The patterns inside the gate become simpler and solid, as if the puzzle has learned who and what we are, how we see, how we think, and has isolated the most effective way to entrance or confuse us.
This pattern leaves perverted afterimages.
And then—
Having found our nature and our weakness, what lies beyond becomes a tortured maze of the nastiest crap I hope to never encounter again, and I’ve become part of it—trapped, strung out on machines with steel teeth that chew me open and then retreat to allow dancing steel arms with needle and thread to stitch me back together before I bleed out.
I see all of us stuffed into big iron caskets like iron maidens, filled with sharpened spikes—not much worse than the suits we had to wear on Titan, but then…
Yeah, they’re worse.
DJ is twitching, neck corded, struggling to look aside, but he can’t. Ulyanova I can’t see—she’s drifting behind me and, caught in more ways than one, I refuse to turn away from the gate. Winding nests of razor-scaled serpents dart forward to grab my head. I’m dying, but I should already be dead. Somehow, even in the middle of my horror, I think: You crazy bastard, you’re pegging at around seven—can’t you ramp it up to eleven?
Never taunt an evil genius, right?
Gurus like it interesting.
The puzzle gets personal. Skyrines and Antags are now personally tearing my flesh. There’s Joe, Tak, Ishida—and even Kazak, dead Kazak, teeth buried in my stomach. Pain isn’t enough. The gate plays with every human fear great and smalclass="underline" of being broken or isolated or eaten, a great shrieking chaos of You’ll never breathe again, you’ll never eat again, you’ll never fuck again, you’ll be lost and nobody will ever find you, and if they do, you won’t care because there’s so much pain, and worse, you’re crazier than clockwork apeshit and now you’re laughing, watching your fellow Skyrines join you in a never-ending hell—
And if such images can have physical overtones beyond the pain and the shock, here they are: the sense that everything in one’s body is about to fail, piece by piece, causing not just pain but deep uncertainty, and maybe it’s already happening or has already happened—
Worse than any instauration, because this one stabs in and hooks forward the socially outcast, the living who are worse than dead, who will shit their pants and soil their souls and embarrass themselves and all who know them and love them, simply by failing in form and duty.
Combine that with the mincemeat grinders and the hooks and the flaying—
And the overall impression that it will all go away, all be forgotten, if only we turn on one another and fight and kill! I can have everything back, my youth, my innocence, freedom from pain, a young, whole body—if only I fight.
All will be forgiven.
My God, that has real power. That reaches eleven. My hands form claws. Borden has curled up like a pill bug. I hear DJ growling like an angry cat, but Ulyanova keeps quiet. I’ve rotated enough to see her face, a paleness waiting to be smashed—I reach for her—
Bird Girl jerks hard on our cable. We cannot keep our eyes on the gate. The Antags close the hatch. It’s over. They haven’t been caught up, not this time, leaving us ignorant humans to bear the brunt. Borden is still tucked up in a tight ball. DJ and I cling to each other.
The nightmare inside the gate was completely convincing to us—but not to the starshina. She licks her lips. She’s into it. She’s ready for a change. What did the gate promise her? Life as a Russian soldier, as a Skyrine, is total misery, and now she’s seen her way clear to being special and in control. A fucking awful transformation, but I see it in her eyes. Already she’s thinking like a Guru.
“Four of our own have tried to enter this gate,” Bird Girl says, and passes us impressions of bloody pieces being returned. “Not just illusion. Death trap. Deadly, killing puzzle.” Now she addresses Ulyanova directly. “Tell us what we must do, how we must think, to pass through.”
The starshina wipes her forehead and inspects her palm, as if she might have mopped more than sweat. She turns to DJ and me. “There are Gurus here—I feel them! They are unhappy and weak. They believe they will die.” Her English has improved. What sort of expertise can she access now? She looks up, aside. “They do not mind dying, but are surprised and angry I see into them. They did not expect that—ever.
“And now we must meet, no?”
DJ looks at her in abject wonder, then at me. We’re still sweating like worms on a griddle.
Bird Girl tugs us back from the closed gate. “We go to see Keeper,” she says, and points her wingtip at Ulyanova.
The starshina seems to suddenly spark. Whatever’s inside her, whatever has combined with her, is making its first moves. She addresses Bird Girl in Russian. The translator hashes and wheeps back English, then Antag. “To do this, to finish it, I am in charge,” she says. “You will show me to Antagonista who looks into Gurus. All my comrades will see, and all of you will see, because gate will kill if we do not go through at once. Understood?”
“Understood,” Bird Girl says.
The Antags have their own Guru mimic.
More sides to the polygon.
GHOSTS, DEAD PEOPLE, AND THINGS THAT NEVER WERE
Bird Girl and the ranking Antags escort us into another access pipe that extends quite a long ways aft through the ship, opening into a chamber that has the benefit, for us, of not being excessively changeable or excessively large. On one side of the chamber, outboard, maybe not too far from the first racquetball court and our hamster cage, is a makeshift hangar where three smaller vessels have been parked—not the same as the larger transports that brought us here, more like orbital fighter craft, suspended in a web of rubbery cables that keep them from bumping. A few Antags in that hangar are busy winging from ship to ship. And finally, we see a squid. Mostly the same as I remember through the foggy walls of our liquid-filled tank on the first transport up from Titan—squidlike in some aspects, but arranged like a catamaran, two grayish-pink bodies with four or five arms each linked by a kind of bridge—but not in water, not this time, and not floppy like you’d expect from a squid on Earth. This creature slides gracefully into a fighter craft and emerges a few seconds later, arms carrying equipment wrapped in dark fabric or plastic.
Borden ignores the squid and concentrates on what she can understand, what might be more immediately important. “Five ships,” she says. “Probably not big enough to take us home, or anywhere far from Saturn.”
DJ stares at the squid. “Wouldn’t want to tangle with one of those.”
The Antags around the corded fighters move into a tunnel. Three emerge a few minutes later with a bundle floating between them, an irregular squirming object wrapped in a flexible bag with a squat brown cylinder attached—some sort of pressurized sack, I’m guessing.
The Antags are going to introduce us to some Gurus. The ones they captured on Mars and apparently kept alive? Maybe not. Maybe we have no idea where their Gurus come from. Wherever, I want to be any fucking place but here. I don’t have a home, not really, but I want to go back there, even if it’s Virginia Beach turned black glass.
We are in the grip of an unpredictable enemy whose motivations may not add up, who have spent years trying to kill us on Mars and on Titan, and that’s bad enough—