Date: 2012-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Science Fiction - Short Stories
Description: A chilling new short story from Hugo Award winner Will McIntosh. The settlers of Cyan have not ventured far beyond the perimeter fence that keeps the planet's strange creatures at bay. But one unlucky woman is about to find out what lies beyond. . .
Publisher: Orbit

THE PERIMETER

WILL MCINTOSH

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The Perimeter

A sound like the scrabbling of a hundred fingernails woke Phillipa. At first she thought it was part of whatever dream she’d been having, but it grew louder as she came fully awake instead of fading away.

It was coming from both the closet and the ceiling. She couldn’t imagine what it could be. There were no mice on Cyan, but it was too uneven—too intentional—to be machinery. She pulled the covers to her chest and drew her legs up, her bare feet suddenly feeling exposed. Nothing from the wild was supposed to be able to penetrate the settlement’s perimeter fence, but how many failures and breaches had there been since they’d arrived ten years ago? Twenty at least. More every year.

The skittering stopped.

Just as she was beginning to feel relieved, it returned. A sharper sound joined it, of clicking on tile. A prickling dread ran through Phillipa as she propped herself onto her elbows to peer into the dark closet. She could see something moving inside but couldn’t make out what it was. Her heart was hammering.

What she needed to do was leap off the bed, take two huge steps so her feet spent as little time as possible on the floor, and get out.

A small, bulbous head squeezed through the crack in the door. Phillipa inhaled sharply and screamed for help. The thing stopped short and looked at her, its eyes narrowing. It hissed a warning as Phillipa drew her knees to her chest and screamed again, unsure if anyone could hear her.

Round, intelligent, lidless eyes stared up at her as it emerged. It had so many legs. Phillipa clapped her hand over her mouth to partially muffle a terrified squeal.

It just kept coming, unwinding out of the closet, pressing along the baseboard. The brilliant teal-and-burgundy legs rippled like waves as the thing moved. It had no feet—its legs ended in points.

Phillipa’s breath came in tremulous gasps. She looked around the room for something she could use to kill the thing or drive it away, but there was nothing hard, nothing sharp. Only clothes, framed photos, a half-eaten melon on a plastic plate.

By the time the thing’s tail (pointing toward the ceiling like a terrier’s) appeared, it was pressed along all four walls. It had to be twenty-five feet long. Its neck stretched horribly as the thing raised its head almost level with her bed. She had to get out of there. Stand on the bed, leap to the floor, one step and use her adrenaline to leap high over the thing and out the door. Slam the door shut, get out of the apartment—

The thing exploded into movement. It darted under her bed—a long chain snaking crazily, its tail whipping. Phillipa pulled herself into a ball, unable to breathe, as a gentle scratching started and the blanket at the bottom of the bed fluttered and danced, and she could feel its pointed feet scrabbling on the sheets. Phillipa cried for help in an airy whimper. She was quivering uncontrollably, drenched with sweat and sobbing. She was afraid to move an inch, terrified to look under the blanket. But she had to do something, had to get herself to safety. She lifted the blanket and peered beneath.

It was everywhere.

Tears rolled down Phillipa’s face. Her lungs refused to accept air as the thing took a ginger step onto her stomach, a pointed leg pressing, threatening to puncture. It was watching her, its three eyes a kaleidoscopic yellow and pink. It took another step. Phillipa slid partially upright, ever so gently. The thing gargled, pressed a needlelike foot into her stomach until she felt a painful prick. She froze. The pressure eased.

Propped on one elbow, she watched, terrified, as it crossed her stomach, slid beneath her—its legs scrabbling against her back like a hundred roaches—and came out the other side. Then it crawled across her stomach again.

It wound around her a second time. Dozens of needle-sharp legs pressed against her skin, each leaving a slight indentation, threatening to press harder. The legs fidgeted; the sectioned body twitched.

If she could reach her com in the kitchen, there was a word to call a security emergency. Phillipa couldn’t remember it. She could barely think.

It went around her again, higher this time, feet like thorns puncturing her nightgown, pressing into the soft flesh of her breasts. Her nose was running, but she didn’t dare lift her arm to wipe it.

Soon there was nothing left of the thing on the sheets; all of it was on her, wrapped around her a dozen times. It tucked its head against her collarbone and looked up at her.

An inch at a time, Phillipa slid out of bed. The thing didn’t protest. She had to get to her com. Barely able to inhale, her breath impeded by the constriction across her chest and stomach, she watched the thing’s face for signs that it noticed her movements, but it only went on looking at her.

When she felt the cold floor under her feet, the thing opened its long slit of a mouth and gurgled something. She didn’t understand the deep, watery sound that came from it but knew it was a warning.

“Help me, help me, help me,” she chanted as she crossed the living room and entered the kitchen. She activated her com and said, “Emergency red, emergency red,” the distress phrase coming back to her out of thin air.

Almost immediately a voice answered, “Emergency red, or do you need a medic? You shouldn’t call emergency red unless—”

“Emergency red, goddammit!”

“On the way,” the voice responded.

Phillipa stood in the center of the kitchen, arms extended, whimpering, as various legs on the thing lifted to groom its body. It covered her from waist to chest, and it smelled awful, rotten.

She heard the front door fly open. The thump of boots filled the hall; then half a dozen people in red security uniforms appeared.

A thousand points stung Phillipa’s skin. Phillipa dropped to her knees, screaming from the pain as the creature made a horrible sputtering sound, like an oil-filled tire deflating. It swayed from side to side like a cobra while every single spiny foot squeezed Phillipa simultaneously.

“Help me,” she whispered, still holding her arms away from her body as the thing gurgled at the security people.

The small, dark woman in the lead spread her arms. “Everyone take a step back. Don’t make any threatening movements. Weapons away.” There was rustling and clicking, then silence. “Back out of the room, one at a time. Meisell, you first.”

When everyone was out, the woman looked at Phillipa. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Phillipa.”

“My name is Melba. Can you tell me what happened in a nice, calm voice?”

Phillipa told her as the creature’s head turned one way and then the other, as if trying to follow the conversation.

When Phillipa finished, Melba asked, “Do you have family we can contact?”

“What? No, my parents are dead. I have uncles and…” She trailed off. The question had thrown her because it wasn’t what she’d expected to come next. “Jesus, why are you just standing there? Get it off me.”

Melba shook her head tightly. “Some of the creatures in the wild are extremely bizarre, and I don’t know anything about this one. We could cut off its head and learn that only makes it angry.”

“Well, find someone who does know about it.”

Melba held up her hands, urging Phillipa to stay calm. “Someone is working on that right now.” Melba lifted her com, requested a medic. Why a medic hadn’t been alerted as soon as the emergency red had been called, Phillipa couldn’t guess. “In the meantime, I’m going to have you sedated. We can’t let a medic get close enough to you to deliver the injection, so you’ll have to do it yourself. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” A sedative sounded good to her. She’d never so desperately wanted to be unconscious.

