Something’s changing overhead. We hear the echoing, drawn-out groans of deep pack ice, like an idiot playing a pipe organ in an empty cathedral. This profoundly scary and stupid noise is punctuated by the softly ratcheting clicks of Antag machines keeping station out in the darkness. Why don’t they just suck us up? They’re hiding in the cells and cubicles of the ancient archive—what I’m starting to call Bug Karnak because for some reason it reminds me of ancient temples in Egypt. Bug Karnak, after billions of years, is still transmitting bug history to those who react to Ice Moon Tea. I could tune in if I want, but it’s much clearer if I coordinate with my liaison, and she seems to be distracted. Maybe she’s waiting for her fellows to make up their minds about our usefulness—thumbs up or thumbs down. Do they have thumbs? Maybe the Antags think we’re decoys. Maybe this sort of thing has happened to them before—recently. Deception and betrayal. They’re being extra cautious.
I wonder if she has a hard time hearing me, too. Yeah, we’re related, but that’s hardly a guarantee of compatibility. To add to the suspense, our replacement pressure suits continue to work us over, slicing through flesh and bone with wires and blades to integrate and control—presumably to make us quicker and more responsive.
What was left of the ice station is probably gone. After our seeds were done shitting out Oscars, and while we were leaving, more seeds must have dropped from Box and finished the job. Seeds save a lot of weight when transporting weapons upsun to places where raw materials are abundant—places like Titan, covered in methane, ethane, and silenes, and spotted with deposits of naturally generated waxes and oils and plastics. But even with an abundance of raw materials, when time is short, efficiency rules. The station was preprocessed. The seeds from Box likely dug in like hungry mastiffs. I wonder what happened to the corpses. Maybe they’re now part of brand-new weapons. How is it possible to stay human in all this? Facing these examples of a fucking hellish ingenuity?
“Antag movement up front,” Jacobi says.
There’s Russian chatter from the third and fourth vessels—unhappy, strident. Litvinov opens up to his troops in the dissident transports. “We do not act!” he shouts in Russian, then in English. “We are here. We have no more decisions to make. If we return, our people will kill us.”
I watch Jacobi’s crescent-lit face, just visible around the rim of her helm, then expand my gaze over to Joe, slung beside her. Our suits creak in the slings. Six of us. How many Russians were crammed into the last two Oscars? Not full complements. Not six, maybe only three, not enough to form true teams, share the stress, subdue panic. Since we didn’t fight together and didn’t have long to socialize, they never made much of an impression, except for Litvinov, of course, and those who died out on the Red … and Ulyanova, softly singing to herself opposite.
Long moments pass. On the second Oscar, Borden reports scattered soft targets—organic. “Looks like a shoal of big fish,” she says. “Native?”
No one confirms. No one can answer one way or the other. We close our plates to access displays and pay attention to the forces directly in front. I don’t see the soft targets or anything that answers to what she means by organic—squishy and alive—but more machines rise into view, twelve of them, longer and thicker than Oscars, escorted by scouts like nothing we’ve seen before—robot falcons flexing ten-meter serrated wings, slung with bolt weapons and pods filled with cutting tools. Butcher-birds, I think.
“Oscar’s about to be cracked like a lobster,” DJ says from Litvinov’s ship.
“Shut the fuck up!” Ishida says, half shell herself.
The fourth vessel’s debate has turned to what sounds like fighting. The fifth joins in. The Russians are falling apart. Litvinov’s not with them. His influence isn’t nearly enough.
It’s painful to listen to.
Ulyanova, under her breath, still sings. But then she opens her eyes and looks right at me.
She smiles.
Something inside me smiles back. Goddamn.
Joe taps his helm and looks around his sling at me, eyes flicking, examining. Can he tell? I work to recover.
Ulyanova’s turned away again.
“I’m not sure our fellow warriors are going along,” Joe says. I do not want to fall into another instauration, another Guru moment—not here and not now. But how could the starshina be connected with all that?
