“Set free?” I ask.
“Our shame,” Ulyanova says. “When we opened gate, we opened cages. Fighters are free.”
“But they’re dead!” DJ says.
Ulyanova lifts an almost bald eyebrow. “Some still live, spread in dark places. Ours and others. Watch for them. They may be on look for you, yes?”
“Shit,” DJ says. He’s as gray as his overalls.
“How many?” I ask.
“Fifty-three,” Vera says.
Ulyanova shakes her head. “Not so many. More have died, killing each other. They are like wild dogs.”
This is a fight we don’t need and certainly don’t want. Makes my spine freeze thinking about it. “Can’t you keep us clear of them?”
Ulyanova looks at us with real sympathy, but suddenly, her smile is wicked. “You are more interesting to ship when you fight.” She shakes her head stubbornly. “I will not change that. It will help keep you alive.”
Gurus and their ghosts know too fucking much about all of us. They know how to arouse fear, anger, violence—which might as well be complete mastery. It’s their script. It’s their stock on the market. And it’s what makes us worth keeping around.
For a while, at least.
Three searchers move up and link arms.
“This way, please,” Vera says.
CLOSER TO THE PALACE
It takes a few hours for the searchers to transfer the rest of our squad from the ship’s midsection, beyond the cloverleaf water park, through the screw gardens and past the ancient cages, all open now, then along the steel vine and into the needle, where we advance along the ribbons, through the clock faces, and slightly outboard to the new black nests.
Borden and Jacobi assign the cubbies to pairs, except for Kumar, who gets his own. Judging from the reactions, our squad will soon exercise its own choices for nest buddies. Without her Queen, Vera is in attendance off and on, enjoying a break, or just enjoying human company…
As if in reward, one of the searchers that are always in attendance around the clock faces moves toward our new quarters, reaches into its slung pouch, and supplies us with more “grapes” and cakes and another round of blankets.
For the time being, most of the Antags will remain close to the hangars where their ships have been moved and re-stowed.
As the others move in, DJ and I gather Borden, Kumar, and Jacobi in the ribbon space and tell them about the cage fighters. The air seems suddenly frigid, as if the cold of outer space has been sucked into the hull along with the starlight.
Kumar maintains a studious silence, as he nearly always does. Then he asks, “The searchers will keep lookout?”
“They don’t fight,” Jacobi reminds us, needlessly.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But they’ll be in the way if the fighters come forward. Ulyanova commands them—but we still don’t know what they can do for her.”
“What’s she look like?” Borden asks.
“She’s a wreck,” I say.
“How long can she keep it up?”
No way I can answer that.
Three of the searchers return aft, leaving two to take up station between the clock faces, arms barely rippling, intent on instructions and details.
“Perfect sailors of a starry sea!” Vera marvels.
We set up watches around the ribbon space to regularly sweep the five empty cubbies.
BARELY SETTLED IN, we’re summoned.
We’ve grown quite adept at moving along the canes and ribbons. The searchers have slung more rubbery cables, so now we hardly need their help. The squad gathers in the ribbon space, where Vera and Ulyanova wait. Forward, two searchers swivel to listen and observe—possibly to protect us, though we all have doubts about what they can do in that regard.
“Show us where we are,” Ulyanova tells the ship, and the ribbons expand as if carving great slices out of the hull—opening up dozens of long, skewed views to vast clouds of stars—the nebulosities of the Milky Way.
My God, how long has it been since I last stared up at that great bridge!
Inside me, something strains—and snaps. I start to laugh. The others look with sour expressions. I can’t explain myself—it’s all colliding in my head, years of walking different worlds, becoming different boys, different men—looking up at the same sky.
Rediscovering a singular moment…
As a grunt on Socotra, studying that arch of a billion suns, I threw away my last tiny fragment of atheism, my last arrogant assurance that I was righteously alone.
I did not want to be alone, and then… I wasn’t.
No way to explain it.
But at that time, the God I believed in was a violent, deadly God.
There were times on Socotra, at the end of basic, knowing I was going to be a warrior, when I tried to think my way to a suitable death—if I died in battle, or in space, out there! Looking up at the night sky, with hardly any lights for hundreds of miles around, I tried to turn the Milky Way into a direct stairway to Fiddler’s Green, the actual Fiddler’s Green—grunt heaven, Valhalla. Where all heroes go when they die.
I silently prayed to my new masters, to this violent god, to the generals and Wait Staff and Gurus, the threatened billions of Earth: Send me all the way out there. Send me on a mission to find the place where brave soldiers can fight forever, but when we are grievously wounded, when the guts hang out and blood gushes, the guts get shoved back in, new blood steams lava red in our veins—wounds stitch up, bones knit, and we return to our comrades, our fellow soldiers, to toast the pain, the victory or the loss, and fight again.
I’d already killed a man, but back then I did not know what actual battle was, certainly did not know what it was like to fight and die in near-vacuum. Eternal war seemed cool. I don’t think that now.
I stop laughing, catch myself in a single hiccup, try to sober up. “Who sees things in these long strips?” I ask Ulyanova.
“The searchers,” Vera answers. Ulyanova nods. “It works for their eyes. They can stretch over two strips and see everything. But we can adjust, as well.”
I look into the widespread four eyes of the closest searcher, trying to estimate the parallax, the distance, but somehow also sensing the intelligence that might be there, might be set free, if it could only get home…
It does not hate us. It serves and does not resent its service. There’s something potential in that wide, deep gaze—something that could be terribly useful and important—but then the searcher swivels and our moment is lost.
“Hey,” DJ says, pointing along one wide ribbon, then another. We look where he directs, tilting on cords to adjust our view, and I make out, cutting a crescent from the starry bridge, a faded brownish-gray shadow. For a moment I can almost feel it suspended below our dangling legs. It’s a planet. Looks vaguely familiar, but we’re not used to this close view, or this way of seeing.
The crescent has a mottled, chunky, mountainous surface thrust between rough expanses of rubbled gray broad plains or maria of smooth white, marked by even bigger, isolated angular mountains like bobbing ice cubes dropped into a sundae. It’s Pluto! We seem to be thirty or forty thousand clicks below its southern polar regions.
Moving back and forth between a few ribbons, like kids in a planetarium, we point out the crusty borders of large, icy peaks—trying to remember those lectures on Socotra. We recover the names: Cthulhu Regio, Sputnik Planum, Tombaugh—