“Because I’m a sap.”
“Because you’re reliable. I knew that given the opportunity on Mars, everything would be easier for all of us—because of you.”
“I would like to have had a choice,” I say.
“Me, too,” DJ says.
“You knew pretty much when we knew,” Borden says. “And on some matters, you knew before.”
“What about Ulyanova?”
The starshina listens, eyes still narrow, lips tight.
“I can’t speak to what the Russians knew,” Borden says, “or when she awoke to her connection.”
Ulyanova lifts her hand and one finger, then folds the finger and looks away as if bored. Or in control, waiting for us to figure all this out so she can get on with her life.
“Bird Girl knew before we did,” I say. “She chose Ulyanova. Maybe their steward told them who to look for.”
“Who’s getting Wi-Fi and who’s not,” DJ says.
“Can you hear anything through her?” Joe asks DJ and me.
“Nothing substantial,” DJ says. “More like static.”
“Then nobody knows what she’s actually tuned into.”
Again her impatient, bored look.
“I do,” I say. “She’s been sharing some of my deepest secrets, and she could only get them through a Guru.”
Joe looks uneasy. “Or me,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“How did the Antags find this ship?” Borden asks.
“Let’s ask them later,” DJ says. “I’m so tired I could croak and not know the difference.”
“Right,” Borden says. “We’ll give it a rest for now.”
I’d like to sort things out further, but have to agree that would not be productive.
“We are done?” Ulyanova asks.
“Done,” Borden says.
Vera brings up a rolled mat and leads the starshina to another part of the cage. Bilyk looks like a lost little kid. Litvinov is paying him no attention, and the others are scrupulously avoiding Russians—all but DJ. DJ spreads his mat next to Bilyk and conks immediately. Bilyk soon joins him.
But I’m buzzing.
We haven’t even got around to the caged dead and the gate.
SORROW AND PITY
We’re allowed a few hours of nothing like peace but at least quiet, and the rest of us are starting to rouse. We take advantage of a stream of water shot through the cage by a trio of bats, then intercept baseball-sized lumps of the cakes we’ve been eating for days and now hate like fury. But we’re hungry. We eat, then hold up mats as curtains. The bats obligingly wash away our by-products. I don’t know where the water and shit goes, but it doesn’t come back into our cage.
“More discussion, sir,” I suggest to Joe. “Debrief on our trip forward.”
He looks uneasy, as if his gut is bothering him, then says, “Let’s do it.”
Ishikawa and Vera escort the starshina to rejoin the main group. Litvinov and Bilyk flank them. Ulyanova’s attitude is again cool and calm. Litvinov is almost obsequious toward her.
Everyone forms layers around DJ and Borden and me, clutching arms and legs and rearranging until all can see and hear. Joe forms up beside Borden and they lead the brief/debrief.
DJ and I, Borden adding details, explain what we saw on the way forward, in the company of Bird Girl and her Antag commanders. We neglect to say much about the screw garden and its low, bushy forest—which nobody understands—but we do describe the tangle of human bodies in the second hamster cage. Borden’s face takes on a brief pained expression, like she knows something we don’t, and doesn’t want to know it.
The explanations wind on. Not all our group is clued into the weird details about Bug Karnak, the steward, and DJ’s and my off-and-on link with Bird Girl.
“Yeah, but why did they pick you four to go forward?” Ishikawa asks.
“Because you’re clued in, right?” Ishida asserts.
“Commander Borden isn’t,” Tak says.
Jesus, we have to start all over again. Everyone asks pointed questions about who knows what, who’s talking to whom, whose head is most busy and why. I doubt that most of our survivors believe deeply in any of this. Trust is going to be hard to maintain—after all, we’re consorting with the enemy, one way or another, all of us, right? And some more deeply than others.
Slowly, with jumps and starts, everyone is brought up to a kind of pause point, the closest thing to exhaustion of topic we can manage for now—which I think should have happened back on Mars, but I wasn’t making those decisions.
Then Borden raises her hand. She’s clenching something. I remember she grabbed a shiny little piece of metal outside the second hamster cage.
I get a sick feeling.
“On our way back, when we passed the corpses in the cage,” she says, “I found this. It must have slipped through the mesh.” She extends a dog tag smeared with dried blood and lets it float out on its crusted chain.
Joe pinches the tag between his fingers as it drifts his way and examines the stamped letters. It’s a newer tag, with an embedded chip, but the letters are still stamped, and that means it belonged to a Skyrine. “Jesus!” he says, and looks at me as if he’s finally had the very last of the air let out of his tires. He releases the tag and wipes his hand on his pajamas.
I grab it next. The blood is dark and crusted but I can still read the name: MSGT Grover N. Sudbury. Master Sergeant—my rank. Grover Sudbury—the rapist bastard several of us, including DJ, Joe, Kazak, and Tak, pounded to a pulp outside Hawthorne.
Bringing back another part of that moment in the dream, the instauration, about returning to Madigan—
Ask Joseph Sanchez about where he went with Grover Sudbury, and why.
I never asked. Too ridiculous.
Tak reads the tag and recoils in genuine horror—the kind of shuddering, supernatural horror you might feel in a nightmare or as a character in a scary movie. Which suddenly we all are. This could change everything—but how?
How does it make anything different?
“He can’t be here,” Tak says, his voice ragged. “We stomped the shit out of him and we weren’t brought up on charges or even asked why.”
“Kazak helped,” DJ says. “Just before we were sent to Socotra. We heard the shithead was given a dishonorable discharge. After that, he went away. Nobody saw him again.”
Borden lets the tag and chain slowly swing between us. “Okay. You knew him. If he was no longer in the service, how did he get here?”
“And how the fuck did he earn rank?” DJ is sensitive about promotion, having been busted down a few times.
The others wait for a story, any story that brings them into the picture.
Litvinov inspects the tag and asks, “Who is this?”
“A psychopath,” Tak says. “He assaulted a sister in a scuzzy apartment he kept just outside Hawthorne, while we were in training. Probably not his first, and we did our best to correct bad attitude.”
“Why is he here?” Ishida asks.
“Was here,” I correct.
“Kind of coincidental, finding his tags, don’t you think?” Jacobi asks, but nobody can put together an explanation that makes sense. Knowledge of the past does not help us get to where we are now.