Killing Titan Read online

  Are Antags still down there?

  Any of us left?

  I’m working to ignore the blackout and what I experienced. Going back to Madigan. Fuck that shit. I should have been section 8’ed as soon as I got back to Earth.

  Time-release terror.

  “Huh?” I flip open my plate and look around. Nobody’s spoken in the noisy cabin. It’s Coyle. She gets me every time she pops in like that. She’s clear, crisp, like inside my suit with me. Almost solid. Ishida has become engrossed in her helm display and pays me no attention. DJ, across the aisle, has kept his plate open and is studiously peering at nothing. He’s out of it, too. We’re both mainlining a strong signal.

  Doesn’t explain the—

  Borden called them instaurations. They must be time-release psych capsules implanted back at Madigan to knock you down in case you get out of their control. I heard of that sort of stuff during Special Ops training. How to control a team that’s gone rogue—implanted suggestion. Drives rogue agents to question everything. Commit suicide. Ups the ante if you disobey orders or defect.

  “You think that’s it?” I have to work hard to think my words back at Coyle rather than say them aloud.

  Maybe. I’m not you, I don’t feel all of you.

  “You sound stronger here. Are you stronger?” I lean my head back in an agony of conflict. Trust isn’t part of my toolkit now, because everything’s up for grabs.

  Shut up and just keep the objective in view. There’s something down below that shitty layer of gunk that’s brought us this far.

  “How do you know any of this?”

  Because I’m part of it. I don’t like it, but I am. We’re going to where it’s all coming together—where everything is held tight. So far, I’m not fixed into that memory. Until that finishes, I’m still flexible. I can make decisions and not just answer questions. But that’s going to end soon. I don’t like what might be replacing me. Doesn’t feel right, but I can’t see it clearly. Big Kahuna? Another bug? I don’t like any of this.

  Sounds like Coyle is dropping back into babble. I’m caught up in my own problems. I have a choice. Either I give in and let the instauration, the Madigan poison, spread, or I pretend it never happened, don’t tell anybody—don’t look Kumar or Joe in the eyes for the next few hours. Keep trying to stay part of this team, which, God help me, I’m actually thinking of with that weird combat affection called unit cohesion, spirit of the corps. Jacobi’s juju is working on me as well as the sisters and the Russians.

  I’m full of spirit, all right. Spirits, more like it. Haunted head, indeed. This is what, number four? I can’t juggle that many balls.

  I concentrate on the view. We’re flying between low hills, turbines roaring on both sides, glider rocking like a carnival ride, then swooping up and down. I drop my eyes below the rim of the helm and the image from the outer sensors follows. Below—through rising silvery mist, swirling and blowing away at unseen nitrogen winds—

  The debris of battle. My God, so much broken, blown-up shit!

  I hear the occasional gasp or oath from the others, buried in the continuous roar. Ishida beside me is speaking Japanese, probably a prayer. Her sweet voice is musical counterpoint to what I’m seeing, what we’re all seeing.

  In jumbled mounds every few hundred meters across a flat brown prairie lie what look like thousands of stomped-down, bronze-colored centipedes, but huge—hundreds of meters long. Even crushed, they appear thick and strong, robust around the head and long in the middle. They’re too damned big—big as ocean liners and cracked open, smashed, their lumpy, glistening interiors open to the corrosive mist. Around and inside them, nothing moves. They’re squashed, they’re dead. We’re flying into a landscape littered with dead monsters. Some of them are ours. Some are not. The biggest of the big, the most powerful, now just wreckage on the Wax.

  “Four minutes to station,” Borden says over glider comm. “There’s not going to be an accordion. Have to move fast. We’ll find heavy combat gear on the other side, but for this transit, these suits will have to do, and that means we’ve got all of five minutes to get inside and get cleaned off.”

  I pull open my plate. Joe hunkers, waiting. I watch him suspiciously. Does he know shit I should know, should have been told a long time ago? Why would I even care what happened to Corporal Grover Sudbury? He was a rapist, a scumsucking shithead. I don’t want to think about him, and maybe that’s the point. I’m out of Guru control. They have me rubber-band screwed to a fine knot, about to snap, primed to step out into the poisonous cold and open my plate. Put an end to the guilt, the fighting—the confusion.

