Killing Titan Read online

  “You went away,” Jacobi says. “Where to?”

  Mushran nods reasonably. “About a hundred meters up and in, there is a kind of control center, damaged but repaired. There are bodies.”

  The Russians get up. Litvinov shakes his head; there’s really nothing to translate, nothing to explain, that isn’t already obvious. Borden tells Joe to look into Mushran’s claim. We recover our sidearms and charge up the bolt pistols. The guns seem puny. I’m hungry for product—for our bigger, badder weapons and transporters. We head for the next chamber over, following the path Mushran must have taken, and see that it was converted at some point into a makeshift armory. The armory occupies one of four chambers that radiate inward from the lock antechamber. Only damaged and broken sidearms—bolt rifles and pistols—remain. There are also three piles of spent matter cartridges, all depleted. It’s dark and quiet. Station is operating on severely reduced power, just barely enough light to see and getting chillier. Our suits are doing a fine job keeping out the cold, but we’ve left our plates open until we get used to the narrow view. Plus the damned things are starting to pinch. I flex to get the joints to break in faster. The pinchings move around and sharpen.

  “I don’t trust Kumar or Mushran, and I still don’t know what to make of Borden,” Joe says.

  “She seems square to me,” DJ says.

  “She’s befuddled,” Joe says.

  “Aren’t we all,” Tak says.

  Joe scowls. “I’m not convinced she’s up to command, double that with Kumar and Mushran hanging over us.”

  “‘You go to war with the army you have,’” DJ quotes sententiously, “‘not the army you want.’”

  “Don’t fucking jinx us!” Tak warns. He’s serious. DJ knows better.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Anyway,” Joe continues, “Litvinov seems to have a grip. What about Jacobi?”

  I think maybe now I should tell him about the time bomb in my head. How it focuses on him. How that makes him a threat to whoever planted it, and how that makes me wonder what the hell role he played in all of this. But I don’t.

  “Jacobi’s strong,” I say. “Moody, but she’s got her shit together.”

  Tak says to Joe, “You’ve been moody since Kazak died.”

  “Moody?” Joe snorts. “I’m crazier than DJ.”

  “Good to know,” DJ says. “Wouldn’t want to excel at anything in this outfit.”

  “But I’m not going to let the crazy loose until I learn why everything we were told is a lie,” Joe says. “And why that became obvious to Kumar and Mushran only a year and a half ago, about the same time Antagonists started dropping comets on Mars—and here, too, apparently.”

  “Ancient history,” DJ says. “But I don’t hear much from Coyle, and hardly anything from the others—” At this his face goes ashen. “Got to say, they all scare the shit out of me. They’re human, but not, know what I mean?”

  “I fucking do not know what you mean,” Joe says. “Thank God.”

  We pass a bank of cylindrical elevators and equipment lifts filled with debris, pipes, cables. We find the stairs. The steps are bigger than we’re used to, with odd grooves up the middle of each riser.

  “Tail draggers,” Joe says.

  “Antags?” DJ asks.

  “You guys tell me,” Joe says. “This station has been occupied by both sides at one time or another, so Mushran says. Three combat operations to control and secure. We won the last one, supposedly.” He nudges the grooves with his boots. “Antags must have turned glass at some point, right? So you’d channel them, too?”

  DJ and I shake our heads. No Antag ghosts. I don’t know whether that would be an interesting experience or not, but right now, this damned suit is really doing a number on my joints and stomach and I don’t need any further distractions.

  We walk up both sides of the staircase, which curves slowly around a long, inner bulkhead, up about twenty meters—a decent climb. My knees are binding now, and it isn’t the climb. Feels like tacks are being driven into my elbows and ankles.

  A wide, deeply cold hallway leads to a dark circular space. The broad, shadowy floor beyond sinks through several levels to form a kind of arena. Mechanical arms and racks of stacked disks hang motionless from the ceiling.

  “Drones?” Tak asks.

  “Vent probes,” Joe says. “Probably broken, or they wouldn’t still be here.”

  We look as we pass. Not a clue. There’s a lot more debris at the center of the arena, and the steps have been slagged—melted and cracked, the cracks sealed with a lighter gray putty. On the far side, big plates of transparent plastic have been shoved over two wide openings, held in place by foam sealant.

