DJ embraces himself in his arms, as Kumar had done earlier. From behind, he looks like someone is hugging him—someone invisible. We’ve all had more than enough. As if reacting to yawns in a crowded room, pretty soon we’re mostly asleep—exhausted and traumatized.
Before Joe joins us, he plucks the dog tag from the air and pokes it through the mesh, letting it slip out to become part of the water and the shit, cleaned up, moved out. “By itself, this is useless,” he says. “We’re going to ask a lot of pointed questions before we let Ulyanova probe a Guru. If that’s what the Antags are planning.”
I feel a twist. They’re not mentioning me, but I know.
Kumar agrees. “Let us see what leverage we have.”
Then they wrap up and at least pretend to join the rest. Perversely, as I grip the mesh and squeeze my eyes shut, I’m picturing how the fight went down in the second cage. How the teams formed and dissolved, sucking in victims, dispatching them, throwing them aside, then turning on one another until one or two remaining fighters simply bled out. A horrible way to go.
Who’s showing me all this?
Just my fucked-up imagination.
Or maybe not.
Sweet.
THE SITUATION THAT PREVAILS
So it was phrased in a silly old cartoon about a real shithead who fought in World War II and sounded like Bugs Bunny and somehow never got himself killed. The phrase is bouncing around my head as I slide in and out of stupor. We are in the situation that prevails.
I hate sleeping in zero g. One can only hang on to wire for so long, before your fingers cramp and you let go and bounce off whatever’s nearby. If it’s another Skyrine, or Borden, they shove or kick you away, usually without even waking up.
But in zero g, I don’t dream much—at least not here. One doesn’t dream inside a dream, right? Maybe all I’ve been living through since I left Madigan is just another Guru instauration, and when I wake up I’ll be back in my apartment in Virginia Beach, getting ready to take my car out for a squeal, maybe drive to Williamsburg for kidney pie and some old-fashioned, cozy history. Real history. Has human history ever been real? How long has this shit been going on? Looks like a long, long time. Lots of wars.
Have to ask: Which war was the most popular, ratings-wise?
I open my eyes and find myself looking through the mesh into Bird Girl’s four purple-rimmed peepers. She’s floating steady on the other side, watching me, just waiting, quiet inside and out—letting me enjoy my restless doze.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Forward. All of you. All of us. Through maze and fake eye shit.” She’s getting creative with her English.
“There’s bad attitude brewing,” I say.
“Brewing? Like beer?”
“Yeah, bad beer. We’re not going to put up with being lowly assholes anymore. If the starshina is valuable to you, we want equality. Knowledge. Concessions. We have memories of dead friends, too. Tell your commanders that.”
Long fucking speech, but inside it takes just instants and there are actually fewer words. More like thought balloons filled with emojis. That’s the way it is, here in the land of deep mind-fuck. The madder one gets, the more the word balloons simplify.
But Bird Girl and I are closely enough related both in ancestry and employment that the message is clear. And when I look back at the others, watching my interaction with the Antag, I see they’re awake and alert and have lined up in combat order. Borden and Joe and Litvinov and Jacobi are at the tip of a fighting formation, holding one another’s hands like they’re going steady. Wonder of wonders, we’re together.
I try to find Ulyanova. There she is, in the charge of Ishida and Vera. Sisterhood of power. Cool to see, and cool to see that our starshina is neither weepy nor green.
Bird Girl brings her four eyes back to mine.
“I will say it,” she tells me, and then moves off back into the darkness of the squash court. I see her shadow exit the cube.
A while later, she and three of the armored commanders return. Bird Girl says, out loud, “We join. No bad beer, right?”
I look back at our officers.
Joe and Borden say, simultaneously, “Agreed.”
Litvinov says, “Agree.”
The translator buzzes.
The cage door opens.
“All?” I ask.
“All,” she says. “Keep together.”
“Where are we going?”
“Forward. We will bring Keepers.”
“And the connection?”
“Connection and Keepers. They will tell us Keeper thoughts.”
“Right,” I say. Doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? I have no idea how Ulyanova is going to respond, how she’ll involve me, or how precise and efficient she’ll be. We’re all new to this.
HORN AND IVORY, BLOOD AND BONE
Joe and Borden and Litvinov grip arms and share a tether, a leash, as we are led forward. Kumar is right behind them, listening as they evaluate our piss-poor options.
“They must feel vulnerable, to agree to this,” Borden says.
“Duh,” Jacobi says from behind. Borden doesn’t even give her a look.
“They’re feeling trapped, like us,” Joe says.
DJ and I are paying more attention to Ulyanova than to our superior officers. She’s being escorted on another tether by Vera and Ishida. Her lips are creased in a kind of dotty smile, as if we’re on a country outing and she’s listening to the birdies, so charming to be here. Jesus.
Without Ulyanova we’re useless to the Antags, and while at the moment, despite the smile, she’s strong enough to manage, to stay alert and keep up with us on the leashes as we’re dragged forward, through the usual curving corridors and then along the screw garden on the rail system—just capacious enough to carry us all…
The strain she’s under, she could still break at any moment. What if her soul crumbles? She’s filled with Guru. Could happen, right?
And me?
DJ and I seem strong enough, we’ve lasted long enough, but are we reliable? Maybe I’m the main POV. I’d gladly ash-can my brain, or at least my imagination, just to be a dumb grunt again.
“Anything left of Titan?” I ask DJ.
“I think they’ve finished bombing. Good times down there.”
He sounds uncertain, so I have to ask, like a kid probing to find out where the Christmas presents are hidden, “But you’re still getting something?”
“Not really,” DJ says. “Just shrapnel from earlier overloads.”
“Right.” DJ and I are a thin soup of residuals, peas and carrots in cooling broth.
Kumar drops back closer. “I do not believe that anyone can connect to a Guru and live long,” he says in a low voice. “Even when they are right in front of me, talking to me, I have never found them the least accessible. They are masters of…” He breaks off. “What is this place we are going? How much do their Gurus and the connected one—how much do they understand about the ship? The systems involved?”
All good questions. DJ answers the first as best he can. “It’s a puzzle lock. You have to solve a code to move forward. Without the code, it’s a meat grinder.”
“Are you sure you all saw the same situation, or the same version of that situation?” Kumar asks.
“You’ll just have to see for yourself,” DJ says with a crease of his cheek muscles.
We exit the transport. I’ve been staring out at the green, brushy inclines of the screw garden and asking myself why Gurus would put such a thing at the rear of the ship. Having impossible problems to solve is what distracts me from how awful our situation is. I’m a nerd. Have been since I was a little kid. It’s kept me sane before. I’ve been a killer since I was thirteen and not once did I enjoy it or feel anything less than shitty. Killing is putting an end to threatening stuff I don’t understand, before I can ever understand it. Nerding out distracts from that essential emptiness.