It’s a nice office. Clean. No plywood walls. No makeshift shelves for the inevitable binders. A real desk. Two metal chairs in front of the desk, an actual upholstered chair behind, in which the man dressed in khaki, not a uniform, sits. This is the Major’s office, but the man behind the desk isn’t the Major. Just another contractor.

The Lieutenant shifts on his feet slightly. The man behind the desk keeps reading the plastic-encased report in front of him. He taps at something with his pen, pauses, jots down a few words in the margin. The Lieutenant keeps his eyes on the wall behind the man. He could bore a hole in the wall with his stare. He concentrates on breathing evenly. Finally the man grunts to himself, looks up.

“Be seated.”

The Lieutenant sits. The man looks at him with a level gaze.

“Was it eight or nine?”

The Lieutenant clears his throat, keeps from fidgeting, looks right at the man, returns his gaze.

“You’re asking about the casualties, sir?”

The man nods, expressionless.

“We were told the village was friendly, sir. We didn’t expect… that is, we…”

He can’t keep looking at the expressionless eyes, raises his head slightly, shifts his sight to a point just above the man’s head.

“It was nine, sir.”

The man nods. Sighs.

“How many of ours?”

The Lieutenant suddenly notices his sight is growing narrower. Literal tunnel vision. It hadn’t been like that in the field, coming up to the village. Never. Never when he was out in the field. Hadn’t been like that at all. Then, always, his senses were sharp, his hearing acute, even his sense of smell heightened, tracking the shifts of charcoal, goat and the muskiness of human habitation in the slight wind. Then, he always felt so alive.

“We lost two, sir. Two wounded.”

The man nods again, toys with the cord of the field phone on his desk.

“I’ve read the report multiple times. And from what I understand, the villagers did not start the shooting. That correct?”

“Yes, sir. However…” A brief sudden memory, like a shaft of light breaking through cloudy skies. Mike looking at him with confusion as he held the stump of his hand, the afternoon quiet destroyed by the roiling clouds of smoke and dust, the concussion lingering like a poisonous aftertaste.

He continues. “However, we got an IED. That started the entire… situation. I believe there was an inadvertent discharge of one firearm as a result, which put the entire squad on edge…”

He stops. The villager had run right at Phil, yelling something. And then he wasn’t running anymore. And then the dirt and dust turned that dark brown underneath his body as the life poured out. And then the little kid had come out of nowhere. And then someone, behind him, he wasn’t sure, had fired. And then, and then…

And then the rest of it.

The man behind the desk finally looks away. He seems tired. Thinks for a moment.

“It’s alright, lieutenant. Alright.” He pulls out a yellow pad from a drawer, writes something on it. Looks up.

“We used to have a saying. We destroyed the village in order to save it.” The man pauses, stares hard, right into the Lieutenant’s eyes. “We don’t do that anymore. It didn’t work out too well.”

The Lieutenant forces himself to return the man’s gaze. He doesn’t care what will happen to him, but he feels ashamed. He let them down, he now knows. All the guys. Dishonorable discharges at the least. Maybe worse. And maybe he does feel bad for himself, too. Why was the bomb there? It was supposed to be a friendly village. Someone should have told him.

The man writes on the yellow pad, continues, “I’m recommending a transfer. Effective immediately.”

The lieutenant stares. He can’t believe what he’s hearing.

“That’s… that’s it?”

The man stops his notations on the pad. Looks up.

“Of course not. That’s just the beginning. There’ll be an inquiry. How it ends up…” the man shrugs his shoulders. The lieutenant sits. He waits. And then he sees another, the third one. Clutching at his shoulder, crying something. And then the fourth. A woman, he believes, half-glimpsed looking out a window before falling away into the interior gloom with a confused expression, time slowing the droplets in the air. And then…

“You hear me Lieutenant?” The Lieutenant stares at the man behind the desk. He seems to expect a response. The Lieutenant strives to remember a response. There’s something he should say.

“Someone should have told me, sir. We expected a friendly village.”

The man behind the desk looks at him for the first time with a hint of humanity, nods, as if to himself. The Lieutenant looks back at him, and can’t understand. It wasn’t his fault, after all. They’d been told the village was friendly. How could it be his fault? This report. An inquiry.

Finally the man looks away, sighs. “Well, it isn’t friendly anymore. Dismissed, lieutenant.”

The Lieutenant gets up, salutes, turns. He walks out of the office, down the hallway, out the door. The late afternoon sun slants against his eyes. He takes a deep gulp of air. The clear blue sky looks dark to him, and there is no scent on the breeze. He doesn’t think of the villagers.

