It’s hard acquiring so much tolerance all at once. I’m not at all sure I wouldn’t prefer to fight Antags again and die. Still, I keep sending—keep visualizing and trying to interpret the return feed. The other user’s feed is turning nasty. I keep seeing battle in space and on Titan, on Mars—I keep seeing dead Antags, friends and lovers, commanders and soldiers.
And dead humans. Lots of dead humans.
She’s testing me.
“We don’t have time,” I say. “They expect a solid answer.”
“What do they want?” Jacobi asks, voice hoarse.
I ask, and receive a kind of picture: humans and Antags standing in a cabin. No armor. No weapons. Separated by mere meters. Can we just talk to each other?
Can we even breathe the same air?
“They want a face-to-face. On their terms, on their ships.”
“How you going to arrange that?” Ishida asks. “They going to crack us open and scoop us out like lobsters?”
“New machines descending,” Borden says across the cold fluid. “We need actionable. What’s Venn doing?”
“He’s communicating,” Joe says sharply. “He’s doing what you brought him here to do! We got problems down here.”
“I say go back and surrender to our own kind,” Jacobi says. “At least they’re human.”
Borden says, voice far away, “I’m in command.”
“Fuck that!” Ishida says. “Turn around and go back.”
I hear Kumar’s voice from Borden’s vesseclass="underline" “That would be suicide. They are killing all who deny the Gurus.”
What we’re engaged in is a fratricidal war. And the Gurus put us up to it. How in hell can I convey this to Tak and Jacobi, to Ishikawa and Ishida? To Ulyanova? Ishida lost half her body to the war! Most who already suspect these bitter truths—Borden, Kumar, possibly Mushran—are on another ship, along with Litvinov.
The Antag vessels are still holding. We have maybe thirty minutes before Box’s reinforcements arrive and all hell comes down on both of us.
Joe says, “It’s on you, Vinnie. This is why you were born.”
That does it. I want to shrink up inside my suit, dry up into a little nut. But the other user is still touching parts of my head. Still trying to find common ground. And providing scenarios, little road maps of how we can proceed. If we don’t attack.
“They can take our machines inside theirs,” I say. “They can get us back to the surface, away from Titan.”
“You mean give up without a fight?” Jacobi asks, outraged.
“Take us where?” Ishida asks. “To their planet? Never go home again?” Those seem like optimistic appraisals, actually. Kumar, Mushran—Borden. They’re all agreed. Makes me sick to think of who agrees with me.
“Guarantees?” Joe asks, though he knows better.
“None at all,” I say. “But it’s why I was born, like you said—right?”
“Yeah,” Joe says, and communicates with Borden. The shouting in our cabin is fierce. “Do it, Vinnie. Let it go!” Joe says. I tell the other, my Antagonist counterpart, to open up their ships and take us inside.
All of us.
We surrender.
Then our ballerina speaks up. She’s having difficulty interpreting the rapid back-and-forth. “I get this straight,” Ulyanova says. “They are enemy? I say, kill them. I say die trying!”
The next part is going to be very, very hard.
TAKE BACK THE SKY
DEDICATION
For those in my family who traveled far in company of service members, and those who waited at home in times of war:
Florence Bear
Earl Bear
Irene Garrett
George Garrett
Lorraine Garrett
Lynn Garrett
Dan Garrett
Kathleen Garrett
Colleen Garrett
Devin Garrett
Barbara Julian
Wilma Bear
PART ONE
DANCING ON CLOUDS
I hate transitions, and this is the worst.
In the control cabin of our Oscar, a gigantic centipede made to swim and fight in Titan’s freezing saline sea, a dozen klicks below the scummy, icy crust—
Pinched and stabbed and wired through and through by the suits we thought were meant to protect us—
I’ve never been more afraid and lost and in pain. We’re exhausted—no surprise, after our passage through the ice station’s freeze-dried carnage. Seeds deposited from the stores of our orbiting Spook fused with the station’s walls, chewed them up, and converted them into five Oscars—ours and the four others flanking us before the labyrinth of the bug archive.
Our former enemies are hiding in that maze. Our former allies are creeping up from behind to destroy us all.
Lieutenant Colonel Joe Sanchez, Captain Naveen Jacobi, Sergeant Chihiro Ishida—our Winter Soldier, half of her body replaced by metal—First Sergeant Tak Fujimori, Starshina Irina Ulyanova, and me, Master Sergeant Michael Venn, are in this Oscar. The second carries Commander Frances Borden, Corporal Dan Johnson—DJ—Sergeant Kiyuko Ishikawa, Polkovnik Litvinov (I’ve never learned his first name), and our mysterious Wait Staff reps, the former servants and right-hand men of the Gurus, Aram Kumar and Krishna Mushran. The rest of the Russians occupy the last three.
On my recommendation—and on threat of ice torpedoes closing in from all sides—we’ve stopped trying to defend ourselves and have surrendered to the birdlike creatures we’ve fought for years on Mars and elsewhere. We call them Antagonists, Ants or Antags for short.
Starshina Ulyanova frantically resisted that surrender and had to be subdued by Tak and Jacobi. She lies quiet now in her sling behind Jacobi. Her rank is roughly equal to DJ’s, corporal, but edging over into sergeant. She’s still having a rough time. Her cheeks and forehead are beaded with sweat, and she stares into the upper shadows of the cabin, lips pressed tight. Her instinct is to continue the fight, even if it means self-destruction—either resisting the Antags, who are presumably here to save us, or trying to destroy our own people. I don’t really blame her. She’s surrounded by leaders and soldiers who haven’t had time to explain the fundamentals we’re all facing. Besides, we don’t speak Russian, and her English is rudimentary.
Even so, there’s something odd about her, as if she’s listening to voices none of the rest can hear—except me. Why do I think that’s possible? That she’s being subjected to an experience similar to my own, maybe to DJ’s…
Maybe not so much to DJ. Maybe just to me.
No evidence for any of these hunches, really, but that by itself doesn’t mean she’s crazy. Hearing voices is why I was returned to Mars, then hustled out with DJ to Titan.
On Mars, inside the first Drifter, DJ and Kazak and I all got dosed with a powder produced by deep-buried fragments of ancient crystal brought to Mars billions of years before on pieces of exploded ice moon. We called the powder Ice Moon Tea, and my sensitivity to its messages was what convinced Commander Borden to rescue me from Madigan Hospital, where I was scheduled for execution. I’m one of the special ones. Glory be. So is DJ. Kazak—Sergeant Temur Nabiyev, our favorite Mongolian—was also one of the special ones, but he died on Mars before I returned.