* * *

Pain woke Phillipa, shredding the thick haze of drugged sleep. When she came to awareness, she found she was already sitting up. A medic, dressed in orange and wearing a mask, was holding vigil over her, hovering uncertainly, keeping her distance in a small room with a low, rounded ceiling. For a few seconds, Phillipa couldn’t remember the terrible thing. She knew something awful had happened to her but couldn’t remember what.

Then she saw the creature peering up at her, and she remembered. She made a pitiful, hopeless sound in the back of her throat.

It was hurting her. Not as badly as when the security people burst into her kitchen, but bad. She stood. The pain stopped.

Relief washing over her, she tried to catch her breath. She could only take shallow breaths, and the terror she felt demanded great whooping breaths.

“I can’t breathe,” Phillipa whimpered, looking at the medic, whose mouth was a tight line, her eyes filled with tears.

The thing pricked Phillipa again, and she jolted and cried out. It was less harsh this time; its legs were pressing and easing in a rhythmic motion, not puncturing, and it was only using a few of its legs, all on her left side, high on her rib cage. She sat.

Instantly, the pricking turned to vicious stabbing. Screaming, she leaped to her feet. It stopped.

Melba burst into the room. “What’s happening? What is it doing to you?” Phillipa was too distraught to answer. The rhythmic, focused pricking had started again. It grew more intense, more insistent with each repetition, until it felt like she was being stabbed with a dozen needles. Whimpering, she stepped toward the medic. The medic took a step away reflexively as more feet pricked Phillipa, all on her left side.

“Somebody help me,” Phillipa pleaded. She turned toward Melba, looking for help, any kind of help.

The pain stopped.

“I can give you more painkiller or a stronger sleep inducer,” the medic offered, looking sympathetic but also terrified.

The pain started again, only this time on her right side.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Make it stop. Somebody please make it stop.” She wanted to sit, to sleep, but she was afraid if she did, it would sting her again. The pricking was bad, but the stinging was much worse.

“Phillipa, do you want more painkiller?” the medic asked. Phillipa turned toward her, and the pain stopped.

It started up again instantly on her left side. Phillipa turned toward Melba, to her left, because last time that had worked. It worked again. Phillipa looked down at the little face looking up at her. She almost expected it to nod, but it didn’t; its cold, strange eyes only stared.

The pricking started again, only this time it ran right up the center of her belly and chest, and it was less painful, more of a prod.

Phillipa thought she knew what it wanted her to do. She stepped forward between Melba and the medic. The pricking stopped for an instant, then started up again right up her center. She took another step, then another. The pricking stopped.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” Melba asked, following her.

“The pain—it’s directing me with the pain. If I move where it wants, the pain stops.”

“Wait,” Melba called as Phillipa stepped out of the little room right into an open field. For a moment, Phillipa didn’t understand where she was. The repulsion fence was fifty meters away. Hundreds of people were lined along the other side, peering…out. They were peering out at her—she was outside the fence. The encampment for the banished—those condemned to die outside the walls because they were both low value and criminal—was a hundred meters to her left.

The people inside were staring, their eyes wide. There were shrieks of surprise and alarm at the sight of Phillipa. Two security people who had been waiting outside the hut eyed her with outright suspicion.

The pain started again, prodding her to walk forward—toward the fence. The thing’s head was darting left, right, up, down, taking in everything. Phillipa stepped toward the fence and the pain eased somewhat. She wasn’t wearing shoes; the rocky, sloped ground was cold and uneven underfoot.

“Don’t go near the fence,” Melba called from behind, her tone suddenly authoritative. “Phillipa, stop.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Phillipa said over her shoulder. “It will hurt me if I don’t do what it wants.”

Melba shouted an indecipherable command, and a moment later she and the two security people rushed past Phillipa, motioning at the crowd behind the fence. “Back. Everyone back.” The onlookers surged backward, away from the fence.

“You can’t go inside. Under no circumstances will you be allowed inside,” Melba said. The creature’s prodding shifted, directing Phillipa to turn left, along the perimeter of the settlement.

She turned, walked along the fence line, among thick weeds and stone. She’d never been outside before—few had—and she was terrified, even with two armed security people trailing her. A growing crowd of onlookers followed inside the fence, most of them silent, a few shaking their heads, tsking in empathy.

As she walked, Phillipa tried to absorb what was happening. The Senate must have called a meeting as soon as Phillipa was unconscious and voted to move her out because people were scared. Scared the parasite would tire of Phillipa and choose one of them as her replacement. Scared it would lash out and bite a child’s nose off. Maybe scared it would lay eggs, like the marabi had done when they burrowed into the settlement last year. So they’d decided to toss Phillipa out to die with the other problem settlers.

Why not? She was a low-value person, after all. Phillipa was well aware that the Senate calculated a numerical value for each resident, but had no idea that value impacted not only how much she would be paid, but also the value placed on her life. If this animal was on one of the senators, that senator would not be banished to a hut outside the settlement. On the ship, she hadn’t been good at engineering or biology or any of the other high-value skills, so she’d been trained as the sole Earth historian, to carry the knowledge of their home world. No one had much use for Earth history since they’d arrived a decade earlier and realized this settling thing wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d thought. Cyan just wasn’t cooperating.

After walking a few hundred yards, the prodding had mostly stopped. Phillipa tried to slow down, and it started up again. Quickly she resumed her pace.

The wheem of a three-wheeled scout vehicle rose behind her; Phillipa glanced back, saw it was Melba, catching up to her. Melba pulled to a stop, hopped off carrying a pack, and fell into step a few meters to Phillipa’s left.

“I’m sorry, Phillipa. I don’t agree with this quarantine,” Melba said.

“Have you figured out how to get this thing off me?” Her bare feet were aching from the sharp stones, her ankles bleeding from the lashing of sandpaper weeds.

“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about. It turns out this is not the first time we’ve encountered one of these parasites. Someone on the advance team—a construction specialist—had one attach itself to him. Since then, a few others have been killed in the wild by the survey team. What we know from those encounters and from studying the dead specimens is that we can’t kill it. It has a reflex that prevents that.”

“What sort of reflex?” Phillipa asked, feeling a creeping dread.

Melba looked her up and down, as if deciding how much she could handle. “When they’re killed, they plunge all of their legs into their host and kill it.”

Phillipa nearly stumbled. Her vision was suddenly swimming, like she was falling from a great height. “Are you saying I’m going to have this thing on me for the rest of my life?”

“No,” Melba said. “I’m saying that at this point, we don’t know how to get it off you.”

“Who’s working on it?” Phillipa asked.

Melba sighed, not meeting her eyes. “The Senate assigned Anatoly Keyes, along with an apprentice.”

“That’s it?” Phillipa asked. The parasite swayed its head, warning Phillipa. She struggled to calm her voice. “Why isn’t a whole team working on it? Why isn’t everyone working on it?”

Melba started to speak, stopped herself, shook her head. “I’m not sure what to tell you. They have their own priorities.”

“They have their own priorities,” meaning Phillipa wasn’t one of them. She was low value, had no useful skills. All she did was teach the children about a place they would never see, that no one alive had ever seen. They were going to let her die out here.

“We’ll figure this out, Phillipa,” Melba said. “I promise. We’re not giving up on you.”

Her words sent a chill through Phillipa. Melba was acknowledging that giving up on her was a possibility. Maybe the Senate preferred her dead. She was nothing but a threat, carrying a hostile species that might lay eggs in her or spread disease. It smelled like something that might be a disease carrier, like it was made of rotten meat.

“So when it’s finished with me, when it gets tired of me, it will just kill me,” Phillipa said.

“No, it can’t do that. Stinging takes a toll on it. If it stings you enough times to kill you, it will die, too.”

Like honeybees on Earth, Phillipa thought.

Melba opened her mouth to say something further, then seemed to think better of it.

“Tell me.”

Melba nodded. “What I was going to say was, that’s what happened to the man on the advance team. As a last resort, the xeno team tried to anesthetize the parasite without killing it, and it stung until both of them were dead.”

While Phillipa digested this, Melba tossed her the pack she’d been carrying. “Food and water, and a pistol. To defend yourself if something comes out of the rocks.”

Or to shoot herself in the head. But Melba wouldn’t say that aloud. “Can someone please get my shoes?”

* * *

The parasite prodded her awake before sunrise. She jolted upright, every fiber of her screaming with exhaustion. It kept prodding until she set one raw, blistered foot on the floor of the hut.

Phillipa groaned from the pain. It had forced her to walk the entire perimeter of the settlement—thirty-one miles. She was filthy, her chest and abdomen itched and throbbed under the parasite’s scaly grasp. The unpopped blisters on the pads of her feet felt like acid-filled pads; the popped ones were raw, open sores.

It prodded her to stand. She grabbed the pack, stepped into her shoes as it forced her outside into the thick bluish Cyan fog. It pushed her to move, faster, faster.

It made her run.

Each step was excruciating but not as bad as the stings. The stings were worse than anything she’d ever experienced. She could feel the poison exploding in her flesh with each sting.

She ran until she collapsed. The parasite allowed her to lie there, her face pressed to the harsh grass, for a minute or two; then it made her stand and run some more. There was nothing but pain and exhaustion—no other thoughts, no space to feel sad or scared.

* * *

Phillipa dreamed she was back in the starship and woke crying in the middle of the night. She missed the starship. Running in the huge open commons with her friends, dinners elbow to elbow at the long tables. For the first sixteen years of her life, she’d looked to Cyan as salvation from the tedium and certainty of the ship, a chance to feel real sunlight, and air that was too hot, and too cold. As soon as they landed, she’d realized how misguided her hope had been. Then she lost her parents to the ketamite plague after the disinfector system failed for the first time. She hated this backward world. If her grandparents had stayed on Earth, there would be no parasite on her. She’d be living in a clean, civilized world with advanced technology, with parents to watch out for her. At school on the ship she was taught how great Earth was, how proud they should be of their native world. If it was so fucking great, why had her grandparents left?

The parasite raised its sickening round head from where it had been resting on her collarbone. She tried to close her eyes, but it saw she was awake. It prodded her to get up.

“I’m too tired. I need more sleep.”

It pinched her with a dozen legs.

“Please. I need to sleep.”

It stung. Blinding pain. Pain shooting off pinwheels beneath her clenched lids. She howled like a wounded rabbit, leaped to her feet. On the way out she grabbed her backpack and swung it gently over her shoulders, trying not to disturb the parasite.

It steered her away from the fence toward the wild. Phillipa stumbled into the dark, gasping in pain, terrified beyond belief. No one went into the wild except heavily armed teams, and there was no one waiting outside her hut to go with her. The security people were at home in their warm beds.

The landscape dropped steeply into pocked, black rock jutting from pools of brackish water. Here and there, stubby yellow shrubs clung to cracks in the rock. The parasite goaded Phillipa to leap from rock to rock.

The light of the settlement receded. Plopping and groaning rose from the pools while screeching and chittering drifted from farther off. Every time Phillipa jumped over a pool she expected a thick tentacle to lash out of the water and grab her ankle, then pull her down into some unseen mouth.

They passed through copses of jagged unzi trees, their branches like lightning strikes and roots running over the rocks and into pools. Occasionally, she heard a snuffling among the rocks, and she would draw the pistol as the parasite steered her away from the sounds.

When the city was a distant glow, the parasite stopped her beside a tiny pool, little more than a crack between two rock formations, then inched her toward the edge. She tried to move in another direction, but it held her there, pushed her toward the water like a skittish horse.

“I’m not going in there. Please.”

The pricking got stronger. The stinging would begin soon. Panting, trembling, Phillipa took a step into the pool. She plunged into the dark water, chest deep, felt something slimy and tubular squirm under her feet. She squealed, clawed at the rock, trying to pull herself out, but the parasite stung and she stopped struggling. She clung to the rock, sobbing, trying to avoid the thing in the water.

The parasite’s head disappeared below the water’s surface. Its neck swayed from side to side; then she felt a jolt, as if the head had suddenly extended. It was feeding.

The slimy thing under the water slid along her ankle; Phillipa jerked away but immediately pressed up against another or maybe part of the same one. She held perfectly still then, barely breathing while the parasite shifted and bobbed, feeding on whatever was down there. Finally its head emerged from the water; it prodded her. She frantically clawed her way out of the pool.

Gasping for breath, Phillipa tried to rest, but the parasite wouldn’t allow it. It pushed her on, choosing ever-harder routes, goading her to leap between rocks that were five or six feet apart. As she jumped, Phillipa thought of how it had made her run. Had that been practice for this? If so, it had no idea how long it took to get a human body conditioned. She glanced down at its ugly round head, at those strange, eager little eyes. God, she hated it.

As if reading her thoughts, it turned her toward what was easily a ten-foot jump. Phillipa balked. “It’s too far. I can’t jump that far.”

The legs squeezed.

“I can’t.” She eyed the pool of thick black water a dozen feet below. Before it started stinging, she backed up as far as she could, ran, and leaped.

She landed on the slanted face of the rock, her feet scrabbling for purchase as her forearms scraped the rough rock. Straining with all her might, she pulled herself up an inch, then another, until her foot found purchase in the porous stone. Standing, she examined the scrapes on her forearms, then held them so the parasite could see. “Are you happy now? That’s the point, isn’t it—to make me suffer?”

A new series of pricks got her attention. At first she thought it had understood what she’d said; then she spotted a hulking animal squatting across the next pool, drinking. It was shaped like two ragged balls of connected fur, four legged, with a nub of a head. In the dim light it took her a moment to notice that it had a parasite wrapped around its chest and shoulders. She gasped.

