SUN-PLANET

My mind slowly tries to boot up. I think I remember the ribbons, expect the waking bodies of my squad, three or four of them arranged loosely around me …

But first, there’s a funny, dreamlike state where I’m back at Hawthorne, in the bar, listening to Joe half-drunkenly try to explain his views about the giant F-bomb reserves kept stored in tanks near Los Angeles and New York.

The other grunts and soldiers in the bar are skeptical.

“Sure, it’s true,” Joe says. “Before the war—the Second World War—F-bombs were strictly limited to military use. Illegal to use them in print or in movies, or in public—unless you were a criminal and didn’t care.”

“Didn’t fucking care,” says one of our fellow recruits. Might be DJ, but I can’t see him clearly.

“Right,” Joe says. “But the reservoirs holding the F-bombs were badly constructed. They were porous. Some leaked out into the water supply in New York, and then in Los Angeles. The plume of F-words didn’t get very far, but by the 1960s it was too late—everyone was drinking that water and dropping F-bombs twenty-four/seven. The military couldn’t stop it. So now, not just soldiers—everybody uses them.”

“But what was the point?” asks another grunt I don’t really want to think about—Grover Sudbury. We’re back before he did his awful thing and we did ours, and then Joe did his. He’s just another grunt in this bar, no better or worse than any other.

“Soldiers use F-bombs to keep themselves grounded, to remind themselves they’re human, to remind them what they give up when they fight and die,” Joe says. “Helps blow off some of the violence and weird crap that violence shoves into our brains. We use them, and we become better at managing a shitty situation.”

Sudbury is still skeptical.

“Now everybody uses them, and look where we are,” Joe says.

“Where the fuck we are,” says the other soldier.

I linger on Sudbury’s face. I want to talk to him, to warn him not to act out being a cruel asshole, but the memory-state, dream-state fragments into glassy shards of pain in my jaw, my arms, my chest.

Now I’m awake, but I don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe. I’ve been dragged from the others and tangled in a cane wall. A few of the canes have penetrated my pajamas and pin me like an insect in a museum. I hurt all over. Worse, my arms and legs, my hands, look lumpy. My entire skin feels hot and bruised.

I extricate myself from the brake, pull out the canes that poke through my clothes, and after a few minutes, float free—but my confusion is total. I don’t see anyone else. I think I’m alone, but then, I make a half turn and see a searcher a few meters away, slowly rotating in the half dark. It’s been butchered—arms hacked away and hanging by the outer plates, midsection almost cut in half, eyes gouged out. More than one attacker, I think—the squid may be peaceful, but they’re also strong.

It’s taking me much longer than before to assemble my conscious self, and it’s all tangled with memories I can’t place, like dreams being edited and erased.

Then a voice rises from a buzzing pool of memory. It’s the first thing I’m absolutely sure about—harsh, hoarse, angry, and putting an emphasis on every single thump I’m receiving. “Never … thought … I’d find … YOU, did you? After what you guys … DID to me.”

I know that voice. But from where, from when? Was it my mother’s boyfriend? The one I shot? I doubt it. But in my haze I remember Mom lying in bed covered with bruises after he beat her up, and I’m thinking, No more of this—no more of him, not ever, why does she put up with it?

And now—

Vera has awakened some of us personally. There’s a look of concern on her face as she shakes us one by one. It takes hard shaking for some—for DJ in particular, but also for Joe and Tak.

We’ve all just had the crap beaten out of us.

“What the hell happened?” Joe asks. “Christ, I’m bloody! So are you.”

“Yeah,” Tak says ruefully. “I couldn’t fight back.”

He looks at me as he tries to flex life into his limbs. I touch my own face, feeling the swollen lips and cheeks, the crusted blood. We examine DJ. Blood and bruises all over. My sight is returning in a spotty manner, as if I’m looking through a slatted window.

How did I let it happen? What is this, some sort of sympathetic response, welting and pain as my mind is probed by Gurus? Feels wrong, feels crazy. They say you don’t remember pain, but new pain flares with every move I make. Something or someone struck me repeatedly. Someone I once knew.

Someone almost human.

So I lean into the memories and bring it all back—the smiling, heavily scarred face leaning over me in the gloom, the same piggy eyes and interrupted eyebrows, but now with nose almost smashed flat. Long since healed but pug-uglier than I remember him.

