Killing Titan Read online

  More visuals. On our way down, and maybe even on our way back up—if we ever get that far—we’ll become ramjets, packing in nitrogen to increase pressure in the fuel mix. The combustibles either freeze or condense on the chamber walls, and the precious slush is skimmed by the outer whisks of the turbines toward the combustion chamber, where the engines inject oxygen and light the mix. Whoosh. I thought the idea of using oxygen in a Zippo to light your cigarette was funny.

  It’s how we get down there.

  Once down, we’re destined to crawl, dig, excavate… and walk. Okay, that’s good, I get that. Walking is good. Big, bulky diving suits, thick legs, sometimes with tractor treads for feet, sometimes with huge grippy boots…

  And the goddamnedest, most primordial-looking machines we’ve yet seen. As big as destroyers, bronze and silver, with a dozen segments and lateral tree lines of ornately fringed legs for carving and crawling and digging—for burrowing deep through ice and rock into the interior oceans of Titan, and for tangling with, and surviving, other monsters. These machines come with their own problems and weaknesses, natcherly, and no certainty there’ll be enough material down there to allow them to grow to full size or reach full armament. In which case, we might have to scavenge the surface of Titan and hunt for machine corpses before we can dive deep. More delays before we fight. But also, delays before we die.

  If we fight at all. If there are Antags down there, or our own people hot on our trail. My head hurts. At this stage I seem to be mostly asleep. I certainly can’t move, which is fine because I’m locked into my couch. A coolness runs all up and down my memories. The cap is pulling away the pain, flooding me with more words, more impressions curious and harsh, informative and discouraging, all necessary to my in-depth training. Not thinking, really, and not worrying, just taking it all in like a sponge—not so bad. Even the bad news feels pretty good. Got a thing you want to think about? Hey, here’s something better. The concepts build in reverse like bricks falling out of a tornado to make a building. Boy do I prefer listening to angels in our helms. We can be bitch-friendly with our angels. We can complain about them, give them rude names, hijack their stupid certainties to help cement squad morale. Not this. We are becoming the caps.

  My muscles twitch. My fingers curl as if wrapping around controls. The last of my diminishing flare of curiosity illuminates a distant question: Where do these caps get their reflex knowledge, the muscle training and innate instincts? Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe cap knowledge is distilled from dead Skyrines.

  The cap floods my curiosity and drowns it with more concepts, pictures, diagrams, like a magician forcing cards. Coyle remains silent. Bug remains silent. Maybe they’re learning right alongside the little homunculus that is me, the tightly curled-up kid trying to pretend he’s watching cartoons before going off to a school he hates, a Central Valley concrete blockhouse filled with kids too crazy to ever get into the Skyrines. It was there I learned that civilian kids are the worst. To Army brats. Maybe they thought I was the creepiest kid in the school. Maybe their moms told them about my mom, or my dads. My real father was stationed at Fort Ord for a year but we didn’t live on base. Until they divorced, my mom spent her mornings in a cannabis haze, but she tried to be good to me. She kept herself just a little whacked-out from the hour I left for school until 6:30 p.m., when she could start drinking—but she really wanted us to live a normal life.

  Not so easy.

  Before I met Joe, I tended to jump without looking, because nothing could be worse than staying right where I was. I wasn’t cruel or sadistic like some of the truly fucked-up kids I knew—the ones who strung mice on nylon lines and watched them dangle and squirm. Jesus, not like those little monsters.

  Okay. I’m going away now.

  Or not.

  Something is trying very hard to put my conscious mind up out of the way, on a shelf, to get on with cap and reflex learning. I don’t resist. It’s all cool. I’ll have time to examine personal questions, try to resolve old philosophical issues, like, Why become a Skyrine? Why volunteer to fight? In part, to seek adventure. But also because war for all the shit is neater and cleaner and sweeter than civilian life.

  All right, that’s a lie. That’s delusional. Help me out, Bug! What was life like in the really olden times? Were there cool bugs and cruel bugs, good and evil bugs, dumb and smart bugs, bugs pious and bugs blasphemous? Were you all smart and nobody dumb? Why can’t I hook into those truths, Bug? I’m thinking you’re—

  Shut the fuck up.