Her parasite goaded her sharply, steering her to back away and jump into the deep shadows of an outcropping. Heart racing, she squatted there until she heard the animal wander off. As it went, it made a peculiar peeping sound that didn’t fit its size at all.

They moved off as Phillipa wondered about the encounter. Had her parasite warned her off because the big animal was dangerous? That didn’t make sense, assuming its parasite wielded as much control over it as hers did over her. Then what? Why didn’t her parasite want to encounter one of its own? It was a shock to see another parasite, to see the sort of creature it was attached to. She would tell Melba. It might help them figure out how to remove the thing.

The parasite steered her farther into the rocks until they were at the edge of the forest. Surely it wasn’t going to take her in there. The rocks were bad, but the forest was worse. There were terrible things in the forest, she’d been told. She drew the pistol from her pack with a trembling hand as the ground grew soft.

The parasite kept her pace slow and deliberate. After eleven years on Cyan, she had no idea what sort of animals she might encounter. She knew so much about lions and tigers and bears, but nothing about her own home. The survey teams were secretive, the Senate eager to withhold information if it meant more power for them.

It steered her around an area where a strange black grass was growing, and as she passed alongside it, some of the grass pulled away, exposing an eye with one of Cyan’s moon reflected in it. She made out the line of a very large mouth as they moved away. The thing was alive, growing right into the forest floor.

* * *

Although nothing else about her life pleased her, it pleased Phillipa to move as she did. She’d never been a natural athlete, but after the past eight or nine months of training under the sadistic parasite, she had no doubt she could outrun anyone in the settlement, male or female. Of course, that assumed anyone in the settlement dared come out from behind the perimeter fence to race.

Reaching a high spot with no rocks in leaping distance, Phillipa dove headfirst, anticipating the parasite’s wishes before it could express them. The wind rushed in her ears for a moment; then she broke the surface of a shallow pool and pulled up before colliding with the muddy bottom. She leaped to her feet, sprinted out of the pool before the spiked kite things that lurked in the mud could respond to the churning commotion she’d created.

Scrambling up a nearly sheer wall, she paused to take in the settlement in the distance. There was a commotion at the encampment of the banished. She took a step toward it. When the parasite didn’t object, she picked up her pace.

Still winded and slick with sweat, Phillipa paused twenty meters from the camp and called out, “What happened?”

A wiry young man turned at the sound of her voice, shielded his eyes from the sunlight. “A marabi got Kelvin. No one saw it until it was right on top of us.”

Phillipa nodded. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

The young man, whose name Phillipa did not know, raised a hand in thanks and turned away. They would all share Kelvin’s fate eventually. Except ironically for Phillipa, who was kept relatively safe by the parasite. It knew how to stay alive in this place and was teaching Phillipa with barbed lessons. She was going to meet a different fate. If she was still under the parasite’s control in another six months, she planned to jump off a cliff, making sure to land parasite first.

Phillipa took one last glance at the encampment, wishing she could sit by their fire at night, before heading toward her hut. She wondered if it was more the parasite or her stink that kept them from inviting her to join them. The parasite didn’t tolerate washing.

Inside the gates, armed security forces were set every fifty meters, watching for threats from outside. The repulsion field was down again. One day, they weren’t going to be able to get it up again.

When she found Melba waiting inside her hut, Phillipa’s pulse quickened. “Have they found something?”

Melba shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.” She was wearing a long black overcoat against the chill of evening.

Very gently, Phillipa lowered herself to her bed, the only place in the hut to sit. “Are they even trying anymore? Tell me the truth.”

“Of course they are,” Melba said so quickly that Phillipa suspected she was lying. “No one is giving up on you, Phillipa. You’re not out here for the same reason they are.” She jerked a thumb in the direction of the banished.

“So, is this just a social call?” Phillipa knew it wasn’t but couldn’t imagine why Melba had come.

“Not exactly, although it is good to see you.”

Phillipa waited. For her, it was good to see anyone, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud. Melba was kind, but she was still complicit in banishing Phillipa to this place.

“I’ve come to ask about your experiences in the wild. The survey team is especially curious to know what you’re seeing.”

What she was seeing? She was seeing the same damned things they saw when they went out there. Then it hit her: even heavily armed, they lost people almost monthly. “Oh, I see. You mean, why aren’t I dead? They want information.” She should have anticipated this. Just a week ago, a team had tried to follow her but couldn’t keep up. “So, before something out there gets me, you want to pump me for information.” She eased herself back onto the bed. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Tell them to get the parasite off me; then I’ll happily give classes.”

“Don’t forget, we still provide all of your food and supplies. I gave you a gun.”

The threat hung in the air.

* * *

Taking two quick steps, Phillipa launched herself off a rock, landed on the side of another, her fingers and toes gripping the slimmest of crevices. A wave of thumps ran across her abdomen, the parasite’s version of praise, as Phillipa quickly scaled the rock, reached the top, wiping sweat from her eyes with the back of her arm. She was quick and agile as a monkey. Not that she’d ever seen a monkey, but Phillipa knew about monkeys and the Eiffel Tower and Casablanca.

The parasite seemed more agitated than usual. If the thing had facial expressions, Phillipa couldn’t read them; it seemed to express itself through its legs, and today, its legs were fidgety. How long had it been since that night the parasite took her? Had it been a year yet? More? With no calendar it was difficult to keep track of the days; maybe she should trade Melba some information for a calendar. Then again, what did the number of days matter? Each was a repetitive blur.

The parasite jabbed right between her shoulder blades, setting her heart racing. She’d forgotten what that meant. She tried longer strides, then shorter, but both moves resulted in sharper jabs. She switched her pack to her other shoulder, but that didn’t stop it, either. She didn’t panic; it would be patient as long as she kept trying to figure out what it wanted.

Finally, she got it: it wanted her to stand straighter. Why it cared about her posture, she didn’t know. But it did. Sometimes all it took was an adjustment to her step (her walk was markedly different from what it had been—the parasite insisted she lift her feet high rather than letting them swing); other times it wanted her to walk the entire perimeter of the settlement without stopping for food or water. Whatever it wanted, she did. She hated it.

They headed toward the forest. She’d grown to prefer the forest. The ground was covered in the feathery droppings that passed for leaves on Cyan. On Earth, dead leaves underfoot made a crunching sound, but on Cyan there was no sound, only a soft, cushiony feel. One of the strange Cyan birds was perched in a tree overhead. Maybe it was closer to an insect. When it flew, its wings spun like they were wound by a rubber band; then they slowed and spun in the opposite direction.

Far away, there was a faint sound. Even before the parasite had a chance to alert her, Phillipa had ducked behind a tree. She waited, listening, as the crack of branches announced one of the boulders moving through the forest. That’s what she called them—boulders. The survey team likely had a better name for them. The team members were inept when it came to surviving among the local fauna, but they were terrific at naming the things that killed them.