“Did you see him?” DJ asks. “He was laughing. Really enjoying himself. Then the squids moved in and tried to separate everybody. Man, you wouldn’t know they can’t fight.”

“Someone we knew,” I say. “I couldn’t wake up.”

“Sudbury! Fucking Grover Sudbury!” DJ shouts, expelling a fine spray of blood. “He and some other fuckers.”

“Some human, some not,” Joe says through broken lips. He holds his head as if it needs to be glued back together. “The searchers stopped them from killing us.”

The smile, the words, the delight Sudbury took in striking me with the back of his gnarly hand, over and over.

Ishida approaches carefully out of the fairy light. She points to the cubbies and cane bridges. “A lot of searchers. Looks like they tried to protect us.”

“They fought?” Tak asks.

“They died.”

Borden emerges from her cubby, the entrance of which has almost been blocked by a dead searcher. She shoves it into a slow, broken-armed spin. “What the hell happened here?”

“I knew we shouldn’t have waited!” Tak cries out.

“What do you think, Venn?” Borden asks.

“It was Sudbury,” I confirm. “Not alone. Another human and as DJ says, a couple of things. Not human.”

“Not Antag?”

I shake my head. “Didn’t see any.”

There are maybe five dead searchers in the ribbon space, up between the clock faces, in the canes—hacked, carved, gouged. Three more are spaced before the curtain, still alive, sighing and flexing. One isn’t moving and is being examined by its fellows. The plates along its skin are flaccid, peeling away. Who would be strong enough to kill a squid? I’ve felt the grip of their arms and can imagine what they could do to defend themselves.

Tak runs another inventory on DJ’s face, his hands. Then me. “Did a real number,” he murmurs, flexing my jaw, prodding my cheek. My whole face seems to explode, and I jerk away, but he says, “Nothing broken I can feel.”

Ishikawa and Jacobi seem barely touched. Ishida checks over Litvinov and Bilyk, but Bilyk shakes her off with an accusing look.

“Four of you seem to have borne the brunt of injuries,” Kumar says.

“I still don’t remember,” Joe says.

Vera shakes her head with cold anger. Then she takes me by the arm. Her hand is tight and wiry, firm. “She will speak with you, if you can go, if you can move.”

“Just me?”

“Just you,” Vera says. The others watch suspiciously.

“I’ll go,” I say. “I can move.”

“I’d like to come,” Borden says.

“No,” Vera says, and leads me toward the curtain. The searchers move the bodies and themselves aside. I try to keep from crying out in pain, but Tak’s right, there are no broken bones—I think.

The curtain gets closer. After what I’ve been through, I don’t want to touch it, or it to touch me. I turn my face aside, lean my head back, and one hand grips the other, to keep it from flailing.

“No fear,” Vera says.

We pass through. Feels like thin cotton wool, like a warm breeze. Vera tugs my arm again. “Rules change. Queen can explain!”

Rules change? Now the rules allow Grover Sudbury to come back from the dead and beat the crap out of me, out of us, and start murdering searchers? Is the ship’s brain breaking free of Ulyanova and trying to kill us all and regain control?

Vera seems to read my mind. “Ship does not care,” she says. “Ship goes, ship makes. It makes for Queen, for starshina. She is waiting.”

The smoky fog swirls and for a second I feel my stomach heave up emptiness … but then my feet touch floor. Flat floor. Things have reliable direction, up and down. I stand. The nausea fades. Ahead, a plaster wall shapes itself and corners with the floor. The floor spreads before me a paint of cracked, chipped, dirty black-and-white ceramic tile. The tile acquires a shallow depth and detail. What’s left of the grout is dark with dirt, as if it’s never been scrubbed.

Arrives before us a wainscot with a beat-up wooden strip and worn wallpaper printed with tiny flowers. The floor and wall become part of a long hallway that smells of cabbage and bacon. I hear voices from down the hallway, tinny laughter—children shouting.

“Ship cares not much about us,” Vera says. “But she is still Queen. You cannot know how much it hurts her!”

Vera opens a wood-panel door. We step through. Beyond lies a small apartment: three tiny, overheated rooms, a kitchen to the right, half-hidden in dark orange light, where someone makes sharp noises with pots and dishes. An old refrigerator sticks out of the kitchen, humming and buzzing. Through another door, half-open, I see a bedroom, a small bed on a gray pipe frame, paint flaking.

