Neither Dave nor Professor Ashbury was tired, but Captain Heath was as good as his word and took himself off to his cot, with Professor Compton worrying at his heels the whole way. Once they dropped out of sight, Dave turned to Ashbury and sketched a formal bow.
“Walk you around the grounds, Prof?” he asked in his best imitation of Good Dave. “A stroll can sometimes clear the head and put a fella in the mood for bed.”
“That sounds like a well-worn family aphorism,” she said.
“A what?”
“A saying.”
“Ah, then you’re right. My grandma used to say it all the time. Believed it, too. She came to live with us after the old man took off. To help out, you know.”
He took the splitting maul along with him, not because he expected any trouble on a platform full of marines and Navy SEALs but because it felt like he should. Like it was his responsibility.
“Lucille,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“B.B. King named all of his guitars Lucille. I’m thinking of naming this baby here. Lucille would work.”
“Why, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I like B.B. King.”
“No, why must you name it?”
Dave paused for a moment. The storms of the last days had broken up, and out here, where they walked around the southern terrace, the sky was densely speckled with twinkling points of light. A day of rain and wind had sucked most of the warmth from the air, and he was glad of the new hoodie he wore, this one a thick gray woolen number from the Naval Academy. The prof was buttoned up inside a Burton ski jacket.
“Would you believe me if I said I had to? That I didn’t have a choice? Just like when I get hungry.”
He held the maul up between them, gripping it with one hand just below the head. Moonlight glinted on the ax blade.
“It’s like … I dunno …”
“You birthed it?”
Dave searched her expression for a sign that she was being sarcastic, but the professor seemed more intrigued than anything.
“No. Not birthed it.”
God, that sounded like something Annie would say: “I birthed these children for you, Dave. I birthed them.”
“No,” he said, starting to walk again. “But it feels like I have to. Like leaving it nameless would be wrong.”
“Okay, then. I suppose you had best name her. Lucille is good. I have an aunt by that name. A genuine 1960s hippie. She was groovy, in the dictionary definition of the word. Beads and everything.”
Dave held the head of Marty’s splitting maul up at eye level. He spoke to it as though it were a child.
“Lucille, I’m glad to make your acquaintance.”
He meant it playfully, but as he addressed the maul, it seemed to grow lighter in his hand. His grip became surer, and a strange, not entirely pleasant shiver ran down his arm and through his body, into the deck beneath his feet.
“Whoa.”
“Is there a problem?” Professor Ashbury asked. She had stopped walking, and her eyes were alive with concern. “Are you okay, Dave? You look like you just got a shock. An actual shock.”
She was right. He was covered in goose bumps. They faded quickly, but he hefted the maul, examining it closely.
Lucille did feel lighter. A hell of a lot lighter.
“Well, that was strange,” he said. “Not the strangest thing to happen today but weird enough.” He let the hammer drop, careful not to hit or even touch Emma with it. “I think she likes her name.”
These are their names, and the dead shall know them well.
He shivered and stepped off, eager to be on the way again.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s a nice terrace out of the wind on the far side of the rig.” They walked in silence for a few minutes, exchanging a few “good evenings” with a squad of marines they passed under the communications shack. Marines, he’d been surprised to discover, were all about good manners. Clouds passed over the moon at one point when they were traversing an unlit walkway. Professor Ashbury found herself unable to proceed in the darkness, but Dave’s night vision adjusted without his even being aware of the change. He noticed her difficulty and reached out a hand, gently taking her by the arm. She gasped.
“It’s cool. I got you,” he said. “Just walk forward.”
He led her across the gantry. Small, shuffling baby steps for her and longer, more confident strides for him. But slowly, like a dancer, so she could keep up.
When they reached the other side, a Coleman lamp spilled a wedge of light onto the deck from around the corner of a prefab unit that had housed crew before it burned.
“Thanks,” she said, genuinely shaken. “I don’t like heights or the dark.”
Dave waited a beat before laughing.
“And so you thought you’d seek your career in outer space?”
“Not exactly. No. It’s just … oh, shut up, you.”
She backhanded him, which didn’t hurt at all. The moon came back out, and they made it to the terrace without any further problems.
“You think there’s anything up there? Really?” Dave asked, pointing at the sky with the maul. The dense steel head blotted out some of the star field. When she answered, her voice was tired. She still sounded a little nervous.