As the sounds reached a crescendo, the enormous, spiny ball rolled past Phillipa. It had eyes all around it that closed just before they rolled against the forest floor, and it was so utterly beyond anything Phillipa could imagine that the first time she’d seen one she cried out and nearly got herself killed.

Phillipa was in new territory, south of the settlement. The terrain was similar—rocks, pools of water, trees.

It was a shame no one in the settlement was interested in Earth history. During one of their information-for-food exchanges, Phillipa tried to tell Melba about the lessons the British learned eight centuries earlier while trying to settle a new world. The British had sauntered into America and set up a place called Jamestown, bringing all the modern technology of their time and expecting to live their lives as they’d lived back in England. They tried to erect walls to keep the new world out, but the new world wasn’t going to be kept out. The people who didn’t get that, who didn’t adapt, didn’t survive. When Phillipa told Melba this, Melba nodded distractedly, and asked what Phillipa knew about some animal or other. The settlement had half as many people as when they’d landed on Cyan, yet they still didn’t get it. Phillipa finally did.

Cresting a rise on a steep, tall rock, Phillipa stopped short.

Below, in and around a pool that was larger than most, were dozens of parasites. Some were wrapped around creatures, others walking on their own sharp legs or wading in the pool, occasionally diving to feed. In the shadow of a shallow cave, Phillipa spotted one wrapped around a dog—a collie, its coat damp and filthy. Someone’s pet that had somehow gotten beyond the gate or, more likely, been dumped outside when the owners didn’t want it anymore but also didn’t want it to be eaten.

Her parasite prodded her on. Phillipa didn’t want to go down there, but she had no choice.

As they approached, her parasite made a keening noise, drawing the attention of the others. They chattered rapidly, skittering, hopping, crawling toward Phillipa, forming a loose half circle.

Her parasite prodded her to walk along the inner perimeter of the circle, directed her to stand up straight, to lift her feet high. As she walked, one parasite in particular caught her attention. It was attached to one of the birdlike things, its head above and behind the bird’s head. When the bird flew, the parasite would be invisible to anyone on the ground. Phillipa thought of the tall unzi trees in the compound, standing far higher than the repulsion fence. If a parasite riding one of those birds dropped into a tree, it could climb into the compound. They were smart enough; she would bet that was how hers got in. That was information the settlement would pay dearly for.

After a few passes in front of the others, her parasite steered her back up the rock, only to immediately take her back down. Through all of this, her parasite weaved from side to side in a rhythmic manner she hadn’t seen before. It almost looked like it was showing off. Preening.

All of the things it had forced her to do for the past months fell into place with an almost audible thud.

It was preening.

She surveyed the beasts the other parasites were attached to—dumb, brutish things. Her parasite had landed itself a smart, sleek ride—a starship among bicycles. For parasites, what they were attached to must be an important part of who they were. It determined their status. Their value.

At the edge of the audience, the dog leaped to its hind legs, pawed the air, and barked. None of the others turned to watch. After a moment it stopped, its bark receding into a plaintive whine.

Her parasite prodded her to swim across the black pool, then climb a steep rock. All this time, it had been training her to be strong and swift not only for its survival, but also to impress its friends. That’s why it had insisted she stand up straight, walk just so, because it wasn’t just about being effective, it was about looking good while doing it. They were all watching; it was basking in their attention.

Maybe she couldn’t kill the little fucker, but she could humiliate it if she could tolerate the pain.

When they reached the summit of the rock, it led her down the side, directed her to jump across a series of pools in view of their audience. Ever so subtly, Phillipa let her foot slip on one of the longer jumps. Flailing her arms, she landed in the pool with an ungainly splash.

As she surfaced, sputtering, the parasite punished her, but it didn’t sting. It was an accident, after all. As she lay panting on the rock under the watchful eyes of two-dozen peeping parasites (the peeping sounded suspiciously like laughter), hers directed her to stand her sorry ass up and continue the show.

It sent her up the rocks yet again to show the others that the miss was a fluke. She resumed leaping from rock to rock, her steps high, shoulders back, just as it had trained her. Still, it was pricking her more than usual, holding the reins more tightly. No mistakes now. She hoped it was sweating.

Another big jump loomed. Phillipa steeled herself against the coming pain, gauged her jump to come up short, leaped into the air…

She landed hard on the steep face of the rock; her cheek, forearms, and knees slammed the rough surface, were torn as she slid down the side, then landed hard on the rocks beside the pool.

The parasite let her have it. The pain was blinding. She screamed as the stings landed on her stomach, her breasts, her lower back. A wall of agony enveloped Phillipa. Every muscle in her body clenched. Her vision went gray, then black.

* * *

When she opened her eyes, it felt as if only a minute or two had passed. She lay with her face on the rock, watched parasites warble and bob, the whole scene canted at a ninety-degree angle.

Tentatively, she pushed herself to a sitting position, feeling so light she almost fell backward. Her shredded nightgown was all that covered her torso. She spun to her left, where the long, long body of her parasite stretched out along the rock. It hissed at her.

Not taking her eyes off it, she reached back into her pack and pulled out the pistol. It just stood there, hissing, as she aimed and fired. The parasite’s head exploded, along with a section of rock a dozen meters behind it. Its long body collapsed, the legs closer to the head folding first, the rest following like dominoes.

Then she was running, leaping like a gazelle, bounding across the uneven surface. Behind her she heard the dog bark, the hiss of agitated parasites, like a nest of snakes probably, although Phillipa had never actually heard snakes.

Running on the surface of a high rock, she leaped, her feet bicycling in the air, and landed lithely on the next rock, laughing, feeling light as a feather without the weight of the parasite to carry. She paused to return the pistol to her pack, confident that she could navigate the wilds without it. She took a moment to catch her breath, reveling in how freely her chest rose and fell. There was no hurry, although she was eager to get back.

She wasn’t returning to the settlement, although what she’d learned—what the parasite had taught her—surely raised her value inside. She’d go back to the banished encampment and invite the other misfits to join her in the wild, to found a new settlement. If anyone inside the settlement wanted to join them, they’d be welcome, too, although Phillipa doubted many would. Let them try to hide behind their walls.

The euphoria came.

Meet the Author

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award-winner and Nebula finalist whose latest novel, Defenders, has been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film. His previous novel, Love Minus Eighty, was named the best science fiction book of 2013 by the American Library Association, and was on both io9.com and NPR.org’s lists of the best SF novels of 2013. His debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for a Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award. Along with four novels, he has published fifty short stories in venues such as Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Science Fiction and Fantasy: Best of the Year. Will was a psychology professor before turning to writing full-time. He lives in Williamsburg with his wife and their five-year-old twins. You can follow him on Twitter @willmcintoshSF, or on his website, www.willmcintosh.net.

Also by Will McIntosh

Soft Apocalypse

Hitchers

Love Minus Eighty

Defenders

SHORT FICTION

The Perimeter

The Heist

Watching Over Us

City Living

If you enjoyed

THE PERIMETER,
look out for

DEFENDERS
by Will McIntosh

A new epic of alien invasion and human resistance by Hugo Award-winning author Will McIntosh.

