Under the Same Sky

The evening was warm, and the market on the terraces below the Museum of Departures stayed open late.

Mara Venn did not climb the museum steps anymore. She sat at the bottom of them on a bench the curators had placed there for her years ago, unofficially, after she had told them she had been coming since before half of them were born. From the bench she could watch the city change color as the sun went down behind the western port. Freighters rose from the field on Vectorium drives that made almost no sound. When she was young, departures had shaken the windows.

Her granddaughter arrived late, as she always did on shift nights, in the gray coat of the colony’s surface defense service. Juno Venn was taller than her mother had ever been and wore her hair cut short enough to fit under a fire-control headset. She kissed the top of Mara’s head and sat down with two cups of tea from the stall that had been there since the Machine Crisis exhibit opened.

“You’re on tonight,” Mara said.

“Battery Three. Midnight to morning.” Juno shrugged. “Nothing ever happens at Battery Three. We sit in the hill and watch the grid do our job for us.”

“You say that as if it were a complaint.”

“Some nights it is.”

Mara looked up. The sky above Terran Reach was crowded and orderly: traffic lights in their lanes, the slow sparks of weather platforms, the faint pale arc where the orbital stations caught the last of the sun. When Juno was small, she had believed the stations were a kind of moon.

“Do you remember what you asked me in there,” Mara said, nodding at the museum, “the first time I brought you?”

“I asked if the machines wanted us dead.” Juno smiled into her cup. “You said it depended what we told them.”

“And what do we tell them now?”

“To keep us safe.”

“That is a very large instruction,” Mara said.

Juno turned the paper cup between her palms. “You were here when the first ships came back. When everyone started building the ring. Were people really that frightened?”

“Of course. We had pictures of ships we didn’t understand, and the Wayfarer crew came home believing they had been followed. People will build a great many things to keep a fear from coming true.”

“Is that why you never liked the grid?”

“I like that it lets you sleep. I don’t like that we’ve forgotten who is supposed to wake up when it decides something.”

Juno looked at her. Mara reached across the bench and covered her granddaughter’s hand with her own.

“If anything happens tonight, remember that the people under those shields are more than dots on your screen.”

“I know, Gran.”

“I know you do. Remember it anyway.”

Across the terrace, conversation slowed in the way it did when everyone received the same message at once. People looked down at their wrists and then, a moment later, up. A child pointed. Somewhere a vendor laughed nervously and then stopped laughing.

Juno’s earpiece chimed. She listened, and Mara watched her granddaughter’s face change from someone sitting on a bench with tea to someone who belonged to a hill full of missiles.

“Recall,” Juno said. “All batteries.”

“Is it a drill?”

“They don’t call a full recall for drills.” Juno stood. Then, because she was still twenty-eight and still Mara’s, she hesitated. “The public alert will say precaution. It will say stay near a shelter.”

“Then I’ll stay near a shelter.”

The city’s lights did not go out. That surprised Mara most, later. The shops stayed lit and the trams kept running, and above them all, from the hills around each of the four cities, the shield projectors woke one after another. The honeycomb rose over the sky in pale hexagons, faint as frost on glass, until the stars looked as though they were seen through a net.

The ring was far above those shields. The three batteries were lower, buried in the hills, positioned to catch anything that broke through. Mara knew this because Juno had explained it to her more than once, patiently, as if she were explaining a household appliance. She understood it differently now that her granddaughter was running toward one of them.

On every screen in the market, the same image appeared beside the alert: a heavy, angular silhouette that every child in Terran Reach could have drawn from memory.

People made the sound that crowds make when a story they grew up with turns out to be true.

“Go,” Mara said.

Juno went. Mara watched her coat disappear into the stream of people heading for trams and shelters. Then she turned, slowly, and looked up the museum steps at the great doors that had always known when visitors would approach.

They stood open. The building was dark inside except for one exhibit, lit for the night as it always was: the reproduction of the Wayfarer’s cockpit, its small screens showing the strangers’ first message on an endless loop.

Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds.