When they buzz back around the wreckage they’ve wrought, I fix my stare straight ahead, knowing they will fire into anything that looks even remotely alive. Weapons are precious things, and the cephalopod bursts cost them. That’s what I’m counting on.
They fire at me anyway. One projectile clips my leg. I let my legs and torso jerk with the push of it but keep my arm hooked in the vehicle’s tubing.
I expect them to gather us all up into a net or tie us up into a caravan and recycle us. It crosses my mind that no one will leave this much good organic material to orbit some planet unless it is impossible to retrieve it, like the armies around the Mokshi.
I wait, breathing shallowly, as the sixty-odd-strong Bhavaja squad pokes and prods at the scattered wreckage of our party. After a long while, I allow myself a blink, and I see them engaged in a heated conversation in sign language. Did they get new orders?
Finally, the leaders break away, speeding back toward the rotten world. Their squad follows after them, leaving me and the dead to orbit the ruin.
I wonder if this is some trick and they’ve left someone behind to watch over us. But all I see is the dead that I’ve been told are my family, and for one terrible moment, I believe they are indeed my blood relations, and that everything I know is dead. I shake myself out of this thrall and pull myself onto Aiju’s vehicle. I try to start it.
But it’s dead. Just like everything else.
I swear and lean over to poke at the guts of it while Aiju’s dead face looks on. I can’t help but believe that if I can just remember everything, if I was just the whole person I should be, I could have not only seen this coming but convinced Anat of it too.
I find half of one of the tentacles twisted in the undercarriage of the vehicle. I carefully pull it out. Droplets of fuel snake from a torn hose. I press it closed with one finger but can’t see any deeper into the guts to find other problems. I long for one of the speculums back in the hangar. It would make this much easier.
What I’m missing is something to fix the leak in the tubing. I can’t just hold my hand in it. I search around and come up with nothing. Aiju’s body is still tangled with the vehicle on the other side. The rest of the bodies are strewn two hundred paces distant, slowly circling back around the world. Eventually, the inhabitants of some other world will find them and have a grand recycling event. I don’t intend to wait up here that long. My air will give out first. Won’t it? I don’t even know how long I can breathe out here in these suits.
I stare hard at Aiju’s accusing face and bared torso. There is, of course, an analog to the organic tubing of the vehicle in the human body.
I work off a piece of the outer shell of the vehicle and bash it with one hand until a sharp piece comes off. I take hold of Aiju’s body and plunge the piece into her frigid torso. I use both hands to tear open her body, which is not yet frozen through, only cold. I pull out the intestines and cut off a short section, squeezing out the waste.
Then I turn off the fuel line, unhook the organic tube, and slip the intestine over it before it freezes. A perfect fit, as if the vehicle is, indeed, patterned after human organs. I hook the fuel line back up and try starting it.
The vehicle comes to life, the green glowing control console blazing. I kick the vehicle forward, circling the detritus of my family once, wondering again why the squad has not netted them all up and brought them back to a Bhavaja world.
What can be more important than salvaging flesh and vehicle components? What are they off to do?
I come up alongside Anat’s body. Her suit has rotted off. A giant cephalopod rises from her side. The iron arm she has menaced us all with is no more. All that remains is a stump of an arm, cut off at the elbow.
I stare long and hard at that arm and remember Anat’s fake displays with it. Why haul that arm around at all, if it is worthless? And what will Rasida do to Jayd now? Has she flushed Jayd out into space too, left her to asphyxiate?
No, the key is the arm.
Why would they take the arm? Why would I have taken it? Probably because, after a display like Anat put on, I thought I could control Katazyrna with it.
Understanding dawns. I turn my vehicle abruptly away from the dead and speed back to Katazyrna, and the invasion I know is already underway.
*
The Bhavaja forces make two broad arcs around Katazyrna. I hide just behind the nearest world, hoping they will think I’m some salvager or scout from another world. But they pay me no mind. They are wholly concentrated on Katazyrna, sending wave after wave of cephalopods and bursts and scramblers into its defenses. Katazyrna is awash in blankets of red and blue and green defenses. The energy rolls off it in thick bands. The world glows so fiercely now that this close, I could almost say it rivals the sun.
Then I see them breach the skin of the world. It tears up under their weapons, curling back like burnt bark. I let out a breath. They are going to get in.
Half the Bhavajas wheel around and dive directly into the broken skin of Katazyrna, seeking to destroy all that I know of the universe, all that I know to be true.
I kick my vehicle forward, powering hard and fast for Katazyrna. I think a whole host of things in those blazing seconds as I power toward the world. The Bhavajas are very likely to fire on me. My own world might not recognize me. It is a desperate, risky move, but so is being alive.
I hurl myself toward the breach, opening up the fuel line as wide as it will go. I look back once and see the misty yellow belch of my spent fuel spiraling out behind me.
The fuel gives out four hundred paces from the surface of the world. I hunker low, though I suppose it won’t matter—there is no atmospheric resistance—and ride the wave of my momentum down and down, toward the breach in the world’s skin.
I zoom between two Bhavaja lines, so fast that when I glance back, I see them still signing to one another, trying to determine if I’m friend or foe.
I have no way to slow my momentum—I’m out of fuel to shoot out the front of my vehicle—so I hit the spongy floor of the first level of Katazyrna hard. The momentum throws me from the vehicle.
I crawl across the floor, trying to get clear of the breach. The massive hole in the skin of the world is mitigated by its thin atmosphere; I might be able to breathe for a while if I take off my suit, but I’m not going to risk it until I get down a few levels. I wonder if the ship has defenses against a breach in its skin.
I run down the empty corridors, past bodies hunched in the thresholds of doorways, all dressed in the black-and-red cut of security personnel. I come to a broad, fleshy wall at the end of the corridor. It’s been carved open with some weapon, and now it stares balefully at me like a weary eye.