Armored up and fresh after a day down, I took the Delta squad out for a roll with Alpha alongside. The new additions were adjusting to Titan gravity and getting a little jumpy. Which was understandable. They’d come screaming down out of orbit in a hurry, been shot out of the sky by Conglomerate crickets, stood their ground by a propane lake, and then flown into Shangri-La, where’d they’d met an unimpressed platoon.
Now it was time to stretch their legs and keep their attention focused forward. Amira had taken the other squad out past the hills on one of her glitch hunts, though she hadn’t told them that. I’d ordered her to take them with her.
Far, far under our feet as we bounded about the Shangri-La plain, the civilian contractors worked to tend the heart of Shangri-La: an Accordance-made dark matter generator, half a mile deep in the rock. This would power everything from our EMP cannons to the skyscraper anti-spacecraft weapons, which we were told could vaporize a rock the size of Manhattan dropping on us.
Which led you to wonder if there would be any on their way anytime soon.
“The Canadian from up near the Arctic, Suqi,” I asked Ken, her wide eyes flashing back into memory, “she got bounced around. Is she okay?”
“Physically. She’s still a bit wary of me, I think,” Ken said.
“You’ve watched too many movies. Leadership isn’t just yelling.”
“And you need to stop letting them stare at you like some movie star,” Ken shot back. “You need to give them some tough orders, make them realize what it is we’re in the middle of. We need them to be ready, not starstruck.”
A message from HQ pinged and scrolled down in the lower left of my helmet’s visor. A request for a meeting. “Damn. HQ.”
“Yeah?” Ken asked.
“They want an in-person.”
“I can have Chef take lead and come with you,” Ken offered.
“Nah.” I shook my head, even though Ken couldn’t see it. There was friction between me and Ken, no doubt. And we’d buried most of it back on the moon. But I still didn’t want him to stand there and watch me get chewed out for something he’d warned me would be a problem with that “see, I told you so” look on his face. “It’s Amira. They’re going to chew on my head a bit, no reason for you to get backsplash. Plus, I need to get Shriek back to our barracks. Keep showing Delta the terrain. I want them to be able to bounce around the basin with their eyes closed. Every loose rock—”
“Every loose rock and every hidey-hole,” Ken interrupted, completing the sentence.
+ + + +
HQ, like our barracks, was just under the surface. So we could boil out on the basin like cockroaches from our crevices if the Conglomeration came at us. It was farther into the center of the basin, underneath the bulk of the Pcholem spaceship that had landed and come to dominate Shangri-La.
Major General Foster didn’t spend a lot of time armored up; he was in Colonial Protection Forces gray BDUs, which almost matched the gray coming in at the temples, and he had a perpetually tired look. He stared at me as I clomped into his office. Behind him on the wall was the Icarus Corps logo, the moon and an Earthrise, surrounded by a sawblade-like sun.
Usually, shit ran downhill. Foster would yell at someone lower in rank, and then on down, and eventually a company captain would end up nervously having a “chat” with me. But most of the CPF captains had come in after I’d fought the Conglomeration at the Icarus crater. They didn’t want to shout at the hero of the Darkside War.
So now I was standing in front of a major general.
“Lieutenant: why the hell are you wearing armor in my office? You can barely fit through the door.”
“Rockhoppers shuck for sleep and showers,” I told him. “Never more than ten feet from armor.”
Foster stared at me. “You telling me you don’t trust how secure my base is?”
“Rockhoppers shuck for sleep and showers,” I repeated neutrally.
We stared levelly at each other. Foster may have been my superior and my elder. But my Rockhoppers didn’t shuck for anything but sleep and showers.
“Fuck it. I really want to talk about Sergeant Amira Singh,” he said, a sour look on his face.
HQ was a giant circle filled with pie slice–shaped offices. What looked more like the bridge of a spaceship occupied the center: consoles for comms, massive holographic displays with maps of Titan and Shangri-La, as well as theater maps of the whole system. Soldiers coming in and out from various parts of Shangri-La. When I shuffled around Foster’s office, I turned my back to all that.
