Bug Karnak didn’t have time to contribute much to our info about this vessel, only that parts of it looked familiar and that the bugs may have encountered similar vessels once upon a time—might know more about them and tell us more about them if we simply observe more, exchange more—help the fragments come together.
As for getting more information from bug steward—
That’s no longer possible.
I’m not sure if it’s an actual shock or just another bloody brick in a wall of cruelty and confusion, but we’ve been dragged to another cube-shaped racquetball court and another round cage suspended by cables.
There are people inside this cage. Or rather, they were people once. A sour, stale smell tells us all we need to know about their present condition.
Bird Girl tugs on the rope, making us loop around each other. We swing past the cage. Inside are clumps of tangled mummies, black and brown and gray. As Bird Girl warned us, based on the evidence clumped in this identical trap, we’re not the only humans on board, but we may be the only live ones.
Borden absorbs the view with a darkening of her face that could be prelude to a heart attack, but I know it’s just more rage—rage pumped up and then barely suppressed by discipline and training. All along, since she sprang me from Madigan, I’ve had a difficult time figuring the commander. That may be because for Borden it’s not so much honor and duty but closeted fury that keeps her going. An urge to vengeance. And not vengeance on our former enemies. There are people and things back home she’s gunning for.
Borden hates Gurus. I pity them all, despite the strong suspicion that none of us will ever see Earth again.
More important to our fate, if the starshina is part Guru, how much longer can she stay human, stay useful to the Antags?
“How many are there?” DJ asks. We try to tally but it’s not easy. The bodies are in bad shape, and not just from decay. They appear to have died while engaged in desperate hand-to-hand. Biting. Rending. Ripping. Severed, shriveled limbs drift slowly across the cage, along with blackened scraps. Some of the bodies are still tied in combat knots, limbs embracing torsos, fingers tight around necks, wrestling holds so much like coitus—others, just plain inexplicable. Last-ditch. Chaotic. Most still wear clothes, pants and shirts dark with old blood. Shoes are not in evidence. A few of the scraps have escaped the mesh. We bat at them with instinctive grunts of pity and disgust.
“Seventy or eighty,” I guess.
DJ covers his nose and mouth with one hand, keeping his other hand on the knotted rope. Borden is beyond expression but her body is stiff and her jaw waxen.
“Didn’t they feed them?” Ulyanova asks, but I doubt they were trying to eat one another. A few, I see, are draped with banners or ribbons covered with symbols I can’t read. Maybe they had all been pressed into some sort of competition, strong against weak—and the Gurus handed out prizes.
“No women,” Ulyanova says. “Maybe all men.”
“How can you tell?” DJ asks. “Not much of the fun parts left.”
She gives him a perplexed look.
“Did Antags kill them?” he asks, but we already know better. These poor bastards were put in a cage and left to their own devices until the fighting made them too weak to live. The Gurus could have recorded their combat and their agonies. Makes sense if this is a Guru ship. Plenty of studio space. Plenty of program opportunities.
Wonder who was the last one and what he was thinking, and how long he lasted after he’d won and the fighting was over?
Ulyanova looks startled. “Getting stronger!” she says.
Whatever she’s hearing isn’t coming from either of us or the steward. Those signals have faded to nothing. Bug Karnak is blown to bits, melted down, buried in ice and Titan’s interior magma. What the starshina’s hearing seems to be from a source much nearer—but we have no idea how all this works.
Ulyanova swings close. “Antagonista are frightened!” she whispers. “No control, no way out… and something wild bad up front.”
Borden’s darkness has gone pale. Her jaw juts. Our prospects aren’t improving. What if Gurus were and are still smarter than bugs? Could they reverse the whole weird, tricky process? Like turning a telescope around.
Are they already looking at us through Ulyanova?
A WORLD OF SHIT, WITH RAZOR BLADES
The three ranking Antags wait for Bird Girl to catch up. We’ve gathered the looping cable between us and clump about three meters behind her. So far we’ve managed to avoid bumping into structural elements—columns, beams, bulkheads, all smoothly sculpted, no signs of manufacture or refinement, like surfaces in a computer rendering.
“Big fucking ship,” DJ says, belaboring the obvious. “But we’re still back in the tail. Maybe we just passed the asshole.”
The translator renders this for Bird Girl. A sidewise glance from her two inner eyes is her only response. Blessedly, we’re beyond the corpse smell. The air here is smooth and cool.
Slow as always, I mull over another obvious data point: Gurus breathe terrestrial air, at terrestrial pressure, even on their own ship—even way out here. Is this their native atmosphere? At the very least it’s what they suck in while they’re here, and that makes the ship human and Antag compatible…
But what do Gurus breathe when they’re at home?
Do Gurus have a home?
And now that the ship is infested by Antags and humans, can it flush out the good air and pipe in the bad, can it fumigate to get rid of us like rats? Or is that too blunt and obvious? After all, how interesting is extermination without conflict, without pitting us against one another? Without cages and corpses and shit?
Fuck the inquiring mind. I do not want to know.
We emerge from another tunnel into a doubly curved chamber, like being inside a big, rope-cinched eggshell. The light here has no obvious source and is orangey-peach in color. At the egg’s large end, blocking any obvious path forward, is a round black plate about six meters across, sectioned in thirds through the middle. The most grizzled-looking of the Antag commanders, whom otherwise I can’t tell apart—no visible signs of rank on their light armor—folds its wings tightly to its body, lower hands clasping. The others follow this one’s lead, including Bird Girl. She’s waiting for a decision. After several minutes, one of the Antags musics some words, which the translator picks up and returns with rough overtones as, “This is difficult place. Many reasons not all are brought here. May cause disease.”
“Illness,” Bird Girl corrects. “We cannot go forward and take control until we pass through a puzzle. The puzzle changes. When we do not look correctly, do not solve, the gate will not let us through. If there is no going through, we stay until we die. No other place to go now.”
“All righty!” DJ says, waving his hand and splaying his fingers as if weaving a protective spell. Not much reserve left for DJ and I doubt there’s much in either Borden or Ulyanova. How much for me?
An Antag commander approaches the “gate.” The others hang on to its lower hands, as if it might be sucked through. At a slap of a wingtip hand, the gate opens in six parts that withdraw into the bulkhead. At first, through the gate I see only gray uncertainty. Then the gray area acquires a spiky focus. A geometric, weedy growth spirals out around the edges, bulging toward us with thorny fingers.
I think of showering after gym class in high school, in the echoing tile washroom, sitting on a damp aluminum bench, when I tried to simulate druggy experience by pressing an index finger against the sides of my eyeballs. But that was juvenile shit. This is real. This is messing with my brain, maybe with my soul.