Nobody knew about the aliens until the attack, and by then it was much too late. But that was the nature of surprise attacks: the very best ones tended to be surprising.
The colony was the seventh one established in the Theta Quadrant Time Well. It was the most remote of the colonies, eighteen standard years from the hub. This likely made it the last, both for the lack of other potentially habitable planets in the quadrant, and for the distance. As a rule—and it was an actual rule, if one interpreted Starseed Bible as a book of rules, which most people did—local spacetime travel shouldn’t exceed a radial distance of more than twenty standards. This was because for as long as the human race had been seeding the universe, nobody had been able to figure out how to extend the average human lifespan much more than a hundred standards.
That rule was more for the sake of the families of travelers than for travelers. A colonist leaving the hub for Hockspit—the unfortunate name of the seventh planet in the Theta Quadrant Time Well—would be devoting only eight standard years of their life to the trip. But it would be eighteen years for any of their friends or family on either side of the journey. And if it was a round-trip, forget it.
This was why most freight was moved between planets around the hub, when possible, and by drone if it had to come from the hub. It was also why, in the unlikely event something that had never happened before happened—such as aliens showing up and attacking for some reason—individual planetary colonies tended to be on their own. It wasn’t that nobody cared to help, it was that nobody could get there in time to effect meaningful change on the proceedings.
For the same reason, the colonies were typically well-defended, sometimes comically so. About half of the planet’s workers were paid by the Intergalactic Matrix, and while a significant portion of those workers performed some bureaucratic role, all were trained and equipped to perform as members of a standing army, should the need arise.
The need had never arisen before, so far as anyone on Hockspit knew. Then, on an otherwise decent afternoon, the sub-orbital perimeter disappeared.
“All right, men, lock and load!”
Sergeant Jusp loved telling his men—a group of humans consisting of both genders, but never mind that—to ‘lock and load’. It meant, get your pulse cannons ready, and was essentially meaningless, an antiquated bit of parlance that made sense back when soldiers fired bullets instead of bursts of concentrated energy from neutron blasters.
Corporal Opie Telluride nonetheless took his weapon off his back and performed a quick visual check to ensure that if he pulled the trigger, the most likely thing to happen next would be that it would fire. Short of firing it into the air, all he could do was check the energy readings and make sure he knew how to click the safety off and on. He did this, and then he put it back over his shoulder. He accompanied this with an eye-roll that did not escape the notice of Corporal Epic Wyn.
“Careful,” she said under her breath. “Too much character will get you kicked out of this man’s army.”
Opie smiled back, and then they resumed positions, eyes-forward at attention. In a smaller group, this exchange could have gotten them into some trouble, but they were in the middle of the largest collection of citizens any of them had ever been a part of; Jusp couldn’t even see them from the stage.
Commanding the soldiers to check their weapons was the end of the speech anyway. Next came the literal marching orders, as each unit was given an assignment. Assignments were greeted with whoops and hollers from the various units, a time-honored assertion of collective bravado to offset the fact that Sergeant Jusp’s briefing was basically the most terrifying thing any of them had ever heard.
Opie knew a lot of the info already, although this was the first time he’d heard it all at once, and the first time he was forced to think of it from a tactical perspective. It was also probably the first time he thought of himself as one of the people who would have to do something about all of it.
The sub-orbital perimeter went down five days earlier. Opie was one of seven in his family who did full-time soldiering, and included in that seven was a cousin named Dino who worked communications. Dino told him about it that night, two days before the news was made public.
The colony had three perimeters. The first was a series of satellites in low stationary orbit. They were only there to detect any inbound traffic to the planet—be they ships or meteors or whatever—and had no built-in defenses. The satellites were also useful for communication, but less so on Hockspit than on a lot of the other colonized planets, because for the most part, this colony could communicate based on line-of-sight.
The second perimeter was airborne: military whirlybirds and stream riders, mostly. These were armed, and they did regular overpass sorties from one end of the habitable zone to the other so regularly, hardly anyone really noticed them anymore, up until they stopped happening.
Opie and Epic, and everyone else in the room constituted the third perimeter… or they would, once they reached the front line.
The speed with which this all happened took everyone by surprise. According to Dino, the sub-orbital satellites went down all at once, which was basically impossible for a network that stretched completely around the planet. They assumed for the first few hours that it was a natural cosmic event—a solar flare or a particularly impressive gravity wave or a dark energy pulse, maybe; the possibilities were pretty far-reaching. But all of those things would have had a directionality to them, affecting satellites on one side of the planet first, and also likely impacting surface-level equipment.
