Scarecrow

There was a door at the far end of the cave that nobody had ever seen open.

It was set into the rock past field four, past the training hall, past the stable with the two old horses. A round steel door, twice my height, with a wheel in the middle of it like the door of a ship, and the word SIMULATION stenciled across it in faded yellow, and under that, smaller, in red: SEALED ENVIRONMENT. AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY.

For nine weeks, it had stayed shut. Liam said he’d tried the wheel once, on the second night, and it hadn’t moved, and a soldier had come out of nowhere and walked him back to the barracks by the ear.

On the Monday after the callsigns, it was open.

”Avalon,” said Sergeant Okafor.

We were standing in squad order on the packed earth in front of the round door. All forty of us. In new gear. Gray, close-fitting, with pads at the knees and elbows and a hard shell over the chest, and a mask hanging round our necks on a strap, the kind that covered the nose and mouth with a filter at the front. The headsets on our ears, green lights on.

Behind the round door, there was dark, and a smell coming out of it I’d never smelled before. Hot. Wet. Thick. Like the inside of a mouth.

”AV-7,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”The planet you’ll be landing on in a little under a year. Eleven light-years from here. You’ve seen the pictures. Green. Blue. Clouds. A very nice place to build a new world.” She paused. ”The pictures were taken from orbit.”

She walked down the line.

”Behind that door is the closest thing the engineers can make to the ground. The air’s thicker than ours, and wetter, and hotter, and it’s got less in it that you can breathe. The gravity’s a little heavier. The light’s wrong. The days are thirty-one hours long. The engineers have done their best.” She stopped. ”Their best is not the planet. Remember that. Whatever happens in there, the real thing will be worse.”

Liam, beside me, had stopped grinning.

”Objective,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”There’s a base in there. A mock-up of a first-wave landing site. Somewhere in it, there’s a survivor.” She let that sit. ”A dummy. Seventy kilos. Your job is to find it, and bring it home. Alive.” Another pause. ”You’ll be going in by squad. Twenty minutes apart. You’ll be on your own. No instructors. Just you, and your comms, and whatever’s in there.”

”What’s in there, Sergeant?” said someone from Squad Three.

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

”Hostiles,” she said. ”Constructs. Mechanical. Padded. The engineers built them to move the way the planet’s fauna is expected to move.” She said it very evenly. Like something she’d been told to say. ”If one touches you, you’re out. Sit down and wait. If three of your squad are out, your squad’s out.” She looked down the lines. ”Squad One. Masks on. Go.”

Squad Eight went last.

We stood in front of the round door for two hours while the others went in. Twenty minutes apart. Squad by squad. We heard nothing. The door closed behind each squad with a heavy hiss and a clang, and then there was nothing at all, and the next squad stepped up.

Squad One came out after forty minutes. Three of them out. Survivor not recovered. They were soaked through, gray in the face, breathing hard. One of the earth-wave cousins sat down on the packed earth outside the door and put his head between his knees and didn’t get up for a long time.

Squad Three came out after thirty-five minutes. Survivor recovered. Two out. The girl who’d asked Okafor the question had a long smear of gray paint down the back of her armor where something had touched her.

Squad Two came out after twenty-eight. Survivor recovered. Nobody out. Sigmund carrying the dummy over his shoulders, his narrow face white and wet. He didn’t look at the observation room. Risa came out behind him and pulled her mask down and stood with her hands on her knees, breathing.

She looked across at me.

She didn’t say anything. But I saw her face, and it wasn’t the face of somebody who’d won.

”Risa,” I said, as she came past. Quietly.

She stopped.

”What are they?” I said. ”In there.”

Risa looked at me for a long moment with her light gray eyes.

”They don’t have hearts,” she said. ”They’re machines. I couldn’t feel anything.” She pulled her mask back up over her face, though she didn’t need to. ”That’s not the bad part.”

”What’s the bad part?”

”You’ll see,” said Risa, and walked away.

”Squad Eight,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Masks on.”

We put our masks on. The filter clicked against my face. The air through it tasted of plastic and nothing.

”Hearth, Ember, Fork, Keep, Scarecrow,” said Okafor, in my ear, through the headset. ”Comms check.”

”Hearth.”

”Ember.”

”F-Fork.”

”Keep.”

”Scarecrow.”

”Go,” said Okafor.

The round door swung open with a hiss, and the heat came out and hit us in the face like a wet hand, and we went in.

It was enormous.

