A SILVER STONE CIRCLED overhead, moving lightly as a bubble in the breeze. Its red eye glinted, watching him. Shulgi tried to keep it in sight, but it settled directly overhead. If he kept looking up like a pheasant gaping at the clouds, he’d leave himself open to attack. He ignored it for now and returned his attention to the ditch where the monster waited for him.
The monster’s egg was broken cleanly in half, the open sides cupping the earth. A material like sea-foam oozed from under the broken sides.
Demons, monsters, spirits, and ghouls had once been common, but that age had passed. In Shulgi’s lifetime, they were only vague rumors and well-worn stories. Everyone claimed to know someone who’d seen them, but when his falconers tracked those rumors to the source, they lost all substance. Until now.
Shulgi’s duty was to protect the land from all threats. In dreams, he’d battled monsters, sometimes losing, rarely winning, but often the dream-monsters disappeared or transformed before the battle resolved. Few of the battles felt real, though the priests claimed he was fighting in a spirit realm where force and motion were unpredictable.
Shulgi was dubious. Everyone dreamed. Most of the time it meant nothing.
Killing the octopus-woman might not be difficult. It was clumsy. Easily frightened, too. This might be Shulgi’s only opportunity to exercise his duty. He’d be sure to kill it with proper ceremony.
* * *
Kiki changed. She did her work and kept the fab humming, but the cheerful, companionable chatter was gone. No jokes, no whispering, no teasing. Minh should have been too busy to notice, too focused on work to care, but she tracked Kiki’s movements, as surely as if she were tagged with a monitoring camera.
Just good project management, she told herself. Keeping an eye on the junior team member.
Kiki was getting cozy with Fabian. He’d set up a hammock on the far side of the island, and Kiki wandered over there often, disappearing for hours at a time.
After lunch, Minh watched Kiki gather up the dishes and toss them to the hygiene bot, then trot under the palms to the beach.
“I didn’t think we’d have to worry about our research assistant defecting to the other side,” Minh said, nudging the whirring bot with her toe.
Hamid was abstracted, running multiple streams, attention only half in the present moment.
“It’s a good move for her,” he answered. “More options with TERN than in Calgary, if she can catch Fabian’s eye.”
A cold stone dropped into Minh’s stomach. “You don’t think they . . .”
“A romance?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I have no time for primate behavior right now. But it’s clear there’s something going on.”
“Kiki’s asexual.”
“She cut off her legs to get this one chance at time travel. What do you think she’d do to make a career out of it?”
The next morning, when Fabian finally rolled out of his cubby, Minh followed him to the other side of the island. His hammock hung between two palm trees, overlooking a slender sickle of white beach bordering water that shaded from turquoise to cobalt a few meters from shore. The sand was pocked with Kiki’s hoofprints, half washed away by the rain.
“I hope you’re not tasking Kiki with any of your historian workflow,” she said as Fabian shook the water out of his hammock.
“Not a chance. The three of you are the most boring time travelers in the world, so I have plenty of time for research.”
He pried open his breakfast container and scooped a spoonful into his mouth.
“But I shouldn’t complain,” he added. “Can you imagine the drama a doc crew gets into? It’s a pain in the ass, but it makes the time go by fast.”
Minh drew herself up to her full height. “I didn’t realize we were here to entertain you.”
“Humans can’t help but be entertaining.” His lips parted in a faint sneer. “Most of them, anyway.”
“Luckily, you’ve got a whole world full of people at your fingertips.”
“Yes. Lucky me.”
He sat on his hammock, legs dangling, and fired a live feed onto the horizon. The sour-faced priestess perched on the edge of a golden chair in a dim courtyard, eyes closed, hands folded in her lap. Lamplight flickered over her face. Her eyelids and lips quivered as she muttered to herself.
“What can I do for you, Minh?” asked Fabian.
Minh pointed at the feed. “I suppose this is what you’ve been sharing with Kiki.”
“She lurks when she has time. I bookmark the interesting bits for her.”
The audio feed picked up the quick whisper of the woman’s breath, the tinkle of water in the fountain at her feet. Minh zoomed in on her face. Lamplight glinted on the golden jewelry around the woman’s collarbones.
“Who is she?”
“Susa, priestess of the moon. She’s praying. Lots to worry about right now in her world. Monsters in a barley field. Disks floating around the landscape. New stars appearing in the night sky.”
Six dead soldiers, Minh thought.
“I suppose there’s no way to explain,” she said softly.
“No point.” He pulled his legs into the hammock. “We’ll be gone soon.”
“Listen, I want to find the safest possible location for the next landing.”
“It won’t be a problem. Choose whatever location you want. Nobody will bother us.”
Minh took a sharp breath. The conversation had been going so well. Now Fabian was talking nonsense.
“Come on, Minh.” He laughed. “What do you think I’ve been doing out here, working on my tan? I’ve been brushing up on my Akkadian. Lots of lexical shifts in the past two hundred years, but she’s been helping me.” He gestured at the priestess.
Minh stared at him. “You’re kidding.”
“When we time travel, we don’t sit around and record stuff. We gather data and analyze it, same as you. I’m making friends with her. She’ll help make our next landing much easier.”
“You’ll tell her to make sure everyone stays away from us?”
“I’ll hand down the law. Don’t look so worried.”
“Then why didn’t you do that on the first landing?” She could throttle him. Grab his skinny neck and squeeze until his teeth popped out.
“We needed to get the cameras and bugs into place. And I’m still working on the language.”
Her vision dimmed as her blood pressure dropped. She dialed herself up and her pressor response surged. Her face turned hot with rage. If she flipped the hammock, he’d be on the ground and helpless.
“Want to meet her?” Fabian didn’t wait for an answer. He adjusted the feed so the priestess appeared to be sitting in front of them. “Say hi, Susa.”
The priestess stood. She raised her left arm and opened her hand, waving awkwardly. Her eyes scanned the rooftops, searching for a point to fix on.
“Shu-lu-mu,” the priestess said in a gravelly voice.
“You’re not talking to her,” Minh said. “Not directly.”
“No, I’m using a morphological parser and a syntax database. But I didn’t have to start from square one. We have a pretty good handle on Akkadian.”
“You told her to stand up and wave. And she did it because she thinks you’re—what? A god?”
Fabian looked a little shamefaced. “Yes.”
Minh nodded. “Okay. Okay, you’re a god. I guess we’re all gods, compared to these people. Where’s the bug?”
Susa raised her hand to her hair and withdrew a tiny black sphere pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She held it out for a moment before replacing it.
“She can make her people do whatever you want?” Minh asked.
“Susa’s powerful,” he said. “Second only to the king.”
“She’ll tell them to keep away from us. Good. What else? Can you make them bring us arthropod samples?”
“I guess so, sure. Can you be more specific?”
“Ask her for worms. Insects. Spiders. Snails and slugs. Eggs and larvae, too—especially aquatic specimens. Mollusks—everything they can find. We want a few of each individual type, not thousands of one kind. Can you do that?”
Fabian grinned. “Now you’re starting to think like a time traveler.”