Tenth Daughter, Part 8

 All the Lights in the Sky

Later than sooner we reconvened by the base of the hill, receiving a scowl from Sargeant. The supplies had been gathered without us and most of the tents were set up. Not ours, and we were last in line for chow. Some electrics had been reconnected and new supplies were due to fall from the sky shortly. But our power suits and laser cannons were useless now. After eating we all gathered around a fire and worked on our suits, bypassing the hydraulics and greasing ball cuffs. To my left Blondie was wetting her blade. Even without a charge it could slice through Octopi leather. But their blue charged shields would twist an ill-timed thrust. We would have to be at our best in the coming fight. 

Night came late in the summer, but soon the blue skies darkened, and foreign stars appeared like flickering candles. We'd never seen these new constellations. Gooney stretched a long finger to the southeast quadrant. The Sun. We couldn't see the Kuiper belt objects we called home. Or the blackened Earth. My sight faded with the sky of this planet, and I thought again of my sister. I impossibly heard the gasps of my parents and screams as the ground came apart. She fell, it was the beginning of the end for us. For the Earth. 

Soldiers gradually drifted away, stowing their suits and weapons, then falling into their bunks. I lingered by the fire and finally stretched out with my hands folded behind my head. There was a small pocket open in the periphery of my mind where I played hearts with a rummy two-toed sloth named Eduardo. Eduardo wore retro Air Jordens, which was ironic if you had any knowledge of Earth history. Also, he spoke with an Eastern European accent that I found hilarious. So droll, so self-deprecating. A little bit putinevil. 

I was winning until the sloth shot the moon. I gave up, closing that pocket, and noticed the stars moving in the heavens. They grew from stars to lights to lanterns falling swiftly. I jumped up yelling along with the blasting claxons that pulled everyone from their sleep.

Tenth Daughter, Part 7

 Mystic Whales Vs Cosmic Octopi

After I sat, with a cup of warm lemon water nestled between my chapped hands, a pocket came unbidden, and with a little hesitancy slipped in, but only part way.  We dropped through the cloud cover, our individual buckets screeching as the super-heated shields burned. Each pod, dropped from the orbiting mother Whale Transport Ship, poked a perfect hole in the cumuli and pulled down hissing trails of vapor in its descent. All the way to the earth. Balloons flated from the cones and like a dance each pod, together, flipped over then impacted the ground. With luck a troop bucket would bounce. What happened next was always an adventure, but the first bounce was key, and lifesaving. If there was no bounce, then either the balloons were not up to the task, or the ground just got the better of them. We had two hundred buckets, and of that all but one survived. Phase 1. 

We were from first landfall to the last approx one mile apart. The rendezvous was quick. We each came to earth fully equipped, delivered from cracked eggs complete, mobile, dangerous. Our metal was hard, our teeth were sharp. In powered armor we hit the ground running and coalesced on central turf.  

The enemy had gathered beyond and without pause we engaged. I was in the leading group, but as previously stated had fallen back. At the hour I thought the ground had caused my fall, but as I settled deeper into the pocket, recounting the action, I discerned no fault for the earth. Did my suit fail, did my knee buckle? Or did I just lose my nerve? I had been in hundreds of simulated battles and this one felt exactly like those.

Whatever, I hadn't quit on my compatriots, or myself. I kept on, and I engaged. The first foe I met lost their head. The top bit slid from my power blade and bounced off a rock, its ugly head spilled from the helmet. The spiky stubble of an impossible beard and a slimy snout scowled at me from the trampled earth. I snarled back and shouldered the torso out of my way, its multi armed leather wriggling, not realizing yet it was dead. I waded deeper into the melee...

In two chairs in a corner of the cottage the two women reclined. Refugees from a fallen Earth system, they had settled here on Proxima Centauri P-15 alongside tens of thousands, delivered in a hundred Mother Whales. Two hundred years ago the planet was empty, and barely habitable.  Now it was a garden, well populated by pockets of human settlements. And host to an invading horde of Octopi-pigs.

I sipped my water while the others finished off a second bottle of wine. The women had no use for clinkers, there was no significant monetary trade in the villages. They preferred the chocolate and flavored cough lozenges we had in our zippered pockets. Their men and grown children had either enlisted in the local militia to guard the village perimeter or had already died fighting. One of the human women fed a small piece of chocolate to the child sitting on her lap. It licked its snout with glee. Its tentacles wriggled with delight. 

Tenth Daughter, Part 6

 Zero Waste and Verdant Exhalation 

"Plunkit, Plunkit."

