Alis and Hague joined Steven, leaving Biela in charge of the Revenge. Trask assured them that they’d find more suits, so the crew could leave the ship and have solid ground under their feet, at least for a little while. Together they headed for the decontamination chambers. As they did so, a group of suited survivors appeared with the intention of masking the Revenge with tarpaulins in order to shield it from curious Illyri eyes.
“There’s no need,” said Steven. “They’re all dead, unless there are any here on Earth.”
Trask stared at him.
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
Trask looked to the sky, as if expecting Illyri to materialize from the clouds and disprove what Steven was telling him.
“Well, we’d better get under cover anyway. There are still Cutters to worry about.”
“Cutters? Is that what you call those things with the tentacles?”
“That’s right. You’ve seen them?”
“We killed some of them too.”
“Is there anything you haven’t killed?”
Even partially shielded by his helmet, Steven suddenly looked older than his years, and terribly tired.
“No,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t think there is. Trask, I—”
But Trask bustled him toward the bunker.
“We need to get inside. Movement attracts them. Come on.”
Then they were underground, moving into decontamination, the noise of it so deafening that Steven could not ask the question he had come all this way to have answered.
My mother. What of my mother?
• • •
They stepped from the main chamber. Fresh overalls were provided. Through the small glass window of the connecting door, Steven saw Fremd waiting for them, and Maeve. Trask moved to open it once the system had given him the all clear.
“Trask?”
The older man turned to him.
“I went to Edinburgh, but my house was—”
Trask hit a button, and the door hissed open. Standing before Maeve and Fremd was a small, middle-aged woman wearing old jeans and a patched cardigan. Steven tried to speak, but no words would come. He felt heat in his eyes, then tears. His mother held out her arms, and her son fell into them.
• • •
Later, over tea and baked beans—the former a treat usually reserved for Christmas and special birthdays in the bunker, the latter the equivalent of a Sunday roast for the survivors—Steven told them everything, from the events on Torma to the final battle with the Illyri over Earth. He kept nothing back, not even Syl’s growing powers, for, if the Cayth were right, they represented the best hope of defeating the Others.
They were a small group: just Steven, his mother, Alis, Fremd, Maeve, Trask, and Hague. The survivors were chatting with crew members from the Revenge who had been freed from duty to enter the bunker under a roster established by Hague, so that everyone would get a chance to leave the ship. Some were using the shortwave radio to try to get news of relatives and friends. Others were already asleep, exhausted by the tension and fighting of recent days and hours.
“She may not be entirely the last hope,” said Trask. He looked at Fremd. “Tell them.”
And Fremd spoke of the deterioration in the brain of the Other, although he was hesitant, and kept reminding them that it was just one specimen.
“We need more of them to examine, though,” he said.
“We can help you get them,” said Steven, “but it doesn’t change anything.”
“What do you mean?” asked Trask.
Alis understood why Steven had spoken as he did.
“If it’s caused by interaction between the Others and their terrestrial hosts, human or otherwise, then its effects will be limited to this planet,” she said.
“With respect,” said Trask, “right now this planet is the only one I’m worried about.”
“They’re not the last of these things,” said Steven. “We destroyed one breeding world, but who knows if the Illyri established more processing plants like the one we saw? At the very least, there are Illyri out there carrying the Others inside them, and as long as they exist, they can breed.”
“But it could be the beginning of a systemic weakness,” said Fremd. “You yourself told us that the Cayth believed the Others were connected by some form of quantum entanglement. If so, the deterioration could spread.”
“When did you get so optimistic?” asked Trask, surprised to find Fremd modifying his tone.
“When you turned out to be so pessimistic.”
“It’s a Cayth theory,” said Alis. “And we’ve no idea whether it produces physical effects in the Others.”
“Well,” said Steven, “let’s find some more Cutters as a first step, and at least we can establish if it’s spreading.”
“Not all Cutters are hosts,” said Trask. “You may have to kill a lot of them. Not that I’ll object if you do.”
Steven started to reply, but instead he surprised even himself by yawning widely. Outside it was already night. Hague was struggling to keep his eyes open too, and Steven’s body ached all over. He needed to rest. His mother’s hand touched his shoulder.
