Грег Бир - The War Dogs Trilogy

That part of the war seems to be over.

“Those brought here by Keepers have finished,” Bird Girl says. “None of our cities remain. We find no living of our kind.”

The big ship’s orbit takes it once more over the belt of thick ice, into a slow, low passage over the southern hemisphere. There’s something cruel and mocking about these sweeps. Are the Guru ghosts, the ship’s brain, squeezing the last reactions out of these heartbroken warriors, facing the bitter truth of their destruction?

Here, in the southern hemisphere, the display reveals that the clear blue-green oceans cover deep destruction. Trenches and plains are burned out, pitted—so deeply scored that the inner heat and pressures of Sun-Planet itself produce boiling cauldrons. Visible open trenches score the southern pole, spouting streams of plasma into space—replacing the benign and illuminating aurorae with grim prominences, overarching cascades of fire. The edges of these chasms glow orange in the eternal night, like angry welts around open wounds.

How much of the archives have been targeted? And who targeted them? The new warriors, or the Antags who followed the commands of the Keepers? The latter, I’m guessing, before they fell to the new warriors. After that, with the destruction of the searchers, the archives would have become irrelevant. Without those tuned to their libraries, their destruction is not important.

Nobody remains to listen. And the steward no longer serves Antags.

Which is why DJ and I, but not Bird Girl, can still hear its voice. The steward has only us to talk to, and soon, we will leave.

The one thought that floods me, overwhelming all indignity and anger, I can also see in the faces of our small band of Skyrine survivors.

Fear for what has happened on Earth since we left.

The display now shows the edge of the equatorial ice, and zooms in to reveal fleets of submarines, ships arranged in starfish flotillas, linked with wave-frothing chains, their upper decks packed with both aircraft and spacecraft. Several of the spacecraft are launching on pillars of spent-matter fire.

“There they are,” Bird Girl says. “That is our reception—a quick death. This is all that remains.”

To see her home world in this monstrous disarray makes her shrink inside. “They fought for years. Some families, old and conservative, filled with honor, fought to keep the archives from changing our relation to the Keepers, our politics and historically revered policies. Cities built to exploit, then to support the searchers—they are gone. All of our unifying efforts seem to have been ignored. Searchers have nearly vanished.”

“How many are left?” Borden asks.

“Wingfuls, if that. There must have been great fear, great hatred.” Her four eyes seem to bore into mine. I can share those emotions, that combination of anger and dismay, because that’s how we’re most alike, Antags and humans—rage and disappointment. Maybe that’s what made both of us attractive to the Gurus. Or that’s how the Gurus shaped us.

“And now… they are gone. The good, the bad, the foolish, the deceived—the wise! All my people are gone. I am full of shame.”

Borden silently studies the view. Ishida’s tears, streaming down one side of her face, are the only sign of emotion in our group. Half of her was destroyed in our war. Strangely, she’s the one with the most empathy for our former enemies.

“A decision is made,” Bird Girl says. “The mimic has done what she promised. And so, after we depart, you will be left here to finish your tasks. There is no place for you down there. But we have duties to perform. Sacred obligations.

“In thousands of centuries, our world will once more travel through the inner space of the solar system. What Sun-Planet will be then… if it will even survive… who can know? But here, and on your world—we ask this of you…”

Three armored females in attendance to the big male are handed a black box about forty centimeters on a side, equipped with a battery pack and canisters. In turn, they give the box to the male, who summons me forward with a broad sweep of his wing.

I receive the box. Ishida and Borden join me and place their hands on the box, as if they know instinctively what’s being given to our care.

I look at Bird Girl.

“We have dual births from each egg,” she tells us through the translator. “Each egg can be configured to seed a family, and this one is so made. These children will be mine, my family’s. You may let them live, if you understand… what we have done. What we are, and what we share. How we have both been deceived.”

“We’ll take care of them,” I vow, and hope I can carry out that promise.

“I think you will raise them honorably.”

“We’ll try.”

“Take what memories are in your heads, or will be when the archives finish with you, and remember what we did for you, in hope of peace.”

We surround the egg.

“And take these as well,” Bird Girl says, as another bag is brought forward. Borden takes it, opens it, and peers inside. She looks up with a puzzled and pleased expression.

“Some of our bolt pistols,” she says. “They look fully charged.”

“Recovered by small cousins from your ships, your bases.”

“I didn’t know they could swim,” Joe says.

“That is why you lost so many battles on Titan,” Bird Girl says. “These, I am sure, will be used to protect.”

She reaches out with a wingtip hand, as if for the last time, to caress the egg in its case. Ishida is crying freely now.

“Tell them how their family died,” Bird Girl concludes, looking toward the transport, the other Antags, the bats, and the two searchers finishing the loading, moving in and out of the lone return vessel.

She raises her joint hand on her injured wing as best she can, and we each touch palms.

“Amen,” Borden says, almost inaudible.

“Godspeed,” Joe says.

Ishida hugs Bird Girl, somewhat to the alarm of the bats—and then releases her.

The bats escort us back to the hangar and we are released. We watch the sealing away from the aft terminus of the spine-tree’s tramway. Bulkheads are set in place and grow up between us and the Antag transport, beaten and battered, in the hangar. Follows a deep vibration that shivers the air.

The Antags are on their way.

“Suicide!” Borden says.

“Honor,” Ishida says.

We begin the long journey forward.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Borden warns, as we each take a pistol and check it. All functional, all well maintained. I think I’d like to have some of those cousin bats go with us. “We’re not out of this yet.”

No place in our pajamas to hide or store the guns, so we carry them open. And between us, we protect the box containing the egg.

The tram vehicles are as tough to hang on to as before, and the journey is made even more arduous by more changes along the tree, plus what must be a major reshaping of the ship’s hull, difficult to understand from our point of view—like rats on an ocean liner.

Throughout, spring-steel threads unwind along the branches and the trunk, filling the spaces between with a curly metallic fuzz—leaving swerving tunnels that barely allow the trams to move forward—while cradling the growth, the ships and weapons, as if they are seeds inside a gigantic pod cramming itself with death and destruction.

I wonder what Ulyanova is contributing, if anything, to these changes. I wonder if she’s even still alive. I hear nothing from the bow, nothing from her world behind the dense curtain. The archives on Sun-Planet also have little to say now, fewer fragments to add—but for one overall impression, a kind of courtesy extended to visiting scholars—the confirmation that in time, Sun-Planet will survive, and will indeed pass through the lower system, between the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, and likely will once again scatter moons and rearrange human affairs. That’s orbital mechanics—possibly set in place by the shifter of moons and worlds.