Nomad (13 page)

Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del. Secret police. The kind who came to make you disappear.

Uncle Konstantine shut the cupboard door.

Nadia hid. She remained silent. She heard the sound of heavy boots. Then she heard screaming and shouts from outside.

*  *  *  *

The massive entanglement device roared around her.

Her fists thumped against the flat metal walls.

“What's happening?” she yelled.

Then she saw light, bright through her eyelids and the blindfold she still wore.

*  *  *  *

Mrs. Lebedevo found her in the kitchen cupboard. Mrs. Lebedevo had been, in Nadia's usual experience, a horrible person. She was someone who complained loudly and often about Jews and the mysterious Jewish doctors she believed would someday poison her. She was someone who glared at the kinks in Nadia's hair. And whenever Mrs. Lebedevo complained about doctors and poisons,
Nadia would say nothing, absolutely nothing, all of the nothing that she knew how to say. Horrible old Mrs. Lebedevo found her alone in the cupboard, and made her tea that wasn't poisoned, and asked her if she had anywhere to go. Aunt Marina and Uncle Konstantine were gone already.

Nadia thanked her politely, and said that she did have somewhere to go. This was true. It was somewhere very far away. She had been planning that trip for over a year, and she had intended to tell her aunt and uncle about it before leaving. She had wanted to introduce them both to the Envoy, her mentor, her closest friend, the lump of purple goo who hid inside the floor of their apartment. She had hoped to ask for their help stowing aboard the last of the N-1 rockets. She had hoped to say good-bye, but she never got the chance.

The men took other things along with Aunt Marina and Uncle Konstantine. Nadia found the dusty outlines of books no longer on the shelves. She found footprints of dirty, melted snow on the carpet. The men had not wiped their boots.

The Envoy oozed its way up through a crack between floorboards, and the two of them sat in silence for a long time before they set their plans in motion. Then the Envoy spent hours on the phone. It mimicked the voices
of many important people to learn what they needed to know.

Nadia gathered together their stolen supplies, all smuggled away from Uncle's lab: cans and tubes of food, tanks of oxygen, and Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's spare suit. Stealing the suit had been especially tricky.

“They have tried to cancel the next launch,” the Envoy told her. It still held the phone, and it still used Uncle Konstantine's voice to speak. Nadia tried to ignore how that made her feel. She also tried to embrace how it made her feel. “They don't want to bother racing to the moon now that the Americans have been there already.”

“Americans just walked around and took pictures,” she said. “But we have a moon base. We're going to build a whole city there.”

“Not now,” the Envoy said. “They've given up on the moon. I pretended to be the new chief Glushko. He has been here for drinks often enough, and his loud bluster is easy to mimic. I insisted that the scheduled launch move forward, but the deception won't last. Even if it works, this will be the final N-1 rocket before all lunar operations shut down. This is our last chance to reach the moon. We should hurry. We need to leave now for the launch site.”

Nadia agreed, but she did not move. “What else?” she asked. “What happened to them?”

“Officially, nothing has happened,” the Envoy said. “Absolutely nothing. Konstantine and Marina have simply disappeared.”

“Can you make more phone calls and get them unofficially released, then?”

The Envoy took its time inhaling a large air bubble to speak with. “No,” it said, gently. “I cannot.”

Nadia bit the inside of her mouth, very hard. Then she kicked the bag. She tried to say “Get in,” but the words refused to come. The Envoy understood anyway, and climbed inside.

She turned her back on her apartment home. She dragged the duffel behind her. In a full G it was too heavy to lift. This must have been uncomfortable for the Envoy inside, but it did not complain.

They climbed aboard a train. Then, early the next morning, they climbed into a cramped capsule inside a massive rocket and flew to the moon.

Now Nadia crouched inside the entanglement device and yelled.

No one answered.

The floor trembled as though shaken by an earthquake. Artificial gravity flailed, unable to decide how heavy anything should be. Gabe felt lighter, and then very much heavier. He held on to his great-grandfather's cane to keep it from floating away. Then he held on to keep himself from falling over.