For now.

I was worried when the wing fell off. Generally it’s not something you want to see happen to an airplane.

Especially when it’s in the air.

Then the engine cut out, but I was having a hard enough time just getting my vision to align with the spinning to pay much attention to it. Something about the world going round every two seconds takes a bit of getting used to. I started reaching for the emergency door handle, to pop it completely off the airframe so I could get out from the machine. The machine that was starting to shed pieces of fabric from where the wing had been attached to the fuselage, wind roar adding to the general feeling dawning on me that this flight wasn’t going particularly well.

That’s when I first smelled some smoke.

The door wasn’t really popping off into the slipstream despite my having pulled the emergency handle off in my hand. Instead, the strut that had before been mated to the now-gone wing had bounced back from that breakup and had speared the door through the window, preventing it from flying off like it was supposed to and for all I knew entreating it to never leave. The door seemed of two minds, alternately slamming against the fuselage like a kettle drum gone berserk and then flipping off on its strut-hinge and seeming, but not quite, to fly off like it was supposed to.

My brain was doing that time-slowed-down thing you sometimes read about, and I pondered the fact that I smelled smoke, eventually (Years or seconds later) guessing the wing had torn a couple fuel lines in its original quest for freedom, which is why the engine had quit and also where the smell of smoke was coming from.

Meanwhile, my dizzy eyes were noting with a weird calm that I’d lost a thousand feet already and the world kaleidoscoping in front of me was now just three thousand feet or so below. Reaching to my belt I undid the first set of straps to the beat of the door banging again, and then the confusing, rushing, whistling roar of wind as the door finally decided that mating with the strut was not the basis for a healthy long-term relationship and finally flew off on its own. Free to pursue a life of religious fulfillment, I guess.

For some reason I still couldn’t get out of the seat, and it took the world doing a couple turns before I remembered that this, like all aerobatic airplanes, had two seatbelts. My brain wasn’t apparently the steel-jaw, fighter pilot, always prepared, master of every situation I sometimes imagined it to be. I eventually grabbed at the second seatbelt latch, the joystick flipping around the cockpit making it a not-quite-graceful exercise, and finally levered myself out of the airplane and into the sky.

Spreading out my arms and legs, I finally stopped spinning and got some sort of sense of direction again. I saw the one winged Decathlon making some aerobatic maneuvers I’d never even contemplated trying out of the corner of my eye. The Earth was below. Funny, but I’d never skydived before. It felt odd. The wind tore at my eyes, so I wasn’t really in the mood for enjoying the magic of airplane-less flight in any case, and I reached for the chute release and pulled it in one motion.

And suddenly I wasn’t rushing through the air at 100 miles an hour, but floating down at 20 or so. The world had a horizon again. My eyes worked again (After blinking a bit). I looked up and to my left and saw the Decath doing its impossible maneuvers on its own and passing me a couple hundred yards away. I didn’t look away until it hit the ground, suddenly just a big cloud of dust and dirt that settled quickly to show a jumble of steel tubes and fabric. Kind of like a modern art installation. Made by a sociopath with a thing against aviation.

Landing the chute winded me, but after a minute or so I could stand. Legs working, arms working, mind more or less working. I got out of the chute harness and ambled in the direction of the aircraft remains. Had some silly idea I had to secure the airplane’s logbook and documents.

I guess it was shock. I didn’t remember sitting down on the ground, or tripping and falling, or anything, but there I was, flat on my back, coming too as the sun was setting and bathing the horizon in a golden glow. Hours must have passed. I rubbed my face, squinted a bit. Where the airplane had been was only charred steel now, the fabric having all burnt off. Good thing this was desert shrub country. It’d suck to parachute safely out, then be burned to death while unconscious. I vaguely remembered a road that led to the interstate some miles to the South. I got up, looked again at the sun going down so I’d know which way was West, turned to the South and started walking.

And let me tell you, I never thought the world could ever be as beautiful as it looked at that moment.

I read the note. Something, something, something else. Didn’t mean much to me. I looked at Mr. Herrmann. The blood around his head was congealing. If there were any flies in the apartment they’d be here soon enough. Somewhere outside on the drowsy street a car door shut, then after a moment, the sounds of leisurely acceleration.

I stared out the window. Dusty. The sun slanted through well enough, but streaks on the pane made the light come through in rays. I looked around the apartment. Not much there. A sofa, TV, small table with scraps from yesterday’s dinner.

This note, though.

What to do.

The interior of the bar was cool and welcoming like a candle-lit cave. Joey was sitting at his usual place, two stools down from the end. I nodded at the bartender, took a seat next to Joey.