I’m more than half-convinced I’m going through another instauration—but this time, perhaps not mine. Maybe Ulyanova’s or Vera’s.

I tongue my mouth and realize I’ve lost a couple of teeth. Through all of my childhood and my adventures with Joe, through Mars and training back on Earth, I never lost teeth. Fuck, that’s a mortal insult.

Shoes are neatly paired beside the foot of the bed, men’s shoes, and a short, flower-print dress has been draped across the gray and pink quilted cover. A dress suitable for a party.

Ulyanova emerges from the kitchen, holding a pot filled with steaming potatoes. “Hard journey!” she says, with a pale, stressed-out smile. “You don’t know how wicked ship can be.” She raises her arms—and the pot goes away. Some of the steam remains. Then she wipes her hand on a towel. She’s looking, if that’s possible, even worse. Like me, she’s lost some teeth—but not through being beaten. I think she’s malnourished, despite the potatoes. What’s real here and what isn’t?

“We have arrived around Antagonista home,” Vera says. “Nobody knows we are here—again, we are invisible.”

Ulyanova avoids meeting my eyes. Gray, finely wrinkled around her face and neck—as if she has grown old here! And Vera is looking older as well. They’re becoming part of this apartment, this life—this instauration.

“Look at him, he is hurt!” Vera says, and suddenly, as if our Guru Queen has seen me for the first time, she notices the blood and swelling.

“Get him ice and a rag,” she tells Vera, her voice deadly calm.

Vera goes to the kitchen and brings back ice wrapped in a worn towel. Both of them apply it to my face, my neck, my forearms. Feels cold. Soothes—a little.

“Do you know what’s happened?” I ask. “The cage fighters—”

“I know,” she says. “Like I said, when I opened gate. Did you not watch for them?”

“They came during the leap, while we were still … stunned.”

“Ah,” she says. “They learn not to sleep, like me. Vera, find chair for Vinnie. We must talk.”

“The ship didn’t tell you they would find us, attack us … that way, that time?”

She shakes her head. “Ship has its motives. Vera! Chair!”

Vera brings forward a cheap dining chair, made of deal and pine. As I sit, I look left. Filmy white drapes billow before a narrow glass door that opens to a shallow patio with cheap iron rails. Through the drapes, as they slowly flap and spread, I see that beyond and across a narrow street, other apartment buildings rise gray and stolid.

How far does the illusion go? How real is it out there? How far can she walk across town, to the park, up and down the streets—when she wants to relax? Queen of the apartment. Of the world outside. Queen of the voices and the children, of the blocks that could very well be out there, if I wanted to look.

“Queen of the city,” I say.

“It is what I tell her!” Vera says. “Queen of Moscow, of all we see. Here Gurus once live and dream of other lifes. But now—only her.”

“I am not entirely queen,” Ulyanova says, with an irritated glance at Vera. “Wrong move, boring move, and ship knows, brain knows—everything will change. All will die.”

“How many human fighters were in the cages?” I ask.

“Fifteen. Some have died since. Humans not best at cage fighting, it seems.”

“Where did the others come from?”

“From where ship has been.”

“Between stars?” I ask.

“No. Big planets out where comets are born. Ship has already carried beings not from Earth, out to Antagonista planet. I warned you.”

“Right.”

I want to get back, organize … warn Bird Girl and the Antags. If they don’t already know.

“A few planets swing down through system every thousand centuries,” Vera says, as if reciting from a textbook. What sorts of beings would grow up on all these worlds? The cold ones, the warm ones? How much more complicated can this get?

“What’s all that to this ship? To the Gurus?”

“Victors of long fights in cages explore, find you. I lose searchers. Do fighters know you? Hate you?” She nearly aspirates the word.

“One does,” I say.

“Male?”

“Yeah. Barely. A monster.”

“Why does this one want to kill you?”

“Four of us helped put him on this ship, indirectly, ignorantly—years ago.”

“The cage fighters kill Antags, searchers—kill with much pain. Pain as they have experienced, and more.”

Her face is so like the face of my mother the morning after she woke up and her boyfriend was gone. Quiet. Not in the least curious. Almost dead-looking. She cooked eggs and made me breakfast.