Our Darkest Hour.

Our Only Hope.

The invaders came to claim earth as their own, overwhelming us with superior weapons and the ability to read our minds like open books.

Our only chance for survival was to engineer a new race of perfect soldiers to combat them. Seventeen feet tall, knowing and loving nothing but war, their minds closed to the aliens.

But these saviors could never be our servants. And what is done cannot be undone.

Prologue

Lieutenant Enrique Quinto

June 26, 2029. Morris Run, Pennsylvania.

It was a quaint Pennsylvania town, many of the buildings well over fifty years old, with green canopies shading narrow doorways. Even the town’s name was quaint: Morris Run. If not for the abandoned vehicles, filthy and faded by two years of exposure to the elements, and the trash stacked along the sidewalk, Quinto might have expected someone to step out of the Bullfrog Brewhouse and wave hello.

“Lieutenant Lucky?” Quinto turned to see Macalena, his platoon sergeant, making his way to the front of the carrier. Quinto wished he’d said something the first time someone called him Lucky, but it was far too late now. Most of the troops he was leading today probably didn’t know his real name.

“One of the new guys shit his pants,” Macalena said when he drew close, his voice low, giving Quinto a whiff of his sour breath.

Quinto sighed heavily. “Oh, hell.”

“The kid’s scared to death. He hasn’t been out of Philadelphia since this started.”

“No, I don’t blame him.” Quinto looked over Macalena’s shoulder, saw the kid perched on the side of the carrier, head down. He was about fourteen. The poor kid didn’t belong out here. Not that Quinto couldn’t use him; they called raw recruits “fish food,” but sometimes they were surprisingly effective in a firefight, because they were too scared to think. The starfish could get less of a read on what they were going to do, which way they were going to point their rifles. Usually the newbies didn’t shit their pants until the shooting started, though. “Does he have a spare pair?”

Macalena shook his head. “That’s the only pair he owns.”

Quinto reached into his pack, pulled out a pair of fatigue pants, and handed them to Macalena. “I hope he’s got a belt.”

Macalena laughed, stuck the pants under his armpit, and headed toward the kid.

What an awful thing, to be out here at fourteen, fifteen. When Quinto was fourteen, he’d spent his days playing video games, shooting bad guys in his room while Mom fetched fruit juice and chocolate chip cookies and told him when to go to bed.

They reached the end of the little downtown, which was composed of that single road, and the landscape opened up, revealing pine forest, the occasional house, mountains rising up on all horizons. There was little reason for any Luyten to be within eight miles of this abandoned backwater town, but they were all out there somewhere, so there was always a chance they’d be detected.

Quinto tried to access his helmet’s topographical maps, but the signal still wasn’t coming through. He pulled the old hard copy from his pack, unfolded it.

The carrier slowed; Quinto looked up from the map to see what was going on. There was a visual-recognition drone stuck in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. As they approached, the VRA drone—little more than a machine gun on treads—spun and trained its gun on each of the soldiers in turn. When it got to Quinto, it paused.

“Human. Human!” Quinto shouted, engaging the thing’s vocal-recognition failsafe. It went on to the next soldier.

It was always an uncomfortable moment, having a VRA drone point a weapon at you. You’d think it would be hard to mistake a human for a Luyten.

Failing to identify anything that resembled a starfish, the gun spun away.

“Get a few guys to pull it out of the ditch,” Quinto said. Four troops hopped out of the transport and wrestled the thing back onto the road. It headed off down the road, continuing on its randomly determined route.

Pleasant Street dead-ended close to the mouth of the mine, about half a mile past an old hotel that should be coming up on their left. When they got to the mine they’d have to unseal it using the critical blast points indicated on the topo map, then a 2.5-mile ride on the maglev flats into the mine, to the storage facility.

If someone had told Quinto two years ago that he’d be going into an abandoned mine to retrieve seventy-year-old weapons and ammo, he would have laughed out loud.

It wasn’t funny now.

The locomotive and five boxcars were parked right where they were supposed to be—as close to the mouth of the mine as the track would allow. They were late-twentieth-century vintage, the locomotive orange and shaped like a stretched Mack truck. Quinto called Macalena and his squad leaders, instructed them to set the big recognition-targeting gun they’d brought along in the weeds on the far side of the road, and place two gunners near the entrance with interlocking fire. When that was done, they got the rest of the squads moving down the tunnel. The quicker they moved, the sooner they’d be out of hostile territory and back in Philly.

Quinto took up the rear of the last carrier for the ride down into the mine. He was not a fan of deep holes with black walls, and when his CO had first laid out the mission Quinto had nearly crapped his own pants.

Macalena climbed in and took the seat beside him.

“So what are we looking for? I cannot for the life of me guess what we’re doing in here.”

Quinto smiled. It must seem an odd destination to the rest of the men, but they were used to being kept in the dark about missions. The fewer people who knew, the less likely the starfish were to get the information. Or so the logic went.

“The feds have been sealing huge caches of weapons in old mines for the past two centuries, waiting for the day when Argentina or India or whoever took out our more visible weapons depots. They coat them in Cosmoline and pretty much forget about them.”

Macalena frowned, sticking out his big lower lip. “You mean, old hand grenades and machine guns and shit?”

“More or less. Flamethrowers with a pathetically limited effectiveness range, eighty-one-millimeter mortars, LAW rockets, fifty-cal MGs.” Most were outdated weapons, but simple, easy to operate.

Macalena shook his head. “So we’re that desperate.”

In the seat in front of them a private who was at least seventy was clinging to the bar in front of her seat. She was tall—at least six feet. The slight jostling of the carrier was clearly causing her old body discomfort. It was true what they said: There were no civilians anymore, only soldiers and children.

“Yup. We’re that desperate,” Quinto said. “They’ve destroyed or seized so much of our hardware that we have more soldiers than guns.”

“What’s Cosmoline?” Macalena asked.

“I didn’t know, either; I had to look it up. It’s a grease they used back in the day to preserve weapons. Once you chip away the hardened Cosmoline, the weapons are supposed to be like new.”

Macalena grunted, spit off the side. “Dusty as hell in here. And cold.”

“Let’s be glad we’re not staying.”

Macalena’s comm erupted, a panicked voice calling his name.

“What have we got?” Macalena asked.

“Vance is dead. Lightning shot, from the trees to the left of the mine.”

“All stop!” Macalena shouted. The carrier slowed as Quinto dropped his head, covered his mouth as the implications sunk in.

Lucky no more.

“Where are you now?” Macalena asked the private.

“Inside the mine, about a hundred yards.”

“Stay there.”

Quinto looked up at Macalena, who raised his eyebrows. “What do you want to do?”

He wanted to get as deep in the mine as he could, and stay there, their backs against the wall, weapons raised until the starfish came to get them. Of course the Luyten would never come down, because they were reading his thoughts right now. Plus it was far easier to blow the mouth of the mine and leave them to suffocate.

