“Deep station in about thirty klicks,” Joe says. His voice sounds loud, overwhelming, but not any more real than the presence. “Something’s still there,” he adds. “It’s not putting out a beacon, and it doesn’t answer.”
We’re leveling off at three hundred meters beneath the crust. All of our sensors combine to show we’re cruising above deep canyons between long, razorback ridges.… Curving mountains running parallel, separated by a klick or less and meeting at right angles with other ridges, like the pocketing squares on a roulette wheel. There are no bottoms to those squares. Nothing the minnows or sensors can measure. The geology here is a total mystery. Is it artificial? If so, made by who or what? Made when?
After all I’ve been through, it’s still a shock to realize that what we’re seeing echoes with other parts of my understanding, what I’ve learned from Bug and Coyle—confirms that our connection is real. I’m not imagining anything. Coyle, my inner Bug, the silvery void…
If I accept that I’m not crazy, and this is why I was rescued from Madigan—why I was picked up and kept there in the first place—knowing that makes it a little easier. I swallow hard. My throat is filled with needles. DJ and I are here to make a tight, strong connection with something old and important.
The silver space fragments. Everything shivers, reassembles. Something else is here with me. Something new but familiar to my inner Bug.
Ripples form in the brightness.
Inquire.
“Yeah,” I say.
“What’s up, Vinnie?” Joe asks.
“Keep it down, sir,” DJ says. “He’s working.”
“Got it.”
Do you have a guide?
“Maybe,” I say. “I can understand you, whatever you are.”
With a guide, you can learn how to access the archive, if you are a qualified user.
“I had a guide,” I say. “She turned glass on Mars. She’s been warning—she’s been telling me about you… I think.”
Eyes open. I’m twitching all over. The Oscar slides around a massive mineral growth, glowing faintly in the ocean darkness—all the other weapons report in, chiming and chitting at each other, maintaining formation but veering starboard to get around that thing that connects the ocean floor to the crust above.
Joe fans out the sensors. We can all see the result in our helm displays. I have to poke with my eyes through the silver, but I’m learning how to do that.
We’re in the middle of a mineral jungle—a deep forest of crystal pillars, each dozens of kilometers high.
“The mother lode!” DJ says.
We slowly move into the jungle. DJ begins to whistle. The tune sounds familiar, but I’ve never heard it before. Still, it brings on an oddly familiar mental state of congruence and connection. The brightness is becoming tangible. I can feel it wrapping my skin, flooding my mind. It’s bright and silvery, and while I can feel it, so far it conveys no information, no meaning other than its own strength and reality.
Again my thoughts are overlaid by vibrating, wavering lines, infinite geometry—and again, I feel and hear Coyle. Her voice is distinct. It ripples the silvery space. The connection between this silvery space and distant archives—on Mars and elsewhere—becomes manifest.
I’m still here, Venn. I’ve got a short reprieve, I think. I’m still your guide, for the time being. Go ahead. Can you understand?
“Jesus! Captain. Yes.”
We don’t have much time. It’s ready. Ask it something.
“But what the hell is it? What’s ready?”
Inquire.
“I don’t know what to ask!”
Ask it about poppa momma shit and where we come from and where we go, and why the Gurus and Antags don’t want us down here. Ask it about moons. You won’t like what it has to say. I’m dead, but I’ve had a chance before I settle in to poke around—and I don’t like it one fucking bit. But you got to ask.
Ask now.
Coyle is thinning rapidly, thinning and fading.
“What’s happening to Captain Coyle?” I ask.
Your guide is becoming memory, which is atonement. We recognize your guide’s music, and we recognize your music. Because you have the proper music, you can be a user.
Inquire.
“Why don’t the Gurus want us down here? Or in the Drifter, in the mines?”
Choose one question.
Make it a good one, Venn! This place is freakish particular.
“Why is everybody trying to keep us away from you, whatever you are?”
You have been lied to.
Inquire.
“By who?”
Across billions of years, we who acquired this memory have encountered forces of decadence and corruption. These forces succeed by persuasion and temptation. They must maintain your ignorance or they will fail. We can relieve your ignorance. Because of that, we are a threat to them.
Inquire.
“You okay, Venn?” Jacobi asks.
I’m not. Inquire! Shit. I don’t like where this is going, because it’s confirming what I already sense, maybe even know, and that’s not good. I don’t want to learn any more. Besides, Coyle has thinned to a wisp.
The vibrating silver turns insistent, brilliant red. No wasting time down here. Painful!
Something pounds on the outside of the Oscar. The giant bronze centipede rocks and shivers. Joe and Ulyanova and Jacobi are fighting to keep the machine under control.
Flowing out over the deep-ocean mountains, around the column of salts and minerals, our minnows report a steady stream of icy daggers, each six or seven meters long, like huge icicles, driven by frilly, ionized currents: a blizzard of electrified torpedoes sweeping in at dozens of knots.
“Incoming!” Jacobi says. “Hold fast!”