The chop thickened, waves engulfed my torso and face, and I tasted salt on my lips. The wind was picking up and a second wave flipped me over as the surf rolled me on to the beach. The sandy beach morphed into an unrivaled expanse of green grass, the downslope of the hill we had just taken, uncontested, but at a loss. I took a last deep breath of salt air, inhaling instead the loamy verge. 

"Plunkit, snap out of it," the sergeant slapped the side of my helmet and my pocket unraveled. "Grab the litter and help get Hagrid to the village." It took six of us to trundle the giant down the hill, stumbling half the way. Between hazardous steps I would glance at his prostrate bulk, sometimes to see his eye lids open halfway. The giant's chest rose and fell slowly, and I prayed it didn't quit, not here, not on this hill.

At the slope's base there was a simple paved road, and one of our lifeless vehicles met us there. The driver had disengaged the transmission and with the help of two other soldiers was pushing the jeep-like transport. We hoisted the gurney onto the jeep and then helped push the car up the road into town. Only one square in, there was a doctor's home, and several of the troops lugged him, not easily, over the threshold. I watched them, unable to help because of the cramped quarters, then turned away from the struggle and walked back the way I came with a few others. The mood was black.

"We should get back to the hill, the Sargeant wanted all hands gathering supplies from the drones."

"Aye, we should," said Goony, but he stopped and looked into the open doorway of a small brick cottage. Inside were two local women and a child sitting at a table. The noon day was warm, and the windows stood wide open, the floral pattern curtains barely stirred in the scant breeze.  He unzipped a side pocket and rummaged inside, pulling out some crumpled bills and a few silver clinkers. "Not much," he said.

"I've some too," said Blondie. She looked at me, and I nodded.

I stepped up to the doorway. "Have you got any wine?" I asked. "Maybe bread?" Sargeant wouldn't miss us, not right away.

Tenth Daughter, Part 5

 Of Olympian, Primordial, and Eldritch

The damage was significant. Our suits were cumbersome and useless without the power function, and our supply drones were on the ground. Worse than that, Hagrid's electric heart muscle took a powerful surge and he dropped like a stone. Or maybe a dump truck load of them. His breathing was labored as his feeble heart struggled to pump enough to keep Hagrid alive. Thankfully he slept while a technician searched his kit for solutions. 

We gathered around the giant, worried. Beyond that, with the tragically unplanned for surge attack, we had gone from the superior force to the clear underdog. Our leaders had been so sure the enemy force was meeting us on the field that they overlooked that tactic. After all, it would have disabled both armies. Now they had equal footing, or better. The numbers were now on their side. 

I took a quick minute to lay in a pocket of comfort, drifting on gentle waves on a salt cove. We were younger now, on holiday from the rigorous training, and I was surly. Dee constantly had the better of me, always scoring higher, forever performing better. I adored her, I always had and probably always would. But it rankled me all the same. Together we floated, bobbing on the primordial waters of Eldritch on the Bay. We were playing a game of moth.

The man squirmed in the ground. He'd been buried alive and was ripping at the crust with his claws and arms. He pushed with his feet, moving dirt aside, struggling to move and to breath. He was racing against time, fighting against death, fearing dishonor. Finally one hand was free, he felt the empty space, the cold bite of air against his bloody skin. He pushed, dug, pulled until his head broke the earth. It was almost like being born. He bled and he cried.

Not too far away another being broke free and hoisted itself from the hole. A woman, strong, bellowing with primal joy. She stood, shakily, then broke into a run. The man followed, panting. There was to be no rest. He was faster at first and caught up, but she grinned as he pulled even, and she winked then sprinted ahead. 

There was a wall ahead, constructed of bricks too smooth to climb. The woman jumped onto the surface and tried to dig her sharp fingered claws into the mortared crevices, but she kept slipping and falling. The man knew he couldn't succeed when the woman failed. Instead he stopped short of the wall and stood very still.

The woman tried to climb again and again, and the man began to slightly quiver, then to shake, and finally violently convulse. His skin started to harden until he was growing the carapace of a stony beetle. The woman gave up her hopeless efforts, breathing hard, and watched the man with wonder.

He stopped shaking and ran his hands across his chitinous belly. He looked up at the woman, who nodded, then started shaking again. The woman blurred to his sight.

She did as the man had done, and soon her body had the smooth exoskeleton as well. The woman saw that the further shaking accomplished nothing, so she bypassed that option and began throwing herself against the wall once again. The man watched. Did she think she would now climb the wall like an insect? No, of course not. Her shell began to spider and crack.