“Done?” he said, not looking away from the television showing some young athletes giving it the old college try. The ones in blue seemed to be doing better than the ones in red. I yawned, nodded instead of saying anything. The note was still bothering me. The bartender magically materialized a beer in front of me, then went back to polishing glasses at the other end of the bar and looking out the window at the world passing by.

“Don’t just nod, dammit. Say yes.” Joey muttered as if talking to himself. I glanced at him. What to do about the note. I tapped him on the arm so he’d look at me, then I slowly and carefully nodded. Waited a beat.

“Sure thing.” I said.

He looked relieved. Didn’t blame him. Having an axe poised over your neck suddenly go away tends to do that to a person. His fingers had been tapping a coda on the bar, and suddenly they stopped. He seemed to straighten up, took a long swig from his glass. I looked at him thoughtfully. There was nothing there except relief, I was sure of it. And then I knew what to do about the note.

I always liked the café San Marcos. The owner was from the old country, meaning a new country settled by old people, and it felt like a small trip every time I walked in. Not in my neighborhood, but sometimes you need to get away somehow. I nodded at the cute barista and wandered off to a table in the corner tucked away and private. I had the paper with me. Nothing like ink on dead trees and a cup to sip and let the late morning float away.

It was on the front page. Local politician, blah blah, accusations and investigations, blah, blah, sudden reveal by the DA of new evidence, some kind of complicated kickback scheme mixed in, like all good scandals, with more than a whiff of sexual escapades. Some intimations of gangland connections. I had to double-check the sentence, but yes, apparently reporters still used that word. “Gangland”. Huh.

I thought back to the note. The girlish handwriting, the address that didn’t say much to me but was where the deed or deeds had taken place. Guess the DA wanted to make his name, needed one little push and that had been it. Joey would have it tough now, I mused. But you make your own bed.

White.

And above, the looming disc of Jupiter, blotting out the horizon.

Nina looked out over the ice. Inside her helmet, the hum of life support, her own breathing. She took another step, feeling weirdly buoyant without the artificial gravity of the ship, its habitat modules spinning at precisely 8.3241 rpm somewhere behind her.

She took another step. Ice, and there, in front, maybe twenty meters or so, the rectangular shape of the remote vehicle and next to it the fallen, stiff, figure of Martin. His helmet lay a few steps away from where he’d crumpled. Even from behind, his head, exposed, had taken on the weird blueish tint of human flesh exposed to Europa’s nearly-nonexistent atmosphere.

Her legs took her forward as if in a trance. She wasn’t crying, but inside felt an immense sadness that she was paradoxically disconnected from. As if looking through a window at a Winter’s day, the frosted panes somehow keeping her distanced from the world outside.

Another step, and suddenly, without conscious thought she was kneeling down next to the body. She turned the shoulders gingerly, forcing his body onto its back and stared down into the sightless eyes. No use looking for a pulse. She stood and softly jounced over to the remote vehicle, careful to avoid the perfectly circular cut it had made in the ice, and the thin cord that plunged down through the surface and into the deep waters below.

A screen on its side of the R-V glowed green. Swiping the pad next to the screen, she pulled up a diagnostics page. All systems A-OK. 4,323 meters of cord diving down through the ice, at the end of which a small camera and maneuvering unit. She swiped the pad again, noticing with surprise that her hand was trembling. The camera screen. What was down there? What had cut the R-V’s video link to the ship? What had caused the other crew to, one by one, end up catatonic or… worse?

The screen blinked over from diagnostics, cool rows of numbers and labels, to camera feed. Over two miles below, the signal from the camera at the end of the cord came through. She stared down at the screen. Strange shapes, limned with bioluminescence, floated softly past.

So there was life. Far below, in the depths of this moon’s oceans. There was life.

But no explanation.

The life support in her helmet softly hummed. She stared down at the circular hole that the R-V’s robotic arm had precisely cut in the surface ice and felt herself somehow being drawn into the inky blackness below. She took a step without realizing it. She was suspended over the hole, precisely a half meter in diameter, and she felt as if on a ledge, staring down a cliff. Something called to her, some strange unknown feeling, a song from a land without visitors. For a long, stretching instant she hovered. And then, a memory, of looking through a frosted window pane at the world outside.

She turned abruptly, grabbed the data card from its receptacle in the side of the R-V and turned towards the ship. It was time to go home.

I remember it was late Summer. The grass had started to yellow, already, and the birds were twittering with the sad, going-South, sense of vacationers packing up in a hotel room. Bill and Mike suggested skipping the first day of school, and I went along because I never learned anything anyway.

