Грег Бир - The War Dogs Trilogy

DJ and Ishida move through the canes, swearing, to recover the pistol.

“It’s an Antag weapon, all right,” DJ says.

“Why was it carrying that, if it couldn’t use it?” Ishikawa asks.

“Don’t toss it,” Tak says. “Maybe Bird Girl will let us arm ourselves.”

“I doubt that,” Ishida says.

Nothing but darkness ahead, no clues.

And then the breeze moving aft carries a swirling cloud of fairy glow. Searcher bodies have been sprinkling the surroundings.

“There!” Ishida says. Her eyes are sharper than ours. A few hundred meters ahead, we see a spray of branches blue-green with searcher dust. We grab hands to form a star, calculate how to kick off all at once, and fly across the intervening space. Joe and Borden snag a branch, then we all scramble inboard to what could be a rail line—a corkscrew curve pointing aft. But the corkscrew ends abruptly, and there’s nothing obvious in the way of transport—nothing like the tram car around the screw garden.

We’re contemplating our next move when we find another body—Antag, one of the armored commanders, caught up in an adjacent branch and mostly hidden by the withered arms of a dead searcher. The Antag’s wings have been left half-spread. All four eyes are open and glazed. She apparently bled out through deep slices along her neck and shoulders—neatly skirting the armor on her breast and thorax.

“How many battles can we fight on this tub?” Joe asks in an undertone.

Borden and Jacobi move off a few slender branches to confer. In the light of more dead Antags and uncertainty aft, they’re reassessing our situation, who to protect, who to reinforce—who to put in danger. I’m glad I’m not making those decisions, but I handicap their choices anyway, and I’m mostly correct.

“Four of us will go on,” the commander says. “Three will return to the ribbon space. We don’t know who’s most in danger, or how protected Ulyanova really is. We can’t risk both Johnson and Venn. I want someone who’s linked to the starshina and Bird Girl with each party. I should have thought of that earlier, but… Fujimori, Johnson, Ishikawa. Back to the nests. Good luck.”

We split up. Joe, Jacobi, Borden, Ishida, and I will continue aft. The pistol goes to Ishida.

“We’ll hand it over to Bird Girl,” Borden says. “Make it a peace offering.”

The great intertwine of tram lines, the foremost station, begins about a hundred meters behind the spike ball.

How many times before has this ship gone through metamorphosis? Across four billion years? I can’t believe any ship could last so long. But the ship, as DJ pointed out, has aspects of a cell—a living thing. Maybe it’s a cancer cell and can go on forever.

“Any idea how much Ulyanova had a hand in designing this?” Borden asks.

“I’d guess she’s just letting the ship follow prior instructions.”

“Which means sending the Antags down to Sun-Planet?”

“That’s what she says.”

“Where there’s nothing left for them,” Joe says.

“And after they’re delivered?” Jacobi asks. “What happens to the ship then?”

“A long trip back to the other side of the Kuiper belt,” I say. “Or… a short deviation, right into the sun.”

“With or without Ulyanova?” Jacobi asks.

“Which would you bet on?” Borden says, and they look at each other with the sublime pessimism of having to anticipate the worst.

I don’t like being put in this spot. “With,” I say.

“All right, then,” Borden says. “Brother and sister of the tea have exchanged confidences.”

“Something’s coming,” Ishida says, and points down the shadowy, spiky center of the tree. A narrow, insectoid car with jointed, grasping limbs at each end is rolling in our direction. It pauses for a moment and reaches out to adjust the angle of a thicker branch, showing considerable persuasion or strength, and then more slowly approaches us. Faceted eyes at the end of long stalks seem to measure and observe.

The car stops a few meters away, ticking.

“Is it alive?” Borden asks.

Before I can hazard a guess, the car starts to move in the opposite direction—aft. We each take hold of a black arm and swing our legs into the cab, trying to hang on as the car picks up speed. We’re on our way, slammed this way and that as it swerves to avoid the thickest and most productive branches.

All around us there’s growth and noise, branches rearranging, more cars passing on the opposite side of the trunk, bundles of raw materials being ferried and delivered to the other branches…

The cell is metastasizing. The ship feels more and more like a gigantic, cancerous lump, producing death and destruction a million tons at a time.

Farther aft, huge objects, the embryonic beginnings of big ships, hang on the outer branches, some hundreds of meters long and still expanding, their hulls not yet closed over. Other, larger grapplers and industrial organelles move new components toward these ships, through gaps in their unfinished skins, and into what I have to assume are the proper positions.

The whole Guru war machine is in full gear, getting ready for a voyage across the solar system and beyond, to a far world where humanity’s new enemies are being fed the old line of imminent conquest and domination…

Recycle whatever you can, right?

Every second we risk being flayed. We’re getting exhausted trying to avoid the rushing tangles, being brushed by nascent weapons or scraped along the rugged sides of half-finished ships.

Borden, seeing we’ve reached our physical limits, tells us to look for a relatively open space between branches and a slowdown in the tram car’s spiraling, jerking passage—and when those are in congruence, we kick off, away from the branches and growths. The contraction of the ship’s hull has pulled in outboard chambers we never saw until now, and we take refuge in one, if it can be called refuge, since it shudders and slowly spins, some of the walls growing long spikes, as if preparing to grab the other side and tug it shut—and may at any moment be absorbed, and us with it. But for a few minutes we find relative quiet and try to catch our breaths before resuming the trip aft.

I move off a few meters along a barely spiked curve and over a rim between the chambers.

“Going somewhere?” Borden asks from behind.

I wonder where I am going, and why. “In my head… I hear a little fly-buzz,” I say.

“Ulyanova?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“Mind if we come with?”

“No…”

The whole cluster of squeezed-down chambers is like the steely pith of a gigantic tropical fruit, with the big seeds removed. As we climb and echo along the walls, crossing over ridges where chambers join, we make sure to keep our bearings so we can find our way back.

According to the buzz in my thoughts, there’s evidence nearby… evidence, and maybe something else.

Ishida, alert and sharp-eyed, spots the evidence first. “What is this crap? It’s not Antag, right?”

Pulling aside a mass of broken canes pushed up against an inner chamber, like a cave inside a cave, we find shreds of fabric. I pull away what might be a decayed coverall. Its tatters reveal three pairs of armholes, two legs, and no neck hole, but an opening in the thorax, the chest, as if whatever wore this peered out from a central eye. The shards are torn, fading, and rotten—pushed around by cane growths like tattered laundry hung on a thousand poles.

The others observe in silence. This may be the migration the Gurus arranged before our war got under way—the previous episode in the season, so to speak, when they laid up a bitter, desperate end for the Antags.