  Ah, at last! Coyle steps back in. She seems to take me down from the shelf and shake me like an old T-shirt.

  Listen. This is important shit. We’re going to where we might actually learn something.

  “Yeah?” I mutter. “Like what?”

  Like where I am.

  If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, right? Here are the eternals: The shit remains the shit, the fight is always confused and messed up, and in the end—

  Goddamn, Venn, hang on. Something really weird is coming. I think you’re in for it.

  Coyle was worried about something. I’ve been waiting for whatever that might be, but I’m still surprised when it arrives. My brain locks up. Thinking stops. Topped out. Too damned full. At the same moment, maybe, comes a sharp jerk. I feel our axis of motion changing. I confuse that with cap visuals of seeds sprouting, growing, like carnival balloons plumping out, becoming monstrous, making crew and warrior spaces, getting ready to take us in. Then that all mixes with motion and coolness and calmness.

  Synesthesia, big word. Mom liked to read dictionaries. She and my dad and several stepdads—she chose them soon after he left, one after another, very much alike—would read pages to each other from an old paper dictionary or a volume from the Encyclopedia Americana, after dinner, in bed, and smoke Old Tobey, as she called it, and laugh at the big words.

  I think I’m in my bedroom, nine, ten, eleven years old, trying to sleep but listening to their muffled voices telling me all about Titan’s atmospheric pressure and natural caches of raw material and how to find them, how to get your machine to self-repair if damaged—take a dip in a methane lake or where volcanic water streams down through carved-out, wax-lined valleys, down to where the plastic trees pop and—

  Mom says, on the other side of my bedroom wall, beyond the stick-and-wallboard and chalky Army paint job, “Your machine will know you because of your touch. Touch ID is key to security and operational efficiency.”

  Mom? Is that really you?

  Pulls me up short for a moment, along with another hard jerk, bump, double bump, and a

  Roar.

  Now my eyes are open. I peer through a port. Blackness outside turns orange, brown, then muddy yellow. We’re getting closer and closer to the answers. But first we’re going to have to dive or dig. Bugs dig up, we’ll dig down. Maybe we’ll meet halfway. But the bugs have been dead for billions of years, right? Deader than Captain Coyle.

  Man, I really need to wake up.

  And this time, unfortunately, I do.

  INSTAURATION ONE: MADIGAN MADRIGAL REDUX

  I’m wrapped in sheets, twisted into a cocoon soaked with sweat. I open my eyes and see a gray ceiling, roll against the tug of the sheets, and see a wide sliding door and beyond that a familiar room. Too familiar.

  I unwind from the sheets and stand by the side of the bed. I feel myself, soft ribs beneath gray underwear, thigh muscles, sinews between my legs, balls okay, cock okay.…

  Hair on my arms and legs, around my junk, hair on my chest, fuzz on my head. To my right is the narrow door to the bathroom, where the light above the shatterproof mirror has been left on—as always.

  I blink away a smear of sleep.

  The battery-powered electric razor rests precariously on the counter beside the sink. I leave it there, about to fall off every time I use it, as a kind of protest. Maybe I can bankrupt them with busted razors. No outlets anywhere, in case I want to try to electrocu
te myself. I wouldn’t, but they’ve been careful not to provide temptations or opportunities.

  I bend down and feel under the foam mattress. The sap is still there. I haven’t taken it out, haven’t yet been rescued by…

  Who?

  I lean my head on the bed. The rumpled sheets and blankets look like a topo map of mountains. All rearranged, tangled, no good now.

  Shit. Of course none of it was real. I had no idea how weird they could get. How far back does it go? How much do I remember about Mars? I remember meeting Teal, being rescued by her in her buggy. I remember the Voors. I remember Captain Coyle and her Special Ops team. Not all a dream. But everything since being locked in at Madigan is now in question. The whirly-eyed inquisitor finally got to me, finally pushed me into the madhouse. I can almost remember his name… which of course I learned in the dream.

  Kafka?

  Kmart?

