Bird Girl and the ranking Antags escort us into another access pipe that extends quite a long ways aft through the ship, opening into a chamber that has the benefit, for us, of not being excessively changeable or excessively large. On one side of the chamber, outboard, maybe not too far from the first racquetball court and our hamster cage, is a makeshift hangar where three smaller vessels have been parked—not the same as the larger transports that brought us here, more like orbital fighter craft, suspended in a web of rubbery cables that keep them from bumping. A few Antags in that hangar are busy winging from ship to ship. And finally, we see a squid. Mostly the same as I remember through the foggy walls of our liquid-filled tank on the first transport up from Titan—squidlike in some aspects, but arranged like a catamaran, two grayish-pink bodies with four or five arms each linked by a kind of bridge—but not in water, not this time, and not floppy like you’d expect from a squid on Earth. This creature slides gracefully into a fighter craft and emerges a few seconds later, arms carrying equipment wrapped in dark fabric or plastic.
Borden ignores the squid and concentrates on what she can understand, what might be more immediately important. “Five ships,” she says. “Probably not big enough to take us home, or anywhere far from Saturn.”
DJ stares at the squid. “Wouldn’t want to tangle with one of those.”
The Antags around the corded fighters move into a tunnel. Three emerge a few minutes later with a bundle floating between them, an irregular squirming object wrapped in a flexible bag with a squat brown cylinder attached—some sort of pressurized sack, I’m guessing.
The Antags are going to introduce us to some Gurus. The ones they captured on Mars and apparently kept alive? Maybe not. Maybe we have no idea where their Gurus come from. Wherever, I want to be any fucking place but here. I don’t have a home, not really, but I want to go back there, even if it’s Virginia Beach turned black glass.
We are in the grip of an unpredictable enemy whose motivations may not add up, who have spent years trying to kill us on Mars and on Titan, and that’s bad enough—
But what about meeting something that wants to watch us kill one another? Gurus. Keepers.
But no choice. We’re either useful or we’re dead.
And goddammit, even with all that, even with my brain telling me to shrink up like a penis in a Speedo swimming through a daiquiri, I can’t tamp my curiosity back into its Prince Albert can. I have to ask—what have we done with our Gurus? Did they return to Earth and get set free in time to visit me at Madigan—one of them, anyway? Did our mutual access to the influence of the tea make me a sitting duck for those implants—the instaurations?
What about Borden? Is Borden a fucking mimic? Joe? Kumar? Mushran? Could we ever know? Shapeshifters just love frozen ice stations, according to the movies. Imagine crossing a cruel fucking movie producer with the Thing from Another World.
That’s it for now. Having worked my way back to pop culture, I’m done with curiosity. I don’t share any of this with DJ or Ulyanova. Better to keep my poisoned imagination to myself.
Bird Girl makes a wide spread of her wings and the others draft into a smaller side chamber with their bundle, away from the ships. I don’t even hear two more Antags come up behind us and take control of the rubbery cable. We could let go and just drift, but Bird Girl turns to look at us and I swear there’s something imploring in her four eyes, like she’s asking, begging, for help. They want to go home, too, and this is the only way for them—even if it’s only a sliver of a chance.
Borden speaks first. “Let’s go see,” she says.
I wish Joe was here, but she’s right. It’s time to face reality. Time to stop trying to think things through and find out what’s really in store.
Ulyanova hand-overs along the rope. The Antags behind herd us to where the package was taken, tank and all. We’re closely watched by six other Antags who have emerged from the ships in the hangar. Several more enter furtively from another angle, I’m not sure where—can’t watch all sides at once—and now there are twelve: six smaller, batlike critters having joined the party. They all watch with far too many eyes as we enter the far room.
Bird Girl takes hold of the cable and carefully persuades us into another curving, bean-shaped hollow with its own reddish glow. The hollow winds on around curvy corners into other hollows, other voids, spaces bean- or kidney-shaped, like we’re being scooted through Leviathan’s intestine. This place is aft of the important bits. What’s forward is protected by the mind-shit gate, the infernal combination lock with agony for tumblers. Until we find our way through, we’re stuck in the ship’s asshole, as DJ called it—where Gurus store humans they want to torment.