“My scientific skepticism took a beating today. I don’t feel like I know much of anything anymore.”
The boots of a marine patrol clanged on the metal runway above them, fading as the men tromped around to the western side of the platform. The running lights of a couple of USN destroyers blinked in the haze to the south, enforcing the exclusion zone around the Longreach. They bobbed and ducked on the swell churned up by the storm, a chaotic drumbeat that sent waves crashing against the pylons below in an unpredictable, arrhythmic dance.
The pylons and the drill shaft were all being monitored by newly emplaced security cams. Infrared and something called “lamps,” according to Heath, which apparently weren’t lamps at all.
Emmeline, who confessed herself too wired and anxious to sleep, let him lead on their stroll around the platform. Dave was familiar with late nights spent walking off his worries. On any given night this last month he could have chosen to lose sleep to worry about his mounting stack of credit card bills, his unfiled tax returns, how to pay for the boys’ school fees, which were about to double when his wife enrolled them in some new joint—not flying in a couple of top-shelf hookers might have helped with that—how to keep a little back for himself so that Annie’s lawyer boyfriend didn’t get everything, the drill of course, which was operating way outside its specs, the bosses in Houston who’d forced that situation on him, the way his car guzzled coolant at about a hundred times the rate it should have, the way he seemed to really need a drink these days instead of just wanting one, a new sore, which looked just like the old ones, that he’d finally decided to pay attention to about a month after it had appeared on his chest and refused to heal—to all of these worries and more he could add his new ones.
And take at least one away.
The small red sore on his chest, which was almost certainly another basal cell carcinoma, was gone.
Woo fucking hoo.
“Something funny, Dave?”
“Just trying to get some perspective,” he said as they climbed the stairwell on the southwestern corner, stopping on the platform just below the helipad, which afforded them a view all the way over to Thunder Horse. The Longreach’s sister platform had its own small flotilla of coast guard vessels and warships, four of them that he could make out, dancing a complicated waltz with the destroyers currently guarding the Longreach, although how exactly a guided missile destroyer was supposed to guard against something like Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn turning up in your media lounge he wasn’t sure.
Emmeline Ashbury leaned against the safety rail protecting her from a long fall to the waters swirling against the massive concrete pylons beneath them and rubbed her hands together. “Cold,” she said. Dave could feel the chill in the air right enough, but tonight it wasn’t cutting into him the way it might normally.
“Seriously,” he said, looking up at the stars again. “Did you ever expect to find anything up there?”
“Expect? No. A good scholar never expects or anticipates anything. You theorize. You test. You wait for the results. But it’s poor form to expect anything. Publicly at least.”
“So why do it?”
Her eyes lit up with a smile that started at the corner of her mouth, highlighted her cheekbones, and crinkled the corners of her eyes.
“You got me.” She put up her hands in mock surrender. “Guilty of expectations.”
Dave’s return smile was queered by the effort of ignoring the rush of sexual imagery that flowed into his mind’s eye when he saw her impossibly white teeth in the moonlight. Annoyed with himself now, he kept a pleasant expression on his face as he jammed his free hand into a pocket, pretending to warm his fingers when he actually was trying to disguise the return of his boner.
Despite what Annie thought, he wasn’t seventeen years old. He knew the difference between appropriate and inappropriate boners. Turning at an angle to shield himself further, he pretended to be fascinated by the flight of a chopper from the rear deck of one of the destroyers.
“You think they’ll keep you on this gig, Prof? Seeing as how it’s not aliens or anything?”
“For a while. We’re here, we’re cleared, the president will want his own eyes on this. That makes us more useful than someone who might have a clue.”
He snorted at that, the weary response of a guy worn down by years of having other people’s idea of compromise forced on him.
“Yeah. I can see that. All the baby scientists and your guy Compton, are they all likely to stay on? I don’t think he’s a fan of old Dave.”
It was her turn to snort.
“It’s not you, it’s him. He really didn’t want to come down here. On the other hand, when you are partly responsible for the creation of the Human Terrain Team program, your prospects for giving TED Talks in Seattle are slim indeed. He has a knack for organizing and running things.”
“A bureaucrat,” Dave said.
“By necessity,” she said.
“So he’s the boss?”