As we watch the serrated falcons maneuver in the deep ice-pudding, banking fore and aft to block any escape, the best scenario I can imagine is that the Antags are being really, really cautious. No surprise given our history and the strangeness of this new relationship. They’re doing everything they can to discourage us from responding defensively or mounting our own assault. With twelve big Antag ships against our five, how can we put on any sort of offense? By acting like we’ve surrendered, perhaps—catching them with their guard down. Who knows what happened on Titan before the stand-down and reboot? Traps and stratagems aplenty, no doubt.
“What the fuck are they waiting for?” Jacobi cries out. My concern exactly. We’re not resisting. How will they carry us out of here, take care of us? Wasn’t that the deal? How long can any of us afford to stick around?
What do they think about the fresh human ships dropping from the surface, no doubt to wreak total destruction?
I finally detect a jumble of thoughts from my Antag opposite. Their ships in orbit are under attack. Just like on Mars, all of us are being targeted. Those who support the Gurus want to find and obliterate us—fellow humans included. On Mars, we saw ample evidence that the Antags were similarly divided.
Inquire.
Again the voice of bug steward. It usually pops up when decision points are reached. However, I’m not sure I can formulate any relevant questions, and bug memory isn’t about current situations or possible outcomes. Or is it? There’s a kind of urgency in the voice. Maybe it knows something, or has been tapping deep into my thoughts and has enough of its own smarts to guess.
Inquire.
About what? I pick something out of my own jumble of questions. If we lose Titan—
“Are there other archives like this one?” I ask, and feel DJ’s approval.
Unknown. Accessing what you know, it is probable that massive force will soon be deployed to destroy this entire moon.
Inquire.
“Do we already know enough to survive on our own?”
Unknown.
“Where are the archives you know about?”
Nothing is certain. Some could remain out on cold moons in the dusty reaches, or on larger worlds far from the sun, completed by our engineers before our own wars nearly destroyed us.
Aha, I think. “The Antag female gave us a glimpse of something she called ‘Sun-Planet.’ Is that what you’re talking about?”
Possibly. It may have been the last world where our kind lived before we passed into extinction. Many hundreds of millions of solar cycles have gone by, but that world may have preserved its own archives. Still, the connections are broken or at best incomplete. There could be much that is new and different. And it is possible the ones you call Gurus have found and destroyed them already.
A long answer. We have no idea what’s being planned for us. No way to survive if we stay where we are. We’ll soon be overwhelmed, or caught in one amazing shit-storm of high-tech combat.
And to add to the tension, my liaison may be what she says she is, a sympathetic presence arguing for our survival, but she’s still grieving for her dead. She still hates our guts, as do her fellow warriors. Most of us feel the same about Antags. They don’t trust any of us and we won’t trust them even if they give us a chance, even if the tea and bug memory say we should.
In a communication colored by apprehension, she informs me that the process is moving slowly. Not every Antag in her force believes human captives can be of use. She’s in a minority, and there’s a bitter argument under way. She’s defending the present plan—defending our survival. If the opposing faction on those waiting ships wins the debate, we could all be gathered up and rescued only to be dumped naked into the frozen sea—or worse, tortured and summarily executed.
Just a heads-up, she assures me. She’s working hard to convince the others they’re wrong, arguing on the basis of Antag honor and loyalty to the ancient ones, whose inheritance runs through all our veins.
The bugs.
Antag honor?
Christ, what have I gotten us into? What if it’s all a sham? How could we expect any better?
In the round cabin, Starshina Ulyanova is shouting in Russian, trying to get Litvinov to order us to fight, to do something!
From many klicks behind our vessels and the Antag ships comes a deep, visceral thump. Heavy overpressure passes, making the Oscar squeal at its joints. Then the pressure fades, leaving us all with headaches—caught with our helms open. We close and seal and immerse in the display.
