More visuals. On our way down, and maybe even on our way back up—if we ever get that far—we’ll become ramjets, packing in nitrogen to increase pressure in the fuel mix. The combustibles either freeze or condense on the chamber walls, and the precious slush is skimmed by the outer whisks of the turbines toward the combustion chamber, where the engines inject oxygen and light the mix. Whoosh. I thought the idea of using oxygen in a Zippo to light your cigarette was funny.
It’s how we get down there.
Once down, we’re destined to crawl, dig, excavate… and walk. Okay, that’s good, I get that. Walking is good. Big, bulky diving suits, thick legs, sometimes with tractor treads for feet, sometimes with huge grippy boots…
And the goddamnedest, most primordial-looking machines we’ve yet seen. As big as destroyers, bronze and silver, with a dozen segments and lateral tree lines of ornately fringed legs for carving and crawling and digging—for burrowing deep through ice and rock into the interior oceans of Titan, and for tangling with, and surviving, other monsters. These machines come with their own problems and weaknesses, natcherly, and no certainty there’ll be enough material down there to allow them to grow to full size or reach full armament. In which case, we might have to scavenge the surface of Titan and hunt for machine corpses before we can dive deep. More delays before we fight. But also, delays before we die.
If we fight at all. If there are Antags down there, or our own people hot on our trail. My head hurts. At this stage I seem to be mostly asleep. I certainly can’t move, which is fine because I’m locked into my couch. A coolness runs all up and down my memories. The cap is pulling away the pain, flooding me with more words, more impressions curious and harsh, informative and discouraging, all necessary to my in-depth training. Not thinking, really, and not worrying, just taking it all in like a sponge—not so bad. Even the bad news feels pretty good. Got a thing you want to think about? Hey, here’s something better. The concepts build in reverse like bricks falling out of a tornado to make a building. Boy do I prefer listening to angels in our helms. We can be bitch-friendly with our angels. We can complain about them, give them rude names, hijack their stupid certainties to help cement squad morale. Not this. We are becoming the caps.
My muscles twitch. My fingers curl as if wrapping around controls. The last of my diminishing flare of curiosity illuminates a distant question: Where do these caps get their reflex knowledge, the muscle training and innate instincts? Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe cap knowledge is distilled from dead Skyrines.
The cap floods my curiosity and drowns it with more concepts, pictures, diagrams, like a magician forcing cards. Coyle remains silent. Bug remains silent. Maybe they’re learning right alongside the little homunculus that is me, the tightly curled-up kid trying to pretend he’s watching cartoons before going off to a school he hates, a Central Valley concrete blockhouse filled with kids too crazy to ever get into the Skyrines. It was there I learned that civilian kids are the worst. To Army brats. Maybe they thought I was the creepiest kid in the school. Maybe their moms told them about my mom, or my dads. My real father was stationed at Fort Ord for a year but we didn’t live on base. Until they divorced, my mom spent her mornings in a cannabis haze, but she tried to be good to me. She kept herself just a little whacked-out from the hour I left for school until 6:30 p.m., when she could start drinking—but she really wanted us to live a normal life.
Not so easy.
Before I met Joe, I tended to jump without looking, because nothing could be worse than staying right where I was. I wasn’t cruel or sadistic like some of the truly fucked-up kids I knew—the ones who strung mice on nylon lines and watched them dangle and squirm. Jesus, not like those little monsters.
Okay. I’m going away now.
Or not.
Something is trying very hard to put my conscious mind up out of the way, on a shelf, to get on with cap and reflex learning. I don’t resist. It’s all cool. I’ll have time to examine personal questions, try to resolve old philosophical issues, like, Why become a Skyrine? Why volunteer to fight? In part, to seek adventure. But also because war for all the shit is neater and cleaner and sweeter than civilian life.
All right, that’s a lie. That’s delusional. Help me out, Bug! What was life like in the really olden times? Were there cool bugs and cruel bugs, good and evil bugs, dumb and smart bugs, bugs pious and bugs blasphemous? Were you all smart and nobody dumb? Why can’t I hook into those truths, Bug? I’m thinking you’re—
Shut the fuck up.
Ah, at last! Coyle steps back in. She seems to take me down from the shelf and shake me like an old T-shirt.
Listen. This is important shit. We’re going to where we might actually learn something.
“Yeah?” I mutter. “Like what?”
Like where I am.
If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, right? Here are the eternals: The shit remains the shit, the fight is always confused and messed up, and in the end—
Goddamn, Venn, hang on. Something really weird is coming. I think you’re in for it.
Coyle was worried about something. I’ve been waiting for whatever that might be, but I’m still surprised when it arrives. My brain locks up. Thinking stops. Topped out. Too damned full. At the same moment, maybe, comes a sharp jerk. I feel our axis of motion changing. I confuse that with cap visuals of seeds sprouting, growing, like carnival balloons plumping out, becoming monstrous, making crew and warrior spaces, getting ready to take us in. Then that all mixes with motion and coolness and calmness.
Synesthesia, big word. Mom liked to read dictionaries. She and my dad and several stepdads—she chose them soon after he left, one after another, very much alike—would read pages to each other from an old paper dictionary or a volume from the Encyclopedia Americana, after dinner, in bed, and smoke Old Tobey, as she called it, and laugh at the big words.
I think I’m in my bedroom, nine, ten, eleven years old, trying to sleep but listening to their muffled voices telling me all about Titan’s atmospheric pressure and natural caches of raw material and how to find them, how to get your machine to self-repair if damaged—take a dip in a methane lake or where volcanic water streams down through carved-out, wax-lined valleys, down to where the plastic trees pop and—
Mom says, on the other side of my bedroom wall, beyond the stick-and-wallboard and chalky Army paint job, “Your machine will know you because of your touch. Touch ID is key to security and operational efficiency.”
Mom? Is that really you?
Pulls me up short for a moment, along with another hard jerk, bump, double bump, and a
Roar.
Now my eyes are open. I peer through a port. Blackness outside turns orange, brown, then muddy yellow. We’re getting closer and closer to the answers. But first we’re going to have to dive or dig. Bugs dig up, we’ll dig down. Maybe we’ll meet halfway. But the bugs have been dead for billions of years, right? Deader than Captain Coyle.
Man, I really need to wake up.
And this time, unfortunately, I do.
INSTAURATION ONE: MADIGAN MADRIGAL REDUX
I’m wrapped in sheets, twisted into a cocoon soaked with sweat. I open my eyes and see a gray ceiling, roll against the tug of the sheets, and see a wide sliding door and beyond that a familiar room. Too familiar.