“What now?” DJ asks.
“Tell the others,” Joe says to Tak.
“Right.” And Tak is off at a run.
“We’re staying?” DJ asks.
“We’re looking for more suits and someplace to get warm,” Joe says. “We can’t do anything back there. Why didn’t Mushran say something?”
“Because he has a death wish,” I say.
“Fucking A,” DJ says.
A quick, hopping survey of the arena chamber overlooking the fissure tells us nothing, gives no clues as to where other equipment might be. Our feet turn blue and go numb.
Tak returns with Borden, Litvinov, and Jacobi. Ishikawa trails. All but Tak still wear the suits. Borden looks at us with mixed pity and sympathy. “We’re going to need to find you more suits,” she says in a small, not-quite-resigned-to-this voice.
“Fuck that!” Joe shouts. His words echo. He points to the bodies, the pools of blood—the red drips from his own flesh. “Mushran saw this, he knows about these fuckers—he must know!”
“I’m sure he did,” Borden says. “When he saw Tak, he looked shocked—then angry. He asked him what the hell he had done.”
Litvinov adds, “Bastard said, ‘It’s only little pain.’”
“Shall we ash him?” Tak asks. Tak never threatens lightly.
“Back off that shit! We don’t have a choice,” Borden emphasizes.
DJ says, “I’m not wearing a fucking iron maiden.”
“Screw you, screw all of you!” Joe shouts, his voice hoarse. He lapses into a fit of coughing. We’re turning grayish blue. All the blood is retreating to our core.
“We need these suits,” Borden says. She looks down on the bodies and the blood. “I don’t know what happened here. Panic. Poor leadership.”
“Goddamned right, poor leadership!” Joe says through his coughing. He sags to a squat, then falls over on one hand. We’re getting too weak to resist the inevitable.
Five of Litvinov’s soldiers join us. They carry four of the bulky suits, still enclosed in sealed plastic bags. They hold them up beside us, sizing. Their faces look ghostly, resigned.
Tak’s look as he takes a deep breath, lowers a big gray pressure suit to the floor, and strips away the plastic is classic Tak. Pure American Bushido. DJ is next. He squats on a bag and inspects his feet. Signs of frostbite.
“No options,” Borden says.
“And when it’s over,” I ask, “will they ever come off?”
“I don’t know,” Borden says.
“These must be new,” I say. “Coyle didn’t say a thing.”
“She’s a fucking ghost!” Borden says with a rare bright spark of anger. Nobody at Division Four or on Lady of Yue warned our commander about these difficulties, either. “Why should she care?”
We open the bags. Warrior and armor, all one. And then I remember what Coyle said, long, long ago.
She did warn me. I just wasn’t paying attention.
FISSURE KINGS
Except for the corpses, the station is deserted, a barely functional shell of what it had been before Titan got its face rearranged in the last prolonged assault. Miracle it survived at all. But no miracle for us. In outline, the hockey puck is not much more than a thick wall around the inner vent. The onetime stadium roof over the vent has collapsed, letting in the elements—mostly methane snow.
Now that we’re back in our suits and suffering the unexpected and literal breaking in, Borden and Litvinov escort us back to the armory, where, under the watchful and nervous gaze of our comrades—plus Kumar and Mushran—the outer walls are shifting and bulging, with alarming snaps and groans, to allow us access to developing product.
The walls begin to smoke and shiver.
“Eating station!” Litvinov says, and he may be right. We seal our plates. The air is frosting, the water freezing out.
Three huge, round, bronze-colored heads dissolve and shove through the station’s outer wall like fish rising from a milky pool. The wall puckers and seals around them. Ports pull open in each head, inviting some of us inside—and cap training alerts us who goes into what vehicle, whose ID will match with the product, who’s trained for which segment of our mission. Depending on the size and complexity of the weapon or transport, there will be one, two, or three drivers, and room for at most five suited warriors—I can see that, feel that.
The slow-building ecstasy of enthusiasm finally arrives. I get it. These guys are good, great, brilliant—whoever designed caps, product, station! We’re being primed to do our bits without complaint. It’s even better than the first after-drop rush when we stand up on Mars. Pain is sweet. We welcome each jab and stab, each strung wire through our muscles, around our bones. Prepped and pumped, in pairs or triples, we break from the tight-packed herd into which we’ve instinctively clumped and, new boots gripping the slippery, icy floor, climb into the ports in the round bronze heads.
The first of the heads, fully crewed, withdraws with puffs of vapor, leaving behind a glassy sheen of freezing liquid and a smoking, dripping hole through which another head suddenly presents. This one’s ours. I’m with Joe and Tak. DJ is going with Borden. Borden looks at me with her usual concern—I’m her charge, her ward, right? But we’re operating according to the instructions of a higher authority. We’re not much more than automatons riding the giant machines. Grunt zombies. Quite different from the drama on Mars. And I’m down with that.
Judging by the size of the round head, Joe and Tak and I are being assigned to a big one. Buddies, all former mates. Outstanding. But then Starshina Irina Ulyanova, the round-faced ballerina, moves in after Joe and before me, followed by Ishida, then by Jacobi, and that’s our full complement. Not a problem. We’re nothing if not flexible. I move to the middle and take a moment to study the inside of the head. We’re in a big, broad-shouldered bronze centipede—do centipedes have shoulders?—very like the ones whose crushed remains litter the ground outside or slush around in the vent. With the portal closed, we occupy a cabin about five meters wide and ten deep extending back to the thorax. It’s dark and warm, like being inside a heated gourd. Web cap training tells me the freshness of the product is responsible for that—heat of manufacture. We’ll cool down once we plunge into the vent or dig through the crust—both are possible with this machine. It calls itself an Offensive Scout, Advance Response, or OSCAR. It can swim or dig or just crawl over most surfaces. Pretty universal. Other types are more specialized.
Tan ribbons fall from the curving bulkheads and shake out into vertical hammocks, with pads and clamps arranged to lock on to our suits. Ulyanova is the first to lie back in one of the ribbon hammocks. Lights above her switch on and match color with a small, bright light over her faceplate, green for green. The clamps lock to her midriff. The pads suck down on her pressure suit. She settles back and relaxes, then tries to look back at us, but her suit is stiff—we’re all stiff. No rubbernecking.
The rest of us follow her example. Our lights match, too. All good. I’m happy drool and grins. Shit, this is fine, so fine—even as something smooth and cool worms up my penis.
Ishida places her arms and legs into a bay to our right. Her hammock adjusts accordingly and she sits up. I can’t see her face, can barely hear her voice in the whir and growl of the centipede, our Oscar, preparing to move out. Tak’s and Joe’s hammocks slide forward right behind Ishida. I’m carried center and aft. We’re now in our assigned stations, even though we’re not yet clear what we’re about to do.
Within minutes, we feel a lurch aft and a wide transparency slides open forward of the driver. Oscar’s face now has a big rectangular eye. Plastic? Metal? I’m betting on a tough, cold-resistant plastic. Wonderful how we use language to mask ignorance. Cap learning carries almost no info on the engineering behind these monsters.