That was the first thing. I’d thought it would be a room. It wasn’t. It was a second cave, behind the first, bigger, deeper, with a roof so high it was lost in a red haze. The engineers had filled it. With rock. With dirt. With plants. Not real ones. Huge, broad-leaved shapes made of something like rubber, taller than the barracks, dripping. With vines hung from the haze, thick as my arm. With a floor of soft red mud that pulled at our boots.

The light was red. Dim, and red, and coming from everywhere at once, so nothing had a shadow.

The air was so thick I could feel it. Heavy. Hot. Wet. Pushing on my skin. And when I breathed through the mask, it wasn’t enough. I breathed again. Still not enough. As though the air had been poured out of a jug and somebody had forgotten to fill it.

”Thin,” said Liam, in my ear, already breathing hard. ”Why’s it thin? It’s thick. How is it thick and thin?”

”Less oxygen,” said Luna. Calm. Very calm. ”More of everything else. She told us.”

I looked at the air.

I couldn’t help it. I’d always looked at air. And now, after the training hall, after four weeks of the cell biology book and Luna across the table asking me what carried oxygen in the blood and why, I looked at it differently.

It was mostly nitrogen. More than at home. A lot of water. Some carbon dioxide, more than there should have been. And oxygen, the little pairs I’d turned into nitrogen inside two hundred and twelve fires. Far fewer of them than I was used to. Maybe two-thirds. Maybe less.

Enough to live on. Not enough to run on. Not enough to fight on. Not for long.

I looked at Toby.

He was already gray. Already breathing fast and shallow through his mask, with his hand pressed flat against the chest of his armor, the way you press on a stitch. Toby had always run out of breath first. On the laps. On the beam. He was the smallest of us, and the youngest, and his body had never had much to spare.

Four minutes. Maybe less.

That was without any oxygen at all. This wasn’t that. This was only less. But less, for long enough, did things too. I’d read the chapter twice. Luna had made me.

”Scarecrow,” said Luna, in my ear. Very quietly. On a private channel. Just me. ”Toby.”

”I see him.”

”Can you?”

I looked at the air around Toby. Just around him. The air going into the filter of his mask, and the air in front of it, a hand’s width deep. And I took some of the nitrogen in it, and some of the carbon dioxide, and I changed them. Slowly. Carefully. A little at a time. Into little pairs.

Not a lot. Not so much that he’d feel it all at once and get dizzy. Just enough that every breath he took had what a breath at home would have had.

I watched him.

After about a minute, the gray went out of his face. His hand came off his chest. He took a breath, a long one, and looked round, surprised, as if somebody had opened a window.

”Better,” said Luna, on the private channel. It wasn’t a question.

”Better.”

”Can you do all of us?”

I looked at the five of us, standing in the red mud. Five shapes. Five masks. Five breaths, going in and out.

”Yes,” I said. ”If we stay close.”

”Then we stay close,” said Luna Windsor, and switched to the squad channel. ”Squad Eight. Tight formation. Nobody further than three meters from Scarecrow. That’s not a suggestion.”

There was a short silence on the channel.

”Why?” said Seraphina.

”Because he’s breathing for us,” said Luna.

Another silence.

”Oh,” said Liam.

”Fine,” said Seraphina. And then, after a moment, in a slightly different voice: ”Thanks, Scarecrow.”

We went on into the red.

The base was a kilometer in.

We could see it for the last hundred meters, through the rubber leaves. A dome. Small. Gray. Half sunk into the red mud on one side, as if the ground had tried to swallow it. Its lights were out. Its door was open. Across its curved wall, in big faded letters the engineers had painted on to look old: AV-1. And under that, smaller: FIRST WAVE.

”Cheerful,” said Liam.

Nobody answered him.

We’d been walking for twenty minutes. Tight. Nobody further than three meters from me. It made us slow, through the mud and the vines, and it made the back of my head ache. Holding five breaths at once. Watching the air going into five masks, and keeping it right, every second, while I walked and looked where I was putting my feet. The pressure behind my eyes had come early and stayed. I didn’t say anything about it.

Nothing had come at us.

That was what was wrong. Squad One had lost three people. Squad Three had lost two. Something was in here. And for twenty minutes, nothing had moved except the leaves, dripping, and us.

”It’s waiting,” said Toby, very quietly, in my ear. ”Isn’t it?”

”Keep walking,” said Luna.

We were thirty meters from the dome when the mud moved.

I didn’t see it come.

That was the thing I kept thinking about, afterward, for days. I didn’t see it. I was looking at everything. The leaves. The vines. The dome. The air. I was looking at all of it, the way I always looked, and I saw nothing coming, because it didn’t come from anywhere I was looking.

It came from underneath.