After a little more work and a lot more math, someone in the tower figured out that Hockspit had been attacked. Something—at least two somethings but probably more—hit the network with a disruption blast from multiple angles at once. This strongly implied an intelligence.
“Derby province,” Epic said.
“What?” Opie asked. He hadn’t been paying attention.
“It’s where we’re going, granite-head. Too early for a nap.”
They started moving as a unit, toward the landing bay to the carrier that would transport them to—apparently—Derby province.
“Not that bad,” he said.
She clapped him on the shoulder, which was painful but also a show of affection in Epic’s world. Opie was tall and gangly, while Epic was smaller and generally more compact, but she packed a lot of muscle in that small frame.
“I swear, Telluride. You’re on the smallest chunk of land in the quadrant and you’re still flunking geography. Derby’s at the edge of the hab zone.”
“South?”
“Western limit.”
“Cold, then, not hot.”
“Temperate. And sure, I guess there are worse places we could be.”
Hockspit was only barely habitable. There was a landmass on the planet that was essentially an enormous steppe, and that was where everyone lived. The weather went from extreme hot to extreme cold and the storm systems were incredibly violent, but on average it was livable for humans. That was the only part of the planet where this was true. There was an ocean that was highly acidic on the west and the east, the south—the equatorial region of the planet—was mostly a lot of lava, and the north was mostly one big chunk of ice.
So there were indeed worse places to be.
They marched double-time until reaching the carrier, up the ramp and into the wide-mouth bay door. All around them, people were talking about what was ahead with a combination of bragging to cover up fear, and out-and-out fear. Because none of them knew what they were in for.
At the surface, the planet’s atmosphere was a little thicker than standard. This meant defining the ‘surface’ as the ground of the plateau on which they all lived, and that was about a mile up from the sea level. It got a lot thinner higher up. The most efficient vertical travel was a whirlybird, until the air got thinner and then a more plane-like design tended to work better. Consequently, the grunts on the carrier were treated to a strangely unpleasant experience.
First, they rose slowly for about forty minutes. Then, quite suddenly and very audibly, the rotors stopped and retracted and the wings deployed. While this was happening nothing was keeping the craft aloft, so they were in free fall. Then, the jets at the rear of the carrier engaged and everyone went from zero gravity to two standards, sideways, in half a second. This was the transition that broke arms and legs and the occasional neck, and invariably made at least a couple of people vomit.
The good news was that it was a smooth flight the rest of the way, as the carrier skipped across the heavier atmosphere beneath it like a round stone on a pond of non-acidic water.
“Well that sucked,” Opie said.
“Always does, soldier,” the guy next to him said.
He turned for a look at the man. He was a lot older than just about everyone else aboard, which made him more interesting than everyone else aboard except maybe for Epic, although Opie was probably biased in that regard.
“You a first gen?” Opie asked.
“Yessir. I’m guessing you’re a third.”
“Second, but I was born on the ride over.”
“A Zee Gee baby full-time soldiering? We really are in trouble.”
He said it lightly, with a smile, but it was the same sort of thing Opie had been hearing in one form or another his whole life. Epic got the same grief for the same reason, and she liked it even less.
There was a myth that children born in zero gravity were too soft and weak for heavy labor. It had to do with the idea that bones only developed properly in an environment with something close to standard gravity. This was sort of true, except colony locals had gravity simulation areas. He learned to walk in one of those spaces. Granted, he didn’t get to experience the gravity of a planet until he was two, but the natural pull on Hockspit was slightly less than one standard. It just didn’t feel that way because the atmosphere was a good deal thicker. He remembered finding the air hard to adjust to, but that was all. He also remembered seeing the sky for the first time, and that was a much nicer memory.
“I’ll make sure I stick by you if something heavy needs lifting,” Opie said.
The man laughed.
“Sure, sure.”
He extended his hand and introduced himself as Koestler.
“Born here, I take it?” Opie asked.
“Builder stock, yes sir.”
Colonies were started by cleaners and builders. Cleaners came first, and mostly worked from ships in low orbit, and just above the surface. Most thankless job in the quadrants, from what Opie had been told. Cleaners spend their lives in space, either above planets that weren’t ready for people yet, or traveling to those planets. They scrubbed atmospheres, cleared land masses and tested for native life.
Builders arrived later, to stand on the planet’s crust and build things. Typically, the biggest buildings and largest land claims would go first to the descendants of the cleaners, which was only fair. Every now and then a builder would be a second gen cleaner, but that was pretty rare.
“Ever heard of something like this?”
Koestler looked him in the eyes. “No. Nobody has, far as I know.”
He was referring less to what happened to the sub-orbital network than to what happened after that, which was how the rest of the colony was really introduced to the problem now facing them.