“He oversees the office,” Ashbury said. “Micromanages quite a bit when he’s not talking at people. He wouldn’t appreciate being lectured about your monsters.”
Dave almost protested that they weren’t his, but of course they were. Neither of them would be standing here if he hadn’t lost his shit and brained the Hunn when it was plastered on—His train of thought nearly jumped the tracks at that point. When it was drunk on Marty’s blood.
“But isn’t this like the discovery of a lifetime? Monsters among us?” Dave asked. “Plenty of juicy research grants out of this. Better than the global warming scam.”
“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” she said quite severely to that. “It’s unbecoming and unnecessary.” Ashbury seemed to gather herself with a deep breath, which she let out in a heavy sigh. “We’re cleared because we’re locked down by nondisclosure agreements. The whole world could be talking about this tomorrow, but we won’t be allowed to. Not in public.”
The navy chopper passed out of view around the bulk of the other platform at the same moment the faint sound of its rotor chop reached them on a vagary of the breeze. A commercial airliner passed high above, away to the south, probably headed for Little Rock or Memphis. He’d had an app on his iPhone that could have told him just by pointing it at the lights in the sky, but of course that was gone now, too. He hadn’t had a chance to get online and check if it was still alive somewhere. The freshening wind carried the scent of the platform away, replacing the industrial smells of oil and chemicals with clean salt air and brine and traces of rainwater.
None of which Dave cared about.
He just wanted to find a way to either hide or get rid of a large, inconvenient erection that was jutting halfway out to Cuba. He found that by placing one foot on the guardrail, he could more easily cover up. It wasn’t funny. If anything, it was kind of painful, and he wondered if he’d actually gotten his money’s worth from the Nevada hookers because at his age he should have been good for a few more days.
“What do you think’s gonna happen, Doc?” he asked, hoping to distract himself.
“You’re not going to stop calling me that, are you?”
She was leaning back against the safety rail now, which only served to emphasize the line of her breasts, even through the heavy ski jacket.
“I forget things,” he said. “But come on. Seriously. You’re the expert. What’s gonna happen?”
“To you? I don’t know. But I was not feeding you a line before. There were people higher up the food chain than Heath who wanted to drop you in a hole until they were sure you weren’t dangerous. You’ll want to keep that in mind no matter what happens.”
He frowned.
“And they gave you a security clearance?”
“I see you know how this works,” she said. “Yes. They did. But I like to think that was for the autopsy on ET and keeping quiet about how the pod people took over the Republicans. For stuff I have issues with, I keep my fingers crossed. And throwing honest citizens in a hole for no good reason, that I don’t agree with.”
She jutted her chin at Hooper, as if challenging him to come back at her. But he didn’t.
“Wait,” he said as if he meant to challenge her. “ET’s dead?”
“Deader than disco.”
She smiled and reached into her jacket and produced a fifth of Pendleton.
“You take a shot, Dave? You look like the kind of man, if you don’t mind me saying so. And I think we earned it today.”
She unscrewed the cap and downed a slug before passing over the bottle. He got a strong scent of whatever perfume she wore as she handed him the whiskey. When he put the bottle to his mouth, the taste of her lipstick was strong. It didn’t help much with his boner problem, which was made worse yet by how different she seemed from the ballbuster he’d met earlier. What the fuck had gotten into this woman?
He passed back the bottle.
“Thanks. Heath’s okay, I guess. But he doesn’t seem the type to run an open bar on board.”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on him, Dave. He’s not so bad. You were a bit of a jerk tonight, and he let you slide on that.”
“He did,” Dave conceded. “And I was.”
Another drink burned down even more smoothly than the first.
“I’m sorry about your brother. Iraq, wasn’t it? I thought that was a bullshit war.”
“They’re all bullshit. But yeah, you and me both. Thanks. So,” he said, wanting to get away from the topic of his brother. He never really wanted to talk about Andy. “You know him well? Heath, I mean.”
“Well enough.”
He filed that away next to Heath having told him that he was just an asset in place. That there was nothing special about his being here. The doc, he was glad to see, was a lady who could handle her liquor. There was no dainty sipping for her. She took a man’s measure from the bottle before recapping it and stashing the fifth back in her ski jacket. Wisps of cloud drifted across the face of the moon, but his eyes adjusted again. He could see well enough in the dark to make out the tiniest blemish where the bottle had smudged her lipstick.