One thing I liked about it: few aliens over us. Our overlords, the Accordance, had basically given Shangri-La over to human oversight.
To Foster’s oversight.
Foster didn’t like me. He’d worked hard to get human oversight. He’d worked hard to get the Arvani off his back and he didn’t want that to change. I was something that might fubar everything he’d gotten set up.
“Amira is—” I began.
“I’ve explained,” Captain Foster said, tapping his glass desk. “You’ve agreed. She can’t be haring off on some intuition based on her unauthorized networking and hacking abilities. I said no unnecessary trips out past our defensive coverage.”
“Absolutely, sir,” I said, as flat and mechanical as I could.
For a month, Foster’d been demanding that Amira focus on beefing up security. Adding trips to the network against outside interference.
But she’d been doing her own patrols. Heading out past the basin, scouring the plains and lakes in her spare time.
“In two weeks, the farms below go operational. We become a real damn fortress here on Titan. Supplies can’t be hit.” Foster worried about that a lot. “With EMP cannons up, the anti-ship batteries, our emplacements on the hills, we are Fortress Shangri-La. We have ammo foundries now. Foundries. We are dug in like a tick on the ass of Titan and we will not be dislodged.”
“I don’t want a loss of focus. Everyone stays behind the walls. Secure. Safe. We destroy anything that comes over the hills. We keep beefing up the hills. The aliens trying to kill us won’t be able to touch us. And the aliens that took over Earth, well, maybe they’ll leave us alone as well. This is important!”
That was new. I hadn’t pegged Foster, a lifer, as having any ill will toward the Accordance. He was old enough to remember Occupation. The accommodations Earth had made to the aliens as they came down to Earth and changed everything.
Apparently, he saw this base as a place to carve out some space from the Accordance.
That made Foster somehow slightly more likable. I wasn’t a lifer. I’d been forced into the CPF because my parents were pacifist protestors against Accordance rule. Join the CPF and they lived under comfortable house arrest. If I hadn’t, they would have been executed.
“If you don’t rein Sergeant Singh in,” Foster warned, getting back to the subject. “I will. Demote her, toss her in a brig, something. I’m done. I have no more patience. Shut her down.”
“Absolutely, sir,” I said, lying through my teeth.
+ + + +
Up from HQ a level, several carapoids had trundled down out of the Pcholem ship. The pony-sized beetles thudded as they walked, natural armor making them something you gave a wide berth as they unloaded new batches of armor onto carts.
Old-fashioned manual labor: a carapoid could easily lift all several hundred pounds of an entire suit of armor.
Several of the carapoids had chiseled symbols on their backs. Swooping letters and what appeared to be umlauts to my human eyes. I’d never seen that on the carapoids down on Earth. They’d been painted official colors, depending on their roles in the Accordance, to match the uniforms of other Accordance members.
I hung back a bit, thinking to ask, but the carapoids kept busy and didn’t slow for an instant as they trucked back up toward the surface. They’d by cycling into the outside without any gear. The carapoids could fold their carapaces tight to themselves and pass up to an hour in some extremely hostile environments. I’d seen them fighting hand to hand out in the clouds of Saturn when stripped of suits by the enemy.
I ranged through a few more tunnels, nodding and stepping aside for officers.
Shangri-La’s medical facilities were located inside a spotless white cavern. The Accordance didn’t see much point in private rooms for general care; most of their technology resided in the ovoid pods stretched in rows by the hundreds. The floors were grilled, the better to flush away any fluids, and could heat up to render the floor sterile again.
A couple of nearby pods were open, the articulated cutting arms inside flung open, as if the moving scalpels wanted an embrace.
I instinctively veered away.
“Do you require medical assistance?” a voice asked in Mandarin, Spanish, and then English.
I turned. A struthiform had approached me from behind. I’d never really shaken the image of them as somewhat stoic ostriches in Roman armor but with velociraptor-clawed legs that could gut you in a split second.