“Why do you let them move around?” I ask her. “Why not just cage them again?”

“Think!” Vera cries. “She tells you! Even now, she plays game with ship. She builds walls inside. Ghosts cannot cross. Brain cannot hear.”

Ulyanova gives me her own sadly critical look. “Brain and ghosts are fascinated by revenge. And so am I. When I open gate, as if to test me, cages open as well. I can do nothing. I cannot protect! I must not. I must not show you are important to me.”

Despite the ice, my whole body aches. I dread the thought of what I might find if we go aft … if we do what we have to do.

“You are more interesting if you fight,” Ulyanova says softly, moving near the window. She seems to want to lean into the sunlight, the breeze through the filmy white drapes. “And you will live … if you fight. Be as brave as searchers, who do not fight—but protect, and die.”

This discussion has long since crossed the line to scaring the shit out of me. So casual, so isolated—behind the curtain. How much time does Ulyanova have before the brain, the ship, the ghosts catch on to our little ruse?

She’s playing with me. She’s making my life more interesting by making me think she controls. How long can that be enough of an excuse? Until we get boring. Then we’ll just be fused like those fucking ships coming back from the transmitter. Maybe the cage fighters are just prelude to that.

Ulyanova straightens and walks around a beat-up coffee table. “Worse is done by Gurus, by ship, before we come. Years before battle seasons on Mars, on Titan, ship grew, ship traveled to a large moon. This moon orbits two worlds, tossed and heated for billions of years … Kept alive without sun, not made by bugs, but older, with very strong inhabitants. Ship auditioned them in little wars, then gathered them by tens of thousands … and carried them to Sun-Planet. It supplied them with arms and landed them … to eliminate Antagonista and searchers. New soldiers, new species—not affected by bug archives. Very popular for Gurus. New show begins.”

Vera says sadly, “Antagonista have no home. Nearly all have died. For those we carry, there will be one last, short war, short fight … death.”

“What if you help them?” I ask, my heart suddenly made of lead.

“I will confirm this mask. And then, ship will cancel us.”

The heat in the fake Russian apartment is muggy, oppressive. “What happens to us, then? If we kill the cage fighters, stay interesting … Are we going to leave the ship and fight down there, on Sun-Planet, with them?” I ask.

“Antags will leave ship. It is their duty,” Ulyanova says. “Hard part comes after.”

“We must not let Guru plans finish,” Vera says.

“I tell Verushka. If I do not stay Queen, ship will gather fighters from yet more moons, more worlds—also not from bugs. Ship will deliver them to Earth. Many, many of them. Soon it will prepare by growing for them new weapons, interesting weapons, evenly matched—and more ships.

“These new recruits, brought to Earth, will be told story, like what Gurus told us—and they will fight to kill humans, all humans, and then, will be set up for long war against those victorious on Sun-Planet. Not Antagonista. Those will already be dead.

“But I have my own plan. If I stay in control, if I do not make stupid move! First, we will go to Mars and Earth and gather up last of Gurus, and last of those Wait Staff and leaders who live only for Gurus. They will be brought into ship and receive promotions, live as we do. For days, they will be happy.” She points out the window at the long, hot summer of Moscow.

“Brain and ghosts will be happy. If I convince, if I am interesting, they may do what I say. I will send you off on ships that carried Gurus and traitors, and you will return to Earth. Then Guru ship will begin trip to far place, to opposite system—three hundred billion klicks. Very long leap.”

In my head, she’s helping me see that path, that grazing, high-speed journey out beyond everything we know, out to the far side of the Kuiper belt.

And I see her opportunity quite clearly. Just a twitch, really. A very small deviation.

“I will help ship finish well,” she says.

Vera shivers.

“I will stay,” Ulyanova says. “To finish my work. Vera … ”

“I will stay, too,” Vera says.

“But now, Antag ships are free to go home,” Ulyanova says. “There is nothing for them to return to. So they will die sadly, valiantly. They have honor. Ghosts and brain love tragic homecoming.”

I’m so lost now in useless backtracking that I start asking really dumb questions. “What about the Gurus who died? How does the ship, the brain react to that?”