Quinto ordered the small caravan to turn around and head toward the mouth.

They barely got moving before they heard the flash-boom of a Luyten explosive. The cave shook; bits of dirt and debris spewed at them, then everything settled into silence, the cave now truly pitch-black, save for the carriers’ headlights.

They climbed out of the carriers. Some of the troops cried, and there was no shame in that. One woman went off to the side of the tunnel and knelt in the rubble to pray. Quinto didn’t know their names, because he hadn’t served with them long. Troops came, and died, and new troops came. Only Lieutenant Lucky went on, mission after mission. Quinto realized he’d begun to believe he really was lucky, or special. Destined to see the war to its end.

It killed him, to think he wouldn’t get to see how things turned out, whether the bad guys won, or the good guys pulled something out of their asses at the eleventh hour.

Quinto used the walkie to apprise HQ of their situation, so HQ wouldn’t wonder when Quinto’s platoon never returned.

“Lieutenant?” Macalena said. He was studying the topo map he’d borrowed from Quinto. “Did you see these?” A few of the enlisted came over to look at the map over Macalena’s shoulder as he ran his finger along black lines set perpendicular to the mine. “There are five vertical shafts sunk along the length of the mine. I’m guessing they were escape routes in case of collapse, or ventilation, or both.”

Quinto looked up from the map, impotent rage rising in him. “Jesus, Mac, couldn’t you have waited a half hour to notice this?”

It took Macalena a second to understand. When he did, he grimaced, curled his hand into a fist, crumpling a section of the map. He turned and walked a dozen paces down the shaft, cursing quietly, viciously.

Even Macalena was too green for this war. He’d been in the infantry for only four months; before that he’d been writing military technical manuals. The army needed fighters more than writers these days.

If Macalena had waited even fifteen, twenty minutes before examining the old map, chances were the Luyten would have been out of range, and they could have climbed out of this hole and gone home.

“We need to move,” Quinto said. “The fish are going to find those exits and seal them up. Spread out, find the exits. When I get to the surface I’m going to set off a Tasmanian devil, give us some breathing room. As soon as it’s spent, get out there. Understood? Let’s move.”

“Couldn’t we just stay down here? Dig our way out when they’re gone?” It was the kid who’d crapped himself, looking absurd in Quinto’s big pants. “If we go up there now, they’ll kill us. I mean, maybe they’ll get distracted by something and leave…” He trailed off.

Everyone stared at the ground, except for the soldier who was praying.

“Let’s go,” Quinto said.

Quinto grasped the cold rung of the ladder that had dropped down when they unsealed the iron hatch.

“Good luck to you, Lieutenant,” one of the troops waiting to follow him called. It was Benneton, the old woman. The kid who’d crapped his pants was there as well, along with four others.

Quinto looked up into darkness. “Here we go.” He headed up the ladder. A lot of people who’d been as lucky as Quinto might have been tempted to believe the streak would hold, but Quinto knew his past held no hint of his future. More to the point, he knew he had no future.

It was a forty-foot climb according to the map, but adrenaline made it effortless. When he reached the top, he twisted the seal on the hatch, then pushed with his back and shoulders to force the hatch open. Daylight flooded into the dusty shaft as dirt and moldy leaves rained down on him.

The kid, who was just below him, passed up the Tasmanian devil. Reaching among the big spines jutting from the central carbon-fiber sphere, Quinto activated it, tossed it outside, and pulled the hatch closed.

The buzzing of razor-sharp shrapnel hitting, and then burrowing around inside everything within five hundred yards, would have been reassuring if Quinto weren’t absolutely certain the starfish had retreated outside the Tasmanian devil’s range as soon as Quinto thought about using it. At least it would back the fish up so they wouldn’t be able to pick off Quinto and his troops as they climbed out of their holes.

“Here we go,” Quinto said to the boy. “Have your weapon out. Run as fast as you can. Try to take one with you.” His guess was that Benneton would stay behind, shoot from the cover of the shaft until the Luyten cooked her. That’s what Quinto would do in her situation; it would probably afford her a few more minutes of life. He took a deep breath, trying to grasp that this was the end, this was the moment of his death, but he couldn’t.

As soon as the Tasmanian devil went silent, Quinto threw open the hatch, his heart thudding wildly, and ran.

Their carriers were trapped in the mine, so his best chance would be to make it to the locomotive. Of course the Luyten would have fried the locomotive, so really there was nothing to do but run, and when the fish closed in, turn and fight.

Two hundred yards ahead, he spotted four of his troops running north, into the woods, toward the nearest cover. That probably made more sense than what Quinto was doing, but all of the moves open to them were losers. It was always the same: The fish knew their exact location, but they had no idea where the fish were. If you could catch a fish out in the open, it couldn’t dodge automatic weapons fire, but you almost never caught them out in the open.

Quinto glanced back, saw the kid was two steps behind, his dirty cheeks tracked with tearstains.

The locomotive had been melted to a lump. He kept running. Everyone but he and the kid had headed north. Since Quinto wasn’t dead yet, it was safe to assume the fish had gone after the larger group first. If he could get outside their range, which meant seven or eight miles, he and the kid might have a chance. Quinto pushed himself to pick up the pace, but when he did the kid started to fall behind, looking panicked. Quinto slowed.

In the distance, Quinto heard the worst sound in the world: the sizzle-crackle of a Luyten lightning stick, a sound as much felt in your body as heard by your ears. Then another. He was spared the pungent, unearthly sweat smell of the weapon. He was too far away.

When he’d made it through the town, Quinto took another glance back. The kid was a hundred yards behind, one hand clutching his side. No way this kid was going to run another four or five miles. Panting, his throat coated in phlegm, Quinto considered leaving him behind. No. No matter how fast he ran, he wasn’t going to outrun Luyten on foot. He could try calling HQ and beg for a carrier to come get him, but they’d only tell him what he already knew: They weren’t going to feed the fish any more than they had to.

So he stopped, pulled out his comm, and waited for the kid to catch up. The kid stopped beside him, put his hands on his knees.

“You want to call anyone? Your mom or dad alive?”

The kid eyed the comm. “Just my little sister.” He swallowed, looked at Quinto. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. We are.”

“Maybe they got distracted by something. Maybe the others killed them.”

“Maybe,” Quinto said. He thought he heard the snap-crackle of something moving through the woods to the north. “Come on.” He tugged the kid’s jacket and headed into the woods on the opposite side of the road.

Should he call his own mother to say goodbye? He would like that, but he didn’t want to risk having her on the line when he died. He didn’t want that to be her last memory of him.

Branches whipped his face as he tore through the brush. It was pointless, but he couldn’t relinquish that last millimeter of hope that he might get lucky, just one last time. He barreled down a slope as the landscape opened, then splashed through a stream and raced up the bank.