The minnows scatter to get a wider perspective. We still can’t actually see—it’s dark and the ocean here is almost opaque—but the minnows are working the whole spectrum, plus sound, which is incredibly precise in the cold. We can hear what’s happening for thousands of klicks, even the echoes off the ridges and roulette pockets—
“Twelve big machines at three klicks, rising from behind a low ridge,” Tak says. “They’re about where the station is supposed to be. They look aggressive, and they’re huge.”
“They’re not ours!” Jacobi says. Her voice is small and deadly calm.
The new machines, sensing us, suddenly fan out and descend to hide in the corner of two intersecting ridges. We can’t see them. We can’t see anything.
“We’re exposed,” Tak says.
“I know that,” Joe says tightly. I understand him well enough to know he’s either following orders from Borden and Kumar, or he has something on his mind. Maybe both. Asking him right now will only distract him. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.
Or when I’m ready.
“Ice torpedoes holding,” Ishida says.
“Slowing,” Joe says.
“Why don’t they just take us out?” Ishida asks.
The ice torpedoes keep station in a cloud around us, barring our progress—but not coming any closer. My head throbs with the red field. I don’t know what it is or why it’s happening now. Maybe I’m having a stroke. Maybe all the shit in my head has finally blown me up inside.
Slowly, though, it’s starting to convey information. Lots of it. Confused, historic, and strategic… if I could understand Bug strategy!
“Slow down,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Nobody’s moving,” Joe says.
“Venn—what do we do now?” Jacobi asks.
I wish I knew.
Ishida has been assigned to our weapons. I click down the list in my head, feeling a sudden dread that we might actually use them—and that isn’t what the red space is telling me is appropriate or necessary. We have place-keeping mines, remoras that attach and deliver spent matter charges, torpedoes bigger than minnows but working the same principles. And that’s pitiful. Whatever’s out there is equipped with weapons way beyond the ones
in our arsenal. They’ve harnessed Titan’s electric flows. They’ve been here longer, they’re survivors, and they’re way more powerful.
But they’re not moving in for a kill.
“What are they?” Ulyanova asks.
Joe strains to look back at me. “You’re our ace in the hole, Vinnie. You and DJ.”
The red space turns silvery again, and in that infinitely dense collection of waiting information, another figure appears. Not human.
“Coyle,” I say. “Goddammit, Coyle, what is this? Where are you?”
Handing off, Venn. I’m settling in to fixed memory. That means I’m finally going to die… except when people remember. You’ll remember me, won’t you? You’ll pray for me?
I remember DJ’s attending Coyle as she turned glass, and my throat tightens. “Always,” I say.
It’ll be hard to work with your new partner, but she’s still alive. She’s a user. And she’s smarter than me, with more experience.
“She—? Descendant of the Bugs?” I ask.
Same as you. Good-bye, Venn. Take care of our troops. And best of luck.
I reach out and feel around with whatever senses once connected us, but I can no longer detect the essential part of Coyle. The hard-core, almost cynical devotion to duty, the bitter sense of humor and doubts about my innate abilities… the devotion to life, despite a career of dealing death. Captain Coyle is gone.
No. She’s here. She’s just not active. I can see her. All of her, spread out like a silvery blueprint before me, naked and complete—everything that turned glass back on Mars, stored, transmitted, has been fixed in the archive, faithfully and truthfully preserved. Feeling no passion, no pain, but eternal—timeless and totally revealed.
“Jesus Christ, Captain,” I say. “You’re fucking beautiful.…”
But of no use to me now.
“Who’s talking to you, Venn?” Jacobi asks.
“Coyle’s fixed,” DJ says.
A new outline sparkles in my mind. The archive has other plans. It wants me to move on. I have the awful feeling that Coyle tried to save the most difficult for last. She? I’m not yet seeing anything solid or embodied, more like the shape of a mind, and very likely that’s what this new presence sees when it looks my way. How the hell do we communicate, if that’s even an option?
Then—
It’s a reality.
The new voice is startlingly sweet, like birdsong in a forest. It rises and drops, and then finds a kind of level range, and I know it for the first time—like Coyle, female, but very different. I’m about to confront the new user, but between us rises again that master steward of the ancient memory stores, the thing whose existence has scared the living fuck out of the Gurus and the Wait Staff.
Inquire.
“What do we say to each other?” I ask. “How do we do this?”
“What are they, Vinnie?” Joe asks. He sounds remarkably scared. “Bug descendants? Natives of Titan?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Captain Coyle isn’t in the picture anymore.”
You have the music. You are suitable as users.
I think this through quickly. I feel like an idiot. I feel as if my lips are moving as I try to read a book.
“You’re mumbling again,” Jacobi says, irritated.
I open my eyes. Ishida is watching me. The silvery void wraps across her concerned face.
“Steady keeping. Ice torpedoes still wait to crush us.” This is Ulyanova.
My focus shifts. I stare into the infinite silver at the resplendent, uncertain outline of the other user, the mind that is also here, and by golly, there is a certain something, an awareness that we are related, maybe more distantly than a snail or a cockroach, but still…
Inquire.
Like playing a TV game show. I sat next to my grandmother on that old-dog-stinky, Afghan-covered couch in Fresno while she watched her favorite game shows, and she knew the rules, the routines. I need to be as smart as my grandma.
