“Losses?” Kumar asks.
“All our gunnery mates, three out of four glider pilots. Fifty-six dead.”
This news shakes Borden. “If we get to Titan, can we even begin our mission?” she asks.
“We can try, Commander,” Bueller says. “Let’s worry about that after we finish Spook prep. Is this all of you?”
“All,” Litvinov confirms. Borden sadly agrees.
“We asked for a hundred and forty. I count thirty-one,” Bueller says. “Waste of a big ship!” She grabs a pair of handles and swings in ahead of Kumar. The bars lurch and haul us forward. “First phase is coming up. Anyone here rated for big weapons? Bolts and long-range disruptors?”
Ishida, Jacobi, one of the efreitors, and Ulyanova raise their hands.
“Good. Talk to me in a few minutes. Right now, all of you strip and we’ll get you right with Jesus.”
The rails carry us forward to a more constrained space, walls dark with streamers of purple. I see little sparks in my vision. All of us going transvac experience cosmic rays now and then. But these sparks leave neon trails. They don’t look like cosmic rays. More like optical migraines. Just a hint of what’s to come.
Bueller watches as we shed our skintights, this time without the help of gravity, a one-handed maneuver—other hand on a handle—that some accomplish with speed and grace, but which takes me longer.
“I want to see you naked, Venn!” Bueller shouts.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bueller’s voice becomes painful. Worse, I find it difficult to look at her—I keep wanting to look away. There’s something off about her outline, her image. Is it me? The purple streaks and neon sparks? A weirdly opticked crew chief. She just doesn’t look real. The rest seem to agree. No one will look at her directly without a squint or shake of the head. Joe is off to my left. I catch his eye. He knows something we don’t. Christ, now I’m feeling like dried bonito—downright flaked.
The shed skintights drift off to nobody seems to care where in the dark chamber. The rails drag us along, bare feet dangling, through a rectangular opening in the far bulkhead and into a space fully as large as an aircraft hangar. Here one rail takes half of us to the right, the rest to the left. Bueller hangs back and hovers, tapping heads to indicate right, left. The grunts do not appreciate the familiarity, but clearly, Go Bitch doesn’t give a damn. We’re all she’s getting and she’s not happy.
Filling the center of the great white chamber is a steel wheel about thirty meters wide and two meters thick across, its inner rim studded with black bumps. The wheel is the first of three that form a tunnel or gantlet. I do not like this. Nobody around me likes this.
“We have to go through those?” Jacobi asks.
“Yeah,” Bueller says.
“Why?”
“Purge!”
“What kind of purge?” Ishida asks.
“Quantum,” Borden murmurs, but I’m the only one who hears her.
Ishida rubs her temple. “Like castor oil, ma’am?”
Bueller looks clown-sad. “Don’t you read our briefings?”
“We’ve been busy, Chief,” Jacobi says.
“It ain’t about your fucking bowels,” Bueller says. “Downsun, you’ve been hanging with bad company since before you were born. Pasts that never were, futures that will never be. They slow you down. Those wheels will start the process of getting you clean.”
“Sounds like a tent revival,” I say.
“Think of it as a cosmic car wash. There’ll be another at waypoint—if we make it, which is getting less and less likely, goddammit! MOVE!”
Bueller swims around us, effortless as a sea lion in an ocean swell. One by one, in two lanes, she guides us through what could otherwise be subway tollgates, closer and closer to the great studded wheels. The tollgate lanes end at two steel autopsy tables. Each is sprung from behind by a heavy piston. Five meters from the first wheel, Bueller taps me and Kumar and tells us to lie flat against the slabs. Not autopsy tables—more like human pinball paddles.
Kumar looks at me with those mild, calm eyes. “I’m told it’s not unpleasant,” he says.
“You first,” I say. He rewards me with the merest grimace.
Behind us, Bueller taps Ishida and Jacobi next, then two Russians. Our sisters exchange finger-hooks and sharp dares and line up. The Russians clump, waiting to see what happens to us. Bueller swims back and jostles and jabs. This makes the Russians unhappy. Go Bitch doesn’t give a fuck. Neither does Litvinov. The Russian colonel looks terminally depressed.
Kumar and I try to lie flat against the tables. Simultaneously, they hiss and not-so-gently shove us through the first wheel with just a half twist of spin. Kumar gives a little shriek, I clutch my balls, and both of us fly neatly through all three wheels. My hair stands on end. I don’t have much hair and what there is is short. My fingertips tingle, but most curious of all, my innards try to decide whether they’re properly arranged. I swear, it’s like a fucking math wiz wants to shuck my guts as a topological experiment—particularly my colon. Maybe I’ll just turn inside out. Won’t make a difference, even inside out, humans are still just donuts.
The wheels ratchet three bumps counterclockwise and wait for the next pair. I let go of my balls. My muscles relax. My bowels stay tight and inside. I’m suddenly right with Jesus, clean and sparkly—renewed. Kumar’s source was correct—as weird as this is, the total sensation, once the purge is finished, is not unpleasant. I feel like a thunderstorm has blessed me with cool air and a lungful of charged ions. Maybe that’s it. Maybe we’re all being ionized. I’ve run into tech sergeants and engineers—including DJ—all Tesla freaks willing to swear that everything the Gurus provided had already been invented by their hero. Some insisted the Gurus weren’t real, that the government was just dosing out bits and pieces of the stuff Tesla did back in the twentieth century. I’m so invigorated I’m giving their crazy theories a new look.
Bueller gets us all through without a hitch. As we clutch ropes and bars beyond the wheels, staring owlishly, deciding whether or not we have complaints, wide circular lids at both ends of the chamber open and we see what waits beyond—fore and aft. It’s a longitudinal view down the hull of the Spook, from a position about fifty meters out from the centerline.
“Fuck,” Borden says with a frightened reverence. That’s the second time I’ve heard her utter this grunt standard. But I agree. No other possible reaction.
Let’s take the description in layers.
Judging from what we saw earlier, the fore end of the Spook is dominated by a wide gray bell, more of a shallow bowl, about sixty meters in diameter. From the convex center of the bowl juts the bullet-shaped bridge or command center, the ship’s prow. The bell’s concave side protects the bridge, command center, and crew areas from radiation or other weirdness aft. Classic.
Looking aft, however, there’s little or nothing classic or familiar about the Spook. First comes a slender run of steel-gray pipes. The pipes surround and support glassy blue modules, like grapes stuck between soda straws. In line aft of the straws and grapes comes a procession of space frames filled with payload or cargo, arranged in fasces like cylinders in a revolver. Each chamber in the cylinders reveals the rounded bronze or gray tip of a seed—what I assume will become, on Titan, a weapon or vehicle or some other piece of equipment. They look like bees waiting to crawl out of a hive. Just aft of straws and grapes, and just before the space frames, the designers chose to mount defensive weapons, extensible pods that rib and groove the transparent outer hull.