“I am looking for Shriek, of the One Hundred and Fourth Thunder Clutch,” I said. “He’s assigned to my platoon.”
The struthiform cocked its head, feathers near its beak shifting as it did so. I could hear the pitched squeak from it before the flattened box on the collar near its throat spoke, translating an alien birdlike language to English for me. “I do not know a Shriek,” it said. “And that clutch no longer exists. What do you truly need, human?”
I sighed. “Shriek is the one that refuses to learn names or give them. He has prosthetic limbs, and facial reconstruction, he . . .”
“Oh. That one. Yes, we are ready for him to return to you.”
The medic led me through to the quarantine wing, where there were actual offices and private rooms. A group of struthiforms clustered around a display, occasionally reaching out with a wing hand to manipulate a three-dimensional image.
One struthiform stood out among the rest. His face had been reshaped, much of it artificial with matte-black patches of machinery. Synthetic leg, and prosthetic fingers on his wing hand whined as he moved. “Devlin!” he chirped, actually using his own vocal cords to call my name.
“He makes your name-sound,” the struthiform next to me muttered. “But he refuses to learn those of his own featherkind.”
“Don’t be offended,” I whispered as Shriek left his fellow struthiforms to approach me. “He is deeply traumatized. He believes to learn someone’s name will only lead to loss.”
“It is against my will that a creature as mentally unbalanced as he practices medicine,” the struthiform said. “But at least it is not on our own kind.”
“A pleasure to meet you, too,” I said, my grin at seeing Shriek fading.
“I’ve been learning more human biology,” Shriek said enthusiastically. “I did not realize you could not keep yourselves clean without help of special materials. I will stop trying to cancel your shipments of head-feather-cleaning supplies.”
“You’re the one messing up the shampoo rations,” I groaned.
Shriek shook out a wing hand. “I’ve learned a great deal of specifics about human biology studying here. I’ll be a better surgeon for your kind now. Let’s not hover overlong, looking at the past, arguing about such petty things as who canceled shampoos,” he said.
I was entirely planning to throw him under the bus when we got back to the platoon’s quarters. Everyone had been griping about shampoo for weeks.
“Have you met the Pcholem yet?” Shriek asked, abruptly shifting conversational direction. “You should, you are famous. It would be delighted to meet someone exceptional.”
“I’ve never seen Pcholem before,” I said. “Where is the pilot?”
Shriek spread his wing hands wide, knocking me back. “You are an ignorant hatchling. Pcholem are not pilots; they are the ships themselves.”
Shriek began leading me upward.
“Imagine a seed born in space, unfurling its wings to feel the solar wind. Do you know there’s a turtle in a zoo in one of your cities that the Accordance took over management of ? It’s two hundred years old!”
“That’s a jump in topics,” I pointed out. “I don’t see your point.”
“There’s the elephant and a fly,” Shriek continued. “The fly is tiny, it lives a single day. Very fast, quick in life. One single spin of your blue globe. And then, the great, larger elephant. It lives for decades of your solar years. Around and around the sun. And trees, well, there are trees that are thousands of years old. Great big slow things, they last longer. Do you follow me?”
“No, not really. Shriek, we’re getting up to the surface. You need armor. Why the hell aren’t you clad? You know the rule: Rockhoppers never—”
“You fear death, hatchling. Good for you. I died all those years ago when I watched the Conglomeration burn my planet. So imagine that seed I told you about stretches its newborn wings wide and soaks up light. It chews up dust from the nebulous vacuum around it, growing the natural biological fusion reactors deep inside its midnight-black skin. And it grows, ponderous and large. And it lasts and lasts, my human.”
I nervously checked the air as we walked through two airlock doors held open, a breach that should have led to a lot of rushing air and drama. I decided to leave my helmet down, recessed into the back of my armor.
“Where do they come from?” I asked.
“Where do they come from? We do not know. Maybe they don’t come from anywhere. Maybe they are always swimming around. But we know when they’re born, their souls are entangled on the quantum level, just like our secure communications equipment in our armor. They’re always splitting souls, budding new ones.”