“I didn’t just mean about me before,” he said. “When I asked what you thought was going to happen, I meant, you know, generally.”
She turned around from where she’d been leaning back on the rail, which put her a little closer to him. Close enough that their elbows touched. She didn’t move away, but after a while he did. It was just too awkward to be that close to her. To any woman, he suspected. Not that he wasn’t interested. Obviously. A woody reaching halfway to next week testified to just how interested. But Dave knew all about getting himself out of trouble, and trying to tumble this woman into the sack was a gold medal start on getting himself deep in trouble. For one thing, she might be his only ally in this whole miraculous clusterfuck. Chief Allen didn’t count; he was more of a friendly snack machine.
If Ashbury noticed him distancing himself, she gave no sign of it.
“It depends, Dave,” she said. “Is this story going to break? Certainly. There’s just too many people who know, people outside their chain of command. The contact was too remote for them to shut down the site quickly but close enough to a major transmission vector that there was no chance of controlling the …”
She stopped.
“Damn. Look at me. Two drinks and I reveal my secret identity. Jargon lady. But I guess you were asking whether it’s over. You know, besides your couch session with Ellen, and the 60 Minutes special, and the whole upcoming Festival of Dave, and the overexposure of Dave and the inevitable vicious backlash against Dave, leading to the second coming of Dave, most likely on Dancing with the Stars? Can you dance, by the way?”
“Sure. I’m a middle-aged white man. I got the moves.”
It was her turn to laugh out loud. It was a light, bright sound on the darkened mausoleum of the Longreach. When she was done, she said, “But I guess you mean is it over with those creatures?”
He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
“You’d know better than me,” she said. “What’s your best guess? Are we done with them?”
Dave really wished he could have another shot.
“Nope,” he said. “I doubt it. I don’t like thinking much about it. Whenever I spend any time doing that, you know, going down the … memory hole … that thing opens up in my head, it feels like I might not come out.”
“It’s amazing isn’t it?” she said. “If we didn’t have those ugly bastards on the slab downstairs, brains in a bucket, just like ET, you’d probably be locked up as a lunatic. But we do.”
She shivered and moved in close to him.
“Anyway, I’m cold,” she said. “And tired now. And a little scared. Walk me back to my cabin, would you? That’s not a come-on, by the way. I’m genuinely scared. And cold. And if I wanted to fuck you, I would tell you. I have Asperger’s Syndrome.”
Dave stopped midstride.
“Shit? Really? I … thought …”
“What? That I wanted to fuck you? Or that I’m retarded now?”
Dave tugged his Annapolis hoodie down to conceal the raging hard-on as best he could, but he was pretty sure she spotted it. And every time she dropped an F-bomb it got worse.
“No,” he said, struggling. “I just thought … I thought. Okay. Yeah, I thought Asperger’s meant retarded. You sort of threw me with that.”
“Well, it doesn’t. So fuck off with that idea. But walk me home anyway.”
She looped her arm through his and pulled him forward.
“It’s dark,” she added. “I don’t want to fall off this fucking oil rig. You’re the safety chap. It’s your job.”
He caught up with her, almost stumbling over his own feet.
“So, since I’m doing you a favor here, you can do me one,” Dave said.
She gave him a look.
“Not like that,” he added quickly. “Just what the fuck is wrong with your friend Compton?”
She shook her head. “He is not my friend. He is my boss at OSTP. When they need additional knowledge or help with a particular field, Compton is the one who contacts the best and brightest. As for what is wrong with him, that would be the U.S. Army Human Terrain System.”
“Again with that terrain thing? What is it?”
“Using the tools of anthropology to understand the enemy in Afghanistan and Iraq,” she said. “A big no-no in the discipline. He’s pretty much blacklisted from any academic position, tenure track or part time, forever. The nondisclosure agreement prevents him from writing a book on his work, so that avenue is closed to him as well.”
“Don’t you have the same problem?” Dave asked.
“No,” she said. “I never went to Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don’t use my skill set in support of programs like Human Terrain. There’s always a berth for me somewhere. The space program is a lot more militarized than you’d imagine.”
“I doubt that. I got a pretty lurid imagination.”
