The three ranking Antags wait for Bird Girl to catch up. We’ve gathered the looping cable between us and clump about three meters behind her. So far we’ve managed to avoid bumping into structural elements—columns, beams, bulkheads, all smoothly sculpted, no signs of manufacture or refinement, like surfaces in a computer rendering.
“Big fucking ship,” DJ says, belaboring the obvious. “But we’re still back in the tail. Maybe we just passed the asshole.”
The translator renders this for Bird Girl. A sidewise glance from her two inner eyes is her only response. Blessedly, we’re beyond the corpse smell. The air here is smooth and cool.
Slow as always, I mull over another obvious data point: Gurus breathe terrestrial air, at terrestrial pressure, even on their own ship—even way out here. Is this their native atmosphere? At the very least it’s what they suck in while they’re here, and that makes the ship human and Antag compatible …
But what do Gurus breathe when they’re at home?
Do Gurus have a home?
And now that the ship is infested by Antags and humans, can it flush out the good air and pipe in the bad, can it fumigate to get rid of us like rats? Or is that too blunt and obvious? After all, how interesting is extermination without conflict, without pitting us against one another? Without cages and corpses and shit?
Fuck the inquiring mind. I do not want to know.
We emerge from another tunnel into a doubly curved chamber, like being inside a big, rope-cinched eggshell. The light here has no obvious source and is orangey-peach in color. At the egg’s large end, blocking any obvious path forward, is a round black plate about six meters across, sectioned in thirds through the middle. The most grizzled-looking of the Antag commanders, whom otherwise I can’t tell apart—no visible signs of rank on their light armor—folds its wings tightly to its body, lower hands clasping. The others follow this one’s lead, including Bird Girl. She’s waiting for a decision. After several minutes, one of the Antags musics some words, which the translator picks up and returns with rough overtones as, “This is difficult place. Many reasons not all are brought here. May cause disease.”
“Illness,” Bird Girl corrects. “We cannot go forward and take control until we pass through a puzzle. The puzzle changes. When we do not look correctly, do not solve, the gate will not let us through. If there is no going through, we stay until we die. No other place to go now.”
“All righty!” DJ says, waving his hand and splaying his fingers as if weaving a protective spell. Not much reserve left for DJ and I doubt there’s much in either Borden or Ulyanova. How much for me?
An Antag commander approaches the “gate.” The others hang on to its lower hands, as if it might be sucked through. At a slap of a wingtip hand, the gate opens in six parts that withdraw into the bulkhead. At first, through the gate I see only gray uncertainty. Then the gray area acquires a spiky focus. A geometric, weedy growth spirals out around the edges, bulging toward us with thorny fingers.
I think of showering after gym class in high school, in the echoing tile washroom, sitting on a damp aluminum bench, when I tried to simulate druggy experience by pressing an index finger against the sides of my eyeballs. But that was juvenile shit. This is real. This is messing with my brain, maybe with my soul.
The patterns inside the gate become simpler and solid, as if the puzzle has learned who and what we are, how we see, how we think, and has isolated the most effective way to entrance or confuse us.
This pattern leaves perverted afterimages.
And then—
Having found our nature and our weakness, what lies beyond becomes a tortured maze of the nastiest crap I hope to never encounter again, and I’ve become part of it—trapped, strung out on machines with steel teeth that chew me open and then retreat to allow dancing steel arms with needle and thread to stitch me back together before I bleed out.
I see all of us stuffed into big iron caskets like iron maidens, filled with sharpened spikes—not much worse than the suits we had to wear on Titan, but then …
Yeah, they’re worse.
DJ is twitching, neck corded, struggling to look aside, but he can’t. Ulyanova I can’t see—she’s drifting behind me and, caught in more ways than one, I refuse to turn away from the gate. Winding nests of razor-scaled serpents dart forward to grab my head. I’m dying, but I should already be dead. Somehow, even in the middle of my horror, I think: You crazy bastard, you’re pegging at around seven—can’t you ramp it up to eleven?
Never taunt an evil genius, right?
Gurus like it interesting.
The puzzle gets personal. Skyrines and Antags are now personally tearing my flesh. There’s Joe, Tak, Ishida—and even Kazak, dead Kazak, teeth buried in my stomach. Pain isn’t enough. The gate plays with every human fear great and small: of being broken or isolated or eaten, a great shrieking chaos of You’ll never breathe again, you’ll never eat again, you’ll never fuck again, you’ll be lost and nobody will ever find you, and if they do, you won’t care because there’s so much pain, and worse, you’re crazier than clockwork apeshit and now you’re laughing, watching your fellow Skyrines join you in a never-ending hell—
And if such images can have physical overtones beyond the pain and the shock, here they are: the sense that everything in one’s body is about to fail, piece by piece, causing not just pain but deep uncertainty, and maybe it’s already happening or has already happened—
Worse than any instauration, because this one stabs in and hooks forward the socially outcast, the living who are worse than dead, who will shit their pants and soil their souls and embarrass themselves and all who know them and love them, simply by failing in form and duty.
Combine that with the mincemeat grinders and the hooks and the flaying—
And the overall impression that it will all go away, all be forgotten, if only we turn on one another and fight and kill! I can have everything back, my youth, my innocence, freedom from pain, a young, whole body—if only I fight.
All will be forgiven.
My God, that has real power. That reaches eleven. My hands form claws. Borden has curled up like a pill bug. I hear DJ growling like an angry cat, but Ulyanova keeps quiet. I’ve rotated enough to see her face, a paleness waiting to be smashed—I reach for her—
Bird Girl jerks hard on our cable. We cannot keep our eyes on the gate. The Antags close the hatch. It’s over. They haven’t been caught up, not this time, leaving us ignorant humans to bear the brunt. Borden is still tucked up in a tight ball. DJ and I cling to each other.
The nightmare inside the gate was completely convincing to us—but not to the starshina. She licks her lips. She’s into it. She’s ready for a change. What did the gate promise her? Life as a Russian soldier, as a Skyrine, is total misery, and now she’s seen her way clear to being special and in control. A fucking awful transformation, but I see it in her eyes. Already she’s thinking like a Guru.
“Four of our own have tried to enter this gate,” Bird Girl says, and passes us impressions of bloody pieces being returned. “Not just illusion. Death trap. Deadly, killing puzzle.” Now she addresses Ulyanova directly. “Tell us what we must do, how we must think, to pass through.”
The starshina wipes her forehead and inspects her palm, as if she might have mopped more than sweat. She turns to DJ and me. “There are Gurus here—I feel them! They are unhappy and weak. They believe they will die.” Her English has improved. What sort of expertise can she access now? She looks up, aside. “They do not mind dying, but are surprised and angry I see into them. They did not expect that—ever.
“And now we must meet, no?”
DJ looks at her in abject wonder, then at me. We’re still sweating like worms on a griddle.
Bird Girl tugs us back from the closed gate. “We go to see Keeper,” she says, and points her wingtip at Ulyanova.
The starshina seems to suddenly spark. Whatever’s inside her, whatever has combined with her, is making its first moves. She addresses Bird Girl in Russian. The translator hashes and wheeps back English, then Antag. “To do this, to finish it, I am in charge,” she says. “You will show me to Antagonista who looks into Gurus. All my comrades will see, and all of you will see, because gate will kill if we do not go through at once. Understood?”
“Understood,” Bird Girl says.
The Antags have their own Guru mimic.
More sides to the polygon.