The red mud in front of Seraphina bulged. Then split. And something came up out of it, fast, the way a fish comes up out of water. Long. Low. Gray. Too many legs. Far too many legs. Jointed, and plated, and pulling itself up out of the ground in one long movement like a hand coming out of a sleeve.

Seraphina threw fire at it without thinking. It went through the flame. It didn’t stop.

Toby sang.

The wall came up in front of Seraphina, shimmering, just in time. The thing hit it and stopped dead, and its front end reared up, and I saw its head for the first time. If it was a head. A blunt plated wedge, with no eyes I could see, and at the front, a seam. Two seams, crossing. And as I watched, the seams opened, and the head split into four. Four pale flaps, peeling back, like the petals of a flower opening. And inside—

”Down!” shouted Liam.

The mud on our left moved. And on our right. And behind us. All at once.

I couldn’t see them.

That was the worst of it. Not that there were six of them, or eight, or however many there were, coming up out of the mud on every side. Not the legs. Not the four-petaled heads. Not the sound they made, which was no sound at all, just the wet suck of the mud as they came out of it.

It was that I couldn’t see where the next one was until it was already there.

I could see the ones above ground. Every one. I could have turned every one of them into anything. Salt. Glass. Sand. The way I’d turned the Town. And I started to. I looked at the one rearing over Toby’s wall and went down into it, fast, the way I’d gone down into the steel ball—

And the mud beside me split, and another one came out of it, close enough to touch, and I hadn’t seen it, because it had been under the mud. I can look into things. I always have. A steel ball, a leaf, a hand. But mud isn’t a thing. It’s everything at once, wet and moving and the same all the way down, and a meter into it there’s so much of it that looking is like staring into fog. I can’t pick one thing in it. I can only change what I can see.

Something touched my arm. Hard. Padded.

Out.

No. Not quite. It had hit the plate on my elbow and skidded off. I spun round. It was rearing over me, petals opening.

And then it was white.

Frozen. Solid. In the air, mid-rear, with its four petals half open, and frost all over it, and its legs locked. It tipped over, slowly, like a statue, and hit the mud with a heavy thud.

Luna Windsor was standing three meters away, with one hand out.

”The ground,” she said, in my ear, very calm, very fast. ”They’re coming through the mud. Mud’s water. Water’s mine.” She crouched. And put both hands flat on the red ground.

The cold went out of her like a wave.

I felt it go past my boots. Through the mud. Down. Out. In a wide circle, all around the five of us, ten meters, fifteen. The red mud went white. Then hard. Then solid, with a crackling sound like a lake freezing over in a single breath.

And under the ice, I felt them stop.

All of them. Every one that was still under the ground. Locked in. Frozen into the earth, halfway up, with nowhere to dig.

The ones already above ground were still coming. Three of them. But there were only three now. And I could see all three.

”Ember,” said Luna. ”Left.”

”Got it,” said Seraphina. And she didn’t argue. Not once. Not a word. The fire went out of her hands in a straight hard line, not a sheet, a line, like a blade, and hit the one on the left in the joint where its head met its body, and it went down.

”Hearth, right.”

Liam went right. With Seraphina’s fire and his own together, the second one went down.

The third one was rearing over Toby’s wall. Toby was holding the note. His face was white. His voice was cracking.

I looked at it. Just it. Pick one thing.

It went to glass. All of it, at once, mid-rear. And stood there, a glass monster on the white ice, with its four glass petals open, and the red light coming through it.

Then it fell over and broke.

It was very quiet.

We stood on the ice in the middle of the red jungle, breathing hard, in a ring. Five of us. Nobody out. Around us, three constructs lying on the ice. One frozen. One burned. One in pieces of glass. And under the ice, I could feel them still. Four. Five. Locked in the frozen ground, where they’d been digging toward us.

”Nobody’s out,” said Liam. His voice was shaking. ”Nobody’s out. Did anybody get touched? I didn’t get touched.”

”Elbow,” I said. ”Skidded off the plate.”

”That doesn’t count,” said Liam. ”I’m deciding that doesn’t count.”

”It doesn’t count,” said Luna. She was still crouched, with her hands on the ice. Her face, through her mask, was very pale. ”The dome. Now. Before the ice goes. I can’t hold this forever.”

We went to the dome.

The survivor was inside, slumped against the far wall, where the engineers had put it.

A dummy. Seventy kilos, in a first-wave suit, gray and battered, with a cracked faceplate and a name patch on the chest that somebody had scraped off. Around it, on the inside of the dome wall, the engineers had painted damage. Scorch marks. Dents.

And gouges. Long ones, in sets of four, running across the curved wall from the floor to above my head. Four parallel lines, very deep, very regular, the same distance apart every time.