“Ship can make more Gurus, if there is need. Ship can even replace itself, given warning. But not in sun.” Her smile is maddening. “You heard Antagonista female,” Ulyanova says. “She wants I will die, after I am used.”

I can’t think how Ulyanova heard that. Perhaps the ship ratted us out. Maybe those of us on the tea have no secrets—boring, lost, all our stories nearing their sad ends.

“You think the rest of us want to kill you?” I ask. “Rather than take a risk you’ll fail?”

“Yes,” Ulyanova says. “Would ship make new me, I wonder? Can you see, Vinnie? I dance on edge of knife. We play with brain. Brain plays with us. All to make story. Audiences wait. We might be popular again—as popular as those who fought on ship for years, fought and died. You sent them here, from Earth—and so did we.”

“So did Antagonista,” Vera says. “Many worlds contribute.”

“How did the cage fighters stay awake?” I ask. “Why didn’t they sleep, like us?”

“Many trips. If they not awake, others kill them. So … they adapt. They learn, do not sleep, no matter how long the time, how hard the trip. Like me. If I sleep, ship knows me to my soul … For now, plan is good. Ship is happy to return to Earth, to Mars, to pick up Gurus, then travel far and start new big show.”

Vera’s expression is that of a deeply puzzled child, as if this is finally getting to her. Madness leads. Reason sleeps. And sitting on the knife’s edge, two of our own, willing to do—what?

It seems to me they’ve got it good here. A waking dream of home.

“You help me open gate,” Ulyanova says. She waggles her fingers and the pot with potatoes reappears. “I remove Guru bombs from your head, use them … All but one. There is one more time I will reach out and use it to speak to you. And after that, one more time we will see each other here.”

She carries the pot back to the kitchen.

“Now go,” Vera says, shooing me. “Tell others Queen is tired. Being Guru is difficult.” With a quick backward glance, Vera follows me out the door to the hallway and then through the curtain, into the ribbon space, still dark, empty now—where have the others gone?—but for the drifting shadow of another dead searcher, its arms hacked away, blood drifting in beads and fist-sized green-brown gobs around the blinded ribbons. The blood has formed a wrinkled crust, making the gobs look like big raisins. I wonder how it got here—killed recently, another fight?

But the blood is old. This one has drifted forward, more likely.

Vera inspects the corpse and hmms sad sympathy. Then she takes my arm and spins me around, as if we’re dancing in the dark, between the drops of searcher blood. “I do not know how, or even if, Queen fools ship, brain, ghosts. They make hard time. She never sleeps, not to let them in.”

“But she’s back home—you’re back, too, right? This is the best you’ve had in years. What would you give to keep it this way?”

Vera looks at me as if I am some sort of vermin, a spider, a filthy mouse.

“Do you get out and go for walks on the streets, through the city?” I ask. “Do you live a normal life? Enjoy the weather? Is it all out there, a solid dream?”

I can’t shake the layers of illusion, both the ones behind the curtain and the ones that wrap my own thoughts. Maybe we’re all still caught up in Guru mind shit. Maybe everything is no more or less real than Ulyanova’s apartment, her pot of potatoes.

Is it possible for me, for any of us, to break free of whatever has been ordained by the Gurus or by their great resource, their master, their reservoir—this fucking ship?

“What is that to you?” Vera says, keeping her voice low.

“Do you know it isn’t real?”

“Queen knows,” Vera says tightly. “This life will end soon enough. Now go!”

She shoos me again, then returns to the curtain.

“HOW IS SHE?” Borden asks.

“They seem strung-out but in control, for the time being,” I say.

Kumar joins us at the asterisk. The ribbons are still dark. All we can see is the illumination from a thin coat of searcher skin juice, probably from the beaten and murdered, scattering deep-ocean guidance around our living spaces.

“How long have I been gone?” I ask.

“Hours!” Kumar says.

“Didn’t feel that long.”

“DJ, Sanchez, and Jacobi have gone aft,” Borden says. Makes me feel a little sick, that they didn’t wait. “They should be back any time now. I’ve ordered Tak and Ishida and Ishikawa to keep guard aft of the ribbon space, in case Antags come forward and try to catch us by surprise.”

“Why would they do that?” I ask.

“We’ve already found dead Antags. They might blame us.”

Litvinov returns from going forward, along the nose. “Is nothing but hollow,” he says. “Empty. What about Ulyanova and Verushka? Is still sane?”

