Titan's Fall (2 page)

2

Ken sat with his legs hanging out of the side of the hopper's open door. It had been chewed up on the approach, holes burned through the skin, but it was still flying. A trio of manta­ships surrounded the hopper. Heavy air support.

“That was amazing!” Ken said over the private channel. “There's nothing left but cricket pieces back there.”

I sat next to him. We'd both been the last ones in before air support started pounding the crickets.

“Twenty minutes. All we did was not die for twenty minutes.”

Ken's helmet turned toward me. “We were warriors! We kicked their ass for twenty minutes.”

I picked a piece of cricket out from between my boots and tossed it out over the Titan plains.

“Victory is victory,” Ken said. “Enjoy the win.”

We rattled in over the Shangri-La basin, scooped out of Titan's surface some thousand years before by a very, very big chunk of rock that hit hard enough to release megatons of force and leave an appropriately sized several-mile-wide
crater. Then Titan's thick atmosphere had gone to work on it, smoothing and shallowing out Shangri-La into its current gentle shape, though still surrounded by blunted hills.

The Accordance buried their fortress down in the basin's hills, and now was building anti-spacecraft weapons in the protection of the basin. Each weapon was the size of a skyscraper, four needles aiming ever upward, and much of it still in the middle of construction.

I was jittery. I wanted to shuck my armor and take a long shower. I was tired of living in underground warrens and ethane lakes and amber light and Jupiter and aliens and war.

“What the hell is that?” Ken asked.

I looked over and instantly spotted what he was referring to. As we crested the Shangri-La hills and skimmed over the basin, the hopper had to curve around the vast body of a ship. It didn't look like any of the mantas or troop transports we'd been shuttled around the system on.

The heart of the ship looked like a quarter-mile-long seed with a deep black skin. A long spine further stretched out in the middle of the air forward and to the rear, a bony-looking structure with gridwork encasing it. Misty clouds surrounded that, held in by an outer transparent shell. And for hundreds of feet even more out past that hull, a second shimmering cloud hung in the air, hinting at yet another layer of ship, maybe held in place by force fields of some kind.

I clomped forward as we skimmed over the artificial clouds, and got the pilot's attention on the public channel. “What is that thing?”

“Pcholem ship,” the pilot said from behind an emergency respirator. Her skin was peeling around it from exposure to whatever raw hydrocarbons had leaked inside. She should have been in a full encounter suit, but pilots this far from the
action hated the bulky interference. It also may have been that she didn't have time to fully suit up, scrambling fast to get to us. “Personnel drop.”

There were thousands of figures disembarking from ramps, more vehicles and equipment coming off the massive ship. All joining the tens of thousands of human contractors here on Titan, digging out bunkers for the base, drilling down into the deep rock.

A constant stream of hoppers and jumpships flew in and out, the jumpships heading for orbit, the hoppers for other distant points of Titan.

“We'll need to talk to the pilots on base about Alexis,” Ken said as the hopper flared to slow down. “Tell them they need to make sure they're going out in flight suits, see if they can get crash protection gear. Let them know hostiles are slipping down. Just in case HQ doesn't think it warrants a mention.”

“Yes, but we also need to ask if they'll be holding a memorial.” Ken always focused on the practical. “We need to pay our respects. Alexis paid the price. And got us in close to shore, where we had a good chance.”

“Right.”

A whole division of the Colonial Protection Forces quartered here. Almost nine thousand armored soldiers. There were more human forces deployed around Titan, but the bulk of them were around Shangri-La.

Welcome home, I thought as we kissed dirt. The Accordance had wanted all this for themselves, no humans out past the moon, the point we'd been unable to cross by ourselves before the Accordance came to Earth.

But now that the Conglomeration had found Earth and the solar system, now that war was in full swing, human workers were everywhere toiling away for the Accordance.

It was necessity. All the planets I'd memorized as a kid, if I just reversed the names, it became a list of places the Conglomeration had taken for itself over the last three months. They'd pushed everything back to Saturn, where we held the moons and bombarded it constantly.

The Accordance needed human boots. And the Icarus Corps, built out of the Colonial Protection Forces, was still being trained and built up.

But the Accordance didn't really trust humans fully. The squid-like Arvani who held the top spot in the Accordance truly didn't regard humans with much more than disdain. We were often left guarding supply routes, protecting machinery. Like the massive weaponry being built here in Shangri-La to safeguard Titan.

Rumors were, something big was being planned for Saturn. Maybe a steady asteroid barrage or nukes. But all of Earth would just be a speck on Saturn's windy clouds. How could you attack something so vast?

+  +  +  +

Down in the bunkers, barracks lit by eerie Accordance bioluminescence embedded in the walls, I met up with the rest of the platoon. Most of them were waiting in the common room for us, lounging on utilitarian cots. News had spread quickly.

At the front, squad leaders Min Zhao and George Berkhardt jumped up. I nodded at them. “Any of you have a pad?”

Min gave me hers, and I fingerprinted in and snagged my dossier and then looked back at my new additions. They were snapping their helmets back down, and I was looking at tired, relieved faces.