A day after the satellites were deactivated by an apparent deliberate attack, the armed sorties that constituted the second perimeter were shot down.
This was especially terrifying for someone sitting in a troop transport flying the same basic pattern as many of those downed airships. They’d all been told that analysis led to the conclusion that the assault on the second line worked because the flights were running on a predictable schedule. This seemed fair provided the weapons that took out the flights were fired from space, because that required predictive targeting, and that only worked if the target followed a consistent pattern. Opie happened to know that was an assumption not fully supported by facts: they hadn’t figured out yet how the second perimeter was actually taken out.
The troop transport was making this jump at a new time, along a path the regular ships never took. Everyone involved still saw this as a huge risk, but it was at least a calculated one.
“Well, this is what we trained for,” Opie said, repeating an oft-stated truism that never sounded all that true.
“True. Makes you wonder though,” the older man said.
“How do you mean?”
“Nobody ever questions training up an army to guard a frontier settlement. That’s just good common sense. But how many generations of us did that without ever facing an enemy? Other than a rogue faction of humanity from time to time? Point is, looks like we got ourselves some aliens, and that’s a first. Sure, we’ve come across xenospecies here and there, but nothing current, right?”
“Current?”
“At the same scale as us. Mostly, it’s bacteria, and maybe some more advanced life forms, with hair and all that. And we’ve found ruins, alien societies who died off before we got there. But you think about it, the universe is big and it’s been around much longer than we have, and it’ll be here long after we’re gone. The odds of us bumping up against aliens who can shoot us out of the sky with weapons that match our technological level, well that’s a pretty small number.”
He leaned in closer, pressed up against the safety belt that was holding him in place.
“At the same time… somebody in the government knew. You don’t build a society on the backs of conscripted military for kicks. You do it because you know someone’s out there.”
They didn’t land in Derby province, because they needed a runway to land and Derby province didn’t have one. There was a maneuver the carrier could have performed, but converting from stream rider back into whirlybird was considerably more challenging than the reverse, because the speed had to be bled off first. It could be done—the craft would essentially commit to a downward spiral in the heavier lower atmosphere, with the wing flaps up to create drag, until it was slow enough to convert to the rotors. The challenge was that it had to be done with precise timing, because if the ship began to fall too fast, the rotors would snap off before engaging. It was scary, anyway, so Opie was glad they weren’t doing that.
What they were doing instead was chute diving from the carrier’s belly. If it meant something that he preferred free falling to the ground over landing on a helipad, he didn’t stop to consider what that something was.
Also, he liked chute drops. In drills, it was the thing he enjoyed the most. If you’re going to live on a planet with a thicker-than-standard atmosphere, parachuting is definitely a pleasant recreational diversion.
It was the middle of the day, which would have been a bad time to drop into a war zone. However, they had significant cloud cover—this part of Hockspit got lots of storms thanks to the natural high/low pressure of the cliff side—and it was only a war zone in a philosophical sense. Nobody was shooting anybody over here, either out of the air or otherwise.
More precisely, nobody was shooting anybody anywhere. After the second round of attacks took out the airborne defense network, there had been no further escalation. That the military higher-ups had elected to deploy troops to certain specific territories suggested they knew something they weren’t sharing, but so far as Opie knew, that something didn’t involve direct engagement with the aliens.
He took in the terrain on the way down. There weren’t a lot of colonists this close to the edge of the habitable zone, so what he saw was mostly hillsides, grasslands, and a few buildings here and there. The military had a weapons cache and general supply fortress buried in one of the hills, but that wasn’t visible from the air. He had the coordinates for it, though; it was the recon point.
He landed on the edge of a livestock paddock. The best farmland in Hockspit was north of this spot, in soil enriched by a pre-colonization volcanic eruption and fed by runoff siphoned from the melting icecaps of the northern pole. The soil was poisoned by the acid Western Ocean, and only certain plants grew naturally. They raised animals here; ones that could survive on an acidic scrub grass diet.
They called these animals cows. Hockspit’s cows were genetically modified specifically for this planet to the degree that one couldn’t breed this animal with a cow from another quadrant’s bovine, and it was highly likely the taste of the animal’s meat varied widely from colony to colony as well. Still, the gene stock was cow, so they were cows.
Opie took to the task of collecting his chute, as he watched Epic float gently to the ground in the field next to his. A couple of the cows on the other side of the fence took a minute to look up from their lunch and moo some additional commentary.
“Storm coming,” she said, as he joined up with her. “Can you smell it?”
“Yeah.” There was ozone in the air, and the clouds were wet.