The man gasped. No, she was getting ahead again. He put his hands up to face and willed them to harden, to grow, to sharpen. Then he plunged the claws into his carapace and dug it away from his body, piece by bloody piece. Each segment fell away with a fibrous gooey strand until the chunks lay in a pile, oozing. 

The woman had gradually achieved the same results and together they stood naked, wet and slimy, shelled like peas from a pod. For a moment they did nothing. The goo weighed them down, made them weak and vulnerable. They stood, haggard, cold beside the wall. But steps away the fading sun still shone, though it was dipping quickly to the horizon. The man and the woman ran, struggled, to the sun beam and arched their bodies to the god of life. The corona sent a gentle finger forth and caressed their gentle bodies, sloughing off the ick and mucus until their furry bodies dried and fluffed heartily. The man and the woman drank the air, filling their lungs, and unfurled their wings. They looked like sails of stained glass, which threw forth a shaft of colored lights with the last ray of sunlight. The dark crept on.

Above, then, high on the steep wall, a beacon arose and signaled the warriors. The man and the woman gasped, then flapped their wings and flew. They didn't fly well. They were new at the moth game, and the man slammed hard against the wall. The woman smartly winged the opposite direction, but she only made circles in the dust. Gradually she lifted from the ground, beating down the gravity. But the man had bent his wing. He tried stretching, then smoothing it out, his tiny moth brain wouldn't give up. 

The woman flew ever higher, until she reached the lamp. Unlike Icarus she touched the sun before she turned to ash and fell back to earth. She had won the game, though it be an effort of Olympian proportions, and bittersweet. The man didn't know what to feel, until a cat came along and swept his broken body into its cavernous maw with a hot, sticky tongue. Crunch was the last sound he felt.

Dee let the ocean do as it would, her hair fanned out in the dapped waves.

The pocket was warm, the pocket was deep. The pocket of respite gently pushed me out and I tumbled back to reality.

Tenth Daughter, Part 4

 A ship with no supply

I was still deep in my reverie when I heard the sergeant bellowing in his typical annoying way. 

"He's waxing poetic, in one of his little wet dreams, right there? Right Winkle?" The words ran like the spittle that splashed on my cheek. Roberts had big, sloppy lips. You needed to pull over an economy sized rubber to hold a conversation. "Give us a story Blinkit, a limerick maybe."

"It's not Winkle, or Blinkle or Pimple," I said. "Hey boss man," I shouted after the sergeant who was walking the other way. "How 'bout a mulligan on this hill? Not big on heights."

They hooted. "Not big on heights! Stinkit is afraid of the big scary hill!" and other such bollix. "A poem, a poem!"

"No mulligans, Plunkit. Ever'body up. We get on over this beast and resupply in the flats. There's fish and ale in town." 

I got up to follow and caught up. "C'mon boss. I don't ask much. I fell hard. Just put me back a couple steps, with Hagrid maybe."

"Fine, this is your one pass, Plunkit. Get your head back in the game." He picked up the pace knowing I couldn't keep up in the armor. "One time only, payback is hell, Plunkit, so don't get killed." 

I walked back to get my helmet and weapons. One of the guys picked up my head gear and tossed it to Stretch. Fuck. Shit. Fuck, again.

"C'mon Blanket. A poem. 'Poetry, pot-pourri, pottery, porta-potty.'"

I snatched the helmet and snugged it over my scalp. "Not Blanket, and no poems. Can't think of a rhyme." I slung the big cannon over my back, Goony slapped my shoulder and gave a little push.

"Get thee back to the giant, Shakespeare," he said. "like you know you like it, in'a rear." Stretch and Blondie chuckled. Not bad, though, I thought as I retreated a little bit. 

We formed up and climbed the hill. I had my cannon slung and my laser fitted arm raised to one side, my other arm outstretched with my palm on Hagrid's backside. His butt was level with my head. Sergeant grunted and we moved. My eyes stayed low, I avoided the blank horizon, and the giant blocked most of my view. The dirt and grass were splendid. Wriggling worms, pigeons in the grass, alas. A poem, a poem, my kingdom for a nail. There once was a man from Nantucket... Shit, they wouldn't stop popping into my brain. I readied a pocket and slipped comfortably numb, between the sheets. The fireworks began as the troops started lobbing bombs over the hill. 