  DAYS PASS. NOBODY visits. Food arrives as usual, but tastes bland, pasty. I read, but the paperbacks don’t mean much. I can’t remember the last page. I can’t even remember the cover of the book, unless I turn it over and stare at it, and then, it doesn’t seem to matter. Elmore Leonard? Louis L’Amour? Daniel Defoe?

  The bell rings at the window. Takes me forever to get out of the chair and answer. I’m toasted. They’ve finally broken me. Brilliant piece of work. Just lead me out to the end of my rope—somewhere out near Saturn—and jerk me back and that fucking does it. I’m one sad little white lab rat. See my twitchy nose, my beady pink eyes?

  The bell rings again. I pack some energy down into my legs and stand to get to the window. The face behind the glass is not the whirly-eyed inquisitor, it’s the other guy. The one who claims he’s Wait Staff. (But didn’t the inquisitor claim that, too? What was his fucking name again, Kafka or Kaffeine? Total toast!)

  The face asks, “How are you feeling today, Master Sergeant Venn?”

  “Not so good, Doc.” I stick my tongue out and say ahhh. He smiles. This guy looks like a mannequin, the way he dresses, so fashionably lost and feckless, someone’s idea of a middle-aged nerd.

  “Have you been sleeping well enough?”

  “Too well, Doc. Take me out of the oven, please? I’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Really.”

  “We don’t expect that, Master Sergeant. We are most concerned about your welfare.”

  “Then let me go. Let me walk on the beach. You can surround me with MPs, I don’t care. I just want to feel sand between my toes and smell the salt water. See the sunset. I need to know I’m back on Earth for real, not somewheres…”

  My voice breaks. I can’t finish.

  “I am most sorry, Master Sergeant. Perhaps soon. But first, I have to report that we have conducted an investigation into your longtime friend, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Sanchez.”

  “What about him?”

  “It seems he is not all he appears to be. Certainly not all he told you he was. Why do you trust him, Master Sergeant?”

  “Fuck you!” I try to shout, but it’s a raspy croak. I step away from the window and turn my back. Why so angry?

  “He was ever your instigator, was he not?” I hear behind me. “He was the one always leading you into trouble.”

  I try to go to the bedroom and close the door, but the door won’t close. I want to go into the bathroom but my legs won’t carry me there. I stand by the bed and think about pulling out the sap and just whaling away at my head.

  The voice goes on, calm but concerned. “He encouraged you to enlist in the Marines, and then to join the Skyrines. He accompanied you through basic and vacuum school and much of special training thereafter. He was with you at Hawthorne and Mauna Kea, but he was not with you at—”

  “Just shut up,” I say.

  “While you were training with your drop squad and various chiefs at Socotra. He rejoined you before your first drop on Mars. Did he seem different to you at that time?”

  He didn’t. Maybe he did. I don’t remember.

  “Did he tell you what he had been doing while he was away?”

  He did. He didn’t.

  “Thereafter, did he not always seem to have special knowledge about the unpleasant situations you were subjected to during your actions? And was he not always there before you, able to locate you and extract you, even during the most extreme circumstances?”

  I return to the living room to face the guy in the window. Is he the same guy in the window I remember from the last time? Doesn’t matter. “I know about you,” I say. “You’re not Wait Staff. Your name doesn’t show up on the lists.”

  He ignores that. “Joe Sanchez is a very special individual, is he not?”

  “He’s my bud,” I say.

  “Then why has he betrayed you so many times?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Suddenly I’m calm and collected and cool. I’m as frosty as a fudge bar in Fargo in February. Vee-Def said that once.

  “Are you really anything without Joseph Sanchez? Are you even a complete human being, Master Sergeant Venn?”

  “What’s your point, you horse-fucking little dweeb?”

  The guy smiles not in cruelty or triumph but in pity. Like he knows he’s about to change my life and not for the better and he almost regrets it.

  “Joe Sanchez has been stringing you along since before you were arrested, Master Sergeant. He has used you to advantage, and will use you again.”

  “How?” I shout. “I’m stuck here! Bring him to me! Put us together in a room with you and some Louisville Sluggers, I’ll knock the Guru shit out of you—”

  The guy behind the glass takes a peculiar, isomorphic side glance that smacks of a special effect gone wrong.