“Hope everyone gets down before the lightning kicks. I hear it’s bad around these parts. You ever drop during an electrical storm?”
“No, but it sounds like a bad idea. Come on, we’re a few klicks away.”
The skies opened before they reached the recon point.
Epic and Opie grew up in downtown Burkin, the one place on Hockspit that could rightly qualify as a city. It was almost perfectly centered in the middle of the habitable zone, which made it as far as it could possibly be from the lava in the south, the ice in the north, and the acid seas of the east and the west. Aside from the fresh water canals that crisscrossed the landscape, Burkin was fully landlocked. Any storm that made it there—quite a few did—had to pass over the entire landmass first, and since it was an uneven landmass with lots of hills and valleys, city dwellers rarely got the real Hockspit high storm experience.
City storms had weaker winds, and the cloud formations usually relied on internal momentum alone to carry through. In Derby, though, the wind and rain was unforgiving. It was fed with new energy from the sea churn and there wasn’t a lot between the town and the cliffs to cut down the force.
The water was also slightly more acidic than Opie was used to. Nothing that would do them immediate harm, but also not the sort of thing it was good to get in one’s eyes. And it made everything smell like vinegar.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part was the lightning.
Most of the bolts reaching the ground were drawn to the lightning rods dotting the landscape. The local cattle farmers used power from the frequent strikes to charge their generators, and also to keep the lightning from doing too much damage elsewhere. The straight-path route to the recon point was full of these, and they knew better than to get too close to one.
Flat, open fields were also probably a bad idea, but on that they had little choice because that described a large portion of the terrain.
“Why do you think they sent us here?” Epic shouted over the rain, between the thunderclaps.
“Don’t know.”
They were double-timing it together down a path between two farms. Their packs had a spotlight attached to the shoulder piece, which they’d both lit up. It helped keep the road visible in between the lightning flashes, but it was difficult to tell by exactly how much, because it felt like they were running through a strobe.
“I mean, this was a targeted landing, right? They sent a whole squad out here. So what was their intel?”
“I’m not gonna know any more between the times you ask me that,” he said. He was thinking about what Koestler intimated on the ride over, though, about the government maybe working with a lot more information than they were sharing. Distrust of government was a little unusual coming from someone in the military arm of that government, but only a little.
“Just want to know what I’m running toward, lughead,” Epic said.
“My guess is, a warm cot, three squares a day, and a whole lot of nothing.”
She laughed.
“You sound pretty optimistic for cannon fodder.”
“They sent us to the coast,” he said. “Might be the front line. Could also be the back. Maybe the aliens land in Swampscrub and work their way across.”
“Thought you were in this man’s army to shoot some xenos.”
“No ma’am. Three squares and a cot is all I ask for. Plus, what else am I gonna do? Government’s the only one hiring. And I get this cool blaster.”
Up ahead, they could see members of their squad hustling along in similar fashion, in packs of twos and threes. Every now and again a civilian would pop a head out of a window to take in the spectacle, but that was about all. Opie was used to the heavy congestion of the city; he couldn’t imagine a life this isolated. He wondered if the people here even knew to expect soldiers. And if not, what did they think was happening?
“I’m just saying it would be nice to have a better idea of what to expect here,” Epic said. “I know our people don’t know a lot, but they know more than nothing, and right now I know less than that.”
“Maybe there’ll be a brief at the bunker.”
“Yeah, maybe. Hey, hold up.”
She came to a stop at a street junction, at one of the first places Opie would argue constituted an actual block, meaning it had buildings on both sides of the street and around the corner of the cross-street. Other than the surprising existence of manmade structures in close proximity, it didn’t seem in any way interesting.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Thought I saw something.”
The road was pressed dirt. Very little out on the edge of the colony appeared to be paved, or all that well defined. There was no curb here, for instance; the side of the road was untended tall grass.
The scene reminded Opie of the old Westerns from the Earth-Eden history archives. He tried to remember what those bundles of hay that used to blow across the road were called. Turboweeds or something like that.
Epic popped the spotlight off the vest and into her hand.
“What did you see?” Opie asked.
“If I knew I’d tell you. Something shiny.”
“Not a lot of shiny things out here.”
“Well yes, that’s why it stood out. Lightning played off it. Probably my eyes just playing tricks.”
She kept walking along, though, as if she had seen something and her eyes were not playing tricks at all.
“Come on, we should keep moving,” he said. “Get out of this rain.”
“You worried you might not be following orders fast enough, soldier?”
“Little bit, yeah. And I’m starting to smell like boiled greens.”
“There it is, did you see?”
She waved the light back and forth over a section of roadside grass. Something did flash back.
