Killing Titan Read online

  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.

  “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.

  We climb in. Ishida takes the pod closest to mine. Jacobi teams up beside Ulyanova. The efreitor seems happy to be working alone.

  Bueller stands by the root hub.

  I’ve fitted my nearly naked body into the bucket seat and watch the laces strap me in. A half helmet swings up from the rear of the pod and cradles the back of my skull. Something buzzes along my spine. Guidance? Nerve induction? I look over at Ishida, but can’t see much—the brightness of the pod’s surface obscures her details.

  The pods extend and we are now surrounded by stars, with Lady of Yue below. Box is trailing behind the arc light, but still closing the distance.

  “We caught them by surprise when we left NEO. Box has been in a hurry ever since,” Bueller says through comm. “She’s larger and faster, but rising upsun, chasing us, she still hasn’t had time to shed all her sins.”

  How does Bueller know that?

  And what the hell does it mean?

  “We still have the advantage,” Bueller says, but her voice drops a note.

  “Box already found you once and clobbered you,” Jacobi says. She sounds right next to me.

  “We need five minutes!” Bueller says. “Those sparkles running to the corners of the cube are drive tension distributors. Cut them with your bolts or disruptors and you’ll slow her down, and that’ll give us just what we need… five minutes, maybe, but not a second more.”

  I fit my hands into the trigger gloves. I’m in charge of a bolt weapon. I know how they work, in smaller form, on a planet’s surface—but this seems natural enough. My fingers feel the guidance and trigger post and I test it, also natural enough. Another buzz along my spine, this time reaching out to my fingers. The pod swings on its pedestal, and I see, along the gleaming inner surface, a set of reticules and crosshairs move into place. They converge on a corner of Box, then outline several of the tension sparkles, whatever the hell those are.

  What if I still have no fucking idea what I’m doing?

  Ishida speaks in my left ear. “Three of us will carve out the far corner, with its interior exposed—see those lines?”

  “I see the far corner.”

  “You will trim the near corner.”

  “Harder to see those lines,” I tell her. “Have you done this before?”

  “Never in space,” Ishida says. “Follow instinct. Hit what you can, but make it count.”

  “If the pyramids ride any higher, if they extend any farther, you can’t help but see the tension lines,” Bueller says over comm.

  “Yeah,” I say, starting to feel really ill. Something is dragging us along through the stars like a cat drags a rat. I assume it’s our own ship. We still haven’t finished getting straight with Jesus, right? Worse, we’re newbies manning weapons that are totally vulnerable to being blown wide open, like glass bottles in a shooting gallery.

  Then Ishida and Jacobi loose their bolts. I follow those pulsing white dots, watch them carve the far pyramid’s tension lines, watch that sharp black corner of the cube shiver and twist on its extended post.…

  And then I focus on the lines just visible below my own assigned pyramid, linking it with the main mass of Box.

  The reticules align.

  Box sends out its own bolts, a firefly mass curving around from the far side, presumably the business end, and traveling twice as fast out to our ship, where they nick another smoking groove in a skirt, then climb up to sizzle one of the pods—

  The lone efreitor is surrounded by a ball of plasma. His pod ruptures and bits of him fly out into the darkness, streaming behind like a tiny comet’s tail. We keep firing, Bueller keeps shouting in our ears. We keep cutting spiderweb tension lines.

  Then all at once, Lady of Yue really cuts loose, and in our present state, the stars take a horrible spin—and we are no longer effective as gunners or as human beings. I spatter the inside of the pod with the contents of my mostly empty stomach—mixed with blood. My eyes feel as if they’re going to fall out on my cheeks.

  But Ishida and Jacobi exchange calm comments, battle discussion—in Japanese. Ulyanova chimes in in Russian. Somehow the tone alone helps me keep it together—that, and another buzz along my spine. We’ve had a definite effect. The corner pyramids are retracting and Box seems to be wobbling. Maybe even getting smaller.

  I think Box is falling back—miracle.

