal, not being helpful, and DJ is sticking close, like we’re all separated out, quarantined; we are still smeared with green dust and after the reports of what happened to some of Coyle’s team, nobody’s at ease being around us. They think we’ve gone over, whatever that could mean.
“I miss my weird-looking parasite,” DJ whispers, and looks at me with a smirk. “The one that sat up here.” He touches the back of his neck. “Don’t you?”
Maybe we do.
De Groot and Rafe tend to Gamecock but he’s fading, getting worse, and his eyes show he knows it. Typically a mortally wounded Skyrine will not be allowed to fill a slot in a jump-up. Not be allowed to take up space in a returning frame, if there is one up there waiting for us. Cosmoline doesn’t work on major injuries and there are no hospitals in orbit.
One major difference between Skyrines and ground pounders. Helps define us. Not that any of us likes it.
We have four who may not make it, including Gamecock, but we’ll take them with us as far as we can. We owe them that much.
The Voors, of course, will not find a slot in any of our jump-ups. Even if we offered—and we won’t—they wouldn’t take them. Joe says they’re getting their wagons back, those that still work; enough to carry their survivors to wherever they can go. Another camp, another settlement, if any will have them. De Groot works like a sonofabitch along with Rafe and two others, hauling and tending.
SNKRAZ.
Our plan is simple enough. We don’t know what will happen when we break through the Antag lines, but attempt to break through we will—and dispose of as many of the enemy as we can. The Voors will follow.
Joe approaches Teal and then me and then DJ.
“I’m handing Teal over to de Groot,” he says. “She can’t come to Earth; they’d never accept her. The Voors will take her with them to a settlement. Rafe seems to think there’s a chance Amazonia will take them all, if it’s still there. If they can make it that far.”
Teal doesn’t react to this news. When Joe walks away to help patch skintights using Voor repair kits, she turns to me and says, “Come back if you can.”
“What about me?” DJ asks hopefully.
“All of you… if you brush te ot’er life.”
I can’t stand that anymore, just so fucking weird and confusing, and so I walk away to join the others while Teal stands there watching us, beautiful, calm, scary as hell. De Groot can have her, I think, but I don’t mean it. I just can’t stand the thought of never feeling that touch again—that beautiful connection to something utterly beautiful and strange.
Teal.
Ice moon tea.