“Yeah, I see it.”
Holding the beam steady, Epic ran to the spot and dug around while Opie put his hand on the butt of his blaster. He couldn’t explain why he did that; it just felt right.
“Someone lost their light,” she said.
“One of ours?”
“Yeah, same gear.”
“So it fell off a vest on the way down or while they were running. Shove it in your pouch and let’s get moving.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
She stood, and raised her discovery up, so Opie could see the rest of the story, which was that while someone had indeed lost their spotlight, they’d also lost a portion of their vest.
“It was torn?” he asked.
“You tell me. These things, they don’t tear, right? What’s the tensile strength of this material?”
She tossed it to him.
He ran his light along the tear, which was jagged. The cloth looked shredded. Or bitten, maybe.
“I know this is crazy, but this looks like…”
“Shut up,” she said, cutting him off.
She drew her blaster and then they stood there for a while and waited for something to happen. Nothing much did, other than the rain.
“What did you hear?” he asked, after a respectful silence.
“Don’t know. A squeak or something.”
“Chasing rats?”
“Not that kind of squeak.”
“You sure? I bet they got rats out here, same as us.”
“Positive.”
The vermin problem in the city was well-known, and seemed to be a persistent problem with every colony. When humanity first traveled the stars, it was by using long-distance haulers and a cryo-frozen crew. But cryo never got much better than a 20% mortality rate, and nobody much wanted to be the one-in-five who never woke up again. Still, back in those days there was no chance of a stowaway rat. Then the hub system was discovered—something people found and learned how to use, but didn’t invent—and suddenly the galaxy was available, without costing three lifetimes to get somewhere interesting. Only then did the rats figure out how to stow away and discover the same new worlds as people. More than once, Opie had heard someone joke that if they ever did encounter an advanced alien species, that species might have trouble figuring out who the dominant Earthlings were.
“Well what did it sound like?” he asked.
“Like metal rubbing up against metal.”
“So you heard a machine somewhere, or a… I don’t know, a pinwheel or something. Do they have windmills out here?”
“I said that’s what it sounded like. Didn’t say that was what it was.”
“Epic, you’re not making any sense.”
“Bet the guy who owned that vest said the same thing.”
“Maybe he did. How about we bring it back to the bunker and let someone smarter than us have a good look at it and…”
There was a loud shriek. It came from above, and to their left, a little up the road. Something was on top of a roof.
The sound was, on the one hand, pretty similar to the noise of two stripped gears rubbing together. On the other hand, it was undeniably a vocalization made by something with a mouth.
“Did you hear that?” Epic asked.
“Yeah, that I heard.”
He shoved the torn piece of vest in his sack and armed himself.
“Came from there. See anything?”
She pointed in a direction that differed from where he thought he heard it. He checked where she was looking, then where he thought he heard it coming from, and both times there wasn’t really much of anything to look at. Their eyes were still iffy from the regular lightning flashes.
He switched his goggles to infra and tried again. This was not a good idea on a night with lots of bright flashes, but made for a decent enough spot-check.
“There’s nothing there,” he said, flipping the goggles back to normal.
“Think they’re invisible?”
“I think I want to go back to what I was saying before. Let’s get to the recon point.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s do. Double-quick.”
They high-tailed it back to the junction, caught a right, and headed down the road as fast as they could safely do so. This wasn’t all that fast, because of the rain and the dirt roads.
Opie wanted to ask Epic what she thought happened to the guy who was wearing the vest, and maybe if she thought it was weird how alone they were at this point. The townspeople hiding inside in the middle of a downpour he could understand, but an entire squadron had chuted to this point. They saw a few folks in front of them earlier, but now there was nobody, in either direction. If they’d been the last to jump it would have made a little sense, but they weren’t.
They’d gone about a kilometer before they heard the sound again—in front of them.
Epic, who was leading, pulled up.
“What the hell is it and where the hell is it?” he asked, as she looked over her shoulder.
“Don’t know, keep moving… DROP!” she shouted.
He did, just before she filled the space he’d been occupying with energy from the blaster. The hand cannon made a familiar THUP-WHOOSH sound: the first from the aperture at the end of the barrel opening and closing, and the second from the air as it surrendered to the rock of hard plasma sliding through.
Epic fired twice, and both sounded like they hit their mark. He tried to get up and have a look, but she’d already grabbed him by the elbow.
“We have to move!”
“But…”
“Now, soldier!”
So he did. It wasn’t the order he’d just received (she technically outranked him) that did it, though; it was her expression. He’d never seen Epic look afraid before.