Speaker Tlatoani pressed her hand against a circular screen set into the wall. Captain Mumwat joined her there. A series of glyphs appeared on the screen. They flickered into words Gabe could read and then back again before he actually read them. Mumwat's visual translation also fluctuated. He looked human in one moment and more like a suit of armor with a fishbowl belly in the next.

The massive device continued to whirr and hum with Nadia inside. Gabe had no way to know if she was okay
in there, and no one to ask. Both envoys climbed all over it, furiously working.

Kaen and Gabe shared a look, but neither tried to speak.

Gabe waited to understand.

He did not enjoy this kind of waiting.

Maybe the Outlast found us. Maybe the asteroid is collapsing. Maybe the ice cave is actually a giant space worm.

A man and a woman, both human adults, came bursting into the room. They exchanged hasty words with Tlatoani and then stood by the only door. Each removed a metal rod from an arm brace. The rods telescoped into short spears, and the braces expanded to become shields. Bright colors flickered across each shield, distracting and hypnotic.

Both gravity and translation stabilized. The captains left the wall panel to join the ambassadors.

“Sunset,” said Tlatoani. “Our jaguars and ocelots paint with snake blood.”

“Translation help?” Gabe whispered to Kaen. “Are we under attack?”

“We're under attack,” she told him.

“Outlast?”

“I assume,” she said, her voice flat and cold. “This is what happened the last time they found the fleet. We locked ourselves down and we waited.”

“To our understanding the Outlast have
not
found the fleet,” said Captain Mumwat in his rumbling voice. “No other ships report attack. This one alone, and only from inside.
Calendar
suffers from parasite infections, from stowaways and saboteurs.”

Gabe heard screams and shouts outside the single door.

The two guards held up their weapons and stood ready.

“Spears and shields?” Gabe wondered aloud. “No guns? No blasters?” He didn't like guns very much, but he thought they would be useful now.

“Projectile weapons?” Tlatoani asked, unimpressed. “Did that translate correctly? Astonishingly ignorant to wish for projectile weapons inside a spacefaring ship. You make my face narrow. Devote yourself to a better understanding of physics if you survive long enough to learn.”

Gabe drew his own elegant weapon. “I'll be sure to do that,” he said, his voice wry and dry.

Purple Envoy dropped to the ground, flattened into a puddle, and then picked itself up. “We must keep the device undamaged,” it said. “The process can't be interrupted now that it has begun. To do so would cause Nadia terrible harm.”

Red sparks burst from the device. The Envoy went quickly back to work.

The door distended with a horrible shrieking sound.

Translation died. Both Kaen and the Speaker said things that Gabe could not understand. Mumwat swam in circles, agitated in the bowl-belly of his armor.

The door fell forward into the room, followed by Outlast.

They had long necks and long fingers, dark eyes and open mouths on pale, bald heads, and they glided smoothly into the room on dozens of tentacles. They leaned forward like bicyclists moving at very high speed.

Translation flickered on and off again. For a single moment Gabe saw the Outlast as human. He saw them as men in combat gear, white men with white letters that spelled
ICE
across thick, black vests. He saw them as the things he feared most. Then heavy boots became writhing tentacles again.

One of the invaders flexed long fingers as though cracking knuckles. Tiny arcs of lightning leaped between its fingertips.

The fight began.

Gabe saw spearheads connect and give off sudden bursts of energy. He saw Mumwat hoist up the Outlast, one in each robotic hand. They sent lightning from their fingertips into his arms, but that didn't seem to bother him down in his belly-bowl. He tossed them through
the open doorway, picked up the fallen door, and held it back in place.

The male guard was down, but still breathing. He had raw burn marks around his neck. Kaen and Gabe helped him to his feet. He fell down again. Then he handed both spear and shield to Kaen before stumbling far from the door.

He can't fight anymore
, Gabe thought.
He can't help, and he knows it. So now he just needs to get out of the way.

Kaen held the shield up in front of them both. She said something. Gabe felt as though he understood the words, even though he didn't. The two ambassadors faced the doorway and waited for one long moment.

That moment stretched until it broke.

