Camouflage

was pretty confusing. “No, I’m not.”
    “Just a saying.” It moved both hands over her body, studying, measuring. Most of it was similar to the male body it inhabited, but the differences were interesting.
    “Oh,” she said. “More.” It was studying the place that was most different. Deborah began to excrete fluid there. It went deeper. She moaned and rubbed its hand with the wet tissues there.
    She closed her hand over the unnamed part, and stroked it softly. It wondered whether it was an appropriate time to leak fluid itself, and began to.
    “Oh no,” she said; “oh my.” She shucked off her pajama bottoms and slid up his body to clasp him there, with her own wet parts, and move up and down.
    It was an extraordinary sensation, similar to what he had done alone earlier, but much more intense. It allowed the body’s reflexes to take over, and they pounded together perhaps a dozen times, and then its body totally concentrated on that part, galvanized, and explosively excreted—three, four, five times, the pressure decreasing.
    It breathed hard into the space between her breasts. She slid down to join her mouth with its. She inserted her tongue, which was probably not an offering of food. It reciprocated.
    She rolled over onto her back, breathing hard. “Glad you remember something.”

- 7 -
apia, samoa, 2019
    T hey had a lot of company when two tugs began to tow the artifact toward the beach. Three military helicopters jockeyed for space with six from news organizations.
    It was a perplexing sight. The artifact wasn’t visible even from directly overhead, though the shroud over it had been removed. The titanium-mesh net that carried its mass kept it suspended a meter above the ocean floor, and the water was perfectly transparent.
    A newsie photographer with diving gear jumped from a helicopter skid and went down beside it, and saw a sand-colored drape over a long cigar-shaped object. The drape fluttered once and revealed a shiny mirror surface. The mesh of the net was too fine for the newsie to reach through and expose it, but it was moving slowly enough for her to swim alongside and offer pictures and a running commentary, amusing for its lack of content, as the artifact hit the sandy floor and crunched through dead coral on its way to shore. It made a groove a meter deep in the sand, and thecables pulling it yanked tight and thrummed with the force of moving it.
    When the tugs came gently aground, Greg and Naomi dragged a heavy cable through the light surf and dove with it, giving the newsie something to photograph. They cut through the mesh with a torch and pulled back the drape while the other two engineers worked their way down the cable with a large metal collar.
    The collar, a meter round, supported four thick bolts. They slipped it over the shiny metal thing, and drove the bolts down with an air hammer, deafening in the water. When they were done, they took out earplugs and waved at the dazed newsie, and swam back along the cable.
    A deeply anchored winch on the far side of the concrete slab growled into life, and the cable started to crawl out of the sea. When the cable sang taut, the growl increased in pitch and volume. People around the large machine could smell ozone and hot metal as it strained. But it won; the cable inched its way up the pad.
    The artifact wormed slowly up through the surf. You wouldn’t have to know anything about physics or engineering to see that there was something fundamentally strange going on—the thing’s unearthly heaviness as it sledged through the damp sand; its mirror brightness.
    The barrier of bright yellow DO NOT CROSS ribbon may have saved some lives. The cable started to fray where it was attached to the collar, then suddenly snapped, and a hundred meters of thick heavy cable whipped back with terrible speed. The broken end of it smashed through the window that protected the winch operator, Larry Pembroke, and sheared off his arm at the shoulder.
    One of the Marine helicopters was down in less than a minute, and while the corpsman gave first aid they put the severed limb in a cooler full of beer and Cokes. They were in the air in another minute, streaking toward Pago Pago, where a surgical team was assembling. He’d be all right ina few months, though it would cost Poseidon, as the saying goes, an arm and a leg.
    By the time the excitement had settled down, Russ and Jack had considered and discarded three plans for getting the heavy thing up on