In our heads, ancient history bumps up against the captured and stored memories of fallen comrades. Sometimes it’s like dancing on a cloud—impossible, but if you don’t believe, you fall.
I can’t shake the strangely lovely image of Captain Coyle settling into her peculiar death. On Mars, when she tried to blow up the first Drifter, under orders from the Gurus on Earth, she and her teammates turned into shiny black glass. We thought those who turned glass were dead. But some came back to haunt us. Absorbing and co-opting enemies is one way the ancient archives preserve themselves. That’s what the Drifter’s crystals contained—a gateway to records kept billions of years ago by our earliest progenitors—inhabitants of the outer ice moons of the ancient solar system.
Giant, intelligent bugs.
Coyle first came to visit me after I returned to Earth and was locked up at Madigan. In those early hours, her presence was confused, less an actual voice and more like word balloons in a comic—empty word balloons. But soon enough they filled in, and what was left of Coyle did her brusque best to take me step by step through the courtesies and techniques of the bug archives. She introduced me to the semiautomated steward who parcels out that memory, if you’re qualified, if you know how to ask the right sort of questions.
The bugs are long gone, but their voices still echo. At Madigan, and on the way back to Mars, I relived bits and pieces of bug history, watched those ancient ancestors of both humans and Antags burrow up through the icy shells of their moons and discover the stars. Life had first evolved on those moons, long before Earth turned green, in deep oceans warmed by residual radiation and the constant tug of tidal energy from their gas-giant planets. I learned that this wasn’t the first time creatures like the Gurus had entered our solar system and provoked wars. I learned that the bugs had fought one another long, long ago—class against class, changing the shape and disposition of the outer solar system.
Dropping big chunks of moon down to Mars, including the Drifters.
Helping seed life on Earth.
Then Coyle warned me that she was about to really die. Her final act was to introduce me to the Antag female who’s now my direct liaison, who’s waiting across the midnight ocean to save us from our own forces.
Coyle’s voice went silent and all that was left of her, the absorbed data of her life and her body, spread out before my inner eye like a beautiful crystal tapestry. The captain was no longer capable of talking, acting, or learning, but she was still full of instruction.
How like Coyle.
YOU CAN GO IN NOW, BUT PLEASE DON’T
My grandfather was a colonel in the Rangers. My grandmother was a fine Army wife and very smart. One of the things she taught me is that God can do anything except change a man’s mind. “That’s why there are wars,” she said, and knew the subject well. In two wars she had lost a husband, two sons, and a daughter, leaving her with just my mother, who was thirty when her sister died. “Men are so goddamned stubborn they will insult, curse, and shout until they can’t back down, and then decide it’s time to send our children out to die. The fellows who order up wars almost never go themselves, they’re too old. But they’re still cowards. If you’re a leader and you screw up a war, or maybe if you just start a war, you should blow your brains out right in front of all the Gold Star mothers, sitting on bleachers in their Sunday best—and that’s what I say, but don’t quote me, okay? This kind of talk upsets your mother.”
Until I was eight and my mother and father divorced, we lived on or around military bases. I bounced through five or six concrete blockhouse schools and hated every minute of it. My mother believed in the goodness of the human race. As if in spite, the human race tried with all its might to prove her wrong. After her divorce, she jonesed for handsome, crazy men and usually ended up with cashiered ex-Army or bank robbers. I thought I had to protect her. Or at least I remember thinking that; maybe it just turned out that way. None of that stopped me from enlisting to become a Skyrine, but now it haunts me.
FISH MARKET DREAMS
In the front slings of our Oscar, Joe and Jacobi try to maintain communication.
“Minnows are quiet,” Jacobi says. “Maybe they’re being jammed.”
All the rest of us can do for now is listen to the sounds gathered by the far-flung sensors, clear and sharp and mysterious in the deep cold, and wait for the Antags to make up their minds. We’re mostly silent, lying slack in our harnesses like aging beef.
Our minnows, silvery drones the size of fingers, act like cat whiskers. They flow smoothly back and forth between us and the Antags, tracking their ships behind the great, dark ridges of the old Titanian archives.
The hovering flocks of Antag ice torpedoes haven’t moved in. We still have hope, I guess. But we’ve surrendered. What does it matter?
When we abandoned the station, other ships were entering Titan’s orbit—human-crewed ships. One of them was the big Box, newer and far more heavily armed than the Spook that brought us here. On our way out to Saturn, leaving Mars’s orbit, the Spook managed to count a little coup against Box, trimming some of its sectional field lines before it was fully prepared—but that won’t happen again.
I wonder what Mushran and Kumar are thinking. They arranged for all this, and for years benefited from their connections with the Gurus. I suppose knowing is better than ignorance, but we’re still screwed. As wars go, this one is a complete fraud. But then, aren’t most? Killers of the brave, the loyal, the committed—killers of our best.
Somehow, I don’t believe that describes me. I’m not one of the best. Joe, maybe, or Tak or Kazak. Not being one of the best may mean I’ll live. But that’s bullshit. Wars don’t discriminate. Wars are blind and violent and nasty, lacking all morality. If they last long enough, they’ll do their best to destroy all hopes and dreams.
Wars try to kill everybody.
But until now, they’ve never actually succeeded.
What’s become very obvious is that the cavalry descending behind us in Titan’s cold sea, other machines carrying other humans, is no longer our friend. It may not know it, but it’s chasing us down in order to cut off human access to bug history—the archives on Titan and maybe elsewhere in our system. Our joint sponsors, the Gurus, do not want any of us, human or Antag, to learn about our bug origins or the ancient wars the Gurus encouraged. If we’re killed here on Titan, and if Titan is finally destroyed, this cancer won’t spread.
Our duty now is to survive, even if we have to join up with our enemies.
COLD TRENCHES
Something’s changing overhead. We hear the echoing, drawn-out groans of deep pack ice, like an idiot playing a pipe organ in an empty cathedral. This profoundly scary and stupid noise is punctuated by the softly ratcheting clicks of Antag machines keeping station out in the darkness. Why don’t they just suck us up? They’re hiding in the cells and cubicles of the ancient archive—what I’m starting to call Bug Karnak because for some reason it reminds me of ancient temples in Egypt. Bug Karnak, after billions of years, is still transmitting bug history to those who react to Ice Moon Tea. I could tune in if I want, but it’s much clearer if I coordinate with my liaison, and she seems to be distracted. Maybe she’s waiting for her fellows to make up their minds about our usefulness—thumbs up or thumbs down. Do they have thumbs? Maybe the Antags think we’re decoys. Maybe this sort of thing has happened to them before—recently. Deception and betrayal. They’re being extra cautious.