“What the hell does that mean?” DJ asks.
“Put them on, take them off,” Tak says.
The first thing we do is shuck our skintights, already frayed and blistering, and on Borden’s orders, toss them into a disposal bin along with helms, angels, everything. Out with the old. Almost naked. There are thirty of us in the station. We haven’t seen anyone else. Are we alone? Nervous, anxious, pacing, we mill and slap shoulders and ribs to stay warm. Despite everything, I feel a sudden need to get my hands on those big weapons. I want to get to work—need to get to work! Because of Bueller’s cap I know nice things, encouraging things about centipedes and excavators and nymphs and crushers and stampers, about deep scrawlers and excalators. I know how to work them. I can see them! I can almost reach out and touch them.
Borden pulls us up short. “First up is the latest fashion,” she says. Her voice is high, reedy. She’s pepped on relief and exhaustion and maybe on the last of the cap training. “Appropriate apparel for the occasion. Without heavy-duty suits, we won’t survive if there’s even a minor breach, and we won’t be able to work outside.” She points down. “Or below.”
“Found ’em!” Tak shouts. One wall of the chamber is covered by big steel crates labeled “Anti-Corrosion Pressure Skins, Style K(int).” There are ten crates, each claiming to contain twenty suits, but six of the crates are empty. Tak and Ishida and Jacobi open the next two crates. Inside hang thicker, bulkier suits, still wrapped in shiny plastic. Tak tears a hole in one and opens a diagnostic panel on the helm beneath, checks the readout, then moves on to a second and a third and gives a high sign. “These look good,” he says.
Jacobi flicks at a scrap of silvery fabric attached to the inside of a crate lid. “What’s this?” she asks. It’s a brief message scrawled in Japanese and Russian. “What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘Don’t wear them,’” Ishida translates.
Starshina Ulyanova reads the Russian. “Same,” she agrees. “Both in one hand—one people writing.”
“Yeah,” Ishida says. “Probably Japanese.”
“What’s the ink?” Jacobi asks.
“Could be blood,” Tak says. He reaches down and picks at the message with his fingernail. A flake falls away. He looks up at me. We stand back.
“What the fuck’s wrong with the suits?” Ishikawa asks. “They look new.”
The air inside the station is clean and breathable but frigid. We’re turning blue. The old skintights—even if we could recover them—would likely be full of holes by now.
“Check the other crates,” Borden says. A thorough search of the crates reveals no other notes and no other choices. “We need these,” the commander concludes. “Get them on and let’s assemble a search team. We’ll carry sidearms, nothing bigger.”
We “don” the bulky gray suits. Circlets of heavy plastic and metal wrap arms and legs and thorax. A full suit-up involves letting auto-clasps grab and tighten each band, which takes about ten seconds, keep your fingers out of the way. The helms are bulky, faceplates narrow and thick. But Titan gravity is lighter than on Mars. The suits feel only slightly heavier than our old skintights.
Mushran adjusts his helm with help from Tak. We swing the plates shut briefly to read what the new angels are saying. Not much. A small blinking display reads, “Adjustment under way. Please be patient.” Sure. Never a choice.
Taps are in abundance on one side of the chamber. Hundreds of warriors at once could take in gasps and sips and energy before going outside, before riding those big weapons into battle on the Wax. We suckle for a few minutes, looking at each other from the corners of our eyes.
“About seventy hours’ worth,” Joe tells Borden. He reads the reserve for these essentials—maybe one more dip, then the reserves go empty. Unless we lose a lot of the team. We pluck loose. Time to reconnoiter. The Russians huddle with Litvinov. Jacobi’s team surrounds her. They confer for less than a minute. Litvinov and Jacobi step aside to whisper with each other. Then Jacobi approaches Borden and Kumar.
“Where’s Mushran?” she asks.
Kumar shrugs. “Gone ahead, perhaps,” he says.
“Stupid!” Borden says with considerable heat. She’s sick of Kumar and Mushran, I don’t doubt.
“I do not disagree,” Kumar says. “He has never listened well, nor followed others willingly.”
“Fucking honch,” Jacobi says.
Borden says, “Before we fan out, time for details. They’re not good.” In her most cautious and low-key voice, she tells us, “Lady of Yue’s arrival survey shows that we’re down to just this one station. The others don’t answer and Lady of Yue couldn’t see them from orbit.”
“No welcome wagon,” Jacobi observes. “Anyone left?”
“The station’s only signals are automatic, and those sporadic,” Borden says.
“We’re going swimming, right?” DJ asks. “Into the fissures—the volcanoes?”
Borden won’t let him get ahead of her. “Our orders are to secure the station and check out the product taking shape, or any other equipment we find, reopen the vent if necessary, then, attempt to access the inner sea.”
“I’m prime for that!” Ishikawa says, flexing her fingers. Teen eager to take the family car out for a spin.
Borden is unimpressed. “We don’t have a large enough team to do it all. I’m making the decision that we take control of whatever product has already been shaped and proceed below. There may still be a deep-sea installation under the crust and no more than a few hundred klicks from here. We don’t know what it looks like, what it contains, or what the inhabitants have accomplished. But that’s our destination, unless Lady of Yue says otherwise.”
“No reports?” Ishida asks. “We don’t know what’s happening down there?”
“None that reached Division Four,” Kumar says.
“Secret even from Wait Staff?” Tak asks.
“Secret from me,” says Kumar. “I do not know about Mushran.”
Mushran has reappeared without being noticed, a singular talent. He is still adjusting his suit, wincing. All of us are uncomfortable. The Russians are stretching, exchanging unhappy glances. Mushran looks up and around, eyes darting at the activity, like he knows something we don’t but it’s not yet time to share.
“You went away,” Jacobi says. “Where to?”
Mushran nods reasonably. “About a hundred meters up and in, there is a kind of control center, damaged but repaired. There are bodies.”
The Russians get up. Litvinov shakes his head; there’s really nothing to translate, nothing to explain, that isn’t already obvious. Borden tells Joe to look into Mushran’s claim. We recover our sidearms and charge up the bolt pistols. The guns seem puny. I’m hungry for product—for our bigger, badder weapons and transporters. We head for the next chamber over, following the path Mushran must have taken, and see that it was converted at some point into a makeshift armory. The armory occupies one of four chambers that radiate inward from the lock antechamber. Only damaged and broken sidearms—bolt rifles and pistols—remain. There are also three piles of spent matter cartridges, all depleted. It’s dark and quiet. Station is operating on severely reduced power, just barely enough light to see and getting chillier. Our suits are doing a fine job keeping out the cold, but we’ve left our plates open until we get used to the narrow view. Plus the damned things are starting to pinch. I flex to get the joints to break in faster. The pinchings move around and sharpen.
“I don’t trust Kumar or Mushran, and I still don’t know what to make of Borden,” Joe says.