Shriek walked out onto the surface of Titan, and all around us a shimmering curtain held back the hydrocarbon atmosphere. We were under the belly of the ship. The Pcholem itself.
“The Pcholem don’t just live for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They won’t say. But they travel between the stars with time dilation. So, they have seen civilizations rise and fall, wars gutter out. And always they keep swimming between the stars. Long after I finally admit to death, long after you wither, human, this Pcholem will eat the dark between the stars.”
With that said, Shriek waved at the dark, curving belly above us. He walked toward a black tongue of a ramp ahead of us, and the darkness at the end of it.
“This is a war we are in. But even in the mud, and death, and shit, and blood, there is beauty, Devlin. Take a moment to come with me and meet a being that may have been navigating the depths of space before your species could even rub two sticks together.”
We stepped onto the ramp. “Are we supposed to be going aboard?” I asked, looking back. There was no security, no Accordance telling me to get back to where I belonged. Just the dark maw ahead.
“No one tells Pcholem what to do. They ask for a favor,” Shriek said, marching on ahead of me with purpose. “That seed I told you about, once it grows, the older Pcholem gather around it and bless it with upgrades. Like the nano-ink on your friend, or the armor around you. And with those grafts, it gets the ability to extend itself. They grow, change, adapt, as they find things they want or when they find new technologies that they value and will trade for more things to bolt onto themselves. They’ll come down into a gravity well, though they hate it here.”
“And this one, it shuttles supplies around for the Arvani?”
Shriek whistled. A derisive sound. “It decided to do this. To bring more supplies here to help Shangri-La. It must have its reasons to pull itself into such a small package of only a mile long, to slim its fields down until all we see is the core.”
We walked into the darkness and stopped.
A second later, a green glow suffused the air around us. The gothic arches and swoops of the interior loomed with ghastly shadows.
Then the darkness around us faded away, the walls becoming translucent. Outside, carapoids continued plodding to unload cargo alongside other human contractors.
“I apologize,” a voice said from the darkness above, echoing smoothly around us. “The last time you stood here, you flew from a burning world.”
“Hello, Starswept,” Shriek said.
“You know its name.” I was shocked. Shriek refused to learn names.
“It is one of four in this system,” Shriek said. “I think it has come down here because it is smart. They value life above all else. Particularly their own, for they are ancient and each life is a precious thing. They are down here to help the Accordance, to help humans. They’ll move us around like pieces on a checkerboard. Supply the pieces. But they won’t fight.”
“They are pacifists,” I said.
“Of a sort,” Shriek said. “Corner one, and it will do anything it can to live. But it avoids that corner at most costs.”
“Then why are they part of the Accordance?” I asked loudly. “Why live under Arvani bootheels?”
The answer came from the halls of the living ship as Starswept replied. “You have seen the Conglomeration’s evil. And Shriek has seen it as well, from this very spot. Is that not a will worth frustrating?”
Something was coming down a hallway toward them in the dark. The green light finally glanced on the body of a carapoid, again with those strange carvings on its carapace. “I hear,” Starswept said from around us, “that you humans miss your own food, so the last time I was on Earth, I made a point of acquiring something for you.”
The carapoid’s thorny arms broke free of the powerful armored wings to hand me a wicker basket filled with boxes of chocolates.
“I’m told,” the Pcholem said, “that this is an appropriate gift between your kind. Is that so?”
I held the basket as delicately as I could between my powered alien-alloy fingers, trying not to break it. “It is.”
“I asked Shriek to bring you here,” the Pcholem said. “You killed the Conglomerate abomination that flew to the lunar satellite of your home world. This is a pure act. An act that Pcholem do not forget. We seek to see all such abominations the Conglomeration has made for interstellar travel destroyed. Know this: You are known among Pcholem, Devlin Hart!”
“I—okay,” I said, stumbling over words. This was getting weird.
In my earpiece, Amira’s voice suddenly kicked in. “Devlin, I need you to get out here. Now. I found something.”