  The pods retract. Bueller opens them and extracts us one by one, ignoring the smoking ruin of the efreitor’s pod—gathering us up in her arms, wiping us down with her sleeves, then grabbing our damp collars and tugging and shoving us inboard using feet, hands, legs, arms, herding us. Her own face is streaked with tears and spattered with vomit. Maybe ours, maybe hers.

  “Did it work?” Jacobi asks, slurring her words.

  “Don’t ask,” Bueller says. “Maybe.” She huffs and tugs. Ishida gives me a thumbs-up. I have no idea what the hell just happened, or what we did—whether it was real or just a nightmare. But through the structure, looking out to where Mars had once been, and Box had hovered, I see nothing—

  Just a gray smear of stars.

  “Move it!” Bueller shouts. “We got four minutes to get you packed away.”

  “We’re fucking puppets,” Jacobi says. “We don’t understand any of this!”

  Borden helps Bueller marshal us toward the centerline. Jacobi is still fomenting. “The Gurus are so goddamned frightened they’re sending us out here and just pulling strings. How the fuck did that ever happen? Does anybody know what’s going on?”

  “Wait until you see Titan,” Bueller says grimly.

  Something comes back to me, something Kumar said. That’s what the Gurus like. They like it interesting.

  Makes me want to puke all over again.

  THE BIG VAMOOSE

  More rails slide from above. Bueller is a dozen meters ahead. She tells us to grab and go. The rails take us aft through the soda straws and blue spheres—Bueller’s so-called soccer balls. They still look like grapes to me. Borden is next handle over. Jacobi and Ishida are to my left. All gawk in wonder or worry. As we’re transported aft, we pass the first few triplets of blue spheres. They’re dark, with stripes faintly barber-poling across their surfaces—out of order?

  Finally we arrive at spheres that glisten pure blue, no stripes. Bueller swims backward, assessing our nearly naked forms with a practiced eye. She tells us to pay attention and assigns each a number. “Name and rank don’t mean shit. Size, mass, composition are important. We’re balancing our balls.” Not even a grin.

  Numbers light up on the corresponding spheres, and our rods and hand
les pull us up next to our assignments, so awesomely efficient it threatens to bring tears to my eyes. I wonder if this is how the secretary’s heroic son got out to Titan a few years ago. Conveyed in brilliant style, using such sophisticated might and know-how—only to get himself killed. Maybe eaten by one of those insects in the Spook’s tail, or something weirder down on Titan.

  Crew Chief quickly opens a plastic box and removes stacks of gray circles, like doilies or lace yarmulkes, each sealed in gel in an envelope of transparent plastic. “Here’s the good stuff,” Bueller says. “I guarantee pleasant dreams.”

  The envelopes gleam and squish as she passes them out, one apiece.

  “Part one of your brain boost, weeks of training—makes you all good citizens. Don’t mess with these beauties. Follow instructions to the letter or you’ll be shit down the chute, useless to me or anyone else.”

  Jacobi and Ishida examine their packages with curled lips. “Could have used one of these earlier, right?” Jacobi asks me.

  Borden and Joe and Tak and the Russians hold theirs gingerly.

  Two minutes left.

  “They’re called caps,” Bueller says. “Used to be an acronym, I forget for what.”

  “Cranial Amplified Programming,” Borden says.

  “Yes, ma’am. Now you know why I forgot. You don’t need to shave your heads, just pull the caps out of their wrappers, place them over the center of your crown, and they’ll settle in and glue down. Leave them there until they fall off. They don’t put anything inside your skull but training and info, and that’ll take twelve hours to set up and become useful.”

  “Not for these two,” Borden says, pointing to me and DJ. “We need their heads clear.” She takes Bueller aside and they have words. The commander has doubts DJ and I are up for this much stimulation. I hear something about her not knowing all that they put me through back at Madigan. Wouldn’t want to trigger instaurations. Maybe she said installations. Either way, what the hell are they?