I wonder if she has a hard time hearing me, too. Yeah, we’re related, but that’s hardly a guarantee of compatibility. To add to the suspense, our replacement pressure suits continue to work us over, slicing through flesh and bone with wires and blades to integrate and control—presumably to make us quicker and more responsive.
What was left of the ice station is probably gone. After our seeds were done shitting out Oscars, and while we were leaving, more seeds must have dropped from Box and finished the job. Seeds save a lot of weight when transporting weapons upsun to places where raw materials are abundant—places like Titan, covered in methane, ethane, and silenes, and spotted with deposits of naturally generated waxes and oils and plastics. But even with an abundance of raw materials, when time is short, efficiency rules. The station was preprocessed. The seeds from Box likely dug in like hungry mastiffs. I wonder what happened to the corpses. Maybe they’re now part of brand-new weapons. How is it possible to stay human in all this? Facing these examples of a fucking hellish ingenuity?
“Antag movement up front,” Jacobi says.
There’s Russian chatter from the third and fourth vessels—unhappy, strident. Litvinov opens up to his troops in the dissident transports. “We do not act!” he shouts in Russian, then in English. “We are here. We have no more decisions to make. If we return, our people will kill us.”
I watch Jacobi’s crescent-lit face, just visible around the rim of her helm, then expand my gaze over to Joe, slung beside her. Our suits creak in the slings. Six of us. How many Russians were crammed into the last two Oscars? Not full complements. Not six, maybe only three, not enough to form true teams, share the stress, subdue panic. Since we didn’t fight together and didn’t have long to socialize, they never made much of an impression, except for Litvinov, of course, and those who died out on the Red… and Ulyanova, softly singing to herself opposite.
Long moments pass. On the second Oscar, Borden reports scattered soft targets—organic. “Looks like a shoal of big fish,” she says. “Native?”
No one confirms. No one can answer one way or the other. We close our plates to access displays and pay attention to the forces directly in front. I don’t see the soft targets or anything that answers to what she means by organic—squishy and alive—but more machines rise into view, twelve of them, longer and thicker than Oscars, escorted by scouts like nothing we’ve seen before—robot falcons flexing ten-meter serrated wings, slung with bolt weapons and pods filled with cutting tools. Butcher-birds, I think.
“Oscar’s about to be cracked like a lobster,” DJ says from Litvinov’s ship.
“Shut the fuck up!” Ishida says, half shell herself.
The fourth vessel’s debate has turned to what sounds like fighting. The fifth joins in. The Russians are falling apart. Litvinov’s not with them. His influence isn’t nearly enough.
It’s painful to listen to.
Ulyanova, under her breath, still sings. But then she opens her eyes and looks right at me.
She smiles.
Something inside me smiles back. Goddamn.
Joe taps his helm and looks around his sling at me, eyes flicking, examining. Can he tell? I work to recover.
Ulyanova’s turned away again.
“I’m not sure our fellow warriors are going along,” Joe says. I do not want to fall into another instauration, another Guru moment—not here and not now. But how could the starshina be connected with all that?
As we watch the serrated falcons maneuver in the deep ice-pudding, banking fore and aft to block any escape, the best scenario I can imagine is that the Antags are being really, really cautious. No surprise given our history and the strangeness of this new relationship. They’re doing everything they can to discourage us from responding defensively or mounting our own assault. With twelve big Antag ships against our five, how can we put on any sort of offense? By acting like we’ve surrendered, perhaps—catching them with their guard down. Who knows what happened on Titan before the stand-down and reboot? Traps and stratagems aplenty, no doubt.
“What the fuck are they waiting for?” Jacobi cries out. My concern exactly. We’re not resisting. How will they carry us out of here, take care of us? Wasn’t that the deal? How long can any of us afford to stick around?
What do they think about the fresh human ships dropping from the surface, no doubt to wreak total destruction?
I finally detect a jumble of thoughts from my Antag opposite. Their ships in orbit are under attack. Just like on Mars, all of us are being targeted. Those who support the Gurus want to find and obliterate us—fellow humans included. On Mars, we saw ample evidence that the Antags were similarly divided.
Inquire.
Again the voice of bug steward. It usually pops up when decision points are reached. However, I’m not sure I can formulate any relevant questions, and bug memory isn’t about current situations or possible outcomes. Or is it? There’s a kind of urgency in the voice. Maybe it knows something, or has been tapping deep into my thoughts and has enough of its own smarts to guess.
Inquire.
About what? I pick something out of my own jumble of questions. If we lose Titan—
“Are there other archives like this one?” I ask, and feel DJ’s approval.
Unknown. Accessing what you know, it is probable that massive force will soon be deployed to destroy this entire moon.
Inquire.
“Do we already know enough to survive on our own?”
Unknown.
“Where are the archives you know about?”
Nothing is certain. Some could remain out on cold moons in the dusty reaches, or on larger worlds far from the sun, completed by our engineers before our own wars nearly destroyed us.
Aha, I think. “The Antag female gave us a glimpse of something she called ‘Sun-Planet.’ Is that what you’re talking about?”
Possibly. It may have been the last world where our kind lived before we passed into extinction. Many hundreds of millions of solar cycles have gone by, but that world may have preserved its own archives. Still, the connections are broken or at best incomplete. There could be much that is new and different. And it is possible the ones you call Gurus have found and destroyed them already.
A long answer. We have no idea what’s being planned for us. No way to survive if we stay where we are. We’ll soon be overwhelmed, or caught in one amazing shit-storm of high-tech combat.
And to add to the tension, my liaison may be what she says she is, a sympathetic presence arguing for our survival, but she’s still grieving for her dead. She still hates our guts, as do her fellow warriors. Most of us feel the same about Antags. They don’t trust any of us and we won’t trust them even if they give us a chance, even if the tea and bug memory say we should.
In a communication colored by apprehension, she informs me that the process is moving slowly. Not every Antag in her force believes human captives can be of use. She’s in a minority, and there’s a bitter argument under way. She’s defending the present plan—defending our survival. If the opposing faction on those waiting ships wins the debate, we could all be gathered up and rescued only to be dumped naked into the frozen sea—or worse, tortured and summarily executed.
Just a heads-up, she assures me. She’s working hard to convince the others they’re wrong, arguing on the basis of Antag honor and loyalty to the ancient ones, whose inheritance runs through all our veins.