  DJ leans back and reaches through the seats to tap my shoulder. “Stick close,” he says. “It’s going to get weirder, but I’ll be there with you.” He looks serious. DJ rarely manages to look completely serious.

  “Slim comfort, DJ,” I say.

  “It’s bad, sir. You hear what I hear? Captain Coyle has been here. She says to tuck prunes and hang on to your fudge.”

  Behind us, listening, Ishida splutters a giggle and reaches a gloved hand to cover her mouth like a Japanese schoolgirl. Damn, that touches me. Somewhere inside, our Winter Soldier remembers being shy. If she can keep that core alive after all that’s happened to her, I can sure as shit maintain. I notice she’s found a pen and scrawled something on her skintight. I saw it on her previous skintight but didn’t pay attention. She’s written “Senketsu” above where her blaze might go. I don’t know what that means. On her own suit, Ishikawa has written “Junketsu.” I’m about to ask, but Borden tells us to seal and check suck.

  Alarms in the cabin.

  Glider hard-bumps and slows to an abrupt, lurching halt.

  TITAN F.O.B.

  The installation is a gray, snow-spattered hockey puck about fifty meters high and maybe twenty times that across. We did not get a good look before the glider nuzzled up to one side.

  We unstrap and bunch in the narrow aisle. Borden pushes up mid-aisle and props her hands against the bulkhead. “Half-charge weapons. We’ll move out in squad order, three teams,” she says. “Jacobi’s team first, Litvinov and Russians next, Sanchez and Johnson, Fujimori and Venn, take the rear.” She gives me a stern look. Joe moves up beside me. Tak pushes through the aisle to stand beside DJ. DJ doesn’t relish being POG any more than I do. “Two on point for each team,” Borden continues. “All but points keep weapons belted. Damage to the station must be avoided at all cost.”

  The lock passes us outside a squad at a time. We don’t wait for the others. It’s every one of us across the crusty Wax and gritty ice-sand to a big black canopy that offers some protection against the weather, like a tent flap.

  In the ten meters between the glider lock and the station, our arms and legs become coated with a fine, spreading layer of liquid methane that instantly starts to steam. We’re warm enough to boil methane. That means our suits are losing heat fast. Sandy ice-grit lands as well and turns to mixed slush that curtains off and refreezes, weighing us down like hanging chains. That distracts us momentarily from the sensation that we’re being squeezed by a big, cold hand. Titan’s atmosphere is almost half-again denser than Earth’s, and our skintights are designed to hold suck, not keep shit out.

  Borden tries to alert the station that we need the outer lock opened. I see her lips move behind her bedewed faceplate. No response. Either nobody is there, or comm is fucked. She makes hand gestures and somehow communicates to us that there’s a way in—maybe she knows the code.

  My world-line is just a vector arrowing through a rugged trail of bad places relieved only by weird sanctuaries where you have to know the secret word or carry a fucking master coin. And it’s not just me. That’s human space in a nutshell. That’s all we’ve conquered in the vac—stretched-out orbital threads between little BBs on which we depend for our lives. Most of the universe hates us so intensely it spreads itself so vast we can’t even think of going there. Down where I am, it’s cycles of hell spiraling in ever-shri
nking circles. Inside, outside. Vac or poison outside, me inside. Tubes and coffins, more tubes, more coffins. Eternal returns of day and night.

  Is it day or night? Day, I think. We landed at sunrise. The glider could have slid around to the other terminator, but Titan’s pretty big—that would have taken a couple of hours.

  Borden finds a big checkerboard. “Venn, get up here.”

  I join her and Joe and Litvinov.

  “Make yourself useful. Coyle should know the sequence.”

  “She’s not very reliable,” I say, but then I reach up and slap my gloved hand on the squares in a staccato sequence. What are our chances? Good, it appears.

  The big outer hatch yawns wide in the great curved side of the hockey puck, really big—way over our heads. Dreamy blue light beyond. Looks like a cheap nightclub, but it’s easily large enough to hold us all. I’m as surprised as anybody. DJ pats my shoulder, but this still isn’t enough to make our commander happy.