“The Cutters will still be out there tomorrow,” she said to Trask. “Let my son rest. Let them all rest for a while.”
They rose, and Steven’s mother led him to a bunk. He removed his boots and lay down, while his mother placed a blanket over him, brushed his hair away from his face, and kissed him softly on the forehead.
And Steven smiled. He was asleep just moments later, and slept with a peace that he had not felt in many, many months.
• • •
They spent two days hunting Cutters for analysis, while shuttles from the Satia brought men to the surface so they could spend some time on the planet. Contact was made with survivors in Scandinavia, France, and Germany, and families briefly reunited. Information was shared, including details of what had been discovered about the brains of the Others.
The hunt was a dangerous business, because they needed to kill the Cutters without damaging them so badly that any Others they might be carrying were destroyed. The Revenge targeted Cutters moving in their spheres, or solitary specimens on the ground. Biela proved adept at using the light cannon to fire single shots, disabling the creatures sufficiently for the Revenge to be able to land and send in soldiers to finish them off. In the end, they succeeded in gathering more than a dozen dead Others. It wouldn’t have been enough for a proper scientific study, but it would do for now.
And while Fremd and his assistants examined them, Steven, aided by Trask in the cockpit, went looking for the nests of the creatures in the major cities in Ireland and the United Kingdom, bombing and burning as they went. They didn’t get them all—that would have required teams on the ground moving house to house—but they got a lot. More to the point, they targeted clusters of spheres, limiting the Cutters’ movement. In addition, as soon as they felt sure an area was safe enough, they’d search out dust-covered supermarkets and restaurants, laden with tins of food, and jar after jar of sealed jam, sauce, pickles, and tomatoes, and these they piled high in the Revenge, taking them back to the west coast of Ireland to restock the bunker’s stores.
But this was just a cluster of small islands at the edge of Europe. They couldn’t do this indefinitely. Already they’d been forced to replenish the Revenge’s ammunition from the destroyer’s reserves. They could have exhausted them entirely, and still only have secured a handful of territories from the predations of the Cutters. The Cutters were also getting clever, or the Others in their heads were. They knew they were being hunted from the air, and had started hiding. By the end of five days, there was not a Cutter to be seen, but they were out there, somewhere.
After the sixth day, Steven took Trask and Fremd aside, and told them that the Revenge would be leaving. He’d thought long and hard about the decision, and discussed it with Alis and Hague. They had agreed with him, Hague more reluctantly than Alis. The war was not here. The war was elsewhere.
The news did not come as a total surprise to Trask. He had been anticipating it, as had Steven’s mother, although it did not stop her from losing her temper with her son, and scalding tears ran unchecked down her cheeks after he confirmed it to her. Devastated to be upsetting his mother, and also to be leaving her again, Steven promised to return with Paul once the Others and their Illyri allies were defeated, but they both knew it was scant consolation, and quite probably an empty promise too.
“You’d better be back,” said Katherine Kerr fiercely, “or I swear I’ll come and get you, both of you, and when I find you, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
And then she found herself unable to say any more, for she was forcing down an animal howl of desolation. Her son was returning to the stars, to a war in which the possibility of victory seemed remote. If her two boys died out there on a distant world, she might never learn of it, and the rest of her life would be spent wondering.
But Steven trusted this Illyri named Syl, the one whom Paul apparently loved, the one who had saved her sons from the gallows. Syl gave him hope, he said, and his mother latched on to some of that hope, and fanned the flames of it.
And Fremd gave them more hope. Of the specimens that had been brought to him, half showed serious signs of deterioration, and three more were in the first stages of it. It seemed the original sample was not an isolated case.
On the morning of the Revenge’s departure, messages were received from Copenhagen and Paris. Signs of nerve degeneration had been found in the brains of more of the Others.
The creatures were dying.
• • •
The goodbyes were short, but no less sad for it. They exchanged their hugs, their handshakes, their kisses underground. Then the crew of the Revenge suited up and left the bunker. They waved one last time from the door of the ship before it closed and they ascended. Within days, the Revenge and the Satia had left the solar system.
For the first time in two decades, no Illyri ships flew above the earth.