More days, or maybe just hours. Couldn’t be days, right? The lights brighten. Antags swim or prance by the walls, peer in, make gestures with their mid-joint wing-fingers. They do have thumbs!
I see no more catamaran squid with their sinuous arms. Could be robots or machines or weapons, but they looked alive to me.
Then the top of the tank opens and those damned spiky metal tentacles reach in and pluck one of us out by an arm and a leg. I think it’s Litvinov, the Russian colonel. The opening closes. We move around, frantically bumping, trying to stay away from the opening.
Can it get any worse?
The tentacles poke back down and explore, roiling the tank’s rippling, foaming surface. In a few minutes, four more suits have been plucked up and out. And now it’s my turn. The cold saline drains from around my suit and a warmer something surrounds me. My joints ache and lungs labor. Pressure has changed. Maybe there’s air outside the tank. Could also mean my suit has sprung a pressure leak.
Then the tentacles relax and release. I’m lying on something but I can’t see what—a table, a rolling cart? I’m moved along a narrow, cramped tunnel that curves sharply off to the left, and then I’m dumped on a slab. The slab is in a small cylindrical room. Two Antags strut around me, then the room quickly fills with the smaller bat creatures, all carrying wicked-looking tools. They climb up and lean over me, over my suit. I can’t move.
But then something sparks in my head—a little communication from the Antag female. She’s making it clear to me and probably to DJ that we’re still not where we want to be. We’re on a small transport ship, in orbit around Titan, and the first thing the Antags are going to do is cut us out of our suits, in case we have secret weapons, in case we can still cause damage, wearing them. The big Antags back off and let the smaller creatures do their work. They surround me, heads bobbing, tools dancing, and make low grunting noises.
I hope they kill me quick.
A scratchy voice, sound not mental, through a translator, says, “Helpers will remove your armor. It will hurt.”
Together, the bats start cutting. Their torch-saws make quick work of the outer shell, which is roughly pulled away, revealing underwear and then naked flesh, with wires stretched taut like guitar strings—
And I’m the frets.
I scream.
The bats work quickly, pulling and extracting and clipping while grunting and whistling, and I bleed all over the table before a bigger Antag sprays on a kind of floury powder that stanches the blood.
When I’m too weak to scream, two big Antags lift me from the table with those damned wing-fingers, shrouded in elastic gloves, and wrap me in gray blankets that fit snug to my body. Where the blankets touch, the pain goes away.
I’d rather die than go through that again.
A big Antag leans over me as I’m carried into another, much smaller room. Expressive damned eyes—two outside, two inside, near the beak. Then I know. This one is the female, my liaison, my connection—those vibrations. Again she does not rely on our private circuit, but uses a translator to tell me in hashy English that the others will also have their suits removed, for her crew’s security but also for our own good.
“They are designed to control you,” the scratchy voice says. “The Keepers are afraid of you.”
“Who’re they?” I croak.
She wipes my mouth with a cloth. “If you join us, you can fight to kill them.”
“Yeah. Sure. When can I speak to my friends?” I ask.
“On a bigger ship, we will find a place for all of you to live together.”
“What about Bug Karnak?” Somehow, through our connection, she knows what I’m talking about.
“It will stay here,” she says.
“But someone’s going to try to destroy it, right?”
The Antag female leans over me, four eyes glittering in the dim light of the cell, beak open to show a raspy tongue. “You will sleep. We are moving to bigger ship.”
She thinks there’s something unusual about this particular bigger ship—I can feel it in the overtones. Something powerful, dangerous, and puzzling.
“Where to after that?”
“Far away,” she adds. “Long journey. Many days.”
“You travel between the stars?”
“We go home,” she says. “If we live.”
Lots of ifs. “Where are you from?”
Through the overtones, I’m left with an impression of something like a big basketball on a billiard table, slowly rolling across gravity-dimpled felt and scattering smaller balls every which way. Makes no sense to me.
Then I realize this might be Sun-Planet.
“You don’t come from another star system?”
No answer to that and pretty soon I’m numb, sleepy all over again—
Asleep.
This time I dream of walking across the dry, brushy hills between the close-packed, apartment-strewn suburbs of San Diego. My mother is walking with me and one of her boyfriends, it’s Harry, goddammit, and he’s packing a Colt pistol in a fast-draw holster slung on his hip. Harry’s about to teach me the basics of high-powered weapons.
Christ. Why can’t I dream something pleasant, something wonderful?