All the Birds in the Sky

Laurence came back. “That was Isobel,” he said. “I don’t quite know how to tell you this.”

The earthquake struck while Laurence was leaning over to put his phone down, so he pitched forward and clocked his head against Isobel’s steel coffee table, sending blood out of a gash in his forehead and nearly knocking him out cold. The room shook hard enough to send books and knickknacks raining down onto Patricia, and the television full of wartime scenes slipped off its moorings, falling on its side. Patricia sat, unshakable, as everything collapsed around her.

33

HERE’S WHAT ISOBEL said to Laurence, just before the earthquake hit: “This isn’t about revenge. You know that. Our people haven’t spent the past few months cooped up in Seadonia, dealing with scabies and bedbugs in close quarters, obsessing about mere payback. But we needed to find a way to move forward, after Denver. Because rebuilding the wormhole machine from scratch would take years, and we can’t risk having those people come back and destroy it again. We could try and set up better defenses, but we didn’t see them coming last time and we can’t guarantee we’ll see them next time. So we have no choice but to take preemptive action.”

“What have you done?” Laurence pressed the phone against the hinge of his jaw until it throbbed. “Isobel, what have you done?”

“We built the ultimate machine,” she was saying. “Tanaa, you know what a miracle worker she is, she did most of the hard part. It’s called the Total Destruction Solution, and it’s amazing.”

Isobel geeked out about the design challenges of creating the T.D.S.: They needed to cram as much armament as possible into the main chassis, without creating something too top-heavy. They wanted something amphibious and all-terrain, with omnidirectional movement and the ability to take out multiple targets at once. Like every designer of cool hardware, Tanaa wound up reaching for shapes from nature: the segmented bodies of the major arthropods, the shock-absorbing properties of a hedgehog’s quills, the stabilizing tail, the six insectoid legs, the multi-sectioned carapace, and so on. The cockpit was spacious enough for two people, with manual controls that were redundant so long as you had someone connected to the brain/computer interface. (Milton had gotten the laparoscopic operation not long earlier.) The result was perhaps a bit busy, but it moved with a sleekness, and when it came time to open up with the five SAMs, the seven industrial lasers, the front and rear napalm launchers — and the crown jewel, the antigravity cannon — the T.D.S. would dance.

“But you don’t even know who you’re dealing with.” Laurence looked into the foamy grounds in the French press on Isobel’s kitchen counter.

“We know more than you think,” Isobel said, with great heaviness. “We know they have a network, with a number of clandestine facilities around the world, including a hostel in Portland, a ballroom-dancing school in Minneapolis, and a bookstore and absinthe bar here in San Francisco. Plus a training facility which they call The Maze, which has a hidden entrance in the Pyrenees. That one, The Maze, appears to be too heavily protected for a conventional assault — but then, that’s why they make bunker busters. It’s today. It’s now. We’re hitting all of the targets simultaneously, before they know what’s happening.”

“Isobel, don’t. Don’t do this. Call it off, please. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m in the cockpit of the Total Destruction Solution right now, with Milton,” Isobel said. “On Mission Street, a block away from that bookstore place. I waited until the last minute to call you, because I didn’t want you to interfere.”

In the background, Laurence could hear Milton saying something to Isobel, plus the unmistakable sound of “Terraplane Blues,” blasting over the speakers in the T.D.S. cockpit.

“You can’t do this,” Laurence said. “You’ll just—”

“We’re aware that you were dating one of the Denver Five,” Isobel said. “We identified your girlfriend in surveillance footage from a gas station in Utah, where they stopped to refuel. I tried to keep you out of this, but by now everybody knows you’ve been compromised. So please, stay away. If you show up here, I can’t guarantee you won’t be treated like an enemy combatant.”

“Isobel, please listen.” But she had already hung up.

* * *

LAURENCE LAY ON the floor groaning, blood gushing from his forehead where he’d thwacked it on Isobel’s coffee table. Patricia squatted over him and licked his wound in one quick motion, apologizing for doing this the quick way rather than the classy way.