  We gather within the hatch. Comm is dead, probably screwed by the clouds of ice dust and sand, but the cold nitrogen is dense enough, and sheltered from precip and wind we can hear each other pretty well.

  “Glider is about to unload seed cargo!” Borden shouts. “The seeds will activate outside the main hatch. We’ll want to keep well out of their way. Early on, they don’t recognize people.”

  “Don’t get between product and material!” DJ calls out in Bueller’s Texas accent.

  The last swirls of ice dust and vapor make it hard to see even inside. The bluish light cuts through some of the haze, but it’s still not bright. We trudge across the hangar with a weird, high-stepping gait, plucking the soles of our steaming boots from dark muck and slick crap. Water has laid down a rugged gray sheet spackled with sticky-looking black gobs. Who gets hangar patrol and cleans up? Maybe nobody’s left alive in the station. That would be a kindness—dying rather than being stuck here.

  My nose twitches. Something stinks in my skintight. Something acrid. Maybe I’m imagining it. Sweat is kind of acrid, plus the stinks we all make—fear, hormones, pheromones, even hydrogen sulfide and methane. But this smells like ammonia. I do not want to smell bitter almonds next. That would be it for all of us.

  “Move it!” other voices shout. My nose was right. Our suits aren’t holding suck in the cold. The seals are hardening, cracking, corroding. Real incentive to get deeper into the station.

  Since nothing welcomes us, Borden walks over to the far wall and the outline of a smaller door. She lines me up and I slap at another checkerboard while the others bunch up like schoolkids after recess, stamping our boots, feeling deep cold seize wrists and ankles—suit heaters can’t begin to keep up—and why not? How fucked was the planning? Why did we have only Mars-rated skintights? We’re off the grid.

  The smaller door opens. Sun-yellow warmth blasts the ice dust to slush and rain and we all crowd into the brightness, dripping and soaking and no doubt stinking of everything rich and strange.

  I look back over the jostling, steaming crowd, through the door into the hangar behind us, and see big, dark silhouettes of things rolling in. Offloaded seeds, bronze or black and shiny, making deep rumbles. They’re growing fucking hair! Jesus, they’re actually sprouting thick slick fibers that writhe like Medusa’s snakes. If they follow us inside, we’ll become part of their balanced breakfast.

  The smaller door slams down.

  I hold my breath until I see the seeds are not joining us. For a moment, we stand without words, silent and stinking, until the ceiling sprouts spray heads and we’re sluiced three times, three complete spray-downs, so forceful we’re shoved against each other like pins in a bowling alley.

  When we’re clean, the inner station opens another door and allows us to proceed. The next chamber is also yellow. A crudely lettered sign has been slapped onto the door between. It reads, “Don/Doff.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” DJ asks.

  “Put them on, take them off,” Tak says.

  The first thing we do is shuck our skintights, already frayed and blistering, and on Borden’s orders, toss them into a disposal bin along with helms, angels, everything. Out with the old. Almost naked. There are thirty of us in the station. We haven’t seen anyone else. Are we alone? Nervous, anxious, pacing, we mill and slap shoulders and ribs to stay warm. Despite everything, I feel a sudden need to get my hands on those big weapons. I want to get to work—need to get to work! Because of Bueller’s cap I know nice things, encouraging things about centipedes and excavators and nymphs and crushers and stampers, about deep scrawlers and excalators. I know how to work them. I can see them! I can almost reach out and touch them.

  Borden pulls us up short. “First up is the latest fashion,” she says. Her voice is high, reedy. She’s pepped on relief and exhaustion and maybe on the last of the cap training. “Appropriate apparel for the occasion. Without heavy-duty suits, we won’t survive if there’s even a minor breach, and we won’t be able to work outside.” She points down. “Or below.”

  “Found ’em!” Tak shouts. One wall of the chamber is covered by big steel crates labeled “Anti-Corrosion Pressure Skins, Style K(int).” There are ten crates, each claiming to contain twenty suits, but six of the crates are empty. Tak and Ishida and Jacobi open the next two crates. Inside hang thicker, bulkier suits, still wrapped in shiny plastic. Tak tears a hole in one and opens a diagnostic panel on the helm beneath, checks the readout, then moves on to a second and a third and gives a high sign. “These look good,” he says.