He just really wanted to know what she thought she saw that warranted two rounds, and if that thing still existed after having absorbed them. Not many things could. If this had, maybe that was why she looked so frightened.
They didn’t get far. Another few houses, another block, another turn, and then there was a new howl. Again, it came from in front, but since the last shout presaged a rear assault—multiple enemies, working in concert, showing effective deception techniques—the first thing Opie did was check their six.
Nothing there.
Then, from the rooftop to their left, an actual alien dropped to the ground…
There was a restaurant not too far from Oliver’s apartment that specialized in something called ‘gastro-pub’ dining. It was really just pub food with fresher ingredients and real chef, but since every fifth eating establishment in the city featured a variant of the same concept, it appeared to be working well for all concerned.
This particular restaurant—it was called Four Horse, which was meaningless—was a favorite of college students. There were ten universities in the metropolitan area, and five of them were within walking distance of Four Horse, so it was well attended almost all the time. The same could be said for the twenty or thirty other bars and eateries along the same strip of road.
Oliver, whose education included community college at a regional campus, had never been to Four Horse, right up until Wilson invited him there.
The invite came one day after he’d submitted The Battle of Hockspit, and the dinner landed two days before the next TAWU meeting. It was such a weird occurrence, Ollie could hardly say no, even if it felt like he was in some sort of trouble.
“Oliver! Hey!”
The entrance to Four Horse was below the service floor. One had to go up a short flight of stairs to reach the tables, which also meant some of the tables looked down on the entrance. Wilson was at one of them, shouting over the alt-rock station playing everyone through their meals.
Ollie waved awkwardly and stumbled around past the hostess desk and through the small perpetual crowd occupying most of the standing areas, until he got to the table. The place felt a lot like a regular bar, and since Ollie wasn’t terribly fond of bars—he wasn’t great with crowds unless there was a counter between them and him—it wasn’t a welcoming experience. He did take note that all of the employees were wearing plaid, which he thought was helpful. If there was a fire, he’d know who to follow.
Wilson gestured him to a chair, and a second later a plaid waitress was there, and a few minutes after that Ollie had a hard cider chosen at random (they had five to pick from) and there was a plate of tater tots covered in cheese and bacon resting in the middle of the table.
“I thought we should talk,” Wilson said. “Outside of the group.”
“All right.”
“Oliver, I think you’re a good writer.”
“Oh.” This jibed with what Minnie insisted, but hearing it was still a surprise. “Thanks.”
“And, I’m not going to share your latest piece with the group.”
“Okay, now I’m not sure what’s going on. Are you kicking me out?”
“No, no of course not.”
Wilson had a dark beer with a thick head, which he took a sip of. Ollie just assumed it was intolerably bitter. It seemed like something a person drank because he wanted to acquire the taste for it, rather than something a person enjoyed.
“Look,” Wilson said, “I think you can do better.”
“I thought that was the point of workshopping.”
“Oh, it is. But… okay, let’s talk about the latest one. I think you did a lot of good things there. You threw in a little omniscient narration, which is a first for you.”
“Did I?” Oliver wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the difference was, but he was willing to believe Wilson did.
“Third person, but not from a character’s perspective. You understand the difference?”
“I guess I do, sure.”
“Transitioning from third omniscient to third close is tough, but you did fine with it. But that’s not… What I’m trying to say, Oliver, is that technically you have all the tools. It’s your choice of subject that I want to push you on.”
“What does that mean? Technically I have the tools.”
“Not a lot of people can sit down and string together words in an order that makes people want to keep reading. You’re a pretty good storyteller, and that’s something that I don’t think can really be taught. When I was getting my MBA, trust me, I met a lot of writers who didn’t have that. You also find different ways to tell stories, and that’s all good.”
“But you don’t like the stories I’m trying to tell.”
“I honestly think they’re beneath you. I think you should be striving for more.”
Oliver grabbed a tater tot and popped it into his mouth. The cheese had already cooled, and room temperature fried potatoes were never quite right, so the combined flavor made for an unpleasant experience. However, it turned out he was hungry, so he took a second and third, while trying to assess exactly what he was being told.
“All right,” he said finally. “So I should be aiming higher. But what am I aiming for? I just want to write stories people like.”
“Right, I get that. I want you to write stories people need.”
Ollie smiled.
“Who’s to say people don’t need a good space opera?” he asked. “Or a horror story? Or an epic fantasy?”
“I think need is too strong a word. People want romance novels. They don’t need them.”
“I think need is too strong a word for any piece of fiction, Wilson.”
“Of course it isn’t. All right, it’s a little pretentious, but a good work of fiction can be important, and important things can change the world.”
