“Ask him about Corporal Grover Sudbury. Ask where he went with the corporal after your comrades exacted their punishment, and what they both did there.”
“Sudbury vanished,” I say.
“Everyone has their role, Master Sergeant,” the voice says behind the window. “The relationship between Sudbury and Joseph Sanchez is popular, Master Sergeant. Far too popular to waste.”
GOOD MORNING, MOON
Someone taps my helm with a padded metal finger. “Venn. Wake up.” It’s Ishida. She’s persistent. I wake up—again. She’s taken the seat next to mine. Borden is across the aisle talking earnestly to Kumar and Mushran. The glider vibrates, roars—again with that huge, MGM lion’s roar—and we roll clockwise, then counterclockwise. The nose lifts, the tail vibrates, something big groans, and the whole airframe shudders.
“Rough ride,” Ishida says with half a frown.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” I insist, but my words are mushy.
I look forward and see Ishikawa, Jacobi—Joe. Beyond them, Litvinov and the backs of the Russians. Their helms are distinctive. When did we put on our skintights? I lift my hand, check the seal with the glove. Same ones made for Mars, but newer—cleaned and pressed. I do not remember any of that. Are we off Lady of Yue?
Apparently. Yeah. We’re on the glider, aren’t we.
I clench the couch arms. Coming awake or out of my trance or whatever, to this, does not feel good. I’m clearly a danger to everybody, blacking out like that.
“Did we all make it?” I ask.
“We’re not down yet,” Ishida says. “Look.” She motions for me to close my plate. I do, and blink down a display. The glider feeds our angels a decent external 270, plus data in sidebars and two ratcheting crawls. I turn my head and the external goes with me. The glider is surrounded by swift brownish haze—methane clouds. A film keeps trying to stick to one or more of the cameras but gets swiped every few seconds. We’re sloping into a valley of ten thousand smokes, but it’s not fire that makes the smoke—it’s freezing methane and a lot of other stuff, all described on the lower crawl. The turbines must be sucking in fine water-sand and that explains the surging and roaring. But we haven’t crashed. We’re still descending.
Everything gets brighter. The haze begins to clear and we see lower decks of brown and yellow clouds, a small sun cutting through a serrated break—the most surreal and beautiful sunrise I’ve seen. A flat deck of cirruslike clouds above the glider burns golden yellow.
We’re down to five klicks from the rugged surface. Rising gray plumes of sandy water ice spew from black, shiny cracks that have to be dozens of meters wide and many hundreds of meters long. Below those cracks… down through them… what? Inner oceans? Deep in the cracks something green or silver-gray churns and bubbles. Ice lava, the crawl says. Ammoniated, highly saline water that just won’t freeze solid and shoves up in a methane-steaming, ammonia-vapor slurry.
Planes, trains, and automobiles all the way. That’s my life. But now we’ve gone as far as we’re going to go, end of the line, right? Journeys end in warriors meeting. Which warriors?
Are Antags still down there?
Any of us left?
I’m working to ignore the blackout and what I experienced. Going back to Madigan. Fuck that shit. I should have been section 8’ed as soon as I got back to Earth.
Time-release terror.
“Huh?” I flip open my plate and look around. Nobody’s spoken in the noisy cabin. It’s Coyle. She gets me every time she pops in like that. She’s clear, crisp, like inside my suit with me. Almost solid. Ishida has become engrossed in her helm display and pays me no attention. DJ, across the aisle, has kept his plate open and is studiously peering at nothing. He’s out of it, too. We’re both mainlining a strong signal.
Doesn’t explain the—
Borden called them instaurations. They must be time-release psych capsules implanted back at Madigan to knock you down in case you get out of their control. I heard of that sort of stuff during Special Ops training. How to control a team that’s gone rogue—implanted suggestion. Drives rogue agents to question everything. Commit suicide. Ups the ante if you disobey orders or defect.
“You think that’s it?” I have to work hard to think my words back at Coyle rather than say them aloud.
Maybe. I’m not you, I don’t feel all of you.
“You sound stronger here. Are you stronger?” I lean my head back in an agony of conflict. Trust isn’t part of my toolkit now, because everything’s up for grabs.
Shut up and just keep the objective in view. There’s something down below that shitty layer of gunk that’s brought us this far.
“How do you know any of this?”
Because I’m part of it. I don’t like it, but I am. We’re going to where it’s all coming together—where everything is held tight. So far, I’m not fixed into that memory. Until that finishes, I’m still flexible. I can make decisions and not just answer questions. But that’s going to end soon. I don’t like what might be replacing me. Doesn’t feel right, but I can’t see it clearly. Big Kahuna? Another bug? I don’t like any of this.
Sounds like Coyle is dropping back into babble. I’m caught up in my own problems. I have a choice. Either I give in and let the instauration, the Madigan poison, spread, or I pretend it never happened, don’t tell anybody—don’t look Kumar or Joe in the eyes for the next few hours. Keep trying to stay part of this team, which, God help me, I’m actually thinking of with that weird combat affection called unit cohesion, spirit of the corps. Jacobi’s juju is working on me as well as the sisters and the Russians.
I’m full of spirit, all right. Spirits, more like it. Haunted head, indeed. This is what, number four? I can’t juggle that many balls.
I concentrate on the view. We’re flying between low hills, turbines roaring on both sides, glider rocking like a carnival ride, then swooping up and down. I drop my eyes below the rim of the helm and the image from the outer sensors follows. Below—through rising silvery mist, swirling and blowing away at unseen nitrogen winds—
The debris of battle. My God, so much broken, blown-up shit!
I hear the occasional gasp or oath from the others, buried in the continuous roar. Ishida beside me is speaking Japanese, probably a prayer. Her sweet voice is musical counterpoint to what I’m seeing, what we’re all seeing.
In jumbled mounds every few hundred meters across a flat brown prairie lie what look like thousands of stomped-down, bronze-colored centipedes, but huge—hundreds of meters long. Even crushed, they appear thick and strong, robust around the head and long in the middle. They’re too damned big—big as ocean liners and cracked open, smashed, their lumpy, glistening interiors open to the corrosive mist. Around and inside them, nothing moves. They’re squashed, they’re dead. We’re flying into a landscape littered with dead monsters. Some of them are ours. Some are not. The biggest of the big, the most powerful, now just wreckage on the Wax.
“Four minutes to station,” Borden says over glider comm. “There’s not going to be an accordion. Have to move fast. We’ll find heavy combat gear on the other side, but for this transit, these suits will have to do, and that means we’ve got all of five minutes to get inside and get cleaned off.”
I pull open my plate. Joe hunkers, waiting. I watch him suspiciously. Does he know shit I should know, should have been told a long time ago? Why would I even care what happened to Corporal Grover Sudbury? He was a rapist, a scumsucking shithead. I don’t want to think about him, and maybe that’s the point. I’m out of Guru control. They have me rubber-band screwed to a fine knot, about to snap, primed to step out into the poisonous cold and open my plate. Put an end to the guilt, the fighting—the confusion.