“Weird dreams. I’ve explained.”
“Yes, mostly—I have my notes. But I’d like to hear it again, in case we’ve overlooked something important.”
“Come in here with me, sir, and I’ll give you the details up close.”
“I note your frustration, Sergeant Venn. Perhaps soon.”
“You still think I’m contaminated.”
“We have yet to determine anything of the sort. Still, you have described coming into contact with nonterrestrial organisms, including Antagonists. All by itself, direct combat with our enemy mandates a period of quarantine—usually, a few weeks in Cosmoline tells the tale.
“But I am most curious about this powder you describe, which you touched, smeared on your skin, inhaled—inside the Drifter. You say it was produced by a crystal pillar that rose within a mined-out cavity that the Muskies, the human settlers, called the Void, or the Church. You tell our doctors that the powder gives you vivid dreams, dreams of living in another time, another place. Curious and interesting. Do you believe these dreams are historical, referring to real events—or delusional?”
Like that. I’m in the hands of experts.
Fuck me.
THEY’VE GIVEN ME a paper tablet and a notebook and pen. No computer. No way to reach the outside world or do any research worth a damn, though they bring me books from the base library or a thrift store, old language textbooks and tattered paperbacks from the last century. I’m reading Elmore Leonard and Louis L’Amour and Jim Thompson, plus a few old novels. I’ve asked for Philip K. Dick. I’ve asked for Kafka. I’ve asked for T. E. Lawrence. No joy.
I’m writing again, but it’s not like I own my life or this story. Maybe the docs will come back with answers I can use. Right. Until then, here’s what I think I know, on my own terms: the brew I’ve slowly distilled from my last deployment on Mars—a sour liquor of intoxicating fact mixed with muddy water.
But here goes.
A LOCAL’S GUIDE TO THE RED
A generation before the Battle of Mars began, settlers from Earth, Muskies, discovered a huge, mostly buried chunk of ancient rock. They called it the Drifter. They did what Martian prospectors do: scoped it out, found it interesting, and started to dig.
The Drifter turned out to be a piece of ice-covered moon that fell on Mars billions of years ago. Along with deep aquifers washing around its plunging roots and abundant reserves of pure metal—nickel-iron, iridium, platinum, gold—the Muskies discovered something else, something that changed their game completely: a fractured, battered tower of crystal hundreds of meters tall, from that distant age when the old moon supported an ocean beneath its thick ice shell. A sloshing, inner sea filled with life. That pillar seems to have been part of the archives of an ancient civilization that came to an end when the moon—with all its ice, ocean, and metal-rich center—was tugged from its far orbit, fell downsun toward Mars, and broke apart in the red planet’s tidal forces. I can see it, almost, that amazing disaster. The huge fragments shaped a dusty, ice-fogged plume, then impacted around the planet like a short, loose whip—drilling through crust, mantle, even pushing down close to the molten core. The collisions happened in mere minutes but released tremendous energies, dividing the northern and southern hemispheres, sending shockwaves echoing, stirring up immense volcanoes—and adding trillions of tons of water to a formerly dry world.
The fragments of old moon brought something else to Mars. Life. And here’s a whizbang conclusion to really dream about in the dark watches of the night—
The blowback from those collisions could have fallen deeper into the solar system and seeded another world, brought another dead planet to life:
Earth.
ANOTHER FINE DAY IN THE BUGHOUSE
Tell me once more, please, about the Drifter, Sergeant.”
“I’ve told all I know.”
“But I want to hear it again. Tell me about what the settlers found inside the Drifter, and what they did with it—and what you did with it when you got there.”
“We didn’t do much of anything with it. We were busy trying to stay alive.”
“You didn’t arrange to bring back samples?”
“Fuck no.”
“Please. We’re on Earth now. What about your fellow Skyrines? Did they bring back materials?”
“Not that I know about. I’ve said this over and over…”
“Please be patient. We’re being patient with you.”
All behind the glass.
BUNDLES OF TROUBLE
Through their chosen human interpreters, the Gurus made it clear to the people of Earth what would happen if we let our mutual enemy, the Antags, have their way with the solar system. The Gurus told us it had happened many times before, and that the ultimate result would be the conversion of every planet, every moon, every asteroid, into raw materials out of which Antag engineers would assemble a kind of gigantic clockwork for harnessing the sun’s energy, and then would convert the sun itself—said energy to be shipped thousands of light years, through means not revealed, to power other star systems and to further promote the conquest of other planets around other suns….
Boosting their geometrically accelerating plans for conquest of the galaxy.
Bottom line, if we do not hold them on Mars, they will drop toward the Earth and our system will quickly become a weird clockwork of rotating wire, armillary rings, vast complex mirrors redirecting the sun’s light and heat into absorption dishes wider than Jupiter… which will then beam it someplace else through I don’t know what method, maybe an opening in the fabric of space-time, maybe just shooting it at light speed to someplace special—
Could be the Gurus don’t want to explain further for fear of scaring us silly. If you know you can’t win, you don’t fight, you give up, right? We have to be able to believe that victory is possible, with a little help now and then from the Gurus. Real super-science stuff, like spent matter drives and suppressors and disruptors—even the Cosmoline in which Skyrines are packed while flying transvac, so beloved by the Corps. Most Skyrines accept this hook, line, and radar dish because it’s kind of exciting. Makes us part of a big picture, fighters in a just and necessary war.
But after a few days on the Red, and especially when our drop is fucked, questions can arise among even our densest warriors, given time to think things through. I’d like to meet an Antag someday away from a battle, on equal, unarmed terms, buy him a Romulan ale, and ask him or her, or it, friendly-like, what the fuck do they tell you to keep you climbing into your ships and shuttling down to Mars or Titan?
Because up until just recently, when we crawled into our space frames and made the long journey for this campaign, we were winning.
We were sure of that.
Now…
I’m out of the whole fucking mess. Locked in my room, going nuttier than I remember being before—and nutty on two worlds, because my other self, the self that returns when I’m asleep and keeps trying to remember that old ice moon, keeps trying to bring back a lifetime billions of years gone—that carapace-coated asshole is every bit as bored and crazy as me, with even more reason.
To add convincing detail, the bug in my dreams, he or it, comes in two parts—an ornately figured parasitic passenger riding a great big, ugly sonofabitch, hanging on just behind a triad of compound eyes. I don’t know which one does the steering. Maybe they trade off.