  “These suits fucking hurt,” DJ says, shaking out his arms, then kicking one leg so hard he almost loses his balance. Mine is pinching more now, too. The pinches are even sharper, really painful. I’d like nothing better than to “doff” the fucker and see what’s going on inside. But we’re across the chamber and join Tak to look at what lies beyond those big, jerry-rigged plates. Tak takes point as we kick at the debris, trying to make sense of how much damage and why.

  Joe walks up to the plates. “Jesus, come look,” he says. We gather in front of a mostly transparent panel overlooking a slow-motion, boiling caldron about a klick wide and filled with rising mist and broken machines. “Our vent,” Joe says. “Lots of battle damage. It’s dark down there, in the center, but you can still see.”

  We press close to the plastic. What lies beyond is spectacular and discouraging. The station was constructed around this fissure, this volcanic vent, like a thick wall around a half-frozen lake. Titan’s dark brown night sky casts a faint glow over the complex. Methane snow drifts down through the cold, clear nitrogen, hits the slushy liquid, and instantly puffs away… to rise into the brown sky, refreeze, and drop again. The continuous cycle of snow partly obscures a churning, circulating graveyard of diggers, submarine-like transports, big, broad-shouldered mechanical centipedes—hard to know how much buoyant crap is out there, passing in twisted review before our unhappy eyes.

  “Looks abandoned,” Tak says.

  “That it does.” Joe looks at me. “Any more clues from Captain Coyle?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Bug?”

  I make an effort to raise Bug. I almost get something—a warning? A memory? A brief suspicion of knowledge, quickly extinguished. “Sorry,” I say.

  “Great.” Joe turns and swings out his glove. “Over there. Mushran was right.” There are bodies on the opposite end of the viewing gallery. I count four.

  We stand over them.

  “Human,” DJ says. “Not combat casualties.”

  “What, then?” Tak asks. He winces as he kneels. “Group suicide?”

  The four lie half-in, half-out of pressure suits like ours, spaced apart from each other as if caught up in their own private agonies—naked jumbles of contorted, mummified limbs. Two men, two women. The men hold knives in skeletal hands. The women seem to be trying to extricate their legs from the bottom halves of their suits. Dried blood covers the floor. Almost no smell.

  DJ says, “‘Don’t wear them,’ right? Written in blood?”

  Joe whistles between his teeth. “Keep tight,” he says. “Don’t guess. Know.”

  “Yeah,” DJ says.

  “Ow,” Tak says, then grabs his stomach. Joe is next. The sharp pain for me is in my right calf, like a dagger shoving through.

  “That’s it,” I say. “The suits are bad.”

  We try to help each other out of the suits. Tak is difficult. It’s like he’s glued in. When we remove his neck plate and helm, the neck support pad takes an upper layer of skin, leaving raw, oozing pink. He’s in agony but doesn’t say a word. We pick the knives off the floor and start hacking and carving at the tough material, each working on the other, pulling aside automatic clasps, lifting and removing rounded plates. Joe raises up his own neck piece. Little bloody wires push inside, sti
ll wriggling toward each other—still trying to grow together.

  “What the hell!” Joe says in a mildly peeved tone. He grabs a wire and pulls. Beads of blood follow.

  The gloves are the hardest. Wires have worked around all my fingers, and one is still plunging through my thumb. I take it at the root, in the wrist of the glove, and pluck it out with a sick moan. Joe is making the same noise as he cuts and then tugs wires from his thigh, his hip, his arms.

  Tak is free first and stands breathing hard before the transparent plates. He’s managed to skip and roll his way into the middle of the bodies. One of the females congratulates us with a wrinkled grimace, as if still watching through her dark, shrunken eyes.

  We stand naked again in the cold, drops of blood falling in quick-freezing spatters. The wounds are painful, intimately horrible, but I don’t think any one of us is going to die. Barely in time.

  “What now?” DJ asks.

  “Tell the others,” Joe says to Tak.

  “Right.” And Tak is off at a run.

  “We’re staying?” DJ asks.

  “We’re looking for more suits and someplace to get warm,” Joe says. “We can’t do anything back there. Why didn’t Mushran say something?”

  “Because he has a death wish,” I say.