It was when we got to the cave put in the mountain that we first felt a bit nervous. We’d walked up through the forest, dodging the cat-sized horseflies and horse-sized pumas. Later, when I grown a bit and moved, I realized my hometown was kind of different, but when you’re a kid you take things as they are.

Anyway, that cave was forbidden. Everybody in town had stories of some dumb kid or brave young fool who’d gone up there and never’d been heard from again. So of course that was where we headed.

It was dark, and dank, and damp and a whole bunch of other things. The bones piled neatly just inside the entrance was our first clue that maybe things weren’t just stories and moonshine after all. We looked at the bones and Mike kept saying the skull looked just like that of Mr. Thompson, the History teach back at school, but Bill and I said he must’ve been drinking his daddy’s liquor that morning, because we’d both seen Mr. Thompson in town just yesterday, heading down Main Road with a spring in his step and heading suspiciously down the road to where Miss Bonnette lived. Which was no-one’s business really, but it was a small town.

Anyhow, the skull’d been a skull for much more than a day, because it had that bleached-out kind of look like the cattle skulls the Mr. Higgard used to line his driveway. Which, come to think of it, was kind of a weird way to decorate your property, yeah, now I think about it. But for some reason Bill was not to be dissuaded from his conviction. He grabbed the skull and raised it up and held it with one hand while he swung the jawbone with the other hand and did a passable imitation of Mr. Thompson talking about the impoooortins o’ th’ seevil wahr. Me and Mike started doubling over laughing, but stopped right quick when we both felt, like, this real cold wind coming from inside the cave and blowing over us.

So of course we turned on our flashlamps and then spent a good five minutes or so arguing about which of us oughta go first, because Bill lost the first time but said everyone knows rock, paper, scissors is a best of three game. So then Mike lost, but he said well if it’s best of three why not best of five? And so anyway, it took five minutes, and ended up me going first.

Which actually, I didn’t mind, because I was thinking about Suzy Bentson and how I was going to tell her later that week about how I’d bravely led our little troop into the belly of the beast, the very den of the monster, and…

Well, that was where my imagination kind of failed me. I didn’t know what’d put them bones there, and without some sort of image, like, I was having a hard time imagining what the horrible beast that lived there looked like. Did it have long arms with hooks on ‘em, sort of like Mr. Billing the Butcher looked when he was swinging around those big slabs in the cold freeze back of his shop? Or did it have just this huge mouth with razor sharp teeth like the big saber-tooth that’d been the only thing worth seeing that trip to Capital when we done that field trip that time? Or maybe it was some sort of vampire-looking man-thing. In which case I didn’t really know what to do, because if there’s one thing everybody knew in our town thanks to the gypsy come up from New Orleans told us, it’s that vampires don’t like garlic, and we didn’t have any of it with us. But I was young and strong and figured no matter what the beast monster looked like I’d just swing as hard at it as I swung at Jimmy Kinner that time he talked about my Momma and down the thing’d go.

The further down the cave we went, the danker and damper it got, until we were wading through water up to our ankles.

The first ice leech was a small ‘un. Maybe just a foot or so. It got Bill, and Mike and me laughed when he started thrashing around and trying to jump up out of the water, running with this limp because, man I tell you, them leeches are heavy, and they just don’t let go. Then both Mike and me got hit, and we started scrambling back the way we came, Mike with two leeches on one ankle, me with just one.

Anyway, we got back up the way to where the cave sloped away from the water, and we all started swinging down with our flashlamps just about hard as we could. Then we sat there panting for a bit, looking at the smashed up leeches and giving them a good hard swing if they twitched. Or even if they didn’t. None of us had a wristwatch, but we all felt like the day was getting on. Mike started whining about how he needed to get back to supper because he wanted to take Bettie to the pictures and his Momma’d find all kinds of chores for him to do if he was late. Me and Bill were kind of tired and wanted to go home too by now, so we were real grateful to Mike for giving us an excuse to talk about what a sissy momma’s boy he was for a good ten minutes before we reluctantly, and with a whole lot of sighing, agreed to call it a day.

It was only later in the week that we found out the beast’d been caught. Turns out Mr. Thompson was a for real shape-shifter type thing, and he’d killed his secret twin brother, which was the skull we’d found, and that he’d eaten poor Miz Bonnette instead of taking her out to the point like everybody’d thought. But I didn’t really care about none of that, and got bored quick when people wanted to talk about it over recess, because Suzy Bentson’d just agreed to go out that Friday. With me.