Fuck, I’m cheerful.
Borden and Kumar and Litvinov form a little triangle in the passage forward, as if blocking the crew chief from exiting without more explanation. But she’s wrung out, and all that’s left to explain is that we’re on our last reserves. Lady of Yue is going to deliver us with all we’re likely to ever get to accomplish our mission—whatever that might be. We’re lucky to be alive.
“Take it slow,” Bueller says. “Take a moment to find yourself again. Sorry to say that we’ve made you a very lumpy bed, my friends.” The Persian-cat look is gone. She seems so damned out of focus I want to rub my eyes.
She peers forward and we rotate to see Kumar preceding a pair of small, skeletally thin figures in dark gray coveralls cinched around their waists—ugly but practical outfits, comfortable in zero-g. Both have prominent gray caps on their scalps—thicker than what we were given. They look permanent.
Kumar says, “Our pilots want to pass along a last bit of information, and wish us luck.”
“These are the rabbis,” Bueller explains in an undertone. “We call them that because of their relation to the law, to deep physics, and those caps. They get new ones every trip. Their caps don’t fall off, and they don’t take them off until they get new ones.” She sucks in a deep breath at the audacity of what’s happening. “Rabbis don’t ever meet with passengers. Socialize, I mean. This is special, so be nice.”
Both of our pilots have short, kinky black hair, flattened noses, and rich umber skin. Except for their thinness, they might be Pacific Islanders, descendants of the first humans to navigate by the stars. It’s a strange meeting, leaders of a doomed crew to an equally doomed expeditionary force.
The pilots take us back to the observation bubble. They want to join us in viewing our destination. At first, they say very little. They speak with their golden-brown eyes, and they point.
Lady of Yue is descending toward Titan, which right now is between Saturn and the distant sun. For the first time, we see all of Titan eclipsing the sun, a moody golden scythe cradling a dark brown ball, backlit by stars and other moons—and by Saturn. The full glory of Saturn and its rings holds our attention for a good long time. Everyone is transfixed.
Almost everyone.
I track Joe’s attention because Joe won’t let the pretty stuff get in the way. Both he and Litvinov survey Lady of Yue fore and aft to get a better picture of the damage. It’s bad. Two of the main cargo frames and two of the balance vanes beyond are marked with gray gouges and slashes. Hard to know whether anything in the frames can be salvaged, but the vanes do not look useful. Three of the six skirts are stiff and dark and one has a peculiar tear running its length, edges still sparking, which I might be able to understand if I knew just what they were made of in the first place—
Then Litvinov and Joe turn. The pilots are actually going to speak to us. Bueller is astonished.
The older pilot has streaks of gray around his temples and the skin of his face looks like soft leather. We settle in, grow quiet, and turn toward him like kids on a bus trip. It takes real presence to make Skyrines settle in so intently.
“We would like to bring better news,” he says in a wispy voice. He has a strong, out-of-kilter gravitas—we can see him, we assume he’s there, but the light he reflects seems incomplete, and when we look sideways, he doesn’t quite stick to the background. “We’ve traveled here for seven seasons. First season, we had stations around the southern hemisphere, and Antags had stations around the northern. We were stretched too thin to fight. More of an exploratory season, learning how to survive, trying to figure the best way to carve down and access the seas—because that’s what both Antags and humans wanted to do.”
“The Ants told you that?” Ishida asks.
The older pilot smiles. “No, dear,” he says, like a patient grandfather. He doesn’t look that old, but the grayness of his reflected light gives that impression. “We sent out surveillance machines, both crewed and automated. Most didn’t come back. That was the only killing going on that season, until the very end.
“Then we learned the Antags were digging deep. They’d broken through to a polar sea and were sinking big machines and fanning them out through the canyons and around the ridges, up to the shelving slopes and crustal caps, as far as they could reach. They made it down first, but we were right on their heels, and we began a two-pronged push on the surface to close up their ventrances—cryo-volcanic fissures and blowholes. We were delicate, because we wanted to preserve as much as we could. We used methane jets to carpet bomb the northern polar regions with conventional explosives, then sent our best big machines on long marches overland. We thought we’d surround and seal off and just vent-hop until we’d closed all of them. Didn’t work.
“Our first-stage product wasn’t that efficient. The Antagonists were better at converting raw materials. Their machines grew faster and became bigger than our machines. They chewed us up on the surface, and we never made it into the deep oceans. First season came to an abrupt end just as we were able to defend and finish our own ventrance. A very brave force descended during the short pause to see what they could see. We had to abandon them.”
I can feel Coyle listening, agreeing. I was there. Bad season, worst season of all—highest percentage of casualties. She stuck around for the second delivery of soldiers and seeds, new product, new designs—after taking in the lessons of the first season.
“Season two was different,” the pilot says. “We lasted, though still with many casualties. We cleared more vents, finished our exploratory journeys from the southern poles to the equator—even claimed vents north of the equator, old Antagonist entrances—surrounded them, sunk in and defeated them, kept the enemy from digging out—thousands of their machines were destroyed or lost. We lost dozens. Finally, a good season for us, terrible for them.
“But the Antagonists had learned. Season three was the most important of all. That’s when we came upon the saline jungles. Some called them cities. They were old and seemed deserted, but our Wait Staff advisors communicated with the Gurus, and they were very interested.”
Mushran regards our dubious expressions with a dignified nod. The pilot defers to him, while Kumar moves around our little group as if conducting a diagnostic survey. He seems concerned about too much knowledge being added all at once. Knowledge can change the mix.
“We thought this was more archaeology than battle, which was fine by me,” Mushran says. “I like to learn and live. The saline jungles were intricate mazes made of compacted salts and waxes and plastics, hard as granite. Traveling between their branches was like seeing coral reefs from a worm’s point of view. They stretched for hundreds of kilometers, rising to touch the crust like pillars—mostly around the equatorial regions, where the tides were strongest, where the aurora sang bright, and purple currents flickered like lightning. Really. Just like that. Continuous and unbelievably beautiful.”
“You were on Titan?” Jacobi asks him.