“Come on,” Nikka said, ever the efficient, careful worker. “Let’s get to shelter.”

“Comin’, luv,” Nigel said in a parody of a British accent.

He felt oddly elated. Emotional currents moved in him.

He watched the crews laboring on the plain, beneath a black sky. For an instant he tried to see them as the Watcher would: Bags of ropy guts, skin shiny with grease, food stuck between their teeth, scaly with constantly decaying cells that fell from them as they walked, moving garbage, yellow fat caught between brittle white bones, stringy muscles clenching and stretching to move a cage of calcium rods around, oozing and stinking and—

He shook himself. The machine cultures had been in the galaxy a long time, since the first inhabited world committed nuclear suicide. They were an accidental fact of the universe, arising from the inappropriate response of the organic beings. But that did not mean they would reign supreme, that their vision was any more true than his own oblique perspective.

Earth needs all the information it can get

With nine years’ time delay?

You heard that message they picked up from the Pacific. People out there afloat, workin’ with the Skimmers, talkin’ to ’em, waitin’ for those gray amphibious things to come up to the surface after they landed—

He’s right, we got-to get information, figure out what’s goin’ on, how these Watchers work, send it Earthside to help them

Damn right Ted we got to

Now listen, I’m as brassed off as any of you at all this delay but believe me I want us to have a full consensus here

What the hell you saying?

You don’t act, Ted, we can replace you last, real fast—

Plenty of people can step right in, take over

Sure, listen, it could be that Watcher hasn’t gotten the whole story from Earthside yet, from those gray ships, they must be pretty damn busy

That Watcher’s old, slow

We hit it now maybe take it by surprise—

Enough of your waffling Ted

Yeah you got the sense of the meeting

You do something and fast or we vote you out, Ted

Simple as that

I understand your concern and if you’ll merely let me think

I’m calling the question Mr. Chairman

No wait let me ask—Bob?

Uh, yes, Ted?

Are we cleared?

All revved

All right then I’m ordering Propulsion to bring the ramscoop up to ignition

That’s great!

I take it I have the approval of you all? And does anybody have anything further to add?

All primed Ted

Team here is ready

Nigel shook himself. Ted has used the consensus for so long, and now it was using him.

“Don’t you think we should get inside?” Nikka asked.

“That air bubble won’t be any protection. Quite the reverse, if you shed your helmet.”

Carlos called, “Look! They’re turning Lancer.” Then plaintively, “They’re not going to evacuate first.”

“The Watcher is active. It might skrag our shuttle,” Nigel said, looking at Carlos.

The man was making an effort to be more authoritative now, speaking more deeply and using more abrupt phrases. Still, it was unconvincing. Inappropriate response. Yes, that was the nub of it, the wrong answer to one of the inherent troubles of organic life. The machines had no need of sex; they could reproduce through a template. And they could alter themselves at will, a form of voluntary evolution.

Organic beings were forever split into the efficient yet isolating bonds of two sexes, two views of the world, two dynamics that only partially overlapped, two beings who desired the other but could never wholly be the other, no matter how surgery or simulations promised a fleeting false liberation from the problem of forever being who you truly were, separate and unlike and yearning in the darkness you made for yourself.

Overhead in the hard night, Lancer moved.

It turned on its axis and brought the exhaust of the ramscoop to bear on the Watcher. Men and women stood on the barren plain and watched the silvery dot that was their home. Lancer pulsed with fresh energy. The magnetic fields gathered, driven by the awakened fluxlife.

“Hope they burn the damn thing to a cinder,” Carlos said fiercely.

“Nigel, I don’t like this,” Nikka whispered.

Nigel said laconically, “Listen. They’re calling it an ‘exploratory attack.’”

“It’s revenge,” Nikka said.

“Don’t be such a coward,” Carlos said roughly. “It’s about time somebody did something.”

Nigel’s eyebrows arched like iron-gray caterpillars. “Indeed. But not this.”

Crusted orange lights moved on the Watcher. Blue bands crisscrossed it. A halo of darting burnt-yellow specks appeared around Lancer as the drive engaged. The ramscoop required a mix of deuterium and other isotopes to begin the fire.

Carlos began, “I bet it’s never seen a fusion drive before, or it’d be more—” and the sky exploded.

A gout of flame curled out of Lancer’s exhaust. The fusion start-up belched ionized plasma in a roaring streak that slammed into the Watcher.

“Jesus!” Carlos cried. “That’ll fry it for sure.”

Soundless, the stream poured forth, spattering streamers of blue and gold and crimson on the Watcher’s gray stone and tarnished metal.

“This is mere show,” Nigel said. Arcing plasma lit the plain around them, throwing grotesque shadows. “The high-energy gamma rays are doing the real damage.”

“How long can it …?” Nikka said.

“Lancer can keep this up for hours, but—ah, see, it’s altering orbit from the reaction already.”

“Damn thing’ll be fried good by—”

Movement from the Watcher.

A thin spout of crisp orange flame shot forward, spanning the distance to Lancer so quickly it appeared instantly as a bar of light between the two. It wrapped around the flux lines of the magnetic throat and exhaust, licking and eating at the ship, curling down the long magnetic tunnels, spewing into the drive tubes, burning everywhere, gnawing at the delicate electronics and fluxlife and humans inside.

Lancer’s drive sputtered. Died. The Watcher’s orange flame went on and on in a deepening, deadening silence, cutting and searing and boiling.

A low moan came over the group comm line. Nigel stood rigid, his chest locked, seeking a purchase on this.

We should have called it Pox, he thought. He looked around at the blind craters: blinkless sockets.

Above, a spot on the Watcher exploded in a shower of crimson and violet. Silent smoke and debris spread a gray fog. “Something in the gamma-ray beam touched off a delayed reaction,” Nigel murmured.

—and he felt himself again, after so many years, living in a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water pouring through, the quality that the Marginis aliens had tried to bring to humans and that Nigel had gotten a fragment of—they had come bearing enlightenment, the one wedding to the world that the machines lacked, sought, and knew only as a sucking vacancy.

Nigel saw in an instant, as the flame from the Watcher cooled, that he had lost it years ago—become tied to events by ropes of care which sank him, tugging him below the waves—and now had found it again, falling down there in that great perpetual night beneath his feet, found it by finally letting go. He stood empty now, his past pilfered from him, free of the baggage of age and death and having to be Walmsley’s Fool, free again to measure each moment by what it was, let’s all slide out of here one of these nights

Casualties! God so many of them look at those indicators

What happened what went wrong