So I’ll come back with no ID or the wrong ID, which is not a problem, because the pop-up crew will pack us in and hoist us all to orbit, to the return frames, and the orbital crew will soak us in Cosmoline and send us back to Earth; that’s what we can count on.
I’m going in and out when I feel a breath of fresh oxygen. My eyes stay open. I can hardly credit what I’ve seen, what Joe has done, but new Skyrines in beautiful fresh skintights are tending to all of us, to Tak and Kazak and DJ.
One sister leans over me—a lieutenant named Shirmerhorn. “Where the hell have you been, Lieutenant Colonel Roost?” she asks me.
“Mismatch on the DNA,” says a tech with a very young voice. He lifts a bio-wand and shakes it by his ear, as if it might rattle.
“Screw the bookkeeping,” Shirmerhorn says. “They won’t notice. Rack ’em and pop ’em.”
And so they do.
I’ve come through all this shit relatively unscathed. Broken ribs, a greenstick fracture of my tibia, a concussion, oxydep-burned lungs. A long session in Cosmoline is called for. Most of it will knit just fine on the way home.
I see Kazak and Tak and Joe and DJ lying beside me in their plastic tents, peeled out of their skintights.
Joe lolls his head. “You’ll touch Earth at SBLM,” he says. “Seattle was Gamecock’s town.” He tells me to go to the Seattle apartment, reminds me of the address—makes me repeat it. “Stay out of trouble. I’ll join you as soon as I can. Lots to tell.”
“What?”
“What it all means, asshole.”
Tak’s listening, lying almost on his side.
Kazak rises up behind him. “What the fuck are you two whispering about?” he says.
Joe smiles. “We’re going home.”
“If they don’t pump bolts into our frames,” Kazak says, falling back, ever the optimist.
“Vee-Def got it,” I say, that image still searing. “He got it quick but bad.”
“Listen close, Vinnie,” Joe says. “This is important. It’s why Coyle was out there, and why all the brass was out there, and I was out there, and why the Antags were out there, chasing us all. There’s a bigger picture, and now you’re part of it, get me? Lie low and just relax for a while, until we can all sit down, private-like, and talk about it. Lots more to come. I’ll be back when I can.”
“Back to the world where we can’t say ‘fuck,’” Tak says.
Joe has a funny story about that, and so, while we’re waiting to be delivered to the pop-ups, he tells us. Maybe someday I’ll tell it to somebody else. If there’s time.
If I’m in the mood.
My moods are getting stranger and stranger lately.
OOPS
Alice and the driver are in custody by the side of the road, and the civvies in the other cars are watching, critical, irritated, thinking we must be smugglers.
“Did you bring anything back with you, soldier?” one of the plainclothes guys asks as he helps me down, very carefully, from the back of the van. “Any crystals—black crystals, white crystals—diamonds or whatever?”
“No, sir. No crystals.”
They have a kind of plastic bag they want me to wear, so I oblige them and put it on. Upper baglike torso encloses my arms, no sleeves, but the lower half fits around my legs so I can walk. Even has a separate breathing apparatus. They load me carefully onto the back of a hover-square. The pilot looks back from the cockpit as I’m loaded and secured, then looks forward, touches his mike, and reports, “Fugitive retrieved. ETA twenty-seven minutes. Prepare Madigan.”
Fucking Madigan. I don’t care who hears me. I do not want to be laid up with doctors and needles and idiots who think I’m carrying something contagious.
Even if I am.
Joe had arranged that I come home as a different man. Relying on typical Corps inefficiency. Thinking I might have some time before the docs found out somebody came back who shouldn’t have, who wasn’t on the list. Who should have died up there, if Captain Coyle and her team had done their job.
No matter.
It was always a long shot.
I had a weird time in Cosmoline on the way back. Unlike most trips, I didn’t just sleep it through. I did some heavy-duty thinking, and not always with my own, difficult brain.
With a new, strange, and friendlier brain.
THE FOUR WIDE blades on the corners whir their dusty lift, and we’re abruptly up and out, flying over the farmland, away from the border.
My plastic bag-suit crackles as I move.
“Welcome home, Skyrine,” says the guy sitting next to me, in his forties, graying, hard-muscled but bulky, eyes darting, fatalistic. Could have been a Skyrine himself once.
Inside the plastic sack, I reach into my pocket. Finger the coin, my Precious. They haven’t frisked me yet. Teal also had a coin, given to her by her father—a kind of key to the Drifter. And now here’s another key. Maybe that means there’s more than one Drifter. Makes sense.
Lots of chunks of old moon fell on Mars way back when.
I HATE TRANSITIONS. Borders in time, in space, the thin lines between one state and another are the most dangerous. We cross two big borders in life, both equally difficult—being born and dying.
Darkness on either side.
I’m afraid, always afraid, of such thoughts, because I do not slide well between states—war and peace, happiness and grief, friends alive, friends dead. I watched a cat die once. It had been hit by a truck backing out of a driveway. It zipped one way, scared by the motor noise, then suddenly, panicking, turned around—dashed right under a tire. I kneeled beside it after the truck had gone. Last few seconds of life, it looked up at me in greater pain than I wanted to imagine, and then it just shivered and closed its eyes. That cat made the grade. It knew all about borders and transitions.
It crossed over without a sound.
I can only hope I will do the same.
For the time being I’m in Madigan, in a secure facility, with no prospect of going anywhere. But at least I’m getting three squares of hospital food, which is better than I expected, and there’s lots of air and lots of water and no smell of pickle, and I don’t have to wear a skintight, so that’s good.
I don’t know what happened to Alice. Maybe she’s here, too, somewhere—in quarantine because she spent so much time with me. I still hope Joe will come for me, but that’s crazy thinking.
Been doing a lot of crazy thinking since I was put into orbit and fell home. But Earth isn’t really my only home now. I dream and think a lot of crazy things.
CAESURA
Okay, I’m ready to spill some conclusions.
Listen close. Tell this to Joe. He probably knows already, but maybe not.
DJ’s strong tea, the green powder, isn’t spores, isn’t an infection of any sort we understand—it’s memory. It’s what the intelligences from the old ice moon designed their crystals to leave behind when the water runs out, so that kobolds can pick up the work later, when water returns.
But the memory dust affects humans, too. It slips into our cells, into our heads. We begin to remember things we never lived. And there’s only one explanation for that.
When the old moon collided with Mars, eons ago, it must have dropped trillions of tons of ice and rock—its icy shell, inner oceans, and deep, rocky core—onto a previously lifeless Mars. The old moon seeded Mars. Rain and snow fell all over the Red until oceans covered the young beds of lava, and Mars came alive for a few tens of millions of years.
But some of that debris blasted back from the impact, far out into space, and drifted downsun.