Later, when he got really good and drunk, Ian puzzled it out. That silvery surface was like some sort of energy shell, nice and thin, he figured, surrounding whatever guts and mechanism worked away inside the squid. When the orb blew up, of course the energy inside got reflected back, the energy shell confining it, until all that energy got spent grinding up the squid’s inside, and the whole thing collapsed like a balloon. Ian swore he saw a little silvery dust where the squid had been, but maybe he hadn’t seen even that.
Years later, Ian ran into Cap at the crabber’s bar in Dutch, the Spacey Dawg.
“It was a bomber,” Cap told him after they’d finished most of a bottle of twenty-five-year Lagavulin single malt whiskey, and they were too drunk to care about talking about something they’d sworn never to speak about.
Nothing official had ever come out. There had been the tribunal, a lot of big Nations hoo-hahs reaming their asses out for not being so careful, especially Cap. Cap took all the blame, but he took it grinning, because he’d figured it out, figured out what he had done was awards time, except you didn’t give medals for things that no one acknowledged happened, even if it had saved earth from evil alien space monsters.
Funny thing was, even though the crew of the Anna Marie never crabbed again, what with bonus pay, a mysterious settlement that one day showed up in their accounts, and stuff like that, they did pretty well—well enough to afford bottles of single malt Scotch flown all the way up from Earth.
“Evil alien space monsters,” Cap said that night years later. “Think about it. If you were an alien race and you knew another intelligent race had become uppity with space-faring ships and stuff, you’d want to mine their home planet. Blow up satellites and ships, make the orbits hard to get through. Send in a bomber and keep mining the orbits until the other race gave up.”
“Yeah, right,” Ian said.
“Think about it,” Cap said again. “You know those arms the squid left behind? You ever think about what happened to them? No one ever told us, because the Nations don’t want anyone to know we’d been attacked by aliens. Cool stuff, those arms, that metal. Pretty tough, tough enough to make shields so ships can fly through moop now.”
“Huh,” Ian said, thinking about how clean that squid had been.
“Whatever,” Cap said. “It wasn’t Chinese. It wasn’t some supersecret terrorist group that blew the orbits the first time. It was aliens, some kind of probe that came into our solar system, saw what we were up to, and blew it all up. It would have blown us up, too, kept mining our orbits until we gave up and stayed on the planet. And we stopped it.”
“You really think so, Cap?” Ian asked him.
“Ah, what the hell do I know?” Cap said. “I’m just a dumb dingaling crabber. And I thought I told you never to call me ‘Cap.’ ”
“Sure thing, Captain,” Ian said, pouring out the last of the Lagavulin. “Buy you another bottle?”