The big male speaks to Bird Girl in a high voice that belies his size—more screech-rasp, untranslated. This goes on for a few minutes, with DJ and I out of the loop and way out of our depth, but happy to be ignored.
“She’s filling him in,” I say.
“I don’t think he likes us,” DJ says.
Nothing on our link except a smothering mask of affection, not meant for us. Bird Girl is truly enamored.
“They should get a room,” DJ says. “Is she going to keep him all to herself?”
He had to ask. From behind, we hear more Antag music, chirps and rasps and soaring notes. I rotate by waving my arms and see five searchers escorting seven more females, including three of the formerly oh-so-superior armored commanders, singing their appreciation like groupies. All of them have folded their wings, leaving Bird Girl as the only female to spread them wide. Clearly this is a great moment for the larger family. We know our enemies not at all.
Two searchers spray something from their tails at the canebrakes. From the shadows we hear rustling and rattling and watch as more canes grow and weave to shape arched thickets, which then fan to connect with the bulkhead, a spiral of climbing ways and bridges.
“That’s cool,” DJ murmurs.
The searchers take hold of us, gentle but no nonsense, and Bird Girl slowly folds her wings, then allows herself to be conveyed by her fellow females away from the big male. Her moment with the paterfamilias seems to be over. Her grief is obvious even without our link—and overwhelming when I dip in. Separation is such sweet sorrow. What a guy. What a species in which to be male! What’s required of the big boy when he’s at home? Is he tasked with a head-butting competition to win his place in the herd? Alpha male sports? Keeping a rolling orgy going 24/7?
DJ and I keep silent on all frequencies as our escorts guide Bird Girl and us toward a spiral bridge of fresh canes.
“Ever seen a dead cell?” DJ whispers.
“Plenty, after a bare-knuckle fight.”
“In microscopes, I mean! Cells got a skeleton made of fibers just like these bamboo bridges—grow at the tips when the cell wants to move, shrink back when it’s not needed.” DJ can be full of surprises. Not all porn and old movies in that noggin. “Kill the cell and the gunk, the gel, shrivels, and leaves a pile of sticks. This ship is a giant cell!”
Good to know. I don’t believe it for a moment, but it’s better than anything I’ve got. We’ve been sedan-chaired around that internal skeleton for half an hour or more, and now, through gaps in the canes we see spaces accessible by other arches and bridges—dark, empty spaces. Maybe Gurus once slept there. Maybe they kept sporting victims up here and pulled them out when needed to fight and die.
I once got into a classroom argument with a teacher about the plural of the name Spartacus. The other kids ragged me all day, on the playground or walking home. Now we’re surrounded by cages and maybe holes that were once filled with Spartacuses. Spartaci. Spartacoi. Fuck it.
Echoes tell me our surround is narrowing. It’s become completely dark. Not even the searchers are illuminating. Not at all reassuring that Bird Girl is with us, because based on what’s passing through our link, her deadly sadness and lovebird grief, she might happily be going to her doom, having displeased the big male with our presence, her dealings with the enemy. No way to know how smart the big male is or what they said to each other. He might have given her instructions to gut herself and us besides.
As the lights come back up we can see that we’ve reached a much slimmer portion of the ship’s hull, perhaps closer to the actual bow. Bird Girl isn’t committing suicide. She’s taking us to Ulyanova. Big male (I’m going to call him Budgie) may not like us, but that hasn’t changed the basic plans.
“Why aren’t the showrunners doing something about us? Why haven’t they learned?” DJ whispers.
“Showrunners? Learned what?”
“Gurus!” DJ says with a critical scowl. “Ship’s been hijacked. Shouldn’t there be a fail-safe, some sort of dead Guru switch, that would blow it up if it’s hijacked?
“Damned obvious,” I whisper back. “Ulyanova’s convincing. Or maybe—” And this hurts to both think and say, I almost want to shut up and just curl into a ball. “Maybe the plan hasn’t changed. We won’t matter a great goddamned toothpick to this ship unless we get boring.”
DJ plays out my drift. “So we’re doing exactly what it wants—and this is our third act!”
