Space

Outer Defensive Line

T-Minus 3 days to Willis’s Impact

Brody had only become aware of land a few months ago. At first he had though of it as “the flat ocean,” because there was no going up and around, you were just stuck on the damn flat part, and he had hated it. Plus, that “air” stuff made his mouth and gills dry. Really, a lot of the time, Brody figured coming out of the ocean at all was a mistake. He should’ve just stayed around the reef, munching as he liked, following his gray, pointed snout to his next meal and slicing through the endless blue.

“Hey mate, you got any joints?” Cooper asked.

“Can you even smoke in that thing?” Brody asked Cooper. The shark’s very first, and best, friend floated in the void beside him. Earth was a blue marble far in the distance, a single droplet of glowing water against the ink of the endless black. The nearest objects they had for scale were one of the attack satellites and drone hives that old man with the machines had made; and the other was the asteroid.

The satellite was taller than most buildings Brody had seen during his brief trips to cities. It had a number of long tubes sticking out of it, all of them aimed at the asteroid. Galtero, the fella from Brazzy or somewhere Brody didn’t know, had said they were smaller cannons than the one on the moon, but still really powerful. The satellite was shaped like a giant cylinder, and was covered with six-sided panels that Brody had been told would open and unleash armies of metal men. The “Genrall” from another country——Chinya? Cheenah?——had filled it with robot soldiers that would back them up. And there were a dozen of the satellites or more all within the path of the asteroid. Brody saw their red lights blinking and their energy cannons glowing.

The only other thing to draw his eye was the asteroid itself. It also glowed, surrounded by a throbbing, pulsing red light shot through with veins of darkness that were somehow blacker than the space around it. It had changed while they had been talking to the TV man, the red glow had gotten brighter and bigger, and Galtero had cut the signal off, despite the asteroid still being hours and hours away.

“I can smoke fine. I just put the joint in one of the filters and heat it. Bingo, hotbox my helmet,” Cooper said. “And looking at that shit out there, I could really use something to take the edge off.”

Brody had experienced many emotions in his life as a shark, well before the menu ever hit him. A lot of excitement, frustration at prey swimming away, satisfaction at a full belly, curiosity. But as the undisputed king of his reef, he had never known fear. He had known some fish were not for eating. They smelled bad. The fish with the white and brown stripes and all the pointy fins had been a big no-no. But he just had to ignore them, not flee from them. He’d never even thought of retreating.

But now, as he floated in space and looked at the baleful red rock, he wanted only to run back to the blue marble at his back and immerse himself in the familiar and reassuring waves. Even with all that he had become, as he was now, the red rock made his rows of teeth chatter.

“Hey dickhead. You look like you’re gonna shit,” Cooper said. Brody frowned at him, a truly impressive and ferocious expression on the shark.

“I’m pissed because you’ve smoked our whole stash already,” Brody said. “And the PM said I can’t use my RAC on weed anymore. They’ll make me sit through one of those meeting things that you keep saying are important,” Brody said.

“Ah, fuck ‘em. But I know you’re holding. My scanner says so.”

“Prick,” Brody said and gave Cooper one of the three joints he had left. The human accepted it and placed the fat rolled up joint into a small compartment on the side of his helmet. Brody didn’t actually mind. Cooper had introduced him to so much, including the idea that you could insult people you liked if you liked them enough. He didn’t really understand it with his brain, but his new, more complex emotions seemed to grasp it.

Brody had gotten high with Cooper during his second night on land, and they’d spent the night eating steaks and drinking beer and smoking while they watched those moving picture things. Movies. And for the first time in his life, Brody had laughed. He’d liked laughing a lot, and he liked laughing with Cooper even more.

A lot of people had been scared of him at first, but not Coop, even after he’d tried to take a bite out of his leg. It had been an easy decision to give Cooper an expensive suit of mechanical armor when the aliens had arrived and given Brody his first taste of real fear. He’d wondered if that had been how all the fish he’d ever eaten had felt when he swam up on them.

But Cooper had made it not so bad.

So Brody found himself smiling his usual sharkish grin even as he flipped Cooper off while the human mooched his weed.

“Please tell me you two are paying attention to this and not just getting high again,” Galtero said. The other human flew up to them in his gigantic robot suit. It was almost the size of one of the satellites, and far more advanced than Cooper’s tiny man-sized robot suit. Still, Cooper's suit had been upgraded a lot, both by the purchases Brody had made from the RAC store and the old man, Gary.

“Uh, it looks more red?” Cooper said. “Relax Galt, it’s still like…fourteen hours away.”

“It does look more red,” Brody said. His eyes adjusted to the distance, growing slightly larger and taking in more light. A few moments ago, the asteroid had looked like just a big chunk of rock with an ominous red glow. Now, however, it looked…

It looked sort of like his mouth. The huge rock had “opened” or split along its horizontal axis and spread open. Spikes of rocks miles long stretched up and down like fangs. And behind them lurked something worse than the red light.

A hole.

Not just a hole, no mere absence of matter.

It wasn’t just a hole in the rock, it was a hole in…

Brody struggled to find the word. His English skill was only a 4, boosted to a 5 thanks to Cooper’s lessons (most of which involved a lot of cursing and references to sex), and his vocabulary was still pretty limited.

“What the hell is that?” Brody asked. “Some kinda hole in…stuff.”

“I don’t know. My scanners are just showing an absence of everything. It might as well be a hole in reality,” Galtero said.

“Fuckin’ hell. It couldn’t just be a big fuck-off rock? That wasn’t bad enough? It’s gotta be a giant asteroid mouth with a demon glory hole in it?” Cooper asked.

“What’s a ‘glory hole’?” Galtero asked. “My English is not so good with the idioms.”

“That’s the fun-time thing in the bathroom, right, Coop?” Brody asked.

“Hah! Yeah,” Cooper said.

“I don’t want to know anymore,” Galtero said. “I’m calling some of the hosts back on Earth. Gary, Mona, Li Qiu, Samaira, they need to be warned.”

“Yeah, that shit’s pretty weird,” Cooper said, the humor leaking out of his voice as the mechanical eyes of his suit zoomed in on the distant asteroid.

“Something’s wrong,” Galtero said. “Brody, can you try calling them?”

“Yeah, I s’pose,” Brody said and brought up his comms window. He clicked on Pan first. The pangolin was a bit of a wimp, but Brody always found himself experiencing a new emotion when he was around the little guy. His English skill told him that emotion was “protectiveness,” and Cooper had confirmed it. The pangolin was the only other animal-turned-host aside from him, and Cooper had told him another word for that: "Camaraderie."

His menu beeped, then displayed a glowing blue message that read “ERROR.”

“Shit, something’s wrong here too,” Brody said. He looked away, toward the asteroid and its red light. His instincts, honed over millions of years, told him the asteroid was to blame. Something about that red light and the hole in space within the asteroid were responsible.

“Okay. Cooper, fly into the satellite and use the normal communications array to contact Gary. Tell him what’s going on and…oh no,” Galtero said.

“What?” Brody said.

“It’s speeding up. I’ve been tracking it for hours and its speed just jumped. It’ll be here in…eight hours,” Galtero said. “Maybe less if it keeps accelerating.”

“I’m gonna call the old man. Keep your shit on a swivel fish face!” Cooper called over the communication line as he flew toward the satellite. Brody growled to himself as he turned to face the asteroid, gaping like the maw of the greatest shark ever, and gaining on them by the second.