I hate transitions, and this is the worst.
In the control cabin of our Oscar, a gigantic centipede made to swim and fight in Titan’s freezing saline sea, a dozen klicks below the scummy, icy crust—
Pinched and stabbed and wired through and through by the suits we thought were meant to protect us—
I’ve never been more afraid and lost and in pain. We’re exhausted—no surprise, after our passage through the ice station’s freeze-dried carnage. Seeds deposited from the stores of our orbiting Spook fused with the station’s walls, chewed them up, and converted them into five Oscars—ours and the four others flanking us before the labyrinth of the bug archive.
Our former enemies are hiding in that maze. Our former allies are creeping up from behind to destroy us all.
Lieutenant Colonel Joe Sanchez, Captain Naveen Jacobi, Sergeant Chihiro Ishida—our Winter Soldier, half of her body replaced by metal—First Sergeant Tak Fujimori, Starshina Irina Ulyanova, and me, Master Sergeant Michael Venn, are in this Oscar. The second carries Commander Frances Borden, Corporal Dan Johnson—DJ—Sergeant Kiyuko Ishikawa, Polkovnik Litvinov (I’ve never learned his first name), and our mysterious Wait Staff reps, the former servants and right-hand men of the Gurus, Aram Kumar and Krishna Mushran. The rest of the Russians occupy the last three.
On my recommendation—and on threat of ice torpedoes closing in from all sides—we’ve stopped trying to defend ourselves and have surrendered to the birdlike creatures we’ve fought for years on Mars and elsewhere. We call them Antagonists, Ants or Antags for short.
Starshina Ulyanova frantically resisted that surrender and had to be subdued by Tak and Jacobi. She lies quiet now in her sling behind Jacobi. Her rank is roughly equal to DJ’s, corporal, but edging over into sergeant. She’s still having a rough time. Her cheeks and forehead are beaded with sweat, and she stares into the upper shadows of the cabin, lips pressed tight. Her instinct is to continue the fight, even if it means self-destruction—either resisting the Antags, who are presumably here to save us, or trying to destroy our own people. I don’t really blame her. She’s surrounded by leaders and soldiers who haven’t had time to explain the fundamentals we’re all facing. Besides, we don’t speak Russian, and her English is rudimentary.
Even so, there’s something odd about her, as if she’s listening to voices none of the rest can hear—except me. Why do I think that’s possible? That she’s being subjected to an experience similar to my own, maybe to DJ’s …
Maybe not so much to DJ. Maybe just to me.
No evidence for any of these hunches, really, but that by itself doesn’t mean she’s crazy. Hearing voices is why I was returned to Mars, then hustled out with DJ to Titan.
On Mars, inside the first Drifter, DJ and Kazak and I all got dosed with a powder produced by deep-buried fragments of ancient crystal brought to Mars billions of years before on pieces of exploded ice moon. We called the powder Ice Moon Tea, and my sensitivity to its messages was what convinced Commander Borden to rescue me from Madigan Hospital, where I was scheduled for execution. I’m one of the special ones. Glory be. So is DJ. Kazak—Sergeant Temur Nabiyev, our favorite Mongolian—was also one of the special ones, but he died on Mars before I returned.
In our heads, ancient history bumps up against the captured and stored memories of fallen comrades. Sometimes it’s like dancing on a cloud—impossible, but if you don’t believe, you fall.
I can’t shake the strangely lovely image of Captain Coyle settling into her peculiar death. On Mars, when she tried to blow up the first Drifter, under orders from the Gurus on Earth, she and her teammates turned into shiny black glass. We thought those who turned glass were dead. But some came back to haunt us. Absorbing and co-opting enemies is one way the ancient archives preserve themselves. That’s what the Drifter’s crystals contained—a gateway to records kept billions of years ago by our earliest progenitors—inhabitants of the outer ice moons of the ancient solar system.
Giant, intelligent bugs.
Coyle first came to visit me after I returned to Earth and was locked up at Madigan. In those early hours, her presence was confused, less an actual voice and more like word balloons in a comic—empty word balloons. But soon enough they filled in, and what was left of Coyle did her brusque best to take me step by step through the courtesies and techniques of the bug archives. She introduced me to the semiautomated steward who parcels out that memory, if you’re qualified, if you know how to ask the right sort of questions.
The bugs are long gone, but their voices still echo. At Madigan, and on the way back to Mars, I relived bits and pieces of bug history, watched those ancient ancestors of both humans and Antags burrow up through the icy shells of their moons and discover the stars. Life had first evolved on those moons, long before Earth turned green, in deep oceans warmed by residual radiation and the constant tug of tidal energy from their gas-giant planets. I learned that this wasn’t the first time creatures like the Gurus had entered our solar system and provoked wars. I learned that the bugs had fought one another long, long ago—class against class, changing the shape and disposition of the outer solar system.
Dropping big chunks of moon down to Mars, including the Drifters.
Helping seed life on Earth.
Then Coyle warned me that she was about to really die. Her final act was to introduce me to the Antag female who’s now my direct liaison, who’s waiting across the midnight ocean to save us from our own forces.
Coyle’s voice went silent and all that was left of her, the absorbed data of her life and her body, spread out before my inner eye like a beautiful crystal tapestry. The captain was no longer capable of talking, acting, or learning, but she was still full of instruction.
How like Coyle.