“To some of our brightest minds, the coincidences became too great to be ignored. It seemed the Gurus were feeling more threatened by the old moons, or something they contained, than by Antagonist domination. What could this possibly be?” Mushran looks around the room. He must have been a teacher once. He’s enjoying the chance to play professor.
“Turning glass,” Jacobi says, lips pursed behind her plate.
Kumar folds his arms and surveys the dark metal ceiling.
“Most interesting,” Mushran says. “But not our primary concern.”
“Shellfish,” I say.
Jacobi gives me a disgusted look, like I’m the snotty kid acting out in class.
“What the hell does that mean?” Ishida asks.
But Mushran agrees. “Indeed, the former inhabitants of the old moon that fell on Mars. Powerful and consistent visions were being supplied to a few settlers, as well as a small number of our troops, after exposure to the contents of the Drifter.”
Jacobi asks, “Why bring Venn here? What does he know about it?”
Rafe has been tapping his finger on the table, a hollow drumming signaling his impatience. Kumar ignores Jacobi’s question and turns toward the Voor, who shoves back his folding chair and rises. “Time a look-see,” Rafe says. “Everyone as thinks they wor masters, powered an’ wise, come a with.” He sounds more like Teal now. I’m not sure I like that. What the fuck does it mean that his accent has changed?
“Lead on,” Kumar says.
OLD AND IMPROVED
Two hours before we need to hit the taps,” Jacobi reminds Borden. The commander nods. That’s a kind of time limit, then, to determine what our options are—whether we go all in and throw in our lot with the settlers and Joe and DJ and whoever else is here, or get back outside, decontaminate, and…
What?
Another possibility presents itself. If this mine is the wellspring of an undesirable variety of madness—uncontrollable shit that nobody wants to deal with, worse than turning glass—then we’ll simply be cut loose. The next step—whatever that may be—will be made without us.
At the head of a widening tunnel, Rafe is joined by three other men I don’t recognize, all dressed in the same white tunics streaked with green. No introductions are made. Rafe speaks to them in that bastard version of Dutch-Afrikaans affected by the Voors. Two break off and head down a side branch into a shadowy gloom with a white glow at the end. Jacobi arranges her sisters in a spaced V, as wide as the tunnel allows. I itch to join their formation, but despite our action on the Red, she doesn’t invite me. I do not want to be kept apart, but—
I get it. I hate it, but I get it. If I were Jacobi, I’d distance myself both from Borden—Navy rank—and me, shithead, VIP POG, as far as I could run.
It’s Ishida who haunts me in a way I can’t define. I keep looking at her. Jacobi and Ishikawa notice, but we’re moving too fast for them to call me out. I’ve met three Winter Soldiers in my years in the Skyrines—never in space, never in combat. We all wonder what it would be like to be torn apart and put back together, made into something not quite human—better than human, more than flesh-and-blood Skyrine, according to some reports from those who should know—but difficult to reintegrate with the Corps, a judgmental and suspicious culture that resists challenge and change because everything we go through and especially combat overloads us with challenge, drowns us in uncontrollable change. We hate change. We hate newbies because they replace people we were getting used to. What if the newbie is actually someone we knew who is now someone different? But my fascination with Ishida goes beyond that.
Is it because I’m not entirely human, myself?
You’ve got real problems, Venn, Coyle says.
There’s that, too.
The tunnel has gradually expanded to about ten meters wide and five meters high as other tunnels combine, the supporting walls replaced by textured beams that then also go away as we’re surrounded by solid ancient rock and nickel-iron, not going anywhere. Vetted by the best mining engineers on Mars. Maybe by some of our people as well.
The light brightens ahead. Mushran and Rafe lead the way around a broad, curving corner—metal phasing into rock, finally becoming rock all around, with the plastic cover going up again as a moisture block.
What stretches up and out beyond that curve has been lit up like a nighttime bridge on a holiday. Red, blue, and green lights rise in sweeping lines along ramparts that begin on a broad, flat floor, then gradually descend to wrap around and intersect more rocky pillars, creating an interwoven, maniacally complicated cloverleaf with nine or ten levels—dropping hundreds of meters below the firm, dusty floor into the heart of the old fragment—encapsulating and supporting great masses of diamond-white crystal.
Borden and Jacobi and Kumar stare in astonishment at this immense and extraordinary excavation. “Is this like the first Drifter?” Borden asks me.
“Yeah, but more.”
The first Drifter’s digs—what the Voors called the Church—had revealed a tall, intact chunk of white crystal, surrounded by braces and struts of rock. In retrospect, and seeing what has been done here, I think the goal of the kobolds had been, and still is, to expose as much crystalline surface as they can. Inside Fiddler’s Green, at least three times as much has been revealed.
So it can make tea, Coyle says. Tea to train kobolds.
“Yeah,” I murmur. “And us.”
Just below the overlook, pipes spray shimmering liquid over the digs, uniting in a cascade that plunges three hundred meters to fill sparkling pools on the lowest level. Rainbows gather around the inset floodlights. This could be another hobo, an underground channel diverted with the specific purpose of giving the crystals all they require, encouraging the kobold caretakers to finish their work, whatever that might be.
Only two people I can see walk the ramparts below, checking and measuring columns and brackets, flashing their torches up faces of crystal. They wear black hoods and shoulder capes made of the same material as the plastic on the walls, like raincoats. They don’t seem concerned about getting wet. One flashes a light up, then nods to the other. They link arms and vanish beneath a rampart.
“Got the layout?” Borden asks me.
“The water is pumped from below,” I say. “It recirculates.”
Kumar says, “Maximized production. I’m not sure this was ever authorized.”
“Nothing in half measures,” Mushran says. “Such was implied from the beginning, as soon as we parted from the other divisions. We go for broke, no?”
“Why are the Muskies helping?” Jacobi asks. “What’s their take?”
“Division Four promised them relocation, supply, and defense,” Kumar says. He doesn’t seem all that enthusiastic now, seeing what’s been accomplished. Jealousy—or too much of a good thing?
“This fragment sat here, inactive, nothing more than a mass anomaly, for over a billion years,” Mushran says. “Until we were sent to work with the miners.”
From an access hatch a few meters behind us, two men emerge, removing their hoods and capes. My spine tingles seeing them.
“Fucking Vinnie!” Tak says, coming forward and patting my skintight. “Why all the armor?”
Behind him, Joe steps forward, face wreathed in a huge grin. “Master Sergeant,” he says. He wraps his arms around me.