The answer to that was probably yes, but not the way he meant it.
“No.” Hannaday would have been dooming himself. Hell, he’d pulled her out of the capsule. “Not a biological problem. I think she is a political problem.”
“Nichols, he is not scared of the politics.”
“No. But every man has shadows in his soul, my friend.”
“He is scared of girls?”
“You could say that.”
“Eh.” Henri turned back, took a step, paused.
I waited for it.
“Becque…” His lover, partner, squad buddy.
It was time to force a smile. “Yes?”
“Becque, he is saying the girl makes him the headache. Becque has never had the headache before.”
“Perhaps he should take an aspirin.” Could this really be a biological? Some sort of timed exposure? With Hannaday getting out fast enough to take a treatment, maybe.
“He also is saying she talks to him, though her lips do not move.” Henri shrugged. “But Becque he has been gek these many years.” He walked away.
I wondered what gek meant, exactly. It wasn’t hard to guess. I stood for a while in the descending chill, watching the hard light of the stars and wondering what precisely this girl had been doing in orbit.
* * *
The land spoke to me. Snow leopards roared from the distant peaks to the south, while lammergeyers circled overhead. Even the bellowing of the yaks carried over the miles and valleys. Together they made a voice.
“You. Airplane man.”
I tried to answer, but my lips were bound together with stinging sutures.
“Do not let them.”
Then a knife of ice slid behind my ear to fill the space between brain and mind.
“Airplane man,” the land whispered as Nichols screamed from a distant place.
* * *
“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.
“Huh?”
I looked around the ger I shared with Nichols. Had he been screaming?
Perhaps, but he was gone now.
“Aren’t you on perimeter?” I asked Becque.
“Oui, but your Nichols he has walked to the desert and he is not returning.”
My TAG said it was just after oh three hundred hours. “When?”
“The midnight, peut-être.”
“Three fucking hours, and you come get me now?”
“We have no SOP about the desert.”
“Right.” I shrugged into my stinking cammies, belted on the Smitty, and grabbed my Stinger rack. “Who’s got perimeter right now?”
“Moi.”
Fuck me. There wasn’t any point in yelling at him. Besides, Henri had said Becque was getting headaches too. “Show me where he went.”
The dew, such as it was, was already down. There’s a hell of a lot of starlight out in the Gobi. Nichols’s trail was clear enough. I shouldered my Stinger and followed.
The night smelled of flowers and a flinty scent off the distant hills. Dinosaur bones out here everywhere, so I’d been told. I could almost imagine one of them lumbering by. I’d rather imagine Nichols lumbering by.
The trail headed due south. I continued to follow, wondering why the hell the camp gimp was out stalking around in the darkness. There were snow leopards in those hills, for God’s sake. Worse than fucking cougars.
I didn’t trust anyone else to bring Nichols to safety.
Something rumbled in the darkness ahead of me. I brought the Stinger rack to port arms. “Nichols?”
The breeze swirled, rustling the low-stem grass clumps and kicking up damp dust. There was another noise, a sort of scraping.
Which was weird as hell, because I could see miles ahead of me, and there was nothing out there.
I walked toward the noise.
“Nichols.”
When the shambling thing popped up out of the grass, it startled me so badly I fired the Stinger. Damned backblast set my sleeve smoldering and started a grass fire. My head rang like a son of a bitch. Slapping holster for the Smitty, I charged toward it.
There was a spread of fur and guts and shattered ribs, limbs blown apart from the body. Blood, shit, and propellant battled in my nostrils. I could see that something was wrong.
I reluctantly bent to touch the fur.
Grass. Wrapped around ordinary skin.
The head lay on its crown, smashed to a broken egg by the missile. I used the edge of the empty Stinger rack to tip it face-upward.
Nichols.
Who for some fucking reason had been wound around with a huge amount of desert grass woven together so that he’d looked like a giant, vegetable bigfoot.