He spotted a flash of crimson ahead, behind a thick cover of green leaves, and stopped short. The kid stopped short beside him, looked at him, questioning, just as a bolt of lightning burst through the foliage.

1

Oliver Bowen

March 9, 2030 (nine months later). The South Pacific.

The door was locked. The room was comfortable, replete with a well-stocked kitchen and an entertainment system that was so up-to-date it contained movies yet to be released. But the door was locked.

You’re considered a risk. They don’t know the extent of my power to influence you.

Oliver turned in his rotating chair to face Five, whose accommodations were less plush. Behind the carbon alloy mesh that separated them, Five’s room was empty except for a water dispensation device that resembled a giant hamster lick. Five was lying flat, his appendages splayed like the spokes of an elephant-sized wheel. His skin had a stony, mottled texture, and there were bristles protruding at evenly spaced intervals across it. The cilia protruding from the tips were as thick as nautical rope, and transparent.

“Because you were able to win over a thirteen-year-old boy, they think you might be able to convince me that I’m fighting on the wrong side? That’s absurd.”

But they don’t know that, Five said. They think you’ve become too familiar with me. Too friendly.

The CIA yanks him out of his position at NYU three days after the invasion begins, shifts him from Research to Interrogation as their field agents die off, tells him to figure out how to communicate with Luyten, and when he succeeds, he becomes a suspected sympathizer? Beautiful.

The next time someone comes, ask them when you’ll be informed where we’re going.

Oliver couldn’t help laughing. “You mean you don’t know?” He waved in what he guessed was the direction of the submarine’s bridge. “Pluck it out of someone’s mind.”

I don’t have to pluck. Your minds are all laid out in front of me. No one on this vessel knows.

“No one knows where we’re going?” It seemed an absurd notion, though it also made sense. If no one on board knew where they were going, or why, a Luyten who happened to be flying nearby—within their eight-or-so-mile telepathic zone—wouldn’t be able to find out, either. The mission must be important. “How are they navigating if they don’t know where we’re going?”

They’re given a set of coordinates corresponding to a point in the ocean, and when they reach it, they’re given another.

“So where are we?”

Oliver jolted back in his chair as one of Five’s mouths opened, revealing a bobbing, twitching hole ringed with teeth that resembled the spines on cacti. Smacking, hissing air and background sounds like water draining came from the hole, the sounds so unearthly and repulsive that at first Oliver didn’t register that they were approximating words.

“Find out where we’re going,” Five said aloud.

The ubiquitous hum of the sub’s engine was the only sound in the room as Oliver composed himself. Ultimately it didn’t matter whether the Luyten communicated telepathically or using spoken words, but it was still profoundly disturbing to hear the thing speak.

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” Oliver said.

“Unlike you.” Somehow the creature managed to inject a note of irony, and perhaps contempt, into the awkwardly formed words.

Oliver slid out of the chair, went right up to the nearly invisible net of carbon fiber that separated them. “Don’t assume you know my mind just because you can read my thoughts. We may not be as simple as you think.”

“Yes, humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. The chosen ones, the purpose for the existence of the entire universe. How could I forget?” Aware that Oliver was having trouble understanding his strangely formed words, Five simultaneously broadcast his words directly into Oliver’s mind, giving him the uneasy sensation of hearing the words with an indescribable overlap. “I know your mind better than you.”

Oliver grunted, folded his arms across his chest. “Right.”

“You’re uneasy. You’re afraid I might try to prove my claim.”

It was pointless to disagree. Oliver had quickly learned how absurd it was to deny what you were thinking or feeling to something who knew precisely what you were thinking and feeling.

“You love your wife now—”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear about Vanessa. Just leave it.”

Five waited patiently through Oliver’s outburst, then continued. “After her affair, her denials, the angry divorce… now you love her. Before, when you claimed to love her, you also despised her.”

Oliver turned, went to the door, and thumped on it with the flat of his palm. “Hey, come on. Unlock this door. I’m not the POW.”

“There’s an irony you’re not aware of, in your newfound feelings for your wife. Should I share it with you?”

Oliver turned to face Five, who was running the fine cilia that served Luyten as fingers across the stump of the limb he’d lost. “No. Thanks for the offer, but, no.”

“It’s something you’d be interested to hear.”

When Oliver didn’t answer, Five continued. “All right, then why don’t I move on? What else can I tell you, to demonstrate you’re as simple to read as I think you are? How about your deepest sexual cravings? Some of these you would never admit to yourself. For example, you’d like to be tied up, gagged with your own dirty sock, and spanked by a woman twenty years older than you.”

Oliver couldn’t care less about his repressed sexual desires. They were what they were; he couldn’t control them, only whether he acted on them. But Oliver knew Five was only playing with him now. It had already dropped the bait it knew Oliver couldn’t resist.

Five grew quiet, waiting for the question it already knew was coming.

“Fine. What’s the irony I’m not aware of?”

All of Five’s eyes fixed on Oliver. “The irony is, your instinct to love her is right, because she never had sex with Dr. Paul.”

As the words registered, Oliver’s vision darkened around the edges, as if he were going to pass out. In some ways, he wished he would. “You told me she had. You gave me specific details.”

“I lied.”

An icy numbness crept through him. He’d destroyed his marriage on the word of an alien bent on wiping out the human race. He’d taken Five’s word as unassailable proof, because Five could reach right in and pluck the truth out of Vanessa’s thoughts. Only he’d forgotten Five had abilities beyond reading minds. The ability to lie, for instance.

He’d told Vanessa he knew she was lying, said her unwillingness to admit the affair bothered him more than the infidelity itself. The floor, which was nothing but steel under a thin layer of beige carpeting, lurched beneath him, either because the sub was adjusting course or his knees were wobbling.

“Why would you lie? I didn’t even ask you about Vanessa—you volunteered the information.”

“I did it to serve as a reminder.”

“A reminder of what?”

“That I might be lying to you at any time.”

It dawned on Oliver that he had no way to contact Vanessa, and had no idea when he would, because he didn’t know where he was going, or why. When he did finally contact Vanessa, would an apology make any difference? He’d trusted the word of a Luyten over hers.

This was going to torture him. In all probability that was Five’s intention in telling him now. Or maybe he was lying now, simply to distract Oliver at a crucial juncture.

“Maybe,” Five said.

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Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Welcome
4. The Perimeter
5. Meet the Author
6. Also by Will McIntosh
7. A Preview of Defenders
8. About Orbit Short Fiction
9. Orbit Newsletter
10. Copyright

Navigation

1. Begin Reading

2. Table of Contents

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Will McIntosh

Excerpt from Defenders copyright © 2014 by Will McIntosh

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Orbit

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
orbitbooks.net
orbitshortfiction.com

First ebook edition: October 2012

Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Published by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

ISBN 978-0-316-24606-4

E3

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Welcome
- The Perimeter
- Meet the Author
- Also by Will McIntosh
- A Preview of Defenders
- About Orbit Short Fiction
- Orbit Newsletter
- Copyright