The bugs.
Antag honor?
Christ, what have I gotten us into? What if it’s all a sham? How could we expect any better?
In the round cabin, Starshina Ulyanova is shouting in Russian, trying to get Litvinov to order us to fight, to do something!
From many klicks behind our vessels and the Antag ships comes a deep, visceral thump. Heavy overpressure passes, making the Oscar squeal at its joints. Then the pressure fades, leaving us all with headaches—caught with our helms open. We close and seal and immerse in the display.
“There they go!” Joe says. The fourth and fifth transports, with their Russian crews, have had enough. They’re trying to turn and head back to what they seem to hope is salvation—the human forces descending behind us.
The Antag falcons have passed over and beneath us and stand between the fleeing vessels and the deep night of Titan’s inner sea. The transports try to respond with weapons—
But Joe has locked firepower to our own centipede. The others can’t fight unless we do.
Suddenly, the wayward vessels are wrapped in a brilliant balls of glowing vapor, followed by another slam and more overpressure. Our hull is struck by whirling bits of debris, like a hard, hard rain.
“Who the hell did that?” Litvinov shouts. “Sanchez! Unlock weapons!”
“It wasn’t Antags,” Joe says. He sounds sick, as if none of this is worth it, life has passed way beyond what can be borne. I have to agree. We’re down by two. How many seconds before we all sizzle?
“We’re seeing long-range bolts from one of Box’s machines,” Borden says, and Ishida confirms. “They’re getting closer.”
Friendly fire, as the shitheads say.
No time left, I tell my Antag female.
From beyond the walls of the stony labyrinth, bolts pass around us, almost brushing the centipede, into the shadows behind—Antags returning fire. Something far back there lights up, refracting through a cloud of slushy ice like fiery diamonds and throwing a weird sunrise glow across the solid gray ceiling.
The wide-winged falcons swarm our remaining Oscars, pods thrusting forward and fanning out tools. Here it comes.
“Antags moving in to recover,” Borden says, her voice strangely calm. Is this what we’re all hoping for? Is this our only chance?
A cutting blade spins into our cabin space, narrowly missing Ishida. Our helms suck down hard at the loss of cabin pressure. My fellow Skyrines cry out like kittens at the roaring flood of subzero liquid. But our suits keep us alive.
Once the cutting is done, with banshee screams, torches provoke scarlet bouquets of superheated steam that bleb around inside the cabin until the cold sucks them back. From superchill to steam heat and back again in seconds—and still, our suits maintain.
In my display, I see more and bigger bolts rise from behind the walls of Bug Karnak, penetrate electrical gradients, make the entire frigid sea around us fluoresce brilliant green—followed by more sunrises behind. Strangely, I feel justified. Wanted. The Antags are defending us. But they’re also killing humans. My guts twist.
From the first rank of falcons, steely gray clamps fan out and jam in through the wedge made by the cutting blades and torches. The Oscar’s head is pried opened by main force. Spiked tentacles shoot from the nearest falcon and insert into the ruined carapace, where they cut through our straps and shuck us like peas from a pod. We’re jerked up and over, bouncing from the edges, dragged through darkness punctuated by more blinding, blue-white flares to an even bigger machine rising over the walls like a monstrous catfish, its head dozens of meters wide. A dark mouth swallows us whole.
Three minutes of tumbling, blind darkness. The seawater around us swirls and drains. We’re in the catfish’s belly.
A little light flicks on below, then left and right, and the tentacles suck down around our limbs, grab us up again, then drop us through an oval door into a narrow tank filled with cold, silty liquid. Soon we’re joined by other plunging, squirming shapes—the crews from the other Oscars. Most of the outside lights switch off. It’s too dark in the tank to recognize one another, but I’m pretty sure one of the suited shapes is DJ. Another might be Jacobi, another, Tak. Then Borden. I hope I’m right that they’re both here. Another, slightly smaller, could be Kumar or maybe Mushran. I try to count but we keep getting swirled around. Rude.
Where’s Joe? Where’s Ishida, Ishikawa, Litvinov, Ulyanova? Then the tank’s sloshing subsides and we drift to a gritty, murky bottom, settling in stunned piles like sardines waiting to be canned.
A dim glow filters through the tank’s walls—translucent, frosted. Sudden quiet. Very little sloshing. My sense of integral motion might be telling me we’re rising, retreating, but I can’t be sure. Nobody’s making a sound.
Why are we here, being treated like this? Haven’t we been told to become partners, to solve a larger riddle? How did we end up so thoroughly screwed, and what did Joe do to get us here? Joe has gotten me into and out of more scrapes than I can number. But our first encounter, I was the one causing real trouble—or reacting the only way I could. Now we’re both here, and I’m not sure what Joe means to me, to us, anymore.
Has he sold us out? Is he even alive?
Thinking you’ve fit all the pieces into a puzzle, then having it picked up, shaken, and dumped—being forced to start all over again—they can’t teach you how to react to that in boot camp or OCS or the war colleges. That’s a challenge you have to learn from experience. And mostly at this level of confusion and weirdness, you don’t learn. You just die.
Bumping and bobbing along the bottom of the tank, listening to my suit creak and click, listening to the distant twang of wires working through my flesh—a never-ending process—I try to keep it together, try to remind myself that the Antags may be connected to the wisdom of bug memory but still have every reason to hate us.
Judging from the contortions and soft moans, the suits are still causing everyone pain. If you don’t move they hurt less. But still, they keep us warm.
There’s ten or twelve left. Way down from our contingent on Spook. Were some dumped? Did the Antags select us out like breeders on a puppy farm?
After a time, everything in the shadows becomes part of a sharp, awful relaxation. I can still think, mostly, but want to slide into old, safe memories, then dreams. Dreams of better days and nights. Of places where there are days and nights. I don’t think or feel that I’m about to die, but how can I be sure? When you die, you become a child again. I’ve seen it, felt it through the return of Captain Coyle. She introduced me to a little girl’s bedroom and her comic books. But I don’t feel like a child just yet, though young memories, memories acquired when I was younger, even bad memories, are more and more desirable, if only to block out the pain. I can’t just give up. Not after all the shit I’ve put others through.
Then, despite my focused concentration, I experience my own moment of panic. I start to scream and thrash. Everything in this fucking tank is entirely too fuzzy and I’m not ready to accept whatever dark nullity is on the menu because I really want to see what’s next, I want to be there, be out there, I want to learn more about what our enemies are up to and who they really are, which ones are our enemies, I mean—learn more about how the Earth was screwed over by the Gurus. When you die, you stop learning, stop playing the game. Is that true? I’m not sure it’s always true. It may not have been strictly true for Captain Coyle. But she turned glass. Maybe that’s a different sort of death, like becoming a book that others can read but not you. And now I don’t hear her in my head because her settling in has finished, the ink in her book is dry and she’s part of the memory banks of our ancient ancestors.