I try to describe their situation—the apartment, the warmth, the familiar comforts of home.

“Life of Gurus!” Litvinov says. “Are they in danger from fighters? From criminals?”

“I don’t think so. But both are looking older. There’s definitely a cost. Ulyanova says the Antags are about to be badly disappointed.” I tell them more about the ship’s past journeys, the rearrangements and transfers from far worlds to Sun-Planet. “The Gurus have been planning for some time to get rid of bug influence.”

Kumar listens intently. “We have failed them, I suppose,” he says, still groggy. Nobody’s paying much attention to him, not even Borden. I check him over but there doesn’t seem to be any particular injury—his bruising is light. “I am fine,” he insists, waving me aside. “Do you still connect with Bird Girl?”

“Just more of that baseline signal. They’re alive, they’re busy, they don’t seem to want to interact … and the big male is the core of their efforts. They want to take him home. They all just want to go home.”

“But they do not know the situation?” Kumar asks.

“If what Ulyanova says is true,” Borden says.

“If they don’t,” I say, “they could learn very soon.”

Joe, DJ, and Jacobi return to the ribbon space. All are looking more than a little out of it, as if the scale of what they’ve seen takes time to absorb, and there is no time.

“Ship is changing all the way back,” DJ says, taking a deep breath.

“Fighters?”

“Three dead ones,” DJ says.

“All nonhuman,” Jacobi says.

“Hurray for our side,” Borden says.

“There are dead searchers and a few Antags all along the route we took, trying to follow the spine of the ship,” Joe says. “The cage fighters must have caught them by surprise—like us.”

“You can’t believe what’s going on back there,” DJ says. “There’s a gigantic tree-thing growing down the centerline, between the screw gardens and over the clover lake—branching and fruiting all sorts of mechanical shit, like making apples!”

“Armaments for our new opposition,” Kumar says. “I would like to see those growths. We might understand what sort of creatures they’re hoping to use to extinguish us.”

“The searchers aren’t being much help,” DJ says. “All we saw are dead—dozens of them. But remember that transport we used around the screw garden?” He seems unwilling to continue until we admit we remember that much.

“Well,” he says, weirdly satisfied, as if he’s sounding out our sanity, “there’s something like that along the tree, maybe half a dozen tracks moving in and around the branches, carrying shit forward and back—fruit, half-formed weapons, ships.”

“Some of those ships look like ones we’ve used,” Joe says. “Others are new and different. And as for weapons … I can’t understand any of them.”

“You won’t be using them,” Kumar observes.

“Anyway, we hitched a ride on one of those railcars going aft,” Joe says. “About three klicks from here, past where the squid ponds used to be, the rest of the Antags have got four ships in an outboard hangar. They seem to think they’re enough to get all of them down to the surface. They want the hell off this hulk.”

“Can’t blame them, if they’re home,” Ishida says.

“Have you seen the surface?” I ask.

DJ says, “Sort of, in the big star dish. There aren’t any squids there now, either. Whole ship seems empty.”

“Could they all be dead?” Ishida asks.

“They could have withdrawn. No way of knowing.”

“Maybe they’re going to be shipped home as well,” Borden says. “Evacuating.”

“Optimistic appraisal, at best.” Kumar says.

“Is Ulyanova ours or the ship’s?” Joe asks. “I really need to know.”

“She’s putting everything she’s got into staying human, and Vera is helping where she can,” I say. “But I’m thinking we gave her a fucking impossible task.”

Litvinov curses under his breath and looks ghostly pale. He’s contemplating the loss of almost every soldier he trained and fought with, one way or another. And we’re no consolation. After all, we might have helped Sudbury become our worst enemy.

“Focus on what we need to know!” Borden insists.

“We’re orbiting a big dark planet,” Joe says. “That much we can confirm.”

“But how can we be sure we’re actually there?” Borden asks.

“The Antags should know, right?” Jacobi asks.

“Sun-Planet!” DJ says in wonder. “Planet X.”

“There are a lot of Planet X’s out around the Kuiper belt,” I say. “Big and small. Maybe warm, maybe cold—in the hundreds. I don’t know how many are as large as Bird Girl’s world, or how many were tinkered with by the bugs, but they and the Gurus have been playing with extrasolar planets for a long, long time.”