I hadn't even time to develop a story line when we crested the hill. The sky was blue and peppered with white cumuli. But the hill was uncontested. Some supply drones buzzed behind us, hovering over the hill then sliding down the other side. Turf was scattered, boulders charred and overturned. Some of them cracked in two, or thirds and more. We'd done more damage to the earth than to the enemy, who had, apparently, taken a mulligan themselves. The little person in my brain piped up. 'I don't think that word means what you think it means.' Right. "I know, shut up, stupid," I muttered.

The giant spun to look at me. "Whazzat?" he asked. Then the sky, which had muted as clouds passed over, lit up strangely, and streaks of plasma fire arced in zigzag patterns. The bolts speared anything and everything, including ourselves. I felt heat from the suit, then the neural connections failed. Beyond and above us the supply drones lurched then plummeted to the earth. 

"Heads up," someone yelled, and then were other screams besides. I wheeled, hoisting my all but useless cannon, then heard a groan and a thud. 

Tenth Daughter, Part 3

 The Wind in her Hair at the Edge of the World

I sat on a smooth boulder at the base of the hill. Once, then not again, I had looked ahead, seeing, not seeing, the hidden objective. Just another obstacle beyond the crest. More enemies and more blood. But I couldn't look over the top of the hill, because from where I sat it was emptiness. There were no trees and no horizon, only sky and nothing. I'd seen that before, after the dust cleared. The lack of something important to me, then the crushing absence. It began there, with emptiness. 

A short respite in the midst of my comrades. I stayed in the present, not retreating into my reclusive pockets. Outside of the job, I didn't much need to hide. I could look back, seeing where we came from. I could munch on the biscuits and sip the juice that our supply line staff passed out while we removed and cleaned our armor and weapons. 

We lost a few, it was inevitable, but the losses were as a whole insignificant. The only way to reconcile loss is to imagine the end game. My way of dealing was to remove all meaningful connections.  I did not mix, I did not converse, I did not share. To the others I was Plunkit. If anybody knew my first name, they never spoke it. Neither did I speak theirs. They were Blondie, and Stretch, and Goony, and Hagrid. There were more, many more that I had no names for. Hagrid was a mammoth of a man, nearly unstoppable, though he had a battery powered heart muscle. He never took up the charge, but came later, somewhere behind me. Sometimes I would see him as I swung and wheeled and fired my cannons. Hagrid was like a pawn, only moving forward. But if he was a pawn, he was the most lethal chess piece I'd ever seen. I didn't now see Hagrid, but I knew there was nothing in that last battle that could have stopped him. Maybe he was behind me, farther up the hill where I would not look. At the next advance maybe I would hang back, behind the behemoth, so I could shield the view... the vast emptiness like a crack at the edge of the world. 

Quickly I opened a pocket and fell in, before I could imagine her swirling hair dissolve into the swallowing dust. My fist closed around the crackers in my hand, and I ground the salt and flour into a fine mist that kibitzed with the commotion and fled our imaginations. 

Tenth Daughter, Part 2

 On the Cusp

The ground opened up beneath her feet. Beneath ours,  mine.  We were young, playing in the park on a beautiful spring day. The year was a few months gone by, but now I feel like spring is when the year really begins. I believe that's when my world ended, and this new one began.

The family was there, ma and pa. Me and my twin sister. We were born minutes apart, but ma would never tell me who came first. Pa never bothered to find out. She seemed older and whatever the truth was, she was my big sister. I looked up to her, and I loved her. 

The park was on the edge of the city, filled with manicured lawns and strategically planted trees, it bordered a crooked stream that was well mown so that every granite ledge and bubbling rivulet could be seen and marveled at. I tossed the ball into the air and swung the small bat, lifting the orb in an easy arc. Deedee, she was Deena or Dianne to everyone else, loped to her right and reached for the ball. She was just about to, it was the easiest catch ever. Then Deedee would have laughed and thrown the ball back. Just easy, just like that. 

There was this loud crack, like a gunshot, and I fell down. In my mind I hear my mother scream, but I know that no human shout could eclipse that crack and the unceasing crashing rumble and rush of pebbles and fine particulate that followed. When the aftermath ended, there was dust. Ma and pa stumbled, maybe crawled, to me. They asked if I was hurt because they couldn't see anything beyond arm's length. If that. Ma felt my face and I winced as she ground the sharp rock and dust into my bloody scratches. 

Then I cried, not from any physical pain, but because the last sight I recalled was Dee three or four steps from the crooked stream waiting for the ball to reach her outstretched hand. We would never be the same. The East, beyond the creek, lost more than a daughter. A big sister. The air above the rent cleared as the winds swirled and flew the dust orderly away. The great crooked chasm took its place. No granite ledges, no tiny waterfalls, no Deedee.