  “Fucking A,” DJ says.

  A quick, hopping survey of the arena chamber overlooking the fissure tells us nothing, gives no clues as to where other equipment might be. Our feet turn blue and go numb.

  Tak returns with Borden, Litvinov, and Jacobi. Ishikawa trails. All but Tak still wear the suits. Borden looks at us with mixed pity and sympathy. “We’re going to need to find you more suits,” she says in a small, not-quite-resigned-to-this voice.

  “Fuck that!” Joe shouts. His words echo. He points to the bodies, the pools of blood—the red drips from his own flesh. “Mushran saw this, he knows about these fuckers—he must know!”

  “I’m sure he did,” Borden says. “When he saw Tak, he looked shocked—then angry. He asked him what the hell he had done.”

  Litvinov adds, “Bastard said, ‘It’s only little pain.’”

  “Shall we ash him?” Tak asks. Tak never threatens lightly.

  “Back off that shit! We don’t have a choice,” Borden emphasizes.

  DJ says, “I’m not wearing a fucking iron maiden.”

  “Screw you, screw all of you!” Joe shouts, his voice hoarse. He lapses into a fit of coughing. We’re turning grayish blue. All the blood is retreating to our core.

  “We need these suits,” Borden says. She looks down on the bodies and the blood. “I don’t know what happened here. Panic. Poor leadership.”

  “Goddamned right, poor leadership!” Joe says through his coughing. He sags to a squat, then falls over on one hand. We’re getting too weak to resist the inevitable.

  Five of Litvinov’s soldiers join us. They carry four of the bulky suits, still enclosed in sealed plastic bags. They hold them up beside us, sizing. Their faces look ghostly, resigned.

  Tak’s look as he takes a deep breath, lowers a big gray pressure suit to the floor, and strips away the plastic is classic Tak. Pure American Bushido. DJ is next. He squats on a bag and inspects his feet. Signs of frostbite.

  “No options,” Borden says.

  “And when it’s over,” I ask, “will they ever come off?”

  “I don’t know,” Borden says.

  “These must be new,” I say. “Coyle didn’t say a thing.”

  “She’s a fucking ghost!” Borden says with a rare bright spark of anger. Nobody at Division Four or on Lady of Yue warned our commander about these difficulties, either. “Why should she care?”

  We open the bags. Warrior and armor, all one. And then I remember what Coyle said, long, long ago.

  She did warn me. I just wasn’t paying attention.

  FISSURE KINGS

  Except for the corpses, the station is deserted, a barely functional shell of what it had been before Titan got its face rearranged in the last prolonged assault. Miracle it survived at all. But no miracle for us. In outline, the hockey puck is not much more than a thick wall around the inner vent. The onetime stadium roof over the vent has collapsed, letting in the elements—mostly methane snow.

  Now that we’re back in our suits and suffering the unexpected and literal breaking in, Borden and Litvinov escort us back to the armory, where, under the watchful and nervous gaze of our comrades—plus Kumar and Mushran—the outer walls are shifting and bulging, with alarming snaps and groans, to allow us access to developing product.

  The walls begin to smoke and shiver.

  “Eating station!” Litvinov says, and he may be right. We seal our plates. The air is frosting, the water freezing out.

  Three huge, round, bronze-colored heads dissolve and shove through the station’s outer wall like fish rising from a milky pool. The wall puckers and seals around them. Ports pull open in each head, inviting some of us inside—and cap training alerts us who goes into what vehicle, whose ID will match with the product, who’s trained for which segment of our mission. Depending on the size and complexity of the weapon or transport, there will be one, two, or three drivers, and room for at most five suited warriors—I can see that, feel that.

  The slow-building ecstasy of enthusiasm finally arrives. I get it. These guys are good, great, brilliant—whoever designed caps, product, station! We’re being primed to do our bits without complaint. It’s even better than the first after-drop rush when we stand up on Mars. Pain is sweet. We welcome each jab and stab, each strung wire through our muscles, around our bones. Prepped and pumped, in pairs or triples, we break from the tight-packed herd into which we’ve instinctively clumped and, new boots gripping the slippery, icy floor, climb into the ports in the round bronze heads.