“There they go!” Joe says. The fourth and fifth transports, with their Russian crews, have had enough. They’re trying to turn and head back to what they seem to hope is salvation—the human forces descending behind us.
The Antag falcons have passed over and beneath us and stand between the fleeing vessels and the deep night of Titan’s inner sea. The transports try to respond with weapons—
But Joe has locked firepower to our own centipede. The others can’t fight unless we do.
Suddenly, the wayward vessels are wrapped in a brilliant balls of glowing vapor, followed by another slam and more overpressure. Our hull is struck by whirling bits of debris, like a hard, hard rain.
“Who the hell did that?” Litvinov shouts. “Sanchez! Unlock weapons!”
“It wasn’t Antags,” Joe says. He sounds sick, as if none of this is worth it, life has passed way beyond what can be borne. I have to agree. We’re down by two. How many seconds before we all sizzle?
“We’re seeing long-range bolts from one of Box’s machines,” Borden says, and Ishida confirms. “They’re getting closer.”
Friendly fire, as the shitheads say.
No time left, I tell my Antag female.
From beyond the walls of the stony labyrinth, bolts pass around us, almost brushing the centipede, into the shadows behind—Antags returning fire. Something far back there lights up, refracting through a cloud of slushy ice like fiery diamonds and throwing a weird sunrise glow across the solid gray ceiling.
The wide-winged falcons swarm our remaining Oscars, pods thrusting forward and fanning out tools. Here it comes.
“Antags moving in to recover,” Borden says, her voice strangely calm. Is this what we’re all hoping for? Is this our only chance?
A cutting blade spins into our cabin space, narrowly missing Ishida. Our helms suck down hard at the loss of cabin pressure. My fellow Skyrines cry out like kittens at the roaring flood of subzero liquid. But our suits keep us alive.
Once the cutting is done, with banshee screams, torches provoke scarlet bouquets of superheated steam that bleb around inside the cabin until the cold sucks them back. From superchill to steam heat and back again in seconds—and still, our suits maintain.
In my display, I see more and bigger bolts rise from behind the walls of Bug Karnak, penetrate electrical gradients, make the entire frigid sea around us fluoresce brilliant green—followed by more sunrises behind. Strangely, I feel justified. Wanted. The Antags are defending us. But they’re also killing humans. My guts twist.
From the first rank of falcons, steely gray clamps fan out and jam in through the wedge made by the cutting blades and torches. The Oscar’s head is pried opened by main force. Spiked tentacles shoot from the nearest falcon and insert into the ruined carapace, where they cut through our straps and shuck us like peas from a pod. We’re jerked up and over, bouncing from the edges, dragged through darkness punctuated by more blinding, blue-white flares to an even bigger machine rising over the walls like a monstrous catfish, its head dozens of meters wide. A dark mouth swallows us whole.
Three minutes of tumbling, blind darkness. The seawater around us swirls and drains. We’re in the catfish’s belly.
A little light flicks on below, then left and right, and the tentacles suck down around our limbs, grab us up again, then drop us through an oval door into a narrow tank filled with cold, silty liquid. Soon we’re joined by other plunging, squirming shapes—the crews from the other Oscars. Most of the outside lights switch off. It’s too dark in the tank to recognize one another, but I’m pretty sure one of the suited shapes is DJ. Another might be Jacobi, another, Tak. Then Borden. I hope I’m right that they’re both here. Another, slightly smaller, could be Kumar or maybe Mushran. I try to count but we keep getting swirled around. Rude.
Where’s Joe? Where’s Ishida, Ishikawa, Litvinov, Ulyanova? Then the tank’s sloshing subsides and we drift to a gritty, murky bottom, settling in stunned piles like sardines waiting to be canned.
A dim glow filters through the tank’s walls—translucent, frosted. Sudden quiet. Very little sloshing. My sense of integral motion might be telling me we’re rising, retreating, but I can’t be sure. Nobody’s making a sound.
