And then—
I feel a pressure down my centerline, pooling around my feet like I’m in an elevator cab. We’re definitely on the move. I can stand, but it’s easier to squat and press my back against the cylinder wall. The pressure grows on my butt and feet. I focus on that pressure, that sensation. Something’s going to change.
After a while, I stop squeaking like a mouse and rise from the bottom, then float up inside the cylinder until I bump my head. Somehow that’s better than just sitting. We’re still in orbit, I guess, but no joy on getting the can open. We’re waiting for that big powerful ship, but it’s not here yet.
The ship we’re all stuffed into at the moment is little more than a light transport, the last of those that once delivered weapons and reinforcements to Antags on Titan. The Antags retrieved their survivors and the few remaining catamaran squid. I get a kind of doubled picture/impression of these remarkable creatures swimming in Titan’s deep icy slush, the supercold, super-saline fluids, and wonder how that makes sense, how they survived—
But I know now that the squid are not native to Titan. They belong with the Antags! And how many Antags remain? Not many. They’ve dumped the falcons and the smaller weapons that faced us across the walls of the archive—Bug Karnak. Those are all gone.
The big ship that’s supposedly out there is not one of the ships that deliver Antags to Mars. Those are much smaller, less powerful, and slower. This one is bigger than big and stranger than strange, and for some reason no Antag is really at all sure it will allow us inside, or how the Antags will take control and fly it, but if everything works out right—if we acquire or earn infinite amounts of luck—we will meet with it soon and be transferred over.
So Bird Girl informs us, DJ and me, reluctant to reveal even this much. She’s doing it only because she’s also scared, and that resonates with our fear. Still, bug steward approves of the resonance. We’re truly related, the steward observes. Proof of some ancient concept, some ancient—
I lose the rest of that overtone, which seems to come out of nowhere specific—the depths of the saline sea, Bug Karnak, maybe—
Or the squid? Did I just touch the mind of one of those? Or something even stranger…
The starshina.
I shudder.
This new and strange ship, if our luck holds, will take us very far away, very swiftly, because of a haze of branching green minds… whatever the hell that means.
Ulyanova again—just briefly. Like tiptoeing over razor blades. I want that to stop, really I do. I try to blink in the darkness. How do I know when my eyes are closed?
Fascinating stuff, no?
But I’m still in a fucking can.
DELIVERED
I have a moment through the awfulness to wonder how the others are doing, if they’re also still in cans. Maybe we’ll all end up drooling basket cases, no use to anybody, and the Antag commanders will just dump us out in space like old garbage. Antags should have no idea how to fix us—only how to kill us. We’ll become part of Saturn’s rings, supercooled packets of meat caught in the grind of orbiting ice and rock boulders, forgotten by everybody…
Bug steward seems to be keeping its presence, its interference, low-key, to encourage the connection with Bird Girl. And I feel Bird Girl more intensely than ever. She’s exploring me in detail, overcoming an inherent reluctance, listening closely to my overtones, but so far, it’s strictly a one-way exchange. Perversely, that makes me both happy and even more queasy.
Then, as if in payment for her intrusion, she provides another blurry impression of our transport working to join up with the big ship. No idea where that is. Maybe it’s still orbiting Titan. If so, why hasn’t Box attacked it?
For a time, I feel like I’m floating in space, no body, just a pair of eyes—vision doubled, so it’s a quartet of eyes—but very low rez. I can barely make out the stars. Then my perspective shifts and I think I see Saturn’s rings, lightly sketched and again doubled, giving me a weird ache in my eye muscles. There are little flashing symbols on the different rings, the shepherd moons—then the view goes back to that goddamned ship. I have to guess through Bird Girl’s eyes, or maybe what someone is telling her—because she can’t see it directly, can she?—how big it really is.
The vessel we’re closing on is maybe nine or ten klicks long and has a short, blunt tail. Forward of the tail swells a gray bulb maybe two or three klicks in diameter. Full of fuel to get home? There’s a cylindrical midsection about four klicks long and a klick in diameter, and at the prow or nose, a long, skinny tube like the needle of a hypodermic. Big and ugly. Forward of the bulb, just back from the nose, five long containers are arranged in pentagonal frames around the middle cylinder like bullets in a revolver. Not all that different from the Spook, actually, but maybe ten or fifteen times bigger. I can’t see what drives it. I’m given the impression the big ship has been hidden away for years—kept in reserve, but by whom, and why?
Why can’t Bird Girl view it directly? Is it invisible?
What’s obvious is that no Antag has never seen or experienced anything remotely like it. The transport’s crew is approaching cautiously, critically, in no hurry, because they’re ignorant of what could happen, but also, Bird Girl is their only connection to someone or something crucial to activating the ship. Maybe two somethings.
One appears to be an Antag, a ragged, poorly treated creature with a sad, shabby demeanor. In Bird Girl’s eyes, this bedraggled Antag is a monster, a traitor, a true atrocity, but essential to the success of this mission.
And there’s something else, something she won’t tell me about or allow me to see. Not an Antag, but a Keeper, fallen so far from grace, after flying so high, that the crew simply wants to kill it. But Bird Girl won’t let them.
And this Keeper, whatever it may be, is afraid of me? Of humans? More afraid of those who are connected to the archives, I’m guessing. That makes my brain itch. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s former friend?
For some reason, I don’t draw the obvious connection. I’m not at my best in this situation. As far as we are concerned, her fellows don’t trust Bird Girl not just because of that weirdness, but because she has a connection with humans, and will force us all to meet and interact. In their eyes, she’s tainted all around.
Great. I try to screw down on our link, to see these complications more clearly, or at least begin to understand them—but now a debate, maybe even a fight, has broken out around Bird Girl, not for the first time, and she’s totally absorbed trying to defuse the tensions and get along with her fellows. There aren’t that many of them left, maybe thirty. Hard to count.
The last Antag warriors are convinced that this journey, this maneuver or feint, will be the last thing they’ll ever do.
Ice Moon Tea has connected us, the steward of bug memory has connected us, but Bird Girl will be very, very glad when our sharing ends and she can revert to her lone fighter self. She feels violated by having to deal with DJ and me and the mysterious Keeper. She feels she’s been sacrificed, her honor discarded.
GARDEN OF ODIN
When her troubles have eased, Bird Girl passes along a tidbit of information, and it’s a wrencher—that the crew believes, or has been informed by their commanders, that there’s something about the big ship that’s frightening and forbidden—taboo.