  The first of the heads, fully crewed, withdraws with puffs of vapor, leaving behind a glassy sheen of freezing liquid and a smoking, dripping hole through which another head suddenly presents. This one’s ours. I’m with Joe and Tak. DJ is going with Borden. Borden looks at me with her usual concern—I’m her charge, her ward, right? But we’re operating according to the instructions of a higher authority. We’re not much more than automatons riding the giant machines. Grunt zombies. Quite different from the drama on Mars. And I’m down with that.

  Judging by the size of the round head, Joe and Tak and I are being assigned to a big one. Buddies, all former mates. Outstanding. But then Starshina Irina Ulyanova, the round-faced ballerina, moves in after Joe and before me, followed by Ishida, then by Jacobi, and that’s our full complement. Not a problem. We’re nothing if not flexible. I move to the middle and take a moment to study the inside of the head. We’re in a big, broad-shouldered bronze centipede—do centipedes have shoulders?—very like the ones whose crushed remains litter the ground outside or slush around in the vent. With the portal closed, we occupy a cabin about five meters wide and ten deep extending back to the thorax. It’s dark and warm, like being inside a heated gourd. Web cap training tells me the freshness of the product is responsible for that—heat of manufacture. We’ll cool down once we plunge into the vent or dig through the crust—both are possible with this machine. It calls itself an Offensive Scout, Advance Response, or OSCAR. It can swim or dig or just crawl over most surfaces. Pretty universal. Other types are more specialized.

  Tan ribbons fall from the curving bulkheads and shake out into vertical hammocks, with pads and clamps arranged to lock on to our suits. Ulyanova is the first to lie back in one of the ribbon hammocks. Lights above her switch on and match color with a small, bright light over her faceplate, green for green. The clamps lock to her midriff. The pads suck down on her pressure suit. She settles back and relaxes, then tries to look back at us, but her suit is stiff—we’re all stiff. No rubbernecking.

  The rest of us follow her example. Our lights match, too. All good. I’m happy drool and grins. Shit, this is fine, so fine—even as something smooth and cool worms up my penis.

&nb
sp; Ishida places her arms and legs into a bay to our right. Her hammock adjusts accordingly and she sits up. I can’t see her face, can barely hear her voice in the whir and growl of the centipede, our Oscar, preparing to move out. Tak’s and Joe’s hammocks slide forward right behind Ishida. I’m carried center and aft. We’re now in our assigned stations, even though we’re not yet clear what we’re about to do.

  Within minutes, we feel a lurch aft and a wide transparency slides open forward of the driver. Oscar’s face now has a big rectangular eye. Plastic? Metal? I’m betting on a tough, cold-resistant plastic. Wonderful how we use language to mask ignorance. Cap learning carries almost no info on the engineering behind these monsters.

  Then, following a cheerful burst of digital notes, we can hear everyone through comm. I content myself by looking forward between Joe and Ishida. Tak is at my two o’clock. We’re on the move. Through a wavering shroud of methane snow, Oscar crawls up and over the edge of the hockey puck. It’s easy to see how busy our delivered seeds have been. The outer walls of the station on this side are so corroded and marked they’ve nearly been eaten away. The hangar where the glider delivered us is already gone. A crawling phalanx of three more fresh machines scours the top of the station, trailing from their stumpy, jointed tails those awful, questing, chewing snake-tresses—

  Tresses busy slapping, cutting, lifting, and then simply absorbing the station. Maybe the product will absorb the corpses as well. Grunts into machines. Total combat efficiency. Wouldn’t brass love that?

  Way back in my head is a velvety blackness, like a curtain in a darkened theater, and it’s slowly drawing aside. There’s nothing onstage yet, but soon…?

  I’m distracted as my helm offers a much wider view. Direct retinal imagery. I darken the plate interior and become a disembodied pair of eyes moving ponderously through the slush, advancing on outthrust claw-clamp feet to peer over the inner rim of the station… down into the vent. The vent’s inner lake swirls like a gigantic, half-frozen toilet bowl of combat shit slowly being flushed. Hey, I’m in a good mood. I’m laughing in my big thick helm, even as painful and intrusive bits of the suit—my suit, my friend!—absorb my sweet flesh the way product eats the station. I’m down with that. I’m down with pain, poison, and frozen death. Happy to serve!