Again my thoughts are overlaid by vibrating, wavering lines, infinite geometry—and again, I feel and hear Coyle. Her voice is distinct. It ripples the silvery space. The connection between this silvery space and distant archives—on Mars and elsewhere—becomes manifest.
I’m still here, Venn. I’ve got a short reprieve, I think. I’m still your guide, for the time being. Go ahead. Can you understand?
“Jesus! Captain. Yes.”
We don’t have much time. It’s ready. Ask it something.
“But what the hell is it? What’s ready?”
Inquire.
“I don’t know what to ask!”
Ask it about poppa momma shit and where we come from and where we go, and why the Gurus and Antags don’t want us down here. Ask it about moons. You won’t like what it has to say. I’m dead, but I’ve had a chance before I settle in to poke around—and I don’t like it one fucking bit. But you got to ask.
Ask now.
Coyle is thinning rapidly, thinning and fading.
“What’s happening to Captain Coyle?” I ask.
Your guide is becoming memory, which is atonement. We recognize your guide’s music, and we recognize your music. Because you have the proper music, you can be a user.
Inquire.
“Why don’t the Gurus want us down here? Or in the Drifter, in the mines?”
Choose one question.
Make it a good one, Venn! This place is freakish particular.
“Why is everybody trying to keep us away from you, whatever you are?”
You have been lied to.
Inquire.
“By who?”
Across billions of years, we who acquired this memory have encountered forces of decadence and corruption. These forces succeed by persuasion and temptation. They must maintain your ignorance or they will fail. We can relieve your ignorance. Because of that, we are a threat to them.
Inquire.
“You okay, Venn?” Jacobi asks.
I’m not. Inquire! Shit. I don’t like where this is going, because it’s confirming what I already sense, maybe even know, and that’s not good. I don’t want to learn any more. Besides, Coyle has thinned to a wisp.
The vibrating silver turns insistent, brilliant red. No wasting time down here. Painful!
Something pounds on the outside of the Oscar. The giant bronze centipede rocks and shivers. Joe and Ulyanova and Jacobi are fighting to keep the machine under control.
Flowing out over the deep-ocean mountains, around the column of salts and minerals, our minnows report a steady stream of icy daggers, each six or seven meters long, like huge icicles, driven by frilly, ionized currents: a blizzard of electrified torpedoes sweeping in at dozens of knots.
“Incoming!” Jacobi says. “Hold fast!”
The minnows scatter to get a wider perspective. We still can’t actually see—it’s dark and the ocean here is almost opaque—but the minnows are working the whole spectrum, plus sound, which is incredibly precise in the cold. We can hear what’s happening for thousands of klicks, even the echoes off the ridges and roulette pockets—
“Twelve big machines at three klicks, rising from behind a low ridge,” Tak says. “They’re about where the station is supposed to be. They look aggressive, and they’re huge.”
“They’re not ours!” Jacobi says. Her voice is small and deadly calm.
The new machines, sensing us, suddenly fan out and descend to hide in the corner of two intersecting ridges. We can’t see them. We can’t see anything.
“We’re exposed,” Tak says.
“I know that,” Joe says tightly. I understand him well enough to know he’s either following orders from Borden and Kumar, or he has something on his mind. Maybe both. Asking him right now will only distract him. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.
Or when I’m ready.
“Ice torpedoes holding,” Ishida says.
“Slowing,” Joe says.
“Why don’t they just take us out?” Ishida asks.
The ice torpedoes keep station in a cloud around us, barring our progress—but not coming any closer. My head throbs with the red field. I don’t know what it is or why it’s happening now. Maybe I’m having a stroke. Maybe all the shit in my head has finally blown me up inside.
Slowly, though, it’s starting to convey information. Lots of it. Confused, historic, and strategic… if I could understand Bug strategy!
“Slow down,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Nobody’s moving,” Joe says.
“Venn—what do we do now?” Jacobi asks.
I wish I knew.
Ishida has been assigned to our weapons. I click down the list in my head, feeling a sudden dread that we might actually use them—and that isn’t what the red space is telling me is appropriate or necessary. We have place-keeping mines, remoras that attach and deliver spent matter charges, torpedoes bigger than minnows but working the same principles. And that’s pitiful. Whatever’s out there is equipped with weapons way beyond the ones in our arsenal. They’ve harnessed Titan’s electric flows. They’ve been here longer, they’re survivors, and they’re way more powerful.
But they’re not moving in for a kill.
“What are they?” Ulyanova asks.
Joe strains to look back at me. “You’re our ace in the hole, Vinnie. You and DJ.”
The red space turns silvery again, and in that infinitely dense collection of waiting information, another figure appears. Not human.
“Coyle,” I say. “Goddammit, Coyle, what is this? Where are you?”
Handing off, Venn. I’m settling in to fixed memory. That means I’m finally going to die… except when people remember. You’ll remember me, won’t you? You’ll pray for me?
I remember DJ’s attending Coyle as she turned glass, and my throat tightens. “Always,” I say.
It’ll be hard to work with your new partner, but she’s still alive. She’s a user. And she’s smarter than me, with more experience.
“She—? Descendant of the Bugs?” I ask.
Same as you. Good-bye, Venn. Take care of our troops. And best of luck.
I reach out and feel around with whatever senses once connected us, but I can no longer detect the essential part of Coyle. The hard-core, almost cynical devotion to duty, the bitter sense of humor and doubts about my innate abilities… the devotion to life, despite a career of dealing death. Captain Coyle is gone.
No. She’s here. She’s just not active. I can see her. All of her, spread out like a silvery blueprint before me, naked and complete—everything that turned glass back on Mars, stored, transmitted, has been fixed in the archive, faithfully and truthfully preserved. Feeling no passion, no pain, but eternal—timeless and totally revealed.
“Jesus Christ, Captain,” I say. “You’re fucking beautiful….”
But of no use to me now.
“Who’s talking to you, Venn?” Jacobi asks.
“Coyle’s fixed,” DJ says.
A new outline sparkles in my mind. The archive has other plans. It wants me to move on. I have the awful feeling that Coyle tried to save the most difficult for last. She? I’m not yet seeing anything solid or embodied, more like the shape of a mind, and very likely that’s what this new presence sees when it looks my way. How the hell do we communicate, if that’s even an option?