"Hello."
No longer in line of dead.
"Hello," he said, voice like rocks in a slide.
"You look pretty shitty, my friend."
So who was it? Familiar.
Shadow in the light, another shadow. "I can't see."
"You both died, you know that? I mean literally, your hearts were stopped and something in the ship, the ship's last energy, wrapped you in a field so you couldn't, you know, decay. Absolutely incredible. Martin, come forth."
Who would talk like that.
Joe Flatworm.
"I'm on the ship?" Martin asked. " Greyhound?"
"We picked you up five days ago. The sores are gone. You're looking a lot better. We got four of the other ships. Saved seven Brothers, seven of us."
"Ariel."
"She's alive. It's been a season of miracles, Martin."
He saw Joe's face more clearly. "The war?"
"It's still going. We're still here." Joe's broad, pleasant face, supple brows, wide smile. He held Martin's hand firmly between his hands. Skin warm, dry, like sunned leather.
Martin craned his neck and looked at himself, wrapped in a medical field, surrounded by warmth, an electric tingle moving from place to place through his body. Relaxed his neck. Swallowed. Throat raw. "Hans?"
Joe's smile vanished. "Hey," he said. "We're getting it done. That's enough."
Add to the list: Hakim Hadj, Erin Eire, Cham Shark. Silken Parts, Dry Skin/Norman, Sharp Seeing, missing or dead as well. Presumed dead after so many days.
Still weak, Martin insisted on leaving the medical field to join Hans and view the war. The war had been on for twenty-four days; most of the damage, Joe said, had been done. "We've whipped them," he said with an uneasy smile. Then he took Martin to the nose of Greyhound.
Hans hung in a net before dozens of projections. His appearance shocked Martin; hair almost brown with sweat and oil, face thin, stinking of sweat and tension. Hans wore only shorts and a sleeveless shirt. His arms seemed knotted with muscles, empty of fat; legs likewise. He did not turn around as Martin and Joe entered.
Giacomo curled asleep in a rear corner, hand reflexively grasping a net.
"Martin's back," Joe announced. Hans shivered and looked around.
"Good," he said.
The projections showed planetary cinders, wreaths of fading plasma, oblong chunks of moons, seed structures scored and headless and broken like sticks.
Hans kept his shrewd and weary eyes on Martin, evaluating, smiling faintly. "How are you feeling?"
"Okay," Martin said. He had never imagined they would ever summon such destruction.
"Kind of stirring, isn't it?" Hans said, nodding at the projections.
Martin shook his head.
"Hard to take it all in, sometimes," Hans said. "I've spent hours up here just… assessing damage, looking for something we haven'tdestroyed. It's complete. Last two days, even Sleep has broken up." He pointed to a large image of scattered masses, some dark, some flickering with light, floating in a gray, hazy void. Within the debris, a piece of what must have been crust, thousands of miles wide, rippled like fabric, its edges crumbling away. "No more staircase gods."
Martin forced himself to breathe again. The intake of breath sounded like a groan. Hans chuckled. "Glad to see you're impressed."
Martin shook his head. Tides of conflicting emotion pulled him one way, then another. We've done the Job. How do we know? We've done it. It's over.
"Whenever you're ready to lend a hand, there's a lot of scut work to get done," Hans said. "We're taking a break now. Ship is on relaxed alert. You should have seen us at the peak. Every Wendy and Lost Boy had their hands on some weapon or another. Giacomo and the ships' minds… the ships' minds, mostly, once the evidence was in… really went to town on new weapons. Long-range noach conversions, quark matter pitfalls, spin shattering, they made a whole new arsenal."
Did they? Or had the ships' minds kept them hidden, waiting for necessity?
"We sent out fifteen craft, mostly for reconnaissance. We got twelve of them back."
Martin nodded, eyes still fixed on the abstract complexity of Sleep's corpse, muted colors horribly beautiful. He could not connect the debris with what he had seen on the two journeys to Sleep's surface. Somewhere in the dust, scattered atoms of Salamander and Frog, the babar, the red joint-tentacle creature that had crawled up onto their disk ferry for a look.
Trillions.
Hans motioned for Martin to come closer. "I've got my suspicions," he said as Martin laddered forward and hung beside him. "I think the moms held back on us at first. Maybe we've been lied to all along. But frankly I don't give a shit. In the end, they gave us the tools, and that's what counts."
Giacomo stirred, opened his eyes, and saw Martin. "Hakim didn't make it. Erin. Cham." Giacomo nodded and set his lips, then shook his head.
"I know," Martin said. Resentful that he could be expected to react. He could not feel grief yet. None of this seemed real. He expected to wake back on Dawn Treaderand know they still had the Job ahead of them.
Giacomo blinked slowly. "We saved Jennifer," he said. His eyes seemed darker, deeper, wrapped in exhausted, bruised flesh. "She'll be all right."
Martin shouldered Hans to peer into Hans' display. Hans made space for him without complaint.
"It's done," Giacomo said. He shook his head in disbelief. "It was a shell. Sixty percent of what we saw was fake matter. We think there were only four real planets. Sleep was one of the real ones."
"Don't cheapen our victory," Hans said.
"It was just a shell," Giacomo repeated. "We found the projectors, we figured out how to make them echo our energy, subvert the system from within… we found a few points where we could start chain reactions… We couldn't have done it before. It wasn't nothing and it wasn't easy. We used up nearly all our fuel."
"Real fireworks," Hans said. "Did you see it?"
"Is there enough real mass, are there enough volatiles for us to refuel?" Martin asked.
"Plenty," Hans said. Martin looked to Giacomo for a second opinion.
"We'll have enough," Giacomo said.
Hans reached out and grabbed Martin's shoulder, fingers hard and painful. He shook Martin lightly. "You going to fault me for this?"
Martin looked aggrieved, or perhaps simply confused.
Hans smiled. "We can go marry a planet now."
"We can't leave yet, actually," Giacomo said. "We have to finish the examination—"
"Autopsy," Joe said from the rear.
"Make sure it's dead. Do some research," Giacomo continued. "The moms need a death certificate. We still haven't talked about being released. We don't know where we're going—"
"Shit," Hans said. "Let's savor the moment. We'll have time enough for the bureaucratic stuff later."
Giacomo seemed not to hear him. "We've got to transfer Greyhound'sBrothers to Shrike."
" Shrikestayed out of it," Hans said. "Can you believe it? They didn't do a thing."
"I didn't do a thing," Martin said.
"You opened the door, Martin."
Giacomo agreed. "You put yourselves in much more danger than we did. You lost many more…" He saw Martin's expression and lifted his eyebrows, cocked his head. "Sorry."