On one side of a kidney void, three Antags have suspended the wrinkled package between them. It’s partly inflated, and something kicks at one end like a kitten about to be drowned. One armored Antag has extended its left wingtip hand to a clasp on the side of the bag. At a musical tweep from Bird Girl, the clasp is flipped and the bag splits along a seam, then peels up and around, revealing a grayish, glistening shape, like two or three wet, furry animals glued together, legs folded, single head tucked in …
“Kumar wasn’t lying. It is like a dog,” DJ says.
“A couple of dogs,” Borden says.
“I see rabbits,” I say. I’m remembering the odd dreamlike interlude I experienced on the way down to Titan, when I either imagined or was deceived into believing that I had never left Madigan, when the guy who said he was Wait Staff but was likely a Guru told me all about Joe and how he was central to my being here, being anywhere, and how Joe had—
Fuck that. What’s important is that I saw the Wait Staff sort of admit to the deception and convert back into being a Guru, but it didn’t look anything like this lumpy, limp bundle.
“We need Kumar,” DJ observes.
“They didn’t tell him to come,” Borden says. She then asks Bird Girl, straight out, “Is that supposed to be a Guru?” The translator sucks in her words and rasps out more tunes.
“It is Keeper,” Bird Girl says.
The damp train of rabbits or dogs unfolds a set of ears—floppy, basset hound ears. Six legs unfold as well, two ending in three-fingered hands. The whole thing is about a meter and a half long and masses in at maybe thirty kilos.
So far, Gurus turn out to be pretty much as Kumar described them. Very little like what I was shown or imagined in my instauration. This one, whatever its real shape, looks pitiful, weak—defeated.
Ulyanova trembles and strains against the cable, taking deep, hiccupping breaths. A seizure doesn’t seem out of the question. “Not finished,” she says, and then reverts to Russian. The translators again convert this to both Antag music and English. “Where is the other? We cannot go through the gate with just one.”
How does she know this? Presumably because she’s channeling this poor damp creature, plugging into the way it thinks.
Ulyanova slips her tenders’ grasping hands and gets too close to the furry bundle. Her own hands form claws. She is almost on it when one of the smaller bats pulls her back—but gently.
Ulyanova looks beyond Borden, along the ranks of Antags. “Don’t let it die!” she says. “I want to watch it suffer.”
DJ has a look in his eyes I haven’t seen except in the thick of desperate battle. And Borden—
Borden has cropped her former agitation, her rage, and is studying the damp gray shape as she once studied me.
“Can you understand Keeper?” Bird Girl asks.
Ulyanova draws in her brows.
“She must tell,” Bird Girl says.
Ulyanova gives her a quick, dagger glance. “I would go back to the way I was, if I could, but I can’t. I know one thing now I did not know then. I cannot unknow it.”
“What?” Borden asks.
“Why Gurus are here,” Ulyanova says.
Borden gives DJ and me a side glance that seems strangely guilty. Was this why the commander came out here in the first place? Maybe not to test me or to hear what DJ or Kazak had to say—no care or concern at all for the bug archives—but to learn what had happened to the starshina out on the Red. Gaining access to a Guru mind, tapping into a direct feed through a channel they can’t control—a channel planned by our forebears hundreds of millions of years ago, designed into the Ice Moon Tea. Bug vengeance or bug defense—ancient and with no regard for our young starshina’s mental health, or, I suspect, for her ultimate humanity.
What would that be worth?
Bird Girl points for us to grab the cables to again be yanked along like leashed puppies. “Take you back,” she says through the translator. “All will be brought forward.”
I haven’t heard her interior voice for some time, but now I do:
She (I see a distorted view of the starshina) is polluted. When this is done, we will kill her and the Keepers with her. Then we will take back the sky.
At that, she puts up a wall. For the time being, no more questions, no answers.
It will be done.