“Besides, between guest speaking, medical research, and this job I get by quite well.”
“So he’s frustrated?” he asked.
“Very much so,” she said. “These days he couldn’t get hired as an adjunct if his life depended on it. The government pretty much owns him so long as he doesn’t piss too many more people off.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs and turned down a corridor.
“They’re going to want to know everything, you know,” she said as they left the mezzanine level of the stairwell. As soon as they were out in the breeze, the unseasonably biting cold became much more unpleasant.
“Who? The media?”
“No. Jesus for an engineer, you can be dense, can’t you?” She punched him playfully on the arm again. “The government. Heath is a believer in you, Hooper. For a born again, he’s quite the empiricist, you know.”
“I think I know what you mean by that,” Dave said. “And Heath’s a God botherer, eh? Figures.”
“No, it doesn’t. And I mean that the evidence out here, the accounts he’s gathered from other witnesses, and the time he’s spent with you, it’s all convinced him we’re in a genuine first contact situation. Just not one covered by the protocols. He’s feeling his way through, and one of the things he feels is that you’re telling it straight. Especially about downloading the creatures’ memories, or mind state, or whatever.”
Dave could smell meat cooking slowly down in the kitchen, but for once he wasn’t hungry. Not for food, anyway.
“Really?” he said. “Because I’m not sure I trust it or even believe it.”
She stopped, forcing him to pull up, too.
“Why not? Memory is just encoded electrical signals. It’s a phase state, a hypercomplicated one but describable if you have the language, replicable if you have the technology.”
“Which we don’t. Do we?”
“No,” she agreed. “But last time I checked, thirty-eight-year-old men didn’t go leaping a hundred feet into the air, either.”
“Thirty-seven. I’m not that old.”
“Congratulations. But back on topic. Last I checked, monsters didn’t chew up oil rigs. And magical hammers didn’t … Hey. That’s warm.”
She touched the head of the splitting maul and pulled her hand away quickly. Dave hadn’t noticed anything usual about … Lucille. Not since she’d given him that mild buzz a little earlier.
“Do you mind?”
The prof carefully reached out and touched the brutal-looking ax head, running her hand over it and caressing the sledgehammer. It didn’t help Dave’s little problem.
Not so little, he corrected silently.
Emma put her hand on his arm. “It’s like you’ve got your own hot water bottle there. No wonder you don’t feel the cold. Just one more thing to add to the list of inexplicable curiosities.”
She let her hand fall away.
“I wouldn’t call what happened to you a gift, Dave. It feels like a burden. It’s not just about the miracle weight loss cure or cartoon superpowers. You have all this knowledge, too. What you don’t have is the knowledge of that knowledge, if that makes sense. You don’t know what you know. How far down it goes. How wide. How to catalog it all. In the end, even if no more of these things come up, the government is going to want to make sure they know exactly what you do.”
Dave didn’t reply. He heard Allen approach long before the chief petty officer appeared, boots ringing on the steel decking. He looked agitated.
“Found you,” he said. “Hope you weren’t planning on going to bed,” he said, oblivious to any double meaning. “We have to get back on shore now. Orders from JSOC.”
“What’s happened?” Ashbury asked.
“More of Dave’s monsters. A heap of them, coming up out of the sewers in New Orleans,” Allen told her. “We’re taking half the marines we got here with us. There’s a big firefight under way. It’s confused. Cops. Gangbangers. Some crazy fucker with a crossbow, they say, like the one you killed after Raising Cane’s. And monster—”
“Wait,” Dave interrupted him. “Did you say a crossbow?”
“Or a bow and arrow. One of the cops took a shot in the head.”
“Sliveen,” Dave said.
They both stared at him.
“You do want me along, don’t you?”
Allen’s eyes slipped to the splitting maul Dave carried on his shoulder.
“Captain Heath insists. You, too, ma’am. And Professor Compton.”
“He will be less than thrilled, but I’ll get him,” Ashbury said, excusing herself to run back to her room to grab a backpack and “some things.”
“Borrow a gun if you can,” Dave called after her. “A big one.”
“Come on,” Allen said, tugging at his elbow. “Heath wants to talk to you before we fly out. And, hey, you know, sorry, dude.”
“Sorry? Why?”
Allen smiled at him.
“The doctor lady is kinda hot.”