“It was always going to come down to humans versus aliens,” says Femi. “That’s all it ever was.”
They are back in the hotel suite, but not the same group as before. Eric and his tentacle stand behind Femi. She sits on an elaborate chair that might as well be a throne, with its gold plating and curly legs. Tolu Eleja is in from the field, his mouth in perpetual motion from hors d’oeuvres. His cousin, Prof Eleja, is next to him. They smell different, in the manner of their contributions, Tolu smelling dirty and the prof of antiseptic. Aminat is here in holo form, onside because of her dead lover and because of guilt: she suggested the solution of using reanimates, and she wants to make amends. No Kaaro, and no Bicycle Girl. Damn.
“There is no army forming up, people. We are the front line and maybe the only line. There is no visible alien invader to focus the attention, no spaceship armada darkening the sky. Rosewater isn’t even on the news. Celebrity sex scandals and arrests of politicians, that’s what they’re talking about. I need to know where we are in this cold war. Report.”
Eric says, “The entire xenosphere has become… impossible to use except sporadically, at unpredictable intervals. Kaaro’s avatar, that fucking gryphon, is everywhere, destroying whatever it can find. Whole swathes of the place have been reduced to white noise. He has gone completely insane. And he’s eating people. As far as I can tell, Oyin Da is still… well, alive, but travel is unreliable.”
“Can you kill the gryphon?” asks Femi.
Eric shakes his head. “It’s Kaaro we’re talking about. There’s no match for him in that place. Even the aliens can’t stop him and they created the xenosphere. I can sneak around before I’m discovered, then I have to run. That’s it. Fucking guy has run amok.”
Aminat shakes her head. “No, he hasn’t. This is deliberate. Remember, if you can’t use the xenosphere, neither can the aliens. This halts their consciousness transfer. It’s Kaaro’s way of stopping the war without bloodshed, I think. He primed his avatar to do this.”
“He always was an asshole,” says Eric.
“Hey!” says Aminat.
“You’ve done the training, Aminat. There’s a chain of command, planning, strategy. He’s gone off by himself, and that gets people killed.”
“Relax,” says Femi. She touches Eric’s forearm, a gentle reminder of intimacies shared. “Tolu?”
“There’s chaos on the streets, almost the same as during the war. Schools have closed, businesses may or may not open, depending on the day of the week. Import-export has ground to a halt. I’ve tried to target infrastructure and so far avoided collateral damage. Not much, anyway. The main problem is that the aliens themselves have taken up mass murder, so my people have been trying to neutralise them. I can turn the heat up or down according to your command, ma’am.” He looks at Aminat as he speaks, aware of her role. “Crime is actually down as the organisational descendants of the twins slowly exterminate each other.”
“Prof?” says Femi.
“I have the ability to reliably create a functioning hippocampus and amygdala, but I don’t know what you need me to do.”
“Aminat?”
“I… I’m not at work because I’m bereaved, but Jack has just summoned me. I don’t know why. Dahun would have stepped into my role, but he’d do it differently.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t fuck about,” says Tolu. “I’ve met him. Barely escaped with my team intact.”
“He’s a mercenary. Can he be bought?” asks Femi.
“No.” Tolu, Aminat and Eric say this simultaneously.
Aminat says, “He’s loyal to Jack for some reason. He’s not a bright-eyed idealist, but there’s a reason he was used for the prisoner swap. The mayor has something, a kind of charisma that doesn’t work on everyone but that holds fast whoever it does work on.”
Femi turns to Eric. “Have you tested the professor’s hippo?”
“Hippocampus,” says the prof.
“Whatever.”
“Yes. It’s not random electrical discharges any more. It’s sending simple keepalive messages from one end to the other, chemical messages that just say ‘Hi, I’m here’ and ‘Are you there?’”
“What do we need an artificial brain for?” asks Aminat.
“I don’t know yet. A kind of Trojan horse? Stick liquid explosives in it and send it to the Honeycomb, where it detonates,” says Femi. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but that’s not unusual.”
“Can’t we take the fight to them? To the aliens?”
“We’ve discussed that already. Their planet is light years beyond our current capabilities,” says Eric.
Aminat shakes her head. “Not with warships. Can we remotely fuck with their servers?”
“How do we link with them?” says Eric.
Femi stares, blank expression, thinking.
“Have you ever heard of Bad Fish?”
“No,” says Femi.
Aminat looks around the room. “Anybody?”
Nobody has.
“Okay. He’s an ally of Kaaro’s and willing to help. He’s a hacker.”
“This is a nice idea, but even hackers require network access of some kind, and we have no connection to their servers,” says Femi.
“That isn’t true,” says the professor, staring at Eric with intent. “They use the xenosphere. We have people who can use the xenosphere.”
“Nobody can use the xenosphere, Prof,” says Eric. “Kaaro has buggered it. So we’re back where we started. We can’t even get Bicycle Girl. Which reminds me, she mentioned someone from her trips into the past, a CIA guy, Owen Gray. He has knowledge of when they first experimented on the alien. Maybe he knows something?”
“I’ll look into that,” says Femi.
Aminat says, “I have to go. Jack has sent a car for me and I’m late as it is. I’ll keep my eyes open.”
Her image dissipates.
“We need a body for you to put that brainoid in,” says Femi.