“Some are dead,” I say.
“I know. One would ha been a new husband. But he didna feel it. The ot’er life did not take. And I didna want t’at, with him na brushing old trut’…”
Even befuddled, I realize this is a new version of her story. Which do I believe?
“Other life?” I ask.
She takes my hand.
Jesus! Her touch fills my head with sparks. She whispers in my ear. “You are t’ere, you feel it, doan you?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I can sort of see Joe in my peripheral vision. The others: not at all.
“Go ahead,” Joe says distantly. “We’re with you.”
Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.
Teal walks beside me into the largest chamber in the Drifter: the Church, the void. Scattered strings of star lights glow along the outer wall, profiling one side of what might be a shaft hundreds of meters high—a great cylinder. Someone has raised nine or ten of the miners’ wide work light panels on tall tripods and connected them to the Drifter’s hydro power through thick cables. Teal walks from one panel to the next and switches the lights on, and now I see the galleries hewn high in the metal walls, all the way to the top.
The void, the Church, is like an inverted Tower of Babel.
The last thing that catches my eye, oddly, is the most startling and prominent, as if I’ve seen it so often before it can be ignored—but of course I haven’t and it can’t.
A pillar of glittering crystals rises through the center of the Church, big, though not nearly as large as the one in my waking dream—my green tea dream—and broken, cracked all over. The pillar is held by embracing spars of rock left in place, but also by hanging nets of interlinked tubules like those making up the kobolds, only thicker. Basic units of construction. Tinkertoys.
The void is the center, the focus of the greatest mining operation in the Drifter: a carved-out and liberated pillar of something like living diamond—a diamond skyscraper, struggling to restore and remake itself after billions of years of being trapped, encased in stone and lava and metal.
And now I can see the connection. The big story.
This pillar, like the one in my vision, oozes a glistening gelatin that slides down around the supports and braces, cascades slowly from level to level, pooling near the base—where unfinished kobolds stir sluggishly, trying out new connections, apparently without direction. Some, however, have begun a laborious journey back up the braces, climbing with agonizing slowness to become part of the thing that will eventually surround the pillar and reinforce the mined-out galleries, filling the deep heart—or mind—of the Drifter. Recreating the immense crystal pillar in those ancient, ice-roofed seas.
The green powder lies thick all over. It forms a thin scum on the churning slime. Maybe the powder comes from the slime.
For a crazy moment, a panicked resistance sets in; all my training and paranoia and battle fatigue and all the bad shit a Skyrine falls heir to rises up like a twister filled with knives and all I can think is that somehow the Antags have drugged me, drugged us all, or maybe command drugged the Cosmoline, and some unknown new enemy (maybe we’re our own enemy) has infiltrated the Drifter to create a literal fifth column, something big and awful and nasty-subversive… Something that if it is allowed to complete its work will spell the end of all that we fight for.
But none of that makes sense.
I’m caught between competing indoctrinations, competing information, and I drop to my knees in the glare of a work light panel, shade my eyes, and look high into the void to try to find that other life again.
The life that had purpose and majesty, yet is now gone.
“Very, very old,” Teal says, getting down on her knees beside me. “Te moon fell on Mars in pieces, long ago. T’is wor one of te pieces. Te Algerians and t’en te Voors part mined it out but at first knew not’ing… T’en te Voors found te Church, but broke a dike and let flow wild te hobo, and when t’ey fled, te old crystals had years and enow water a shape old servants… First of the awakening.”
“Kobolds,” I say.
“After te Voors abandoned te Drifter, te servants dug and searched.”
“The red and blue parts in the map,” I say.
“All yes. In te beginning, Fat’er lived an breat’ed te green powder all t’rough te old spaces, blown up from te deep hydraulics. He had time enow a feel te ot’er life, time enow a guess what t’wor.”
“He told you?”
“No need. He wor first gen. He inhaled green powder like all te rest… Gave him weak sight a life a te old moon. T’en, te Voors sent his first wife out a te dust. ’Tis why he went a Green Camp. Better t’em t’an Voors. And he fat’ered me. What he only slightly felt and dreamed slid deep inna my genes… and grew.
“But word got out. T’wor traitors in all camps. T’at’s why te Voors came a Green Camp a trade for me. By t’en, te doctors told, te child a te exposed man and woman will be te one—’tis t’ird gen will grow and finish te big story.
“De Groot had only sons—said he’d atone for what t’ey did and trade for me. Wanted a see te Drifter clear, work it, use it… T’ought it would give t’em power over te Earth and over te Far Ot’ers, too. And maybe ’twill. But look… Drifter can defendT itself…”
We follow more cables, thinner—leads from Skyrine demolition packages. Explosives have been rigged around the bottom of the void, around the pillar, and even more hang higher up from the growing tubules and braces—dozens of spent matter charges rigged to expend their energy all at once, a rather impressive show of force—what our sisters carried in those heavy packs when they arrived, hitching a ride with the very folks who could take them where they wanted to go.
All planned.
“Captain Coyle?” I ask. Joe and then DJ are right behind me, listening. My focus is on Teal, but they’re here, too.
“The Voors tried a stop t’em. Your women shot t’em,” Teal says. “I saw some die.”
Coyle and the ladies were assigned a special ops mission, a mission we were not privy to. None of us are expected to survive.
Teal walks ahead, crossing rock bridges carved from the mass of old stone, a kind of elevated maze over a slow lake of glass-clear, shining ooze, filled with half-made kobolds, rippling over a thick bed of glowing red and blue flowers, the foodstuffs and guides of my deep ice vision.
The old moon trying to come back to life…
Trying to remember.
Captain Coyle’s wires extend across the lava bridges, to the other side of the pillar, where more charges hang prepped and ready to blow. Collapsing the entire void, possibly pulling the head and shoulders of the Drifter down beneath the surface of the Red, ending all the labor that the Algerians and the Voors had put into this amazing formation.
Putting an end to all the possibilities, all the raw materials, and why?
“Why kill such knowledge?” Joe asks. And now I see it, too. Knowledge more dangerous than opportunity and resource. “Crazier still, why kill us?”
DJ comes into my filmy sidelong view. “Strong tea. We’ve got it, and they don’t want us to have it.”
“Abody dinna want knowledge,” Teal says.
“Which abody, I wonder?” Joe asks.
DJ’s moved ahead of us, over a high bridge, but Teal calls for him to stop, holds up a finger, points out an extrusion from the base of the pillar: a dark, hard, shiny material we have not seen before but which has been described to us. Not rock, not metal. Throwing up a dark meadow of sharp spines, thick as grass, silvery black, translucent, at once beautiful and frightening.