“It isn’t pretentious to think fiction can change the world. It’s pretentious to think you’re the one who can write it.”
Wilson laughed.
“I like that. All right, let me reframe this for you. I don’t expect you to write the great American novel. I do expect you to try to write it.”
“But I don’t want to write that kind of thing. These are the stories I want to tell.”
“They’re beneath you.”
Oliver didn’t think they were beneath him. He didn’t think there was any story that fit that description as long as it was a story he wanted to tell. He did think they were beneath Wilson, and he wondered if someone had this same talk with him once, when he was getting his Masters. And, once he was through wondering all that, he wondered once more what Wilson was actually working on. Was Wilson writing his own great American novel? If so, why was he pressuring Oliver to do the same? Surely, there can be only so many great American novels, and Wilson was supposed to be the important generational voice at this table.
“All right,” Oliver said. “So what do you recommend?”
“I’d like to give you more specific assignments. See if we can force you out of your comfort zone and flex those muscles some. I was on the other side of a lot of these same exercises, and since you can’t… sorry, I’m assuming you can’t jump into an MBA program yourself, but maybe I can bring some of it to you.”
For a second, the fact that Wilson annoyed the heck out of Oliver fell away and he was touched. Flattered, even. He didn’t think his writing was nearly as good as Wilson did, apparently. Maybe that was reason enough to go along with him and see where it led.
He suspected it would end badly, because writing something someone else thought he should write, instead of what he wanted to write just seemed like a bad idea all around. It was a lot like the dark beer Wilson was drinking, actually. Sure, with effort Oliver could probably learn to appreciate it, but he would never get rid of the bitter aftertaste, and he might end up quitting beer altogether.
“Sure, what the hell. I’ll try it.”
“Great!”
Wilson held up his dark beer, and they toasted.
“Oh, and before I forget, Minerva wanted to know what the alien looks like.”
Oliver almost choked on his cider at the mention of her name. “She wants to know…” he repeated.
“Yeah, you stopped before describing the alien. In the story. She wants to know what it’s supposed to look like.”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “That was the problem.”
“That’s why you stopped?”
“Yes. I mean, I want to create something new. All the alien species in these stories are variants of pretty normal creatures we can all relate to. Lizards, or, you know.”
“Bugs,” Wilson said. “Giant bugs. They’re always giant bugs.”
“But that’s why these stories are more than you make them out to be, I think. These are archetypes.”
“Sure, sure, I get all that. Put a bug under a microscope and it’s terrifying. But you’d be the thousandth writer to get to that same place if it ended up being a giant bug.”
“That’s why I stopped. I wanted something like that, but different. It’s the same reason I couldn’t keep going with the horror story. By the ending, it’s the same ghost story tropes all over again. I wanted something new, but couldn’t think of it.”
Wilson grinned.
“This is why we’re talking at all, Oliver. This is your instinct. You don’t want to do the same old thing.”
“There’s value in those same old things.”
“Yes, yes. But you’re resisting it yourself. That’s why you haven’t finished anything.”
“I could.”
“You don’t know what the aliens are going to look like, and you don’t know who the ghost is or what she wants, and I’m nearly certain you’ve no idea what this Kingdom is all about. All you do know is you want these things to be new and different and something nobody ever thought of writing before, and you’re stopping because you can’t find that thing. Your need to write something great and original is preventing you from being one of those people who just churns out another genre story.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with…”
“Yes, I know, I’m not being dismissive of genre as a whole. I am being dismissive of tropes, and expected beats and outcomes. But Oliver, if you want to blaze a new trail, it’s that much harder if you start down the same path as everyone else.”
Oliver didn’t know what to say to this, so he stuffed a tater tot in his mouth and didn’t say anything. They were legitimately cold now. He wondered if they were going to order actual dinner before they ran out of things to talk about.
“Look,” Wilson said. “As long as you’re writing it, it’s going to be something original. Don’t get all swell headed, because I could say that to anybody. Every one of us is an individual creating something unique that only we could create, and blah blah blah. You get what I’m saying. So if you finish these stories you probably will find a way to make them different, if that’s what you want. But you’ll still be using someone else’s paintbrush. I’d like to see what happens if you start from scratch.”
“All right. So what’s my first assignment?”
“Excellent. Your first… oh wait, Pallas.”
What?”
“That was the other thing I promised not to forget. Minerva is insisting you join us.”
“I know; she’s made that really clear a couple of times.”
“Well now she’s looped me into this, so if you don’t attend we’re both going to be in trouble. I’ll give you plenty of advance notice, all right? We’re going on the last Saturday of the month. Be at our apartment by 4 PM and we’ll take it from there. And no, you do not have a choice. Blow her off at your peril, because her next step is going to be to find out where you live and drag you out the door.”
