“Damage,” Borden observes. Many of the pods are blackened, dark—or gone. Bueller makes a little grunt, but adds nothing.
The three long “skirts” begin aft of the payload, about a third of the ship’s length back from the bridge. When we first saw them, they rippled and flowed, kind of pearly, but now they’re stiffer and singed with streaks of gray—not as pretty but still impressive. They surround and partly obscure a stack of pale gray disks, each about sixty meters wide and separated by trusses like coins in a magician’s hand. Even damaged, this central complex shimmers with a foggy uncertainty that makes my eyes cross. Like Bueller, none of it looks entirely real. Maybe it isn’t. The trusses and coins run aft another fifty meters beyond the skirts’ hemline to the Spook’s tail—flaring black cones that I assume are engine nozzles, ribbed with red and black vanes that might shed heat. All of this, the Spook’s business end, is wrapped in a fine hairnet of intersecting struts and beams.
Seen almost in its entirety, the ship is weirdly beautiful, like a blown-glass jellyfish leading a parade of steel and enamel fruits. Doesn’t look remotely human-made. None of this does, really.
Bueller’s sun-chapped lips pull her ruddy cheeks into a hard grin. “That’s enough,” the crew chief says. “We’re transvac in fifteen minutes. We need you properly stoned.”
“Stoned?” Ishida asks, one eye wide.
“Stowed,” Bueller says. Her grin flattens. Comically somber, she waves us on.
“She’s nuts,” Ishida says, not quite out of the crew chief’s hearing.
“These are traditionally odd people,” Kumar says. “They have adapted to an odd ship. But Lady of Yue has been traveling to Saturn and back for five years with never an incident.”
Jacobi lifts an eyebrow. “Except now. Ship looks pretty banged up. How much can she take?”
“She is very strong,” Kumar says. “I have been told—”
“You’ve never been on a ship like this, have you?” Borden asks him.
We pause to admire the broken protocol.
“There has never been another ship like this,” Kumar finally says, voice low.
“Guru theory?” Ishida asks.
“Not precisely,” Kumar says. “Wait Staff was instructed to approach humans who had particular ideas, to fund them and give them laboratories in which to work. We did. This is one of the results.”
“I knew it!” DJ says. “It’s Tesla shit, right?”
“All human, huh?” Jacobi says, in no way agreeing with DJ. “But guided by Gurus. And Socrates’s boy slave understood geometry from birth.”
Again, learned sister.
“We eat first?” Ishikawa asks.
“No time!” Bueller calls from the front of our line. “We assign soccer balls. Big Vamoose in fifteen minutes. Short sleep. Then food.”
“Soccer balls?” a Russian asks behind me.
“Big Vamoose?” another Russian asks, frowning.
I slip my hand out flat, showing motion at speed. He still looks puzzled.
“What happens in the second purge?” Jacobi asks.
Borden decides this line of thinking is not productive. She calls down the line to Litvinov, “Anyone see Mushran?”
The Russian colonel is making sure his troops are organized and prepped and distracted. He points forward. “Went before,” he suggests. “Ship is big and very clean!” he adds cheerily. “Never stay in such fine hotel.” His troops appear unconvinced.
Bueller warns us against touching or even brushing each other for the next few minutes, so we keep apart—not that there’s been much hugging. What does happen at midpoint? Maybe I’m too encrusted with unresolved bits, a deep dark sinner who won’t make it. Maybe I’ll be bleached out of existence. I might have some of Coyle’s sins hanging on me as well. But my inner voices have chosen to be quiet—no Bug, no Coyle. I’m all alone in here. Feels almost normal.
I turn left and look up through a clear panel into more structure. We all look. Beyond intricate shadowy architecture we get a glimpse of the brownish limb of Mars, slowly rolling.
“Bye-bye, Red,” Jacobi says.
I keep staring, like maybe Mars can answer something for me before we leave. Above the limb, I see a star. The star goes black. The space around the star goes even blacker. Then, something huge cuts a shadowy wedge out of Mars. The wedge seems to double, sharpen, and form an arrowhead.
Jacobi and the others have turned away, waiting to be led to their places for the next ride. Try as hard as I can, I can’t make sense of what’s happening out there, and after the confusion of our intro to the Spook and all the other shit we’ve been through, my instincts are numb.
The wedge digs deeper into Mars, blocking most of what I can see. Then I see it’s part of a cube, a huge cube—and its corners are pushing out and twisting around, shaping pyramids, which in profile look like arrowheads. Between the pyramidal corners and the main body of the cube, sparkling spiderwebs are being drawn by the thousands.
It’s the ship we saw in orbit before departing from Earth.
It’s Box.
I tap Bueller on the shoulder to distract her from herding the rest of us aft to our soccer balls. As she slowly spins about, a high whistle pierces the air, and Lady of Yue shudders around us, then begins an awful wailing sound, like a woman who’s just lost all of her children.
The skirts, the sails that flow aft of the cargo and crew areas, are spreading wide, revealing more damage as they expand—but also sending out their own spider-silk sparkles. The sparkles fan to shape a nimbus, then flow farther aft, where they cage a welding-torch-blue glow. Fascinating to watch, painful, hypnotic. Leaves burning afterimages on the backs of my eyeballs.
“Don’t look!” Bueller shouts, then grabs my shoulder and shoves me toward the others. There’s a weird sensation, like the ship is expanding longitudinally, like we’ll soon be squeezed out and left behind, surrounded by vacuum. “Grab hold! We’re moving now.”
I feel myself drifting aft, my grip on the rail insufficient to keep me in place against the growing acceleration. Borden and Ishida are sliding along right next to me, along with Ulyanova and two more Russians. Below me I see Jacobi and Ishikawa and DJ. I can’t see Joe or Kumar.
Then—we’re a tangle of limbs, bodies, heads colliding against the far bulkheads. Cables and equipment sway and swing above us. Bueller still tries to pull herself forward, but she’s finally pried loose and joins us in the tangle, right on top of Borden.
Everything around us reflects that far, sapphire-blue arc light. Through the forward frame, I can make out that Mars is gone. But not the black cube. That shadow is following, then trying to flank Lady of Yue even as we untangle, cursing and climbing free. Bueller rises over the mass and looks around, eyes flinty—then points to Ishida, Jacobi, the efreitor, and Ulyanova.
“Outboard to the weapons,” she says. “We have four. We need five.”
“Venn,” Jacobi says. I try to remind her about my not being rated, but she shrugs it off. “Just bigger point and shoot,” she says. “Right? Follow Ishida and you can’t go wrong.”
Joe watches us from a recess, where he’s shielding Kumar. He tips a salute at me. I mouth something rude, but he’s already turned and is dislodging Kumar from a nest of snaking cables.
At Bueller’s command, more rails and cables descend, and, behind Jacobi, we all grab hold, to be yanked outboard so hard I wonder that my shoulder stays in its socket.
“Keep your eyes forward!” Bueller calls as we move through the framework, toward the weapons pods on their translucent booms, now retracted snug against the outer hull. I count twenty pods—fifteen that were apparently ruptured during the previous encounter, no doubt venting their contents—their gunners—into space. Five are still intact.