A giant, dead, vegetable bigfoot.
“God damned mother fucker!” I screamed.
When I turned, I couldn’t see the camp.
* * *
I ran until my legs gave out. I’d lost the Stinger rack somewhere, but my Smitty still banged against my thigh as I stumbled. I reeked of propellant, blood, my own sweat. The sky above me glittered like a city in the heavens, New York ascended to the country of the saints.
Oh, God, what had I done?
Then I was down in the grass, too, clawing at the loose stems growing clumped from the gravel floor of the desert. They seemed warm to my touch. The plants crinkled in my hands, bending and snapping.
Was this what Nichols had felt?
Nichols.
What the hell had happened to him? To me? To the sky?
How had I shot a man with a Stinger, I wondered. I remembered the cold knife of ice. And something was wrong with the stars.
Something was wrong, all right.
I laid the Smitty on my chest, pointing the barrel at my right foot. The weapon was cold and heavy. If I shot my toes off out here, I’d likely bleed to death before help arrived. Assuming help ever did arrive. But I couldn’t run any farther—the scarred muscles of my thighs were already knotted beyond pain.
Item: I could not find or see the camp, even though I had a straight backtrail.
Item: I didn’t believe a Stinger would kill a man at point-blank range, not that way. It was an antiaircraft missile, and the warhead hadn’t exploded.
Item: One by one, my boys were getting those headaches.
I realized that I was dreaming. That space bitch of Hannaday’s was doing this to me. My finger rested on the trigger of my pistol.
If I was dreaming, I should just be able to wake up. My mind was my own.
Item: The trigger was oily and chill as it should have been. I could even feel the familiar scarring on the curved metal. Had I ever dreamed this real?
Item: I was dead out here anyway.
But this was going to hurt like fuck, and I hated the thought of dying stupid.
I gritted my teeth and pulled the trigger.
* * *
“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.
“Huh?”
I looked around the ger I shared with Nichols. Had he been screaming?
Fuck no, I’d been screaming. I threw the blankets back, looking for my bloody, shattered foot.
Nothing but a smooth black boot.
“Where the hell is he?”
“Nichols,” said Becque. “You know already?”
I had the Smitty out then, aimed at Becque’s face. “Listen to me, ami.” Did spacegirl speak French? Did it matter, inside my dreams? “Quel est le deuxième prénom de Henri?”
Becque put his hands up, backing slowly toward the ger’s door. “Hey, Allen. Easy.”
“Respondez-vous, Becque.”
“Allen…”
I shot him in the face.
* * *
“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.
I rolled out of my cot, snap-drawing the Smitty. He ducked out, the orange wooden door slamming hard. I was up and after him.
Outside the sky blazed like Manhattan in heaven. The camp was gone, just my ger in the middle of the Gobi. No Becqu
e, either.
Dreamland again, then. But I had some authority in this version.
“Come out,” I said. “Get out here and talk to me.” Smitty braced, I turned a slow circle.
No one but me and the ger.
I imagined the ger gone, and on my next circuit it was. I was alone in the Gobi under a blazing sky.
The sky …
I looked up.
The stars were moving. Fucking dreamland. They swirled, coiled flaming snakes on the prowl, making spirals that would suck down my soul if I let them.
“Stop it,” I shouted, aiming the Smitty upward. “I can’t give you what you want if you don’t tell me what it is!”
The spirals flowed into a face. A shaggy face.
No, not shag. Grass.
Nichols’s eyes winked down from high above. His voice was on the wind, made of the noises of a thousand miles of desert.
“Allen.”
I aimed toward one sparkling, swirling eye. “It’s you, isn’t it? Spacegirl.”
The eye in my sights winked with a noise like a storm over water.
“What were you doing in orbit?”
“Dreaming real,” said the night-hunting birds.
Dreaming real. She was black, blacker than anyone I’d ever met. Radiation burns?