Why are we here, being treated like this? Haven’t we been told to become partners, to solve a larger riddle? How did we end up so thoroughly screwed, and what did Joe do to get us here? Joe has gotten me into and out of more scrapes than I can number. But our first encounter, I was the one causing real trouble—or reacting the only way I could. Now we’re both here, and I’m not sure what Joe means to me, to us, anymore.
Has he sold us out? Is he even alive?
Thinking you’ve fit all the pieces into a puzzle, then having it picked up, shaken, and dumped—being forced to start all over again—they can’t teach you how to react to that in boot camp or OCS or the war colleges. That’s a challenge you have to learn from experience. And mostly at this level of confusion and weirdness, you don’t learn. You just die.
Bumping and bobbing along the bottom of the tank, listening to my suit creak and click, listening to the distant twang of wires working through my flesh—a never-ending process—I try to keep it together, try to remind myself that the Antags may be connected to the wisdom of bug memory but still have every reason to hate us.
Judging from the contortions and soft moans, the suits are still causing everyone pain. If you don’t move they hurt less. But still, they keep us warm.
There’s ten or twelve left. Way down from our contingent on Spook. Were some dumped? Did the Antags select us out like breeders on a puppy farm?
After a time, everything in the shadows becomes part of a sharp, awful relaxation. I can still think, mostly, but want to slide into old, safe memories, then dreams. Dreams of better days and nights. Of places where there are days and nights. I don’t think or feel that I’m about to die, but how can I be sure? When you die, you become a child again. I’ve seen it, felt it through the return of Captain Coyle. She introduced me to a little girl’s bedroom and her comic books. But I don’t feel like a child just yet, though young memories, memories acquired when I was younger, even bad memories, are more and more desirable, if only to block out the pain. I can’t just give up. Not after all the shit I’ve put others through.
Then, despite my focused concentration, I experience my own moment of panic. I start to scream and thrash. Everything in this fucking tank is entirely too fuzzy and I’m not ready to accept whatever dark nullity is on the menu because I really want to see what’s next, I want to be there, be out there, I want to learn more about what our enemies are up to and who they really are, which ones are our enemies, I mean—learn more about how the Earth was screwed over by the Gurus. When you die, you stop learning, stop playing the game. Is that true? I’m not sure it’s always true. It may not have been strictly true for Captain Coyle. But she turned glass. Maybe that’s a different sort of death, like becoming a book that others can read but not you. And now I don’t hear her in my head because her settling in has finished, the ink in her book is dry and she’s part of the memory banks of our ancient ancestors.
Is that any different from real death?
I just want to keep on making a difference.
To that end, and because my throat really hurts and thrashing around is pointless, I stop. I keep bumping into the others and I don’t want to hurt them.
And I’m worn-out.
I roll left and try to see through gummy eyes. Through the murk and foggy walls, I make out blurred outlines of Antags flapping their wings like penguins or seabirds, swimming or flying by the tank. Checking on us. Are they actually flying, or are they in liquid like us? I grasp at this problem like a sailor grabbing at a life preserver. I say to myself, out loud, like I’m a professor back in school, “Their ships may be filled with oxygen-bearing fluid, like Freon—which allows a different relationship to the pressures outside. Maybe we’re being subjected to the same dousing. Or maybe it’s just warmer water, seawater. Maybe they come from an ocean world. I don’t know. I have no fucking idea what’s what, I’m just making shit up.”
So much for the professor.
I try once more to retreat into better times, better history, but I can’t find my way back to the sunset beach at Del Mar, to wearing shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops, to hitchhiking and walking with Joe before we ever enlisted, hoping we could pick up girls or girls would pick us up. I was fifteen and Joe was sixteen and given the age of the girls who might have been driving those cars that flared their lights and rumbled or hummed by in the night, that wasn’t likely.
But I can’t reach back to good times. I keep snagging on the first time I needed Joe, the first time we met, before we became friends.