It was, a corner of his mind thought, a very woolly ride.
He flew-ran down the hill, into the village, unstoppable, unable to offer any resistence.
He flashed on Jobs, saw a blur that might have been Violet Blake, blew past, wind rushing in his ears. If he hit anything at this speed he’d crush the last of his natural bones.
All at once the hole was there, right in front of him, right below him, down he went, down into a field
of black, dotted with stars. It was a whirlpool, a sink drain, a vacuum hose, sucking him out into space.
Space?
Down and through and all at once Mo’Steel was sucking on nothingness. His skin was freezing cold. He knew he’d be dead in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
He tumbled, weightless, twisted, saw forty, fifty strange, hovering creatures, liquid blue-steel, floating in space below the hole.
He turned, unable to control anything, nothing to touch, twirled, and into his field of vision rose an object so massive, so vast it seemed as big as a planet. It was a maze of protrusions, towers, bubbles, clefts, doughnuts, cubes, and pyramids.
It extended far beyond his field of vision in every direction. And it was beautiful.
Some surfaces were blazing bright as though filled with the light of a sun shining through green or red or yellow glass. Other parts were mirrored, showing nothing but distorted, twisted reflections of the stars. There were transparencies, opacities, glowing milky translucences. There were long streams of living light that bounced and curved and danced. There were shadows so deep they seemed to swallow light.
It was impossible to take in. He was an ant clinging to the undercarriage of a car, too tiny and insignificant even to be able to imagine the size and shape and purpose of the vast object above him.
Mo’Steel wondered if he was already dead. Wondered if his mind was already gone.
Then pain reminded him that he still lived. His frostbitten flesh slammed into something hard and unyielding.
He grabbed, reflex taking over. He grabbed and his hands slipped, numb, insensate fingers clawed at a surface that allowed no purchase. But he could wrap his arms around it. He wrapped his arms and held on, with his head swimming, lungs starving, draining the last molecules of oxygen into his heart.
He held on to the creature, the smooth, glossy, liquid-metal creature, as it fired engines within its hind legs and zoomed up toward the ragged hole in the bottom of the ship.
Mo’Steel saw the others, a cluster, rising all together with what seemed grim determination, up through the hole into the village, up through the hole in the hill. Farther down the ship, a quarter mile away, a second band of the creatures. More beyond that. At least four, five separate assaults, all taking place at once.
Mo’Steel held on with the last of his strength. Up
and up, up through the hole. Up toward a pale-blue, Brueghel sky.
Then they were through and Mo’Steel could feel the warmth, not warm but warmer than empty space. But still no air. Still his lungs seized and his diaphragm convulsed.
As if it had belatedly discovered his presence, the creature shook him off. Mo’Steel was ten, fifteen feet above “ground level” when he lost his grip.
He fell. He had weight again. He fell back toward space. Back to the hole. Back down/up into the stars.
He reached feebly, woozy, half-blind, trying to grab the lip of the hole. But there was no way, too far, emptiness beneath him.
And all at once a square of steel appeared.
Mo’Steel landed hard. His knees crumpled. He fell facedown, slid, jerked the wrong way, confused, and now his legs were dangling out into empty space.
Squares. Appearing all around. Ten-by-ten-foot squares, running around the hole, racing in a circle, filling in the gap, appearing out of nowhere, simply appearing. Like dominoes, they rippled. Coming toward him!
He yanked his legs up and a second later rested them on a solid surface.
Steel? Hard, anyway. The hole was closing, healing itself.
He was thinking. Yes. Breathing! Air, thin, but there. Thin better than nothing, a lot better. He had to expand his lungs to the max with every intake, gasping like a fish on land, but awareness was returning, oxygen was in his blood once more.
With an audible snap the hole was closed.
And now a wall of dirt was appearing, materializing. Mo’Steel was lying in a hole, facedown on steel, and the soil beneath the village was being replaced. It was like a wave rushing toward him, a ten-foot tsunami of dirt.
He got to his feet, ran straight toward the advancing wall, scrambled up, riding the wave of dirt like a surfer. He rose on the swell, windmilling his arms, kicking frantically with his feet.
And then, it was over. He was on his knees behind a rough-hewn stable. Two peasant women were doing something with a large copper pot.
He was gasping, sick, stomach convulsing, retching dry heaves, and still so cold his body was shaking like he had malaria. There was blood draining from his ears, blood seeping from his nose and eyes.
“Okay,” Mo’Steel said, “that was enough of a rush. Even for me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“WELL, SOMEWHERE THERE’S A BRIDGE.”
Jobs watched as the blue-black creatures rose up through the hole in the village. Up through the hole in the hill above.
Machines or creatures or something in between, it was impossible to tell. They were quadrupeds, four sturdy legs supporting a high-arched body. They reminded him of Halloween cats, backs high. A head was carried forward, like any grazing animal might, but from the sides of the head grew two tentacles. They waved like snakes, like guardians of the face.
They were armored, metallic, blued steel that moved like plastic. Or perhaps the seeming armor was actually the creature.
The rear legs fired short bursts, like maneuvering rockets. They flew but not fast, not like missiles
or even like jets. They lumbered. Like helicopters perhaps. Clumsy.
Up through the two holes they came, dozens of them. And Jobs thought he saw more in the far distance, behind the Tower of Babel.
They rose above the landscape, a blurry nightmare to Jobs’s oxygen-deprived brain.
Then, air. A little at first, more. His lungs drew greedily. His head began to clear.
The hole was being filled. Squares of steel were appearing, plate against plate, rimming the hole, healing the scar, shutting out space. The steel plates simply materialized, entire, one after another. Like something out of a cartoon.
