“And by now,” she continues, “I presume they know the territory better than we do. They might just play with us until we’re all dead. Or they could capture and torture us one by one.”
“If the Gurus stocked the cages with Sudbury’s type,” Joe says, “from all sorts of species, we’re not dealing with soldiers but with homicidal maniacs. They may not have any strategy. They may not care how many of their own they lose.”
“Where would they go? Where would they hide—back in the hamster balls?” Ishikawa asks, looking at me as if I know.
“Too obvious and exposed,” Joe says. “We started this. We have to finish it.”
“Would the Gurus have given them bolt weapons?” Jacobi asks.
“In the cages? I doubt it,” Tak says. “Not a good show, and besides, they could blast their way out.”
“What I’m asking,” Jacobi continues, “is whether they’ve captured weapons since they got loose.”
“Antag bolt weapons have ID locks,” Tak says. “I doubt humans of any sort could fire them.”
“What if the fighters include Antags?”
“ID’d to the owner,” Tak says.
“So probably not,” Joe says.
“Antags may have recovered our weapons from the Oscars,” DJ says.
“We don’t know that, and I don’t want to think they’d hand them over to cage fighters,” Joe says, with a glance my direction: Would they?
“Then we might be evenly matched, up to a point,” Borden concludes. “Question is, have they ever had the run of the ship before?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “This is just the sort of thing Gurus would do to stir the pot.”
“But Ulyanova doesn’t say that, does she?” Tak asks.
I shake my head.
“What’s she think we should do?”
For the third time, I explain what she told me—that the Antags are about to get the shock of their lives, and that Earth could be next. I don’t get into the balancing act she’s involved in with the ship. She’s not worried about the cage fighters. She has bigger issues.
“We’ve done reconnaissance many times,” Tak says, clearly ready, even eager, to go on a mission to search and destroy. “We practiced at Hawthorne. We ran multiple exercises on Socotra, and we did it for real on Mars—first season.”
“Against Antags,” I say.
“Antags caught in a bad drop of their own,” Joe reminds. “But we’re definitely prime in tough situations, in strange territory.”
“Doesn’t make it easier,” Borden says.
“Commander, have you had that sort of training?” Tak asks, forthright as always.
“Similar,” she says. “Twenty weeks of SEAL training in Cuba.”
“Jesus!” DJ says.
“Not many sandy beaches here,” Borden says.
“Borden’s in charge,” Jacobi says. Nobody disagrees. Everyone falls in behind her.
We work our way back along the ribbons and the spiraling cane bridges. Without the searchers to grow and maintain them, the canes are already decaying. There are fragments everywhere, and dust, getting into our lungs, our throats, our eyes.
Borden, DJ, Jacobi, and Tak stick close to me, forming a kind of arrowhead. Joe, Ishida, and Ishikawa take up the rear.
The ship ahead of the bulge is very different from when we moved forward. There’s that long, thick central tree DJ and Joe saw, made of the same featureless hard stuff as the rest of the ship, stretching back over the leaf lake (now dry and cracked) and producing strange fruit. War fruit—weapons and ships, nascent, nasty, ready to fill out for new recruits on the other side of the solar system.
Then—there’s another tug on our ancient string telephone.
“Feel that?” DJ says to me. “Think they’ll let us in?”
As if in answer, the probing presence tempts me with a nugget of information. I see through a deep eye, an eye that temporarily blocks everything around me, a more personal panorama of Sun-Planet, as if I’ve lived there a very long time—broad, icy regions decked in low, scudding clouds, great sheets and glaciers stretching tens of thousands of klicks to a livid glowing horizon—and on the margin, the border between the southern hemisphere and the belt of ice: a swirling black ocean filled with searchers, feeding, diving like whales—millions of them.
The archives are in the southern hemisphere, under kilometers of ocean. The searchers dive deep and touch them, access them. That’s why they’re called searchers. They’re more important to the archives than the Antags, even. Searchers are wiser. Smarter.
And no goddamned good for war.
And then this glorious nugget of history and insight is supplemented by a permission, a demand—another offering.
Inquire.
ANCIENT OF DAYS
I ask, “How old are you?”
DJ agrees that’s a good place to start. We seem to sit beside each other in a steady stream of give-and-take, sensual exploration, study. The rest are momentarily irrelevant. I don’t see them. I feel a nudge, hear a word, but do not respond.
I’m deep.
How old are you?
“Not very old,” I answer, along with DJ.
Inquire.
“Do you recognize where we got our education, our training?”
Down near the sun. An old planet or moon.
Inquire.
“Are you older than the archives on that moon?”
Probably not older. Perhaps more complete. Was there damage to those archives?
“We think they’ve been destroyed. Archives on a planet even closer to the sun have either been destroyed or severely damaged.”
Who is responsible for this damage?
“We are, partly. But we’ve been influenced, instructed, by the Gurus.”
We see that. Here they are called Keepers.
“You let them take control of the Antags?”
Follows a search through our memories for associations. Apparently we aren’t going to have any privacy, and that could save a lot of time.
Until recent time, the Antagonists, as you call them, were not aware of the existence of these archives. The Antagonists are from the northern hemisphere. They are the only ones to be infested with Keepers. The searchers are from the southern hemisphere, mostly around the polar regions. They are scholars and aware of the archives, of our history, but neither the Antagonists nor the Keepers have enlisted them as fighters because they are not suited.
They resemble animals familiar to you?
“Yes. Squid.”
Not closely related to you, these squid—perhaps enigmatic?
“Yeah. And probably not great scholars.”
DJ chips in. “We call this world Planet X. What’s your name for it?”
Too old to be important.
Inquire.
“Is this planet natural?”
You know already it is not.
“How old is it?”
Comes a number so vast I stumble around in my head trying to control it. Then I realize the units: vibrations of an atomic particle, maybe an electron in orbit around a proton—a hydrogen atom. Everything in these archives is measured by those beats, those vibrations. Very rational. Could be close to universal. But we’re not that sophisticated.
“What’s that in years?” DJ asks.
The steward of the archives digs deeper into our heads and understands. Four and a half billion years.