Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

She met Marybeth’s eyes, and there was a depth to her gaze that was missing before.

“My Lexi,” Ellie said. “My Lexi is gone.”

After the treatment, Ellie didn’t need a caretaker, but Marybeth had long since abandoned her apartment and they enjoyed each other’s company. Ellie often wore the same grim smile that so often graced Yolanda’s face when she was sick, and it tugged at Marybeth’s heart. She tried to remind herself that Ellie was a different woman, a straight woman, but she could not help but hope that somehow, if enough time passed, things could be different.

Ellie made good progress in embracing reality. Together they dismantled Lexi’s crib and set it out on the curb in front of the apartment. It wasn’t long before a woman who looked like she might be expecting came and carried it away.

Oskar came back from L.A. Marybeth greeted him at the door, and had no choice but to let him in, for all that he abandoned Ellie when she needed him most.

“I’m so glad you’re both okay,” he said. Marybeth shrugged. He could say what he wanted, it wouldn’t change what he had done. She only hoped that she wouldn’t lose Ellie, now that he was back.

“Hi, Oskar,” Ellie said. The sight of him brought her to tears, but Marybeth couldn’t tell whether they were tears of joy or pain or anger.

“I’m so sorry,” Oskar said. “I didn’t want to leave you, but I couldn’t stay. I was hurting too.”

“I forgive you,” Ellie said. “I know it must have been hard.”

He smiled and went to embrace her, but she stepped back. “I forgive you, but we can’t go back to how things were. I saw what might have been, if the Eridani had never come, and Lexi had lived, and it was beautiful. We could have had an amazing life. But those are impossible futures, and I have to let them go and come back to what is real.”

“Is it another man?” Oskar asked, then realized that Marybeth was standing there. “Or another woman?”

Ellie shook her head. “There’s no one else. Certainly not Marybeth, though she’s a dear friend.”

It was nothing that Marybeth did not already know. She had always known that Ellie was straight; there had never been any sign that she was interested. Ellie would never be Yolanda.

Marybeth grabbed her coat and made polite excuses. Ellie and Oskar had a lot to talk about, and Marybeth didn’t want to hear it. She went outside and started walking, not caring where she went.

The wind picked up, and an orange cloud blew down from the Eridani foodtrees. The second sporefall had begun, a new cycle of alien life. According to the translators, the initial sporefall had been a different strain, modified to be more aggressive for terraforming, so that the Eridani would be sure to have foodplants when they arrived at their new home. This second sporefall should be as harmless to humans as ordinary pollen.

Marybeth sneezed at the orange air, but she refused to go back inside.

She would not hide from this new world.

A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs , won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fourth, A Daughter of No Nation , has won the 2016 Prix Aurora. She has published over forty short stories in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed , and numerous print magazines and anthologies. She was the co-editor of Heiresses of Russ 2016 . She teaches writing at two universities and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at a third.

Alyx is married to fellow Aurora winner Kelly Robson; the two made their outlaw wedding of 1989 legal in 2003, when the Canadian Supreme Court conferred equality on same-sex couples.

My offworlder allies don’t trust me.

Squid, we call them, though their home planet is named Kabuva. They’re twelve feet in length from top to tip, see, with bullet-shaped caps that pull tight over a spaghetti of tentacles. When they bell out these caps, they look less like calamari and more like giant umbrellas. The Brits used to call them “brollies,” as a matter of fact, back before England was annihilated.

All the players in this game have nicknames. The other human army wrangling for control of Earth calls itself the Friends of Liberation. Pompous, right? We’ve shortened it to Fiends.

As for us, the squid-sponsored Democratic Army, we’re the Dems. “It’s either Dems or us,” the Fiends say. Bad pun; they end up taking over the world, they’ll probably outlaw laughing.

It’s just after dawn on a sunny July morning and I’m humping through East Los Angeles with a squad of ten heavily armed and overtired squid fry. Squid-squad, get it? Hence the song. How many Fiends can a squid-squad squash?

It doesn’t help that squid armor is silly looking—essentially an upside-down mussel shell that hooks to their bullet-shaped caps. When the going gets hot, they yank in their tentacles and seal the carapace tight, firing weapons from inside the all-but-impregnable canister. Once sealed in, though, they can barely move.

The newest fry teedle along on the tips of their tentacles, shell all but shut. Vets tend to leave it half open, on the grounds that the carapace sensors don’t work for shit.

We’re here today because Intelligence has designated this neighborhood so thoroughly infiltrated by Fiends that there’s no way to tell the bad guys from noncombatants. An evac order’s gone out, and now we’re one of the squads going block to block ensuring each house, shop, and low-rise is empty. Behind us floats a demolition ship, hanging just over the rooftops like a big blimpy starfish. Every time we give the all-clear on a building, the ship glides in and starts dusting the structure to nothingness.

Once this whole area is flattened, the squid will compile a few dozen skyscrapers for the humans who lived here. These buildings will be wired, so that any Fiendish conversations go straight to Kabuva Intelligence. The general idea is neighborhood Fiends will have to move elsewhere… those that do will be tagged as probable hostiles and rounded up for interrogation.

Bluto, on point, goes rigid and the squad snaps to alertness. He rips an apartment door off its hinges.

“Cantil?” The unit commander, Loot, caresses the back of my neck; this is his idea of a nudge.

“Anyone in there?” I call, first in American and then in Spanish. The amplifier built into my face mask makes my voice come out officious and strident, anything but reassuring. “It’s okay. Come out and you won’t be harmed.”

The response is a pepper of bullets from antique machine guns, and the squad barges in happily. I wait in the hall. Loot’s a good guy, as squid go; he doesn’t expect me to pitch in when they’re beating on probable civilians.

Screams, thumps, punches. The firing stops. I inhale a dense reek of gunpowder. Ah, the good old days.

Soon enough they’re hauling out the troublemakers: a mother and son maybe, both netted like trout. The boy is unconscious; livid sucker marks show he’s been throttled. The woman is shrieking.

Loot asks: “What is she saying?”

I tilt up my mask, taking the opportunity to poke a stick of gum into my mouth, and kneel beside her. “Ma’am? Nobody’s going to hurt you. We need to evacuate—”

“We ain’t leaving!” she yells.

I turn to Loot. “She doesn’t want to leave her home. I doubt she’s a Fiend.”