Now dirt appeared, eight or ten feet of it, covering the plates. Upon the dirt, right behind its advance edge, the buildings of the Brueghel village were once again taking shape.
The hole was healing. But the quadruped aliens had made it through.
They assembled in the air. Jobs counted. Hard to be sure, but he thought there were thirty-six. Thirty or forty, any way.
They reminded Jobs of his own people, of the Wakers. They seemed hesitant, hovering, unsure.
“Mo! Miss Blake!” Jobs yelled. The risk seemed
acceptable: The aliens were ignoring the peasants that reappeared to populate the village.
“Olga? I mean, Ms. Gonzalez?” Jobs called. No answer. Oh, god, had they all been pulled out into space? What about the others, the main group? What about Edward?
He yelled again. No answer. He got to his feet and scanned in every direction.
Then he spotted Mo’Steel rounding a stable and felt a flood of relief. His friend was walking though the reconstituted village, carrying half a dozen pies.
“Mo! Over here!”
Mo’Steel came at a run, pausing only to glance up repeatedly at the hovering armada of armored aliens.
“Is my mom with you?” Mo’Steel demanded.
“I don’t know where she is, Mo. Or Miss Blake, either,” Jobs said.
“This ain’t a planet, Duck,” Mo’Steel said.
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“This is a ship. We’re inside some whompin’ big ship.”
“Yeah. And those guys up there just boarded it forcibly.” He looked closely at his friend.
He and Mo’Steel watched the aliens.
“I was outside, ’migo. Caught a ride back inside
with one of those Blue Meanies. You should see this ship, Jobs. God, I hope my mom’s okay.”
The more Jobs watched, the more he became convinced that the Blue Meanies were space suits of a sort, small, individualized spacecraft almost. It was in the way they moved: not with the ease of a biological creature or with the speed and assurance of a sophisticated robot. They were clumsy, uncertain. Creatures within machines.
The hole was completely repaired. The village was back. The wall Jobs was on rebuilt itself, like a video on rewind. Bricks appeared, piled one atop another. He jumped to the ground and winced at the pain in his back.
Mo’Steel yelled, “Mom! Mom! Can you hear me?”
There came an answer. “Over here. In the barn.”
They found her with Violet Blake and Billy, all in the darkness of what might have been a barn but for the absence of animals, or even animal smells.
“Everyone okay?” Jobs asked.
“What about those creatures out there?” Olga asked, ignoring Jobs’s query and hugging her son.
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “They don’t seem to care about us.”
“This is not a planet,” Violet Blake said. “I was looking at space out there. Stars. We’re in space.”
“Seems like,” Jobs said. He was distracted. Of course it was a ship, not a planet. Why hadn’t he figured it out before? That’s why the shuttle showed no reentry scarring. That’s why the solar sails hadn’t burned away. They hadn’t landed, they’d been picked up by a ship that could simply match velocity.
It was the scale that had thrown him off. It was impossible to conceive of a ship vast enough to contain a tenth of what they’d already seen.
“Hey, you can eat these,” Mo’Steel announced. He held out a pie for Jobs.
“What’s it taste like?”
“Like you care? You live on jerky and chips. Tastes like . . . I don’t know, maybe some kind of meat.”
Jobs hesitated, but there was no point resisting. He had to eat. He took a tentative bite. “Tastes like . . . I don’t know. Like chicken?”
“That’s original,” Violet said. She took a pie for herself. “It does taste like chicken. Maybe it is.”
Jobs edged back to the door and peeked outside. He expected to see the aliens still hovering. They were, but now they had formed up into a V. Like geese heading south.
“They look like they’re getting ready to leave,” Mo’Steel observed.
“Hard to tell. They aren’t exactly human.”
The “V” formation hovered and rotated slowly counterclockwise. Then, with sudden, shockingly smooth speed, they jerked back clockwise.
They fired their jets and the entire formation shot ahead.
The lead alien ran smack into a steel plate that appeared in the air before him. Jobs could hear the ringing of metal on metal. The alien crumpled and fell.
They were all moving now and as each advanced, a steel square appeared to block him. But now the clumsy moves were abandoned. The aliens shot forward and up and around, dodging, zooming, accelerating, and decelerating. Some dropped down to just above ground level and blew between buildings, smacking carelessly into peasants.
“It was a ruse!” Jobs said. “They were playing dead! Hiding their speed. They were hiding their capabilities, playing lame.”
It was a dogfight, a melee. The plates materialized, floating steel walls. The Blue Meanies evaded them.
The plates caught many. Many crumpled and fell to the ground.
But others escaped.
As Jobs and the others watched, a dozen or
more of the blue-steel space suits burned jets and disappeared beyond the Tower of Babel.
“I wonder where they’re going?” Olga mused.
“To the bridge,” Jobs said.
“The what? What bridge?”
Jobs watched them disappear from sight. Their flight was no longer obstructed. The defenses of the ship had either been exhausted, or the ship had simply decided to let the Blue Meanies pass.
“This is a ship,” Jobs said. “We didn’t land, we were picked up. We were picked up, we were attacked, eight of us were kidnapped. We’re separated from the others. Now this. Well, somewhere there’s a bridge, or the equivalent.” He nodded as if to himself, accepting his own analysis. “Someone or something flies this ship. Someone or something’s got an agenda. Someone or something is in charge. That’s where those Blue Meanies are going. And I’ll tell you what else: It’s where we better be going, too.”
It was a long speech for Jobs and he felt a little embarrassed. He was going to ask if anyone else had a different opinion, but Mo’Steel slapped him on the back and grinned.