I have to admit I was bored back in the tail, for a while, but this is definitely more and more interesting. I’d fucking stay tuned. What do we say to Ulyanova when we meet up? Wonder what Budgie will say once he’s brought up to date?
Somehow these awkward thoughts leak to Bird Girl. She directs her searchers to move her and favors us with close examination. Four eyes bore into my two. I’m outmatched.
“Show respect,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“We have left the mimic alone. Now she makes request for your presence.”
DJ and I look at each other.
She raises a ridge between her shoulders and shakes it out with a shuffling noise. The searchers link up, grip our hands, and reach us out to a ladder of large, U-shaped grips mounted on one face of a long, sinuous beam. They release us to the grips, cold and hard, then swing off to one side. DJ and I cling as the beam pushes forward—grows forward!—and twists, spiraling us like a steel vine toward a diffuse haze, like moonlight in a cathedral.
Bird Girl has crossed with us and grips the rungs behind, wings folded. “Climb,” she says.
The beam carries us into a narrower, longer chamber, like a pipe or a needle, filled with long ribbons about as broad as my forearm. The ribbons cross over in a kind of braid every five or six meters and are alternately dark, then bright again, illumination flowing aft as if carrying signals to the rest of the ship—like fiber-optic cables. The beam pushes and twists up the middle of these ribbons, contorting to avoid the braids. Searchers are moving up along the outside, keeping up with us and following more arches of canes.
As the ribbons twist along to an end, we see just beyond their conclusion four oblong panels, as colorful as stained-glass windows, but arranged in a wide quadrangle, like the faces in a clock tower. From where we are, each of the four faces appears divided into multicolored wedges, like pie charts—but sprinkled with stars.
As we grow up to and then through the faces, two searchers hiding in the angles between retreat into shadow like shy schoolchildren. The faces have painted themselves with thousands of cryptic symbols, red and blue against a silvery background like a clear dusk sky. Every few blinks, the symbols lift and rearrange—impossible to read or understand.
“Any constellations?” DJ asks from below. The beam—the vine—pushes and twists on.
“No,” I say. “Some sort of diagram.”
Maybe this is Ulyanova’s playroom and these are her mirrors, where she’s pasted Day-Glo stickers to remind herself of a human childhood. But the stars that flock in the surrounding mosquito cloud are pinpoint brilliances, like stars in a clear night sky. Not at all like stickers.
Beyond the ribbons and inboard from the faces, more searchers are spraying to encourage canes to grow, giving access to another swallow’s nest of shiny black spheres—different in color, but not unlike our present habitats.
“The mimic asks that you will all move here,” Bird Girl says. I detect a seething kind of hatred in her, and not just for Ulyanova—for us as well. Meeting up with Budgie seems to have stiffened her anger—maybe bent her thoughts. At any rate, I’m not feeling any sense of partnership, much less affection.
“Better accommodations?” DJ asks.
“Closer to where the mimic hides.” She stretches out a wing.
Starboard from the clock faces, about fifty meters forward of our new domiciles, I make out a slowly undulating curtain, like a tapestry woven from strands of smoke. I turn to communicate this discovery to DJ and Bird Girl when, without warning, Ulyanova and Vera appear through the curtain and surge up before us.
Bird Girl retreats a few rungs, feathers spiked, and DJ lets out a shuddering groan, but the starshina looks only at me.
“Long time!” she says, and tries for a charming smile. Epic fail. My God, she’s nothing but skin and bones! In this light, her face stretches across her skull like frog skin, moist and shiny, eyes large and brilliantly empty. “I am glad you are here,” she says. “I need to think again like human.” I cringe as something from her probes my mind, like frozen fingers touching my thoughts, my memories. Ulyanova cocks her head, trying perhaps for coyness, but appearing toothy, feral. “So many strange days. Vera and I make new home. It will be beautiful when finished.”
“It is already beautiful,” Vera says. “It could be more useful.”
“I know ship well,” the starshina says. “I dream it. Work is difficult! They fight me, question me, all the time. Here—move closer and help me stay human, will you? Before long trips begin.”
