DJ leans back and reaches through the seats to tap my shoulder. “Stick close,” he says. “It’s going to get weirder, but I’ll be there with you.” He looks serious. DJ rarely manages to look completely serious.
“Slim comfort, DJ,” I say.
“It’s bad, sir. You hear what I hear? Captain Coyle has been here. She says to tuck prunes and hang on to your fudge.”
Behind us, listening, Ishida splutters a giggle and reaches a gloved hand to cover her mouth like a Japanese schoolgirl. Damn, that touches me. Somewhere inside, our Winter Soldier remembers being shy. If she can keep that core alive after all that’s happened to her, I can sure as shit maintain. I notice she’s found a pen and scrawled something on her skintight. I saw it on her previous skintight but didn’t pay attention. She’s written “Senketsu” above where her blaze might go. I don’t know what that means. On her own suit, Ishikawa has written “Junketsu.” I’m about to ask, but Borden tells us to seal and check suck.
Alarms in the cabin.
Glider hard-bumps and slows to an abrupt, lurching halt.
TITAN F.O.B.
The installation is a gray, snow-spattered hockey puck about fifty meters high and maybe twenty times that across. We did not get a good look before the glider nuzzled up to one side.
We unstrap and bunch in the narrow aisle. Borden pushes up mid-aisle and props her hands against the bulkhead. “Half-charge weapons. We’ll move out in squad order, three teams,” she says. “Jacobi’s team first, Litvinov and Russians next, Sanchez and Johnson, Fujimori and Venn, take the rear.” She gives me a stern look. Joe moves up beside me. Tak pushes through the aisle to stand beside DJ. DJ doesn’t relish being POG any more than I do. “Two on point for each team,” Borden continues. “All but points keep weapons belted. Damage to the station must be avoided at all cost.”
The lock passes us outside a squad at a time. We don’t wait for the others. It’s every one of us across the crusty Wax and gritty ice-sand to a big black canopy that offers some protection against the weather, like a tent flap.
In the ten meters between the glider lock and the station, our arms and legs become coated with a fine, spreading layer of liquid methane that instantly starts to steam. We’re warm enough to boil methane. That means our suits are losing heat fast. Sandy ice-grit lands as well and turns to mixed slush that curtains off and refreezes, weighing us down like hanging chains. That distracts us momentarily from the sensation that we’re being squeezed by a big, cold hand. Titan’s atmosphere is almost half-again denser than Earth’s, and our skintights are designed to hold suck, not keep shit out.
Borden tries to alert the station that we need the outer lock opened. I see her lips move behind her bedewed faceplate. No response. Either nobody is there, or comm is fucked. She makes hand gestures and somehow communicates to us that there’s a way in—maybe she knows the code.
My world-line is just a vector arrowing through a rugged trail of bad places relieved only by weird sanctuaries where you have to know the secret word or carry a fucking master coin. And it’s not just me. That’s human space in a nutshell. That’s all we’ve conquered in the vac—stretched-out orbital threads between little BBs on which we depend for our lives. Most of the universe hates us so intensely it spreads itself so vast we can’t even think of going there. Down where I am, it’s cycles of hell spiraling in ever-shrinking circles. Inside, outside. Vac or poison outside, me inside. Tubes and coffins, more tubes, more coffins. Eternal returns of day and night.
Is it day or night? Day, I think. We landed at sunrise. The glider could have slid around to the other terminator, but Titan’s pretty big—that would have taken a couple of hours.
Borden finds a big checkerboard. “Venn, get up here.”
I join her and Joe and Litvinov.
“Make yourself useful. Coyle should know the sequence.”
“She’s not very reliable,” I say, but then I reach up and slap my gloved hand on the squares in a staccato sequence. What are our chances? Good, it appears.
The big outer hatch yawns wide in the great curved side of the hockey puck, really big—way over our heads. Dreamy blue light beyond. Looks like a cheap nightclub, but it’s easily large enough to hold us all. I’m as surprised as anybody. DJ pats my shoulder, but this still isn’t enough to make our commander happy.
We gather within the hatch. Comm is dead, probably screwed by the clouds of ice dust and sand, but the cold nitrogen is dense enough, and sheltered from precip and wind we can hear each other pretty well.
“Glider is about to unload seed cargo!” Borden shouts. “The seeds will activate outside the main hatch. We’ll want to keep well out of their way. Early on, they don’t recognize people.”
“Don’t get between product and material!” DJ calls out in Bueller’s Texas accent.
The last swirls of ice dust and vapor make it hard to see even inside. The bluish light cuts through some of the haze, but it’s still not bright. We trudge across the hangar with a weird, high-stepping gait, plucking the soles of our steaming boots from dark muck and slick crap. Water has laid down a rugged gray sheet spackled with sticky-looking black gobs. Who gets hangar patrol and cleans up? Maybe nobody’s left alive in the station. That would be a kindness—dying rather than being stuck here.
My nose twitches. Something stinks in my skintight. Something acrid. Maybe I’m imagining it. Sweat is kind of acrid, plus the stinks we all make—fear, hormones, pheromones, even hydrogen sulfide and methane. But this smells like ammonia. I do not want to smell bitter almonds next. That would be it for all of us.
“Move it!” other voices shout. My nose was right. Our suits aren’t holding suck in the cold. The seals are hardening, cracking, corroding. Real incentive to get deeper into the station.
Since nothing welcomes us, Borden walks over to the far wall and the outline of a smaller door. She lines me up and I slap at another checkerboard while the others bunch up like schoolkids after recess, stamping our boots, feeling deep cold seize wrists and ankles—suit heaters can’t begin to keep up—and why not? How fucked was the planning? Why did we have only Mars-rated skintights? We’re off the grid.
The smaller door opens. Sun-yellow warmth blasts the ice dust to slush and rain and we all crowd into the brightness, dripping and soaking and no doubt stinking of everything rich and strange.
I look back over the jostling, steaming crowd, through the door into the hangar behind us, and see big, dark silhouettes of things rolling in. Offloaded seeds, bronze or black and shiny, making deep rumbles. They’re growing fucking hair! Jesus, they’re actually sprouting thick slick fibers that writhe like Medusa’s snakes. If they follow us inside, we’ll become part of their balanced breakfast.
The smaller door slams down.
I hold my breath until I see the seeds are not joining us. For a moment, we stand without words, silent and stinking, until the ceiling sprouts spray heads and we’re sluiced three times, three complete spray-downs, so forceful we’re shoved against each other like pins in a bowling alley.
When we’re clean, the inner station opens another door and allows us to proceed. The next chamber is also yellow. A crudely lettered sign has been slapped onto the door between. It reads, “Don/Doff.”