I looked at them. Then I looked back at the door, at the frozen construct lying on the ice outside, with its legs locked. At the ends of its legs.

Four claws. The same distance apart.

I didn’t say anything.

We carried the survivor home the way we’d carried the beam. Five pairs of hands. No arguing about the front. Luna on the left, Seraphina on the right, and neither of them saying a word about it. Liam and Toby in the middle. Me at the back, carrying most of it on the turns, and breathing for all five of us.

Thirty-one minutes. Nobody out.

Sergeant Okafor was standing outside the round door when it opened.

She looked at the five of us, coming out of the red with the dummy between us, soaked, gray, breathing hard. She looked at Toby, who wasn’t gray at all. She looked at me.

”Thirty-one minutes,” said the corporal with the timer, beside her.

”Adequate,” said Sergeant Okafor.

That was all. She didn’t say anything else. But she watched us put the dummy down, all five of us at once, carefully, and she didn’t look away until we’d done it.

The others went off toward the showers. I didn’t. I took my mask off, and stood in front of her, and waited until the corporal had gone.

”Sergeant.”

”Forty-one.”

”What are they?”

She looked at me with her dark still eyes.

”Constructs,” she said. ”Mechanical. Built by the engineers.”

”Built to look like what?”

Sergeant Okafor didn’t say anything for a moment.

”Placeholders,” she said.

”Placeholders for what?”

”For whatever’s there.”

I looked at her. At the steel side of her face, and the other side.

”I looked inside one,” I said. ”The one Keep froze. While she was holding the ground.” I kept my voice very low. ”It’s steel, and rubber, and padding, and a motor. But the outside isn’t a machine’s outside. There are holes in the plates. Little ones. Along the sides. In rows. For breathing.” I paused. ”There are pits on its head. Where the eyes would be, if it had eyes. Lined with something soft. For feeling heat.” I paused again. ”None of it does anything. It’s a machine. It doesn’t breathe. It doesn’t need to feel heat. Somebody made a cast of something, Sergeant. Something real. And they made it exactly. Every hole. Every pit. Because they didn’t know which parts mattered.”

Sergeant Okafor looked at me for a long time.

”And the claws,” I said. ”They match the marks on the wall in the dome. Exactly. Four. The same distance apart.” I swallowed. ”Nobody paints marks like that from a picture they’ve made up.”

The lamp over the round door hummed.

”Go and breathe, forty-one,” said Sergeant Okafor quietly. ”You’ve been doing it for five people for an hour. Your nose is bleeding.”

I put my hand up. It was.

She turned to go. Then she stopped, with her back to me.

”I trained the first wave,” she said. ”Thirty-four of them. In this cave. On those fields.” She didn’t turn round. ”There was no sim, then. No round door. No constructs. The engineers built all of this afterward.” A pause. ”After.”

She walked away.

That night, in the reading room, I asked Luna about the war.

”The enemy,” I said. ”The ones in the reports. The ones that came in the ships. What did they look like?”

Luna looked up from book 84.

”Tall,” she said. ”Two arms. Two legs. Armored. Very fast. Some of the reports have drawings.” She looked at me for a long moment. ”Not like that.”

”Not like the constructs.”

”Nothing in eighty-four reports looks like those,” said Luna Windsor. ”Nothing on the northern front. Nothing on the eastern front. Nothing anywhere.” She closed the book. ”Whatever those are a cast of, it wasn’t in our war.”

The water in the mug on my side of the table had frozen solid. Neither of us mentioned it.

I opened notebook fifteen. My hand was shaking a little. It had been, since the sim. Holding five breaths at once for an hour does something to you.

Day 64. The sim. The air there: two-thirds the oxygen. Toby went gray in a minute. I breathed for five people for an hour. Nosebleed. Pressure very bad.

The hostiles came from under the mud. I couldn’t see them. Mud is fog to me past a meter. I can only change what I can see.

Keep froze the ground. Frozen ground can’t be dug.

And then, under that, slower:

The constructs have breathing holes. Heat pits. Claws that match the gouges in the first-wave dome. Somebody made a cast of something real.

Okafor says: placeholders.

Okafor trained thirty-four in the first wave. The sim was built after.

I looked at that for a long time.

Across the table, Luna Windsor read it upside down. She didn’t say anything. She turned to the next page of the cell biology book, to the chapter on lungs, and turned it round so it faced me.

”Read it,” she said. ”All of it. If that’s what the air is going to be like, you’ll need to know exactly how much a person can do without.” A pause. ”And exactly how much you can carry.”

I read it.

All of it.