  Jacobi flicks at a scrap of silvery fabric attached to the inside of a crate lid. “What’s this?” she asks. It’s a brief message scrawled in Japanese and Russian. “What’s it say?”

  “It says, ‘Don’t wear them,’” Ishida translates.

  Starshina Ulyanova reads the Russian. “Same,” she agrees. “Both in one hand—one people writing.”

  “Yeah,” Ishida says. “Probably Japanese.”

  “What’s the ink?” Jacobi asks.

  “Could be blood,” Tak says. He reaches down and picks at the message with his fingernail. A flake falls away. He looks up at me. We stand back.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with the suits?” Ishikawa asks. “They look new.”

  The air inside the station is clean and breathable but frigid. We’re turning blue. The old skintights—even if we could recover them—would likely be full of holes by now.

  “Check the other crates,” Borden says. A thorough search of the crates reveals no other notes and no other choices. “We need these,” the commander concludes. “Get them on and let’s assemble a search team. We’ll carry sidearms, nothing bigger.”

  We “don” the bulky gray suits. Circlets of heavy plastic and metal wrap arms and legs and thorax. A full suit-up involves letting auto-clasps grab and tighten each band, which takes about ten seconds, keep your fingers out of the way. The helms are bulky, faceplates narrow and thick. But Titan gravity is lighter than on Mars. The suits feel only slightly heavier than our old skintights.

  Mushran adjusts his helm with help from Tak. We swing the plates shut briefly to read what the new angels are saying. Not much. A small blinking display reads, “Adjustment under way. Please be patient.” Sure. Never a choice.

  Taps are in abundance on one side of the chamber. Hundreds of warriors at once could take in gasps and sips and energy before going outside, before riding those big weapons into battle on the Wax. We suckle for a few minutes, looking at each other from the corners of our eyes.

  “About seventy hours’ worth,” Joe tells Borden. He reads the reserve for these essentials—maybe one more dip, then the reserves go empty. Unless we lose a lot of the team. We pluck loose. Time to reconnoiter. The Russians huddle with Litvinov. Jacobi’s team surrounds her. They confer for less than a minute. Litvinov and Jacobi step aside to whisper with each other. Then Jacobi approaches Borden and Kumar.

  “Where’s Mushran?” she asks.

  Kumar shrugs. “Gone ahead, perhaps,�
�� he says.

  “Stupid!” Borden says with considerable heat. She’s sick of Kumar and Mushran, I don’t doubt.

  “I do not disagree,” Kumar says. “He has never listened well, nor followed others willingly.”

  “Fucking honch,” Jacobi says.

  Borden says, “Before we fan out, time for details. They’re not good.” In her most cautious and low-key voice, she tells us, “Lady of Yue’s arrival survey shows that we’re down to just this one station. The others don’t answer and Lady of Yue couldn’t see them from orbit.”

  “No welcome wagon,” Jacobi observes. “Anyone left?”

  “The station’s only signals are automatic, and those sporadic,” Borden says.

  “We’re going swimming, right?” DJ asks. “Into the fissures—the volcanoes?”

  Borden won’t let him get ahead of her. “Our orders are to secure the station and check out the product taking shape, or any other equipment we find, reopen the vent if necessary, then, attempt to access the inner sea.”

  “I’m prime for that!” Ishikawa says, flexing her fingers. Teen eager to take the family car out for a spin.

  Borden is unimpressed. “We don’t have a large enough team to do it all. I’m making the decision that we take control of whatever product has already been shaped and proceed below. There may still be a deep-sea installation under the crust and no more than a few hundred klicks from here. We don’t know what it looks like, what it contains, or what the inhabitants have accomplished. But that’s our destination, unless Lady of Yue says otherwise.”

  “No reports?” Ishida asks. “We don’t know what’s happening down there?”

  “None that reached Division Four,” Kumar says.

  “Secret even from Wait Staff?” Tak asks.

  “Secret from me,” says Kumar. “I do not know about Mushran.”

  Mushran has reappeared without being noticed, a singular talent. He is still adjusting his suit, wincing. All of us are uncomfortable. The Russians are stretching, exchanging unhappy glances. Mushran looks up and around, eyes darting at the activity, like he knows something we don’t but it’s not yet time to share.