“That sounds terrible. Why is she so insistent?”
“I think she wants to adopt you. Don’t ask me why, and don’t say no.”
“All right, fine.”
“Excellent. Now let’s get some real food, these potato things are dreadful.”
Dinner devolved into small talk about nothing in particular, and also a little about Wilson’s super-secret writing project. A very little. What Oliver learned was that Wilson was writing something “stupidly ambitious” and “never-before-attempted” and that he expected to fail miserably. He’d only written one chapter so far, but it felt like more because he’d written it seventeen times.
Oliver wanted to talk more about Minerva, but worried that expressing too much interest might be construed (correctly) as inappropriately obsessive.
When the meal was done—he paid without asking, and it wasn’t as awkward as Oliver thought it was going to be—Wilson handed out the new writing assignment.
“Write something personal,” Wilson said.
“That’s all?”
“Sure.”
“Personal, but fictional?”
“Yes, stick to fiction. Maybe first person, if you feel up to it. You haven’t done that yet.”
“It’s a little vague.”
Wilson sighed, as if to say something personal was an incredibly precise instruction as far as he was concerned.
“All right. Stick to a small story. One person meets another person in a place. Describe the people and the place, have them interact, and then get out. No aliens, or ghosts, or dragons. Just two people having a conversation in a place.”
“That really sounds boring.”
“Maybe it will be. See what happens.”
“All right. Oh, can you give me a letter?”
“A letter? That’s really a gimmick for the… yes, all right. Um, E. The letter E.”
Then they shook on it, and Oliver pushed his way out.
The crowd at Four Horse had only gotten worse over the course of the meal, with overflow from the bar filling up all the standing space inside, until it seemed as if people were actively looming over them as they ate, in anticipation of a table clearing out. Oliver had a burger made by someone overly fond of sriracha, which he somewhat regretted. Still, it was a free meal, and those were hard to complain about.
Once on the street, Oliver oriented himself and headed down the road. He wasn’t too far from a subway station, but using the subway to get home from this spot just seemed lazy: it was only three stops, it was a decently warm night, and the walk was only a couple of miles. Also, he could save on train fare, and maybe work out a plot before he got home.
To end up going in the proper direction, he had to navigate the modest college pedestrian detritus littering the sidewalk for three blocks until he reached Common Ave and hung a right. It was exactly the kind of stretch of city that Oliver hated, because for the most part these kids—he called them kids even though they were only a couple of years younger than him—hardly ever looked where they were going even when they were sober. Here, most of them were not.
At one point, he had to step all the way to his left to avoid a phalanx of undergrads who thought it necessary to walk four abreast, and if that weren’t bad enough, the one on the end did all his talking with his arms. Oliver nearly got struck in the face by an act of over-exuberant gesticulation, while the kid responsible for this near-collision didn’t even notice.
Oliver’s aggressive sidestepping, in turn, nearly resulted in a different collision with another person. The large man, just coming out of another bar, came to a stop just before he ran Oliver down.
“Careful,” the man said, in a deep baritone.
“Sorry!” Oliver said, quickly getting out of the man’s way and continuing along the sidewalk.
It wasn’t until Oliver reached the next street that he realized the man he nearly ran into was the same one he saw lingering at the coffee shop before. He was the one who spoke to Minerva.
Also, he was following Oliver.
That couldn’t have been right. It was a big, busy thoroughfare, with lots of people moving in both directions, so undoubtedly the guy was just heading the same way Oliver was, as were many other people.
Except none of those other people paced Oliver quite so exactly as the large man. Ollie kept looking over his shoulder to confirm that it was all in his mind, but instead, every time he checked he became more convinced that he was being stalked.
He got to a busy intersection just as the walk light ended and raced across. The cars rushed through as soon as he reached the curb. He turned back.
The large man was standing on the other curb, unable to go any further. That he was staring right at Oliver more or less cemented Ollie’s concerns.
“Hey!” Oliver shouted, over the traffic. “Can I help you, man?”
“Can’t,” the man shouted.
“Then leave me alone!”
“Can’t,” he repeated.
“What?”
“I understand you’re a sorcerer.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard.”
“Who told you to say that?”
It was a prank. It had to be. Maybe Wilson put him up to it. Or Minerva, who after all was seen talking to the guy. But it didn’t seem like something either of them would really do.
“You did,” the man said, smiling.
“You’re crazy! Leave me alone!”
“Can’t.”
The light changed, and the man started across the street. Oliver decided this was a good time to start running.
He didn’t stop until he reached his apartment.