“She seems square to me,” DJ says.
“She’s befuddled,” Joe says.
“Aren’t we all,” Tak says.
Joe scowls. “I’m not convinced she’s up to command, double that with Kumar and Mushran hanging over us.”
“‘You go to war with the army you have,’” DJ quotes sententiously, “‘not the army you want.’”
“Don’t fucking jinx us!” Tak warns. He’s serious. DJ knows better.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Anyway,” Joe continues, “Litvinov seems to have a grip. What about Jacobi?”
I think maybe now I should tell him about the time bomb in my head. How it focuses on him. How that makes him a threat to whoever planted it, and how that makes me wonder what the hell role he played in all of this. But I don’t.
“Jacobi’s strong,” I say. “Moody, but she’s got her shit together.”
Tak says to Joe, “You’ve been moody since Kazak died.”
“Moody?” Joe snorts. “I’m crazier than DJ.”
“Good to know,” DJ says. “Wouldn’t want to excel at anything in this outfit.”
“But I’m not going to let the crazy loose until I learn why everything we were told is a lie,” Joe says. “And why that became obvious to Kumar and Mushran only a year and a half ago, about the same time Antagonists started dropping comets on Mars—and here, too, apparently.”
“Ancient history,” DJ says. “But I don’t hear much from Coyle, and hardly anything from the others—” At this his face goes ashen. “Got to say, they all scare the shit out of me. They’re human, but not, know what I mean?”
“I fucking do not know what you mean,” Joe says. “Thank God.”
We pass a bank of cylindrical elevators and equipment lifts filled with debris, pipes, cables. We find the stairs. The steps are bigger than we’re used to, with odd grooves up the middle of each riser.
“Tail draggers,” Joe says.
“Antags?” DJ asks.
“You guys tell me,” Joe says. “This station has been occupied by both sides at one time or another, so Mushran says. Three combat operations to control and secure. We won the last one, supposedly.” He nudges the grooves with his boots. “Antags must have turned glass at some point, right? So you’d channel them, too?”
DJ and I shake our heads. No Antag ghosts. I don’t know whether that would be an interesting experience or not, but right now, this damned suit is really doing a number on my joints and stomach and I don’t need any further distractions.
We walk up both sides of the staircase, which curves slowly around a long, inner bulkhead, up about twenty meters—a decent climb. My knees are binding now, and it isn’t the climb. Feels like tacks are being driven into my elbows and ankles.
A wide, deeply cold hallway leads to a dark circular space. The broad, shadowy floor beyond sinks through several levels to form a kind of arena. Mechanical arms and racks of stacked disks hang motionless from the ceiling.
“Drones?” Tak asks.
“Vent probes,” Joe says. “Probably broken, or they wouldn’t still be here.”
We look as we pass. Not a clue. There’s a lot more debris at the center of the arena, and the steps have been slagged—melted and cracked, the cracks sealed with a lighter gray putty. On the far side, big plates of transparent plastic have been shoved over two wide openings, held in place by foam sealant.
“These suits fucking hurt,” DJ says, shaking out his arms, then kicking one leg so hard he almost loses his balance. Mine is pinching more now, too. The pinches are even sharper, really painful. I’d like nothing better than to “doff” the fucker and see what’s going on inside. But we’re across the chamber and join Tak to look at what lies beyond those big, jerry-rigged plates. Tak takes point as we kick at the debris, trying to make sense of how much damage and why.
Joe walks up to the plates. “Jesus, come look,” he says. We gather in front of a mostly transparent panel overlooking a slow-motion, boiling caldron about a klick wide and filled with rising mist and broken machines. “Our vent,” Joe says. “Lots of battle damage. It’s dark down there, in the center, but you can still see.”
We press close to the plastic. What lies beyond is spectacular and discouraging. The station was constructed around this fissure, this volcanic vent, like a thick wall around a half-frozen lake. Titan’s dark brown night sky casts a faint glow over the complex. Methane snow drifts down through the cold, clear nitrogen, hits the slushy liquid, and instantly puffs away… to rise into the brown sky, refreeze, and drop again. The continuous cycle of snow partly obscures a churning, circulating graveyard of diggers, submarine-like transports, big, broad-shouldered mechanical centipedes—hard to know how much buoyant crap is out there, passing in twisted review before our unhappy eyes.
“Looks abandoned,” Tak says.
“That it does.” Joe looks at me. “Any more clues from Captain Coyle?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Bug?”
I make an effort to raise Bug. I almost get something—a warning? A memory? A brief suspicion of knowledge, quickly extinguished. “Sorry,” I say.
“Great.” Joe turns and swings out his glove. “Over there. Mushran was right.” There are bodies on the opposite end of the viewing gallery. I count four.
We stand over them.
“Human,” DJ says. “Not combat casualties.”
“What, then?” Tak asks. He winces as he kneels. “Group suicide?”
The four lie half-in, half-out of pressure suits like ours, spaced apart from each other as if caught up in their own private agonies—naked jumbles of contorted, mummified limbs. Two men, two women. The men hold knives in skeletal hands. The women seem to be trying to extricate their legs from the bottom halves of their suits. Dried blood covers the floor. Almost no smell.
DJ says, “‘Don’t wear them,’ right? Written in blood?”
Joe whistles between his teeth. “Keep tight,” he says. “Don’t guess. Know.”
“Yeah,” DJ says.
“Ow,” Tak says, then grabs his stomach. Joe is next. The sharp pain for me is in my right calf, like a dagger shoving through.
“That’s it,” I say. “The suits are bad.”
We try to help each other out of the suits. Tak is difficult. It’s like he’s glued in. When we remove his neck plate and helm, the neck support pad takes an upper layer of skin, leaving raw, oozing pink. He’s in agony but doesn’t say a word. We pick the knives off the floor and start hacking and carving at the tough material, each working on the other, pulling aside automatic clasps, lifting and removing rounded plates. Joe raises up his own neck piece. Little bloody wires push inside, still wriggling toward each other—still trying to grow together.
“What the hell!” Joe says in a mildly peeved tone. He grabs a wire and pulls. Beads of blood follow.
The gloves are the hardest. Wires have worked around all my fingers, and one is still plunging through my thumb. I take it at the root, in the wrist of the glove, and pluck it out with a sick moan. Joe is making the same noise as he cuts and then tugs wires from his thigh, his hip, his arms.
Tak is free first and stands breathing hard before the transparent plates. He’s managed to skip and roll his way into the middle of the bodies. One of the females congratulates us with a wrinkled grimace, as if still watching through her dark, shrunken eyes.
We stand naked again in the cold, drops of blood falling in quick-freezing spatters. The wounds are painful, intimately horrible, but I don’t think any one of us is going to die. Barely in time.