Грег Бир - The War Dogs Trilogy

Jacobi is three meters away, clutching the pistol we recovered earlier—

And firing three more times before it whines that the charge is gone.

We stare at her in astonishment.

“Somebody made a mistake,” she says. “Thought I’d make sure.”

We push back from the corpses, surrounded not just by their main masses, but by twirling gobbets of flesh, revolving and rotating limbs, strings of internal organs.

None of them belong to us.

We’ve just engaged and taken down four cage fighters, and cannot believe that we’re all intact and alive.

“Any more?” Ishida asks.

“None I can see,” Joe says.

“Where’s Sudbury?”

No sign. Maybe one more.

Jacobi and Borden do brief examinations of our opponents. They’re all dead, but worse, are absolutely painted by old scars. The ape is missing fingers and a lower leg from a previous encounter, and every one of them looks as if they were once much stronger, more capable.

Before the cage matches.

Perhaps before they were all released.

No satisfaction comes with this victory. No glory, nothing but the chance to return to the spinning, fruiting branches and hitch on another car—completing our horror-train ride aft.

What a prize.

We feel barely alive when the car stops with a jerk and the limbs fold away, threatening to pinch our hands. We let loose and hear, then see, Antags. They’re drafting away from the ships in the hangar to intercept us. But they are hardly any sort of welcoming committee.

The air around us flashes with wings, grasping hands, bolt rifles, and pistols. The Antags take quick control of our group. Jacobi offers them our weapons. A bat intervenes to take them and moves off to join the busy mix around the interior of the hangar, where the big male is directing the loading of passengers and cargo. Preparing for departure. Two searchers move between the ships, interacting with the bats, helping carry cargo from one transport to another. Other Antags perch nearby, like a string of crows on a power line, wings folded, waiting. Looks as if they’re packing to return to the planet. What’s left of their home to return to?

I try to connect with Bird Girl, tell her we’re here to deliver information—but the Antags tie us in cords and jerk us again into bouquets, not in the least gentle.

The big male interrupts his supervision to make a sweeping gesture with one wing. The armored officers and bats stop their own activity and move out of the hangar to surround us.

Then Bird Girl emerges from the hangar, assisted by several bats. Her wings are folded, but one is oddly bent as if dislocated. She’s carrying her own bolt pistol and her shoulders are damply fluffled.

The crowd around us parts as she comes forward.

“You’re going home?” I ask.

Her reaction is like a needle into my head. “There is nothing left, but there is an end,” she says, pulling herself into something like dignity, her feathers smoothing. “Honor in completion.” I get her impression of what will come after: vast calm seas, warm lights glowing over water and land, over ice. No enemies except those chosen to bring glory and more honor. Bird Girl’s Fiddler’s Green.

“You have seen what our world has become,” she says. “Who has told you this?”

“The mimic,” I say. “I wouldn’t wish it for any of you.”

“I could feel your sadness,” Bird Girl says. “After all we have done, and what we are now… Our husband wishes me to teach you, so you may teach others, what we were, what we are, and what we are about to become.”

Joe and Jacobi have moved close, as if to protect me from the crowd—but there is no more anger, no more resentment. They have made their peace, and for these people, these races, that is remarkable.

What follows next between us is an internal dance, a remarkable exchange of what she anticipates for us—of where humans might go from here, the ship crossing to Mars and Earth, passing on to gather up Gurus and move to the next stage, whatever that will be… but leaving us to join those we feel are family.

This acknowledgment that we will live, that we might possibly go back to Earth, that Earth might still be there… this brings an end to many decades of deception and folly. The utter betrayal played upon them by the Gurus, the Keepers, is striking deep into the most conservative and warlike members of the families throughout the hangar.

“Our husband has changed,” she says. “He will ask a favor.”

For those not on our connection, a bat has set up the guts of an old human helm display to be shared—a kind of courtesy I would never have expected.

In one great painful sweep, Bird Girl feeds me what they have seen through remotes and the star dish. The surface of Sun-Planet has undergone big changes. The topography is very different from what she was taught on Titan.

It seems Bird Girl was also something of a nerd, among her kind. Her favorite subjects rise above the rest, the phenomena and characters of home that she had most wanted to experience.

For the first time, I understand the equivalent of the Antag compass—the normal points and several other coordinates that Antags use, including where heat plumes are migrating way below the crust. Plumes and heat and magnetic field lines affect weather. Sun-Planet has external weather and internal weather. If the hot, pressurized inside fails, the outside fails not long after.

But the current reality overshadows her studies.

What they have seen:

Wide gray prairies and plains, low, layered mountain ranges, and…

Ruins. If these had once been cities, they seem to have fallen from a great height like chandeliers and shattered, then been kicked around. Walls, facets, fields of debris glisten like broken ice. The arcs of aurorae still flicker through the collapsed remnants of great arches. Apparently these cities once flew. Must have been a wonderful sight.

Directly below and stretching to the aurora-wrapped horizon, the eastern and western edges of two of the largest of six continents face each other across a narrow isthmus filled with swirling, muddy ribbons, flowing south toward the one great global sea, the watery wall between all the landmasses in the northern hemisphere and the huge equatorial belt of ice. That belt is more than fifty klicks thick in places—a daunting wall between the two ecosystems the bugs seeded here billions of years ago.

In Bird Girl’s memory, the southern hemisphere is just the opposite of the northern—mostly water fingered with hundreds of rocky, ice-bound ridges of land. But we’re not looking at that yet. We’re surveying northern Antag territories, historical lands and their associated waterways—

Lands where millions of generations of Antags once swam and bred and fished, spread across the continents, discovered all the requisite technologies, built their communities, their farms and cities, and in time developed a civilization at least as old as our own.

Only to became entranced by the heart-wrenching stories of the Keepers.

Thousands of craters interrupt the old map of historical memory, often hundreds of klicks across, as if asteroids or small moons had been dropped from orbit. At Bird Girl’s command, the screen outlines where major cities and government-designated regions once were. She mentally tries to convey some of their names—a phonetic murmur of her mind—and then, one by one, not finding them, scratches them out with blasts of reddish anger. They are amended on the screen as well—blotchy erasures. I flinch at her vigorous rage.

The destruction on most of the continents comes in the form of asteroid falls, followed by gigantic scorching runs across the landmasses, like claw marks—pointing to huge orbital weapons no longer in evidence. The small oceans now have very different outlines.