“And that Christmas ornament, too,” DJ says. “Moving shit around.”

Joe shakes his head. “I’m not even going to think about that.”

Borden says, “Job one, we have to put together something like weapons, go back in force, and kill the rest of the cage fighters. And we have to make sure the Antags are happy to leave without killing us—or Ulyanova.”

“Might be walking into a hornet’s nest,” Jacobi says.

DJ observes that Sudbury never did have leadership skills. “He could barely understand orders.”

“Maybe so, but since then he’s gone through a whole new level of fight club,” I say.

“Doesn’t matter,” Joe says. He’s trying to pare the mission down to something we can all understand. Borden seems to approve. “I assume what Ulyanova told you is that the mice are loose in the cheese shop and the cats don’t fucking care. Happy to watch us all fight it out.”

Long pause. I tongue the gaps where my teeth used to be. Wonder if they’re floating around here somewhere …

Without warning, the ribbons begin to glow, then to alternate between lighting the darkness and giving us a look outside. Instinctively, we rotate and crane to get a full view of where we are—above and below.

Above is another terrific view of stars, including the ever-glorious Milky Way. Again, parallax unchanged. Below—

A great suggestive curve of shadow, dark brown and pewter, wreathed like a Christmas tree with flickering aurorae strung between hovering, glowing spheres. Too big to see all at once, the likely equator is divided by a thick belt of what could be ice, green or blue under the spheres, pale gray beneath the aurora.

Out here, tens of thousands of millions of klicks from the sun, there’s no sunlight, just the illumination from those rippling, ever-refreshing aurorae, moving like ocean breakers above the surface, defining segments of bright and dark—a twilight-only version of night and day.

As described.

Sun-Planet.

“It’s split in half,” Jacobi says.

DJ looks caught up in it all, smug at the confirmation. His mind is absorbing the new details. As is mine. It’s beautiful and strange down there. “Divided planet,” he says. “Antags grew up in the northern hemisphere, searchers in the southern. Separated by thousands of klicks of ice! Brilliant. Bugs had a hand in this, right? Two species separated until they were ready.”

“Bad news for the searchers,” I say. “At first.”

“Yeah … But then they learned how to get along.” His voice trails off at these strange, impersonal memories of Antag history, exploitation. They behaved so much like humans.

The mention of bugs provokes a weird sensation inside me of yet again being examined by an outside interest—curious in a fixed way, insistent but gentle. Something very old and disturbingly familiar is rummaging through my head and picking out words, maybe trying to learn my language—but then it comes upon fragments of my interactions with the archives on Mars and on Titan. Bug memories. I contain history I never lived, history I couldn’t possibly know, along with the serial numbers, the identifying marks left by those archives.

DJ isn’t looking smug now. “It’s back!” he says.

“What?” Ishida asks.

“There’s an archive nearby,” I say.

“It’s fucking huge,” DJ says. “Bigger than anything we’ve found so far.”

I confirm he’s correct.

The others absorb this with their own weary familiarity. We’ve been jerked around by history and by our ugly ancestors too many times to take great cheer at this news, but at least it gets us moving. At least it could promise more interesting developments.

“Let’s go,” Joe says.

Bilyk suddenly doesn’t look good. His arms and legs hang limp, his skin is pale, and his eyes have rolled back. Ishida intervenes and Litvinov doesn’t object. She carefully rotates him to show us the spreading bruise along his neck and the back of his head. Our attackers must have sapped him, cracking his spine.

“Is he alive?” Ishikawa asks.

“Barely,” Ishida says.

He didn’t complain at first. Now he can’t.

Litvinov looks at all of us as if this is the last straw and escorts the efreitor back to their nest. DJ tries to go with Bilyk, but Litvinov blocks him. “He must heal himself,” Litvinov murmurs. “He is strong.”

“And what if the fighters return?”

“I am staying here,” Litvinov says. “I am old and too slow to matter back there. We will watch and try to protect curtain, Bilyk—last of my soldiers. I ask Kumar to stay with us.”

Kumar agrees with a nod, then looks at the rest of us, as if he will soon be a dead man.

“We don’t have real weapons,” Borden says.

DJ and Tak brandish their canes, rather pitifully—though the tips are sharp, if they’re used correctly.

“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.