  “That’s it!” I say in triumph. “That’s what Kafka said to me. He said you couldn’t be Wait Staff. You have to be a Guru!”

  “I am a Guru,” the guy says, and then, briefly, I see him without the overlay. He looks like he could be a fucking Guru, but I’ve never seen one, so how can I be sure? He’s not exactly a mammal, he’s certainly not a bug, and he’s definitely not an Antag. Also, he’s not ugly. He looks efficient and smaller than I would have thought. The figure behind the glass keeps talking. Where’s his mouth? Somewhere above the bump that might be a jaw, below the wide ridge that holds a shiny gray bar that might be his eyes. Gort eyes. RoboCop eyes. Shit. I still don’t see his mouth. Just little motions above the jaw. Maybe he’s a straw-sucker.

  “You should ask Joseph Sanchez the following questions,” he says.

  For a while after that, I don’t hear anything. I stand there trying to focus on the window, on the deepening darkness beyond the glass.

  Sound returns.

  “Ask Joseph Sanchez—”

  “Yeah, ask him what, Goddammit?”

  “Ask him about Corporal Grover Sudbury. Ask where he went with the corporal after your comrades exacted their punishment, and what they both did there.”

  “Sudbury vanished,” I say.

  “Everyone has their role, Master Sergeant,” the voice says behind the window. “The relationship between Sudbury and Joseph Sanchez is popular, Master Sergeant. Far too popular to waste.”

  GOOD MORNING, MOON

  Someone taps my helm with a padded metal finger. “Venn. Wake up.” It’s Ishida. She’s persistent. I wake up—again. She’s taken the seat next to mine. Borden is across the aisle talking earnestly to Kumar and Mushran. The glider vibrates, roars—again with that huge, MGM lion’s roar—and we roll clockwise, then counterclockwise. The nose lifts, the tail vibrates, something big groans, and the whole airframe shudders.

  “Rough ride,” Ishida says with half a frown.

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” I insist, but my words are mushy.

  I look forward and see Ishikawa, Jacobi—Joe. Beyond them, Litvinov and the backs of the Russians. Their helms are distinctive. When did we put on our skintights? I lift my hand, check the seal with the glove. Same ones made for Mars, but newer—cleaned and pres
sed. I do not remember any of that. Are we off Lady of Yue?

  Apparently. Yeah. We’re on the glider, aren’t we.

  I clench the couch arms. Coming awake or out of my trance or whatever, to this, does not feel good. I’m clearly a danger to everybody, blacking out like that.

  “Did we all make it?” I ask.

  “We’re not down yet,” Ishida says. “Look.” She motions for me to close my plate. I do, and blink down a display. The glider feeds our angels a decent external 270, plus data in sidebars and two ratcheting crawls. I turn my head and the external goes with me. The glider is surrounded by swift brownish haze—methane clouds. A film keeps trying to stick to one or more of the cameras but gets swiped every few seconds. We’re sloping into a valley of ten thousand smokes, but it’s not fire that makes the smoke—it’s freezing methane and a lot of other stuff, all described on the lower crawl. The turbines must be sucking in fine water-sand and that explains the surging and roaring. But we haven’t crashed. We’re still descending.

  Everything gets brighter. The haze begins to clear and we see lower decks of brown and yellow clouds, a small sun cutting through a serrated break—the most surreal and beautiful sunrise I’ve seen. A flat deck of cirruslike clouds above the glider burns golden yellow.

  We’re down to five klicks from the rugged surface. Rising gray plumes of sandy water ice spew from black, shiny cracks that have to be dozens of meters wide and many hundreds of meters long. Below those cracks… down through them… what? Inner oceans? Deep in the cracks something green or silver-gray churns and bubbles. Ice lava, the crawl says. Ammoniated, highly saline water that just won’t freeze solid and shoves up in a methane-steaming, ammonia-vapor slurry.

  Planes, trains, and automobiles all the way. That’s my life. But now we’ve gone as far as we’re going to go, end of the line, right? Journeys end in warriors meeting. Which warriors?