Dreaming. Abos, from Australia. “Dreamtime, not dreamland,” I said.
“Different in the sky,” the snow leopards coughed.
I didn’t believe a fucking word of it. “Wake up!” I shouted, slamming the butt of the Smitty into Hannaday’s scars on my thighs.
* * *
“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.
I’d brought myself out of it this time, in control. I hoped. One hand on the Smitty, I said, “Quel est le deuxième prénom de Henri?”
Becque’s fear shifted to disgust. “Henri, he does not have a middle name, bibelot.”
“Fuck you, too. What’s going on?”
“Nichols, he is outside screaming about God’s iron knives.”
“Yeah. Get that girl out of wherever she is, and awake.”
The door banged shut. I grabbed my Stinger rack—still loaded, I was pleased to notice—then stopped.
What good was a weapon going to do me?
The real question was whether this girl was Hannaday’s agent, his tool, or his prize. And I didn’t believe that even Hannaday could make things happen in orbit. She had to be stolen.
The real weapon was in the head, like always. Hers was just a little more to the point than most of ours.
* * *
Outside, Beier was sitting on Nichols’s chest. They were both breathing hard, and there was some blood. Hard to tell in the starlit dark.
The sky was normal.
Thank God.
Spacegirl was in front of me, dangled between Becque and Etchy. She smiled softly. The smile of someone who expects to die.
“You’re abo,” I said.
“Anangu,” she replied, in a soft voice that reeked of Oxford and MI-5. Her first word to us.
“Anangu. With power over the Dreamtime.”
She shrugged within her captors’ grip.
“What were you doing in orbit?”
Another shrug.
“You belong to Hannaday now. You know Hannaday?” I waited, but she didn’t respond. “He owns all of us. He owns our contracts, he owns our airplane, and he owns our every waking moment. But…” I stared hard into her eyes. “He’s never going to own our fucking dreams.”
Her smile faded.
“So. Can you dream him real, the way you’ve been dreaming us? Can you put the knives in his head?”
Shrug.
“Listen to me.” I leaned in close, almost touching her face. “If you want to walk away, to live a life of your own and be free of him, you’d better find that shit inside you. Because when Hannaday comes back with the last plane, if we don’t smoke him, he’s going to smoke us.”
“Allen.” Etchy’s voice was soft. Careful.
“Yeah?” I didn’t break eye contact with spacegirl.
“You are more crazy than Nichols.”
“Shut up,” I suggested.
Spacegirl found her smile again.
* * *
We gave up all pretense of following Hannaday’s plan. Instead we sat around and worked up scenarios for taking the Antonov without killing the pilot. For responding to a Delta-force type extraction attempt on the spacegirl. For long-term escape and evasion.
Every bit of it hopeless. Every one of us knew that in our bones. They all stayed away from me except for Nichols. The rest of the boys thought I was crazy, or crazier. Nichols didn’t care.
Spacegirl just smiled, ate our chow, and slept a lot. I hoped like hell she was cooking up a Dreamtime whammy for Hannaday.
Four days later something overflew us very, very high. It left a contrail like a string of butt beads.
“Aurora,” Nichols said.
The biggest, baddest, blackest spy plane in the world. I knew who they were looking for.
Two hours after that an F-117 screamed past. In the middle of the Gobi, no less. He had to have scrambled out of Almaty. I didn’t have my Stinger rack handy, and it wouldn’t have gotten a lock on that fucker anyway, but I loosed a few Smitty rounds after it. Not that the flyboy would ever give a shit.
Nichols laughed. “Damn, I wish we had some real SAMs.”
“Pretty soon you’re going to wish we had some spetsnaz troopers. Wait till his friends come back.”
We got spacegirl in the kitchen ger, surrounded by all eleven of us armed to the teeth and beyond, except Korunov who was standing by her with water and a first-aid kit. If we had to start shooting, though, we were already lost.
She just fell asleep with that little smile on her face.