Pale hands and tentacles wrapped around the edges of the door, sparking like electric eels. The remaining guard attacked the tentacles with her spear. Kaen did the same. Gabe yelled something he hoped sounded fierce and stabbed at the reaching limbs with his sword.

Tentacles translated into boots kicking down the door, and then became tentacles again. They wrapped around Mumwat's wrist and broke his grip. The slab of metal fell back. It fell against Mumwat and shattered his fishbowl. The empty suit collapsed. Mumwat lay flopping in a puddle on the floor.

Gabe tried to reach the aquatic captain, though he
didn't know what to do or how he could possibly help when he got to him.

His feet left the floor and kicked empty air.

Tentacles pinned his arms together. They lifted him higher and squeezed. Gabe dropped the sword. He couldn't breathe.

Kaen climbed the wreckage of the broken door. She had lost her spear, and her shield, but she used the cane sword to stab the Outlast through the eye.

It fell. Gabe fell with it.

Get up
, he thought as he struggled to climb out from under dead tentacles.
There'll be more of them. They fight in numbers. They fight to overwhelm. Get up.
But he didn't hear any scuffles or slithering. He didn't hear screams outside the room, or shouts of alarm inside. He didn't hear anything but his own hasty scramble to get away from the dead things sprawled on the floor like the ropes of a mop head.

Kaen helped him up. The two of them stood beside Mumwat, who did not move.

Gabe suddenly knew what to do about that.

“Envoy!” he shouted.

Purple Envoy jumped from the device, flattened itself into a gliding shape, and flew across the room.

Gabe pointed at Mumwat. “Fishbowl,” he said. “Like the bubble helmet you made for me, but the other way around.”

Purple Envoy didn't waste time answering. It absorbed the spilled puddle. Once it held a big enough bubble of liquid it rolled over Mumwat and surrounded him, too.

The captain floated without moving. He rolled upside down. Then he twitched, fluttered fins, and began to swim in very small circles. He didn't have very much room to move in there.

I
BELIEVE YOUR IDEA WORKED
, the Envoy wrote across its own skin in glowing purple letters.

Gabe stopped holding his breath. He shared a look with Kaen, who still held the sword. Then he glanced at the entanglement device, which clanked, whirred, and sent red sparks in all directions. Blue Envoy continued to fiddle with it.

“How's Nadia?” Gabe asked.

U
NKNOWN
, Purple Envoy wrote. W
E CAN'T KNOW UNTIL THE PROCESS IS COMPLETE, AND THAT WILL STILL TAKE SOME TIME
. B
UT AT LEAST IT CONTINUES UNINTERRUPTED
. T
HIS IS A TREMENDOUS RELIEF TO ME.

The uninjured guard stood watch in the broken doorway. Kaen joined her there. People of all different species moved in the street outside. None of them were Outlast. All of them stared upward.

Gabe went to see why.

Smoke billowed from the bowl above the pyramid, high above Night and high above Day. It formed dark, swirling clouds in the space between the two cities.

Oh no
, he thought.
They broke the sun.

Huge cracks and fissures marred the massive bowl at the apex of the pyramid. Glowing sun stuff spilled out like lava. Gabe thought it would pour down the sides, transforming the pyramid into a volcano and roasting everyone within. But the glowing liquid did not pour into Night, or drip from the bowl into Day. Instead it swirled away sideways, caught between two gravities. The clouds burned. The sky burned between Night and Day.

Gabe watched it happen until he couldn't watch anymore. Then he went back inside and picked his way between the fallen Outlast.

One of them moved.

Gabe shouted. He didn't know what he shouted, exactly, and without translation it didn't really matter.

Tentacles reached for him, and for Kaen, who answered with Toledo steel. Then the guard whacked the Outlast with the side of the spearhead she carried. Bright energy burst between weapon and skin. The Outlast slumped. The guard methodically secured its many limbs with some kind of foam.

Still alive
, Gabe realized.
We have a prisoner.

Three ambassadors stood in the Chamber of the Homeworld, inside the House of Painted Books, inside the Temple of the Sun, underneath a cracked and hastily repaired bowl of burning solar stuff.