Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice,
INTRUDERS
The mass of a comet was pressed into a long dense needle. Dressed with carbon weaves and metametals, the needle showed nothing extraneous to the universe. The frigid black hull looked like space itself, and it carried nothing that could leak or glimmer or produce the tiniest electronic fart—a trillion tons of totipotent matter stripped of engines but charging ahead at nine percent light speed. No sun or known world would claim ownership. No analysis of its workings or past trajectory would mark any culpable builder. Great wealth and ferocious genius had been invested in a device that was nearly invisible, inert as a bullet, and flying by time, aimed at a forbidden, heavily protected region.
The yellow-white sun brightened while space grew increasingly dirty. Stray ions and every twist of dust was a hazard. The damage of the inevitable impacts could be ignored, but there would always be a flash of radiant light. A million hidden eyes lay before it, each linked to paranoid minds doing nothing but marking every unexpected event. Security networks were hunting for patterns, for random noise and vast conspiracies. This was why secrecy had to be maintained as long as possible. This was why the needle fell to thirty AU before the long stasis ended. A temporary mind was grown on the hull. Absorbed starlight powered thought and allowed a platoon of eyes to sprout. Thousands of worlds offered themselves. Most were barren, but the largest few bore atmospheres and rich climates. This was wilderness, and the wilderness was gorgeous. Several planets tempted the newborn pilot, but the primary target still had its charms—a radio-bright knob of water and oxygen, silicates and slow green life.
Final course corrections demanded to be made, and the terrific momentum had to be surrendered. To achieve both, the needle’s tail was quickly reconfigured, micron wires reaching out for thousands of miles before weaving an obedient smoke that took its first long bite of a solar wind.
That wind tasted very much like sugar.
The penguins were coming. With their looks and comical ways, Humboldt penguins meant lots of money for the Children’s Zoo, and that’s why a fancy exhibit had been built for them. People loved to stand in flocks, watching the comical nervous birds that looked like little people. But of course penguins were nothing like people, and while Simon Bloch figured he would like the birds well enough, he certainly wasn’t part of anybody’s flock.
Bloch was a stubborn, self-contained sixteen-year-old. Six foot five, thick-limbed and stronger than most grown men, he was a big slab of a boy with a slow unconcerned walk and a perpetually half-asleep face that despite appearances noticed quite a lot. Maybe he wasn’t genius-smart, but he was bright and studious enough to gain admission to the honors science program at the Zoo School. Teachers found him capable. His stubborn indifference made him seem mature. But there was a distinct, even unique quality: because of a quirk deep in the boy’s nature, he had never known fear.
Even as a baby, Bloch proved immune to loud noises and bad dreams. His older and decidedly normal brother later hammered him with stories about nocturnal demons and giant snakes that ate nothing but kindergarteners, yet those torments only fed a burning curiosity. As a seven-year-old, Bloch slipped out of the house at night, wandering alleys and wooded lots, hoping to come across the world’s last T. rex. At nine, he got on a bus and rode halfway to Seattle, wanting to chase down Bigfoot. He wasn’t testing his bravery. Bravery was what other people summoned when their mouths went dry and hearts pounded. What he wanted was to stare into the eyes of a monster, admiring its malicious, intoxicating power, and if possible, steal a little of that magic for himself.
Bloch wasn’t thinking about monsters. The first penguins would arrive tomorrow morning, and he was thinking how they were going to be greeted with a press conference and party for the zoo’s sugar daddies. Mr. Rightly had asked Bloch to stay late and help move furniture, and that’s why the boy was walking home later than usual. It was a warm November afternoon, bright despite the sun hanging low. Three hundred pounds of casual, unhurried muscle was headed east. Bloch was imagining penguins swimming in their new pool, and then a car horn intruded, screaming in the distance. And in the next second a father down the street began yelling at his kid, telling him to get the hell inside now. Neither noise seemed remarkable, but they shook Bloch out of his daydream.
Then a pair of cars shot past on Pender. Pender Boulevard was a block north, and the cars started fast and accelerated all the way down the long hill. They had to be doing seventy if not a flat-out eighty, and under the roar of wasted gas he heard the distinct double-tone announcing a text from Matt.
It was perfectly normal for Bloch’s soldier-brother to drop a few words on “the kid” before going to bed.
“So what the hell is it,” Bloch read.
“whats what,” he wrote back. But before he could send, a second cryptic message arrived from the world’s night side.
“that big and moving that fast shit glad it’s probably missing us aren’t you”
Bloch snorted and sent his two words.
The racing cars had disappeared down the road. The distant horn had stopped blaring and nobody was shouting at his kids. Yet nothing seemed normal now. Bloch felt it. Pender was hidden behind the houses, but as if on a signal, the traffic suddenly turned heavy. Drivers were doing fifty or sixty where forty was the limit, and the street sounded jammed. Bloch tried phoning a couple friends, except there was no getting through. So he tried his mother at work, but just when it seemed as if he had a connection, the line went dead.
Then the Matt-tones returned.
“a big-ass spaceship dropping toward us catching sun like a sail are you the hell watching?????”
Bloch tried pulling up the BBC science page. Nothing came fast and his phone’s battery was pretty much drained. He stood on a sidewalk only four blocks from home, buthe still had to cross Pender. And it sounded like NASCAR out there. Cars were braking, tires squealing. Suddenly a Mini came charging around the corner. Bloch saw spiked orange hair and a cigarette in one hand. The woman drove past him and turned into the next driveway, hitting the pavement hard enough to make sparks. Then she was parked and running up her porch steps, fighting with her keys to find the one that fit her lock.
“What’s happening?” Bloch called out.
She turned toward the voice and dropped the key ring, and stuffing the cigarette into her mouth, she kneeled and got lucky. Finding the key that she needed, she stood up and puffed, saying, “Aliens are coming. Big as the earth, their ship is, and it’s going to fucking hit us.”
“Hit us?”
“Hit the earth, yeah. In five minutes.”
On that note, the woman dove into her house, vanishing.
Perched on a nearby locust tree, a squirrel held its head cocked, one brown eye watching the very big boy.
“A starship,” Bloch said, laughing. “That’s news.”
Chirping in agreement, the squirrel climbed to its home of leaves.
An image had loaded on the phone’s little screen—black space surrounding a meaningless blur painted an arbitrary pink by the software. The tiny scroll at the bottom was running an update of events that only started half an hour ago. The starship was huge but quick, and astronomers only just noticed it. The ship seemed to weigh nothing. Sunlight and the solar wind had slowed it down to a thousand miles every second, which was a thousand times faster than a rifle slug, and a clock in the right corner was counting down to the impact. A little more than