* * *
The first Blackhawk helicopter arrived at dawn the next day. It roared about a hundred yards overhead, then arrowed on across the Gobi. When it crashed near the horizon, I stepped inside the ger to check on spacegirl.
She was still asleep, but her smile was so wide she was practically grinning.
The Blackhawk’s course had never changed once it had passed us.
Jesus, I realized, spacegirl could have killed us all.
Three more followed minutes later, juking and sweeping like they expected hostile fire. I had my Stinger rack out and ready, but I wasn’t feeling like much of an optimist. They shot right past the camp, heading for an imaginary LZ a kilometer east. Two of the choppers got tangled coming in. The third one belly-flopped.
I didn’t want to see her face this time. Even though those troopies out there would have killed us all, this was too much.
We settled in to wait for Hannaday. He was smart enough not to keep throwing hardware at us. He’d come in.
But he took his sweet time.
* * *
“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.
“You don’t need him, Anangu,” I said. I grabbed my Stinger rack and stepped outside into the blazing stars of the Dreamtime. Becque was already gone.
Okay, clear enough. She’d handled Delta Force, but this was up to me. Hannaday was my demon.
Fine. I had some fucking sense of the rules now. Even in Dreamtime my legs ached. I owed him here as much as anywhere in real life.
The Antonov lumbered past at tree-trimming altitude. The helicopters still burned in the distance. Nice trick that, after all these hours. I trotted toward the windsock where Hannaday’s pilot would put it down.
The Antonov flopped in like a child’s nightmare of flight, bouncing hard on the ruts. First I put my Stinger into the starboard engine. She was already taxiing when the missile hit, but the nacelle exploded, taking that landing gear with it. The noise was horrendous.
I kept walking through the reek of rocket fuel and airplane fire.
Hannaday was out in seconds, his Armani coat torn at the seams, an Uzi in his hand. “Allen, you crazy fucker!”
; Smitty got him in the right kneecap.
He went down, Uzi braced.
“Water,” I told the night in the voice of a thousand flowers.
Then I walked into the damp spray of his trigger pull.
“What the…?” Hannaday threw the Uzi at me. I swatted it away, knelt down next to him.
“Hey, fucker.” I put my pistol at the back of his left knee and shot him again. “How’s it feel?”
Hannaday was sobbing now, begging in words that came so lumpy I couldn’t understand anything but the tone.
I tugged his chin up toward me. “It’s only a dream, friend,” I told him. “But I can make you hurt until you die of the pain.” Not true, exactly, but she certainly could.
He got some coherent words out. “She’s not yours!”
“So now you own the night mind?” I set the Smitty against his temple.
“No! You don’t understand!”
“Listen.” I leaned in close, practically kissing his ear. “You’re snow leopard bait in here. She can make every sleeping moment of your life screaming hell, until you pull the trigger yourself to get out of it. And then you’ll just wake up screaming again, over and over and over and fucking over. So what I want is the God damned plane and a safe conduct out of here. You call off your dogs, we all go away, including her, and that’s it. Done.”
“It’ll never happen,” he gasped, gritting his teeth. Hannaday smelled like a corpse already, shit and old meat. “Thing is, she dropped out of orbit. But she never went up in the first place, Allen. She came from up there.”
I shot him in the temple, then said, “Wake up,” in the voices of a dozen screaming GIs in a burning helicopter.
* * *
There was no Becque this time, but the camp was empty. I nosed into a couple of gers. Everybody’s gear was here, just not their personal selves.
The Antonov was parked by the windsock, both engines intact.
It was daylight. I couldn’t check the stars, but I didn’t really need to. This was real life, whatever that meant these days. I took my Stinger rack and headed out toward the plane.
Spacegirl sat on the lowest rung of the ladder, huddled in her Russian flight suit.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“You’ll own us all.”
Another shrug.
“You’re the weirdest alien invasion in history. What do you want?”