DJ climbs closer, starts to speak, maybe to save me from the full brunt of that brightly dead look, but Ulyanova simply glances his way—and he’s knocked from the rungs into a nearby cane thicket, where he waves his arms and legs like a fly in a web.
Nobody dares to move. What more could she do if we actually crossed her?
She takes a shuddering breath. Then, at her permissive gesture, Vera and I link hands to pull DJ back to the rungs. He favors his elbow, which has been scraped by a broken cane.
Vera backs off a few rungs and watches DJ and me like a hawk. Literally. As if we’re mice trying to hide.
“You have questions … ?” Ulyanova asks.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“In needle at tip of ship,” she says. “Like hypo that will inject us to stars.”
“Is this a control room?” I ask.
“It is part of ship’s eyes. Often, brain shows me what it is seeing. I control—but dead Gurus still try to return, take power, change things—and worst of all, talk.” She looks both amused and sad—easy enough in her present condition. “I keep them in brain’s closet. They are not happy!”
“Ship treats us well,” Vera says brightly, as if that justifies everything.
“I do not stand in ship’s way,” Ulyanova says. “None of us are problem, not you, not me—not yet. We amuse.”
“Can you tell the brain, the ship, where to go? Take us back to Earth—now?”
“Ship goes where it has gone, back and forth and around comet clouds, for thousands of years. This trip, after last delivery, after long journey out to Antagonista planet, it will return to Mars and Earth and maybe Titan, to pick up remaining Gurus.”
“They’re leaving?”
This seems to humor her. “They plan different.” Ulyanova favors me again with that ghastly smile. I feel sick with guilt, empathy—not good emotions for a soldier. I remind myself if she fails, or if she turns against us, the starshina could kill us all. It wouldn’t be her fault, but what would it matter?
I don’t know whether to pity or fear her, but what I do not want to do is tick her off.
DJ climbs close again, coming back for more. I always knew he had courage but this is exceptional. “We’re on our way to Planet X, right?” he asks.
She has eyes only for me but answers him anyway. “Next stop is near Pluto, for delivery. Then out to Antagonista world. Then return to Earth. They failed.”
“Who failed?”
“Dead Gurus.”
“Failed how?”
“Their deliveries did not amuse. But still they hide and plan.”
“Nasty things,” Vera says. “They are canceled, but always hope.”
“I tell them what they want to hear. They pay attention. So for now, I control.”
“Fine,” I say, and brace for her response. “But if we can’t control the ship and take it home, or wherever we want to go—what have you accomplished?”
Ulyanova regards me with sad triumph. “I stop ship from blowing out air and killing you like rats,” she says. “Is that good thing?”
“She is Queen,” Vera says, and pats her shoulder, then reassures her, “It is good thing. It is very good.”
Is Vera truly a friend, an advocate—or a kind of pet?
“Come with,” the starshina says. “Bring up searchers to help.” She swings toward the nest of spheres. “This is where squad will live,” she says. “Antags will also soon move closer, farther forward, where we can protect from ones we have set free.”
“Set free?” I ask.
“Our shame,” Ulyanova says. “When we opened gate, we opened cages. Fighters are free.”
“But they’re dead!” DJ says.
Ulyanova lifts an almost bald eyebrow. “Some still live, spread in dark places. Ours and others. Watch for them. They may be on look for you, yes?”
“Shit,” DJ says. He’s as gray as his overalls.
“How many?” I ask.
“Fifty-three,” Vera says.
Ulyanova shakes her head. “Not so many. More have died, killing each other. They are like wild dogs.”
This is a fight we don’t need and certainly don’t want. Makes my spine freeze thinking about it. “Can’t you keep us clear of them?”
Ulyanova looks at us with real sympathy, but suddenly, her smile is wicked. “You are more interesting to ship when you fight.” She shakes her head stubbornly. “I will not change that. It will help keep you alive.”
Gurus and their ghosts know too fucking much about all of us. They know how to arouse fear, anger, violence—which might as well be complete mastery. It’s their script. It’s their stock on the market. And it’s what makes us worth keeping around.
For a while, at least.
Three searchers move up and link arms.
“This way, please,” Vera says.