I try to stay away from the new user and focus the silver on the master steward. Don’t want to say something stupid or be rude.
“Are we both descended from those who made you?” I ask.
Yes.
Inquire.
“Another mind?” I ask. “Something else affected by the tea? DJ!” I say.
“With you, bro,” he says. His voice has changed. “This is a joint and a half, ain’t it?”
“Can you see the other one? The other user?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I should resign my commission.”
DJ is a noncom.
“Tell me!”
“Well, this much is obvious,” DJ says. “It’s not Coyle, it’s not a bug… and it’s not human.”
“You guys are driving me nuts!” Joe shouts. “Give me some actionable!”
After all Joe has done to and for me, I feel a weird moment of justification.
“Those folks out there, they don’t want to kill us,” DJ says with a deep sigh. “Not anymore. We need each other.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Jacobi asks sharply. She looks stretched and exhausted. We’re twelve klicks beneath the icy crust of Titan, within sensor range of a grove of massive, crystalline pillars that rise from the cross-ridged floor of the saline sea to the frozen roof. The ice torpedoes are poised between us and a flotilla of huge weapons—overwhelming force.
I break through the silver and look steadily at Jacobi. “Captain Coyle has handed me over to something else,” I say to her. “Someone new.”
She gives me a conspiratorial squint. “What sort of someone?”
“Still trying to find out,” I say.
Inquire.
“What do we do now?” I ask the steward.
Use the sense your music gives you. Speak to your partner.
“We need to surrender,” DJ says softly.
“Is DJ nuts?” Joe calls back. “Vinnie—is he nuts?”
“I don’t know!” I say. “Maybe they want to take us someplace safe. Someplace where we can meet and talk.”
I still can’t see the other clearly. Maybe she doesn’t want to be seen clearly. Maybe there’s not that much trust despite our common music and the master steward.
Inquire.
“Where do they want to take us?” I ask. I feel the archive lightly brush parts of my mind.
Use the sense the music gives you.
Great. I’m sitting on top of the most massive data store in the local universe, and it’s a stickler; I’m the user. I make the decisions. I could spend the next million years working through inquiries about limitations and rules, but all I got in my head is an image of that Antag helm on Mars, cupping a broken bird-head with four eyes and a raspy tongue.
And based on what I’m learning, remembering that, remembering all the dead and the dying and all the blood on my hands, all the friends and fellow soldiers now gone and all the blood on their hands, and all the bird-heads we’ve broken back there on Mars and Titan and everywhere else…
Nearly all female…
And then I get it. I understand. I know who’s out there, who’s driving those weapons. We’re both descended from the bugs.
And we’ve both been deceived.
That’s huge.
I simply want to break down and cry.
I rise above my confusion and try to figure out my strategy. What do I believe? What’s the truth, and how liable are we to counterintelligence, cointelpro, whatever the fuck you call it? I’m not a very good juggler. Maybe this is one ball that’s primed to explode.
Inquire.
“What went wrong? How did this happen? Who are the Gurus and what do they want to do to us, for us?”
The others hear me. They’re stunned into murmurs and prayers. Jacobi is trying to stifle sobs. Skyrines have sharp and sometimes predictive senses. Some of us already know the shock that’s coming. I feel sure that Joe knows. Has known for some time. Like Kumar and
Mushran and even Borden. Division Four. Traitors all.
One inquiry at a time.
“Yeah—why are the Gurus doing this and telling us these things?” This seems to be simple enough, related enough to deserve an answer.
For billions of years, they and their kind have sold war to the outer stars.
I’m not sure I understand what that means. “Our war, you mean? Sold it how? How do you know this?”
One inquiry at a time.
“How do you know this?”
Long ago, they convinced us to fight with our brothers.
It lets me experience more directly what it’s saying—I see data feeds and communications radiating from our solar system. We’re being televised. We’re being recorded and spread around the galaxy.…
“It’s a business for them? We’re entertainment?”
They transmit your fighting and dying, your wars and pain, out to far worlds. It fits an old pattern that to these forces, advanced into decadence and boredom, your people and troubles, your murder and pain, are amusing.
Inquire.
“Bugs fought for them?”
Many did. Those wars destroyed four moons. The final archive that preserves that history is this one.
Inquire.
Damn right. There’s a big question here. “Where did the moon come from that hit Mars and sprayed Earth?”
At the last, in desperation, one moon from this system was flung inward toward the sun, toward the young inner worlds. It failed to arrive as planned, and struck the fourth planet.
And helped start life on Earth—all by mistake.
Inquire.
“You thought you were losing?”
Yes. We were losing.
Inquire.
“Did you lose?”
That was long, long ago, and the builders of the archive have long since passed on.
A painful subject, I sense, even to an objective archive. “They’re dead?”
Passed on.
I can still conjure up a clear picture of Bug. Ugly and covered in baroque carapaces, a united pair of creatures—brains and brawn. This image, the statistical portrait of an entire culture, has until now served as a representation of what the green dust awoke in the Drifter. Somehow I’ve drawn reassurance from its example—however strange and distant. But I never thought of Bug as a warrior. An explorer, a thinker, a strangely friendly presence—but never as a hero, and certainly not a tragic hero.