Then, following a cheerful burst of digital notes, we can hear everyone through comm. I content myself by looking forward between Joe and Ishida. Tak is at my two o’clock. We’re on the move. Through a wavering shroud of methane snow, Oscar crawls up and over the edge of the hockey puck. It’s easy to see how busy our delivered seeds have been. The outer walls of the station on this side are so corroded and marked they’ve nearly been eaten away. The hangar where the glider delivered us is already gone. A crawling phalanx of three more fresh machines scours the top of the station, trailing from their stumpy, jointed tails those awful, questing, chewing snake-tresses—
Tresses busy slapping, cutting, lifting, and then simply absorbing the station. Maybe the product will absorb the corpses as well. Grunts into machines. Total combat efficiency. Wouldn’t brass love that?
Way back in my head is a velvety blackness, like a curtain in a darkened theater, and it’s slowly drawing aside. There’s nothing onstage yet, but soon…?
I’m distracted as my helm offers a much wider view. Direct retinal imagery. I darken the plate interior and become a disembodied pair of eyes moving ponderously through the slush, advancing on outthrust claw-clamp feet to peer over the inner rim of the station… down into the vent. The vent’s inner lake swirls like a gigantic, half-frozen toilet bowl of combat shit slowly being flushed. Hey, I’m in a good mood. I’m laughing in my big thick helm, even as painful and intrusive bits of the suit—my suit, my friend!—absorb my sweet flesh the way product eats the station. I’m down with that. I’m down with pain, poison, and frozen death. Happy to serve!
We hear Borden’s voice, transmitted by sound through the saline solution, echoing and chirping. As usual, she brings good news. “Last transmission from Lady of Yue,” she says. “Big hurt is in the system—a Box and seven other ships. They’ll be in orbit around Titan in ten hours. Box can deliver hundreds more seeds, enough to overwhelm any Antag residues—or us. They aren’t transmitting to Lady of Yue and they do not appear to be here to help.”
“Fifteen to thirty klicks descent through the crust before we swim the deep ocean,” Joe says. “Catch up on your reading—this is going to take a while.”
“Payload is ready for delivery, right?” Jacobi asks. She means me and maybe DJ. I’d be flattered, but I’m still distracted—severely so. I feel the awful loss of control of my own thoughts, like I’m being funneled down another pipe. Another poison capsule is breaking open in my head, the second trap—the second instauration is on its way.
A suave, mellow voice asks, “What’s it like, Skyrine? After all these years. Look back upon your long and astonishing list of experiences, and tell us in your own words….”
The velvet curtain opens wide, the stage fills.
I fall onto it.
NO NO NO FUCK NO
I’m standing on a huge platform, small and alone, before a dark, unseen audience of millions, maybe billions. I’m completely naked and flooded in light. I look down on my nakedness and see that my arms and legs are chewed and wrinkled, red and brown and leathery. I’m alive but uglified. The audience sighs with a far-off storm of sympathy. They love my ugliness. Fighting has made me into a fucking Elephant Man. Thank you for your service! War is so… so… evocative! My wrecked body arouses in that unseen crowd deep emotions they can’t otherwise imagine having, right? Emotions they don’t want to have, not in real life, but that’s entertainment, isn’t it? Horrorshow, as the Russians say.
Time to do my bit for the cause.
Somewhere above me the suave Voice lists in boring detail the actions in which I’ve participated, the war zones I’ve visited. Some I don’t remember or have never heard of—places on Earth and everywhere far and wide. There’s been war on Earth? Then we fucking screwed up, didn’t we? I don’t need this. I just want to return to the action, to wherever it was I just came from, to finish fighting beside my fellow Skyrines and learn whether we’re all going to live or die. I don’t want to be debriefed or celebrated or encourage folks to buy bonds. That’s true fucking old-school.
Business well over a billion years old.
And so—
I dig deep and find Coyle, beg of her, defer to her, she’s been listening close—
Enough. No need to be a ghost before you’re dead!
She seems more faded than the last time, but she somehow finds the means, the inner roots of this delusion—reveals them to me—and together, we put the poison back in the capsule, shut down this fucking engram, this instauration or whatever it is.
Attaboy, Venn. We’re so close! I know there’s something in here that will help you… A little more time for me to move around, and I’ll find it.
UNDER PRESSURE
“What?”
The curtain closes. Gone in a flash. I open my eyes. I’m back in my hammock, listening to my fellow crew members as the giant bronze centipede probes the half-frozen water of the vent lake. No wonder I have a hard time distinguishing dream from reality. Time to get down to the real business at hand. I look left and right and see through a thick haze five other transports. Six in all. Arrows and symbols tell me Borden is taking point. She’s with Kumar and Mushran—a lot of honch in one vehicle. Maybe she’ll dive so deep the whole damned vehicle crushes. Bye-bye, brass. Bye-bye, whirly-eyed Wait Staff. Cap training prissily informs me this is not a good attitude. Maybe not. But Borden’s craft is definitely descending first. And what a craft! If ours is like a centipede, hers is a tank-tractor earthworm about ten meters across the beam, its eight segments equipped with rippling treads on three sides! And the first five segments are studded with robust grasping arms. The arms and grapplers and other Swiss Army knife extensions will grasp and cut and weld and do all manner of crazy shit. Borden’s earthworm can dig faster and swim deeper than any machine in our phalanx, our flotilla, whatever the hell we are. She’s not just taking point, she’s presenting a serrated edge.
I don’t actually see this. I remember it. I even know how to drive that talented bastard, should I need to. I receive another burst of pain-free pleasure as reward for accessing cap training. Your grunt can learn new tricks.
“Why does everything have to look like insects?” Ishida asks.
“Bugs made us,” Tak says.
“I do not believe that,” Ishida says. “Never have, never will.”
“What, then?”
“Angels,” she says primly. “Spirits. Kami and yokai.”
“Yokes? What?” Tak frowns as he peers ahead.
“Yokai,” Ishida repeats.
“That’s like fairies,” Jacobi says from up front.
“We are made by fairies?” Ulyanova ventures, first words she’s spoken since we sealed and departed in the Oscar.
Ishida sighs. “Not fairies, yokai.” I see someone has again scrawled Senketsu on one shoulder of her suit. Not ink. Blood, I suspect.
Oscar crawls over the floating wreckage, shoving big pieces aside, while we listen to hollow thumps against our outer hull. We’re trying to reach an open space in the slush where we can descend without getting hung up. Temp outside is fluctuating wildly. Inside, our suits pinch and adjust some more. I feel something slide up my rectum. Terrific. My guts twist like a tub of worms. But then, almost immediately, the other pains subside. My guts settle. Anesthetic enema? Small mercies.