Most of them were older than me. But they seemed younger somehow. And they were looking at me expectantly.

“Tony Chin?” I called out, glancing down at the pad. The squad leader raised a hand. “Over to my left.”

He took a few steps over. I glanced at the pad. “Maria Lukin, Lilly Taylor, Yakov Ilyushin, over to Sergeant Chin. Rockhoppers, meet the new Charlie squad! Now, Yusef Obari?”

Yusef likewise raised a hand.

I waved to my right. Yusef moved over. “Aran Patel, Mohamed Cisse, and Suqi Kimmirut, join Mister Obari. Rockhoppers, this is Delta squad.” I updated our documents.

Berkhardt moved up. “I can help you with your armor,” he said to Tony. “You can call me Chef.”

“Chef ?”

“George Bork-Bork-Bork Berkhardt,” Min Zhao explained.

Berkhardt shrugged. “I can't cook for shit, but I speak a little Swedish. And Sergeant Zhao is ‘Max.' Should be obvious where we got the nickname.”

“Everyone shuck down and clean your armor, stow your weapons,” Ken ordered. “If you have any questions, Chef, Max, or me are here. We have bunk beds ready, look for your last name on the rack. We don't have a dedicated shuckdown room, you take your armor off and plug it in next to your bunk. You're never more than a quick sprint away from your armor, got it?”

“Yessir!” they chorused.

I had been looking over Alpha and Bravo squads. Zizi Dimka, Chandra Khan, and Lana Smalley under Sergeant Berkhardt for Alpha. Sergeant Min Zhao's Bravo squad included Greg Vorhis, Jun Chen and Erica Li. That was almost everyone.

“She's not here,” Ken said, seeing me survey the platoon.

“I know.”

“She's supposed to be here.”

I grunted. “I know.”

Erica Li was telling the new platoon members they should turn over any food they'd smuggled in to her. “I'll get them into the platoon safe. That shit is in high demand around here, and unless you've got it locked up, people will steal it. They're that sick of alien dog food.”

“If you don't handle it, it will go up the chain,” Ken said. “It has to.”

“I'll go find her,” I snapped.

One of the new platoon members gingerly pulled a chocolate bar out and handed it over to Erica.

“I'll deal with that,” Ken said, jerking his head in the direction of the chocolate bar.

“Right.” I turned for the stairs up to the surface.

Behind me Ken shouted at Erica. “Froyo! Hand the chocolate back over. Taylor, there is no safe down here for food.
Come on
.”

+  +  +  +

I found Amira at a northeast hilltop, perched on a slab of rock, watching a hundred or so contractors in simple EVA suits working away at an EMP turret. The gun was a fifty-­foot-long barrel with power cables as thick as a car running off down the nearby tunnel, which itself sank deep under Shangri-La.

The barrel had yet to be winched into place.

From her perch I could see the whole Shangri-La basin as well as the job site, now dominated by the cloudy shells of the Pcholem starship sitting the middle of it all.

“You ignoring the platoon open channel?” I asked her.

“I was busy. Welcoming the newbies is not high on the priority list. We talked about this.” Her armor was streaked with dirt and peeling paint. What hydrocarbon-filled lakes had she been mucking around in?

“We hit a cricket scout cloud coming back. Lost the jumpship. Lost Alexis.”

Amira stood up and turned to look at me. The name patch
SINGH
was missing its
S
.

“I told you they'd be coming here,” she said.

“Could be a fluke,” I said. “Accordance holds orbit. The surface was cleaned before we got moved here, before we lost Saturn. Maybe the crickets snuck through.”

“No,” Amira said. She stepped close enough that I could see her face behind the helmet. The silvered nano-ink tattoos were bright against her brown skin, and her eyes flashed like a cat's as light caught them. “I can taste them, they're out there, just on the edge. Accordance security says I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think our systems here have been compromised. They won't let me get in and audit them. They don't want humans sullying their systems.”

“We're not trained—” I started, trying to bleed some of the anger out. She interrupted me.

“I've been playing with Accordance networks and tech for years. It's better but not infallible. You know that. The Conglomeration snuck past them to get to the moon, and that wasn't supposed to happen. And we took the hit for that.”

“I know.” I thought back to watching the jellyfish-like Conglomerate ship hovering over our training base. The flash of explosions. Stepping over all the corpses of recruits, reaching for emergency oxygen, the crystalized eyes.

Only three of us survived: Amira, Ken, and me. The heroes of Icarus Base. The survivors of the Darkside War. The three
humans who took down an entire Conglomerate starship ourselves.

But it hadn't been just the three of us. There'd been all the others who'd died helping us.

And the new squads who'd died during the drop onto Saturn. And the retreat from Saturn.

“I was hoping you'd come say hi to the fresh meat like everyone else,” I said.

“Then you should have ordered me.”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I should have. But you don't ever listen to me when I do that.”

“Well, just because the Accordance has leverage on you through your parents back on Earth and can promote you to be Pet Lieutenant doesn't mean I have the same strings on me. But keep playing your cards right, you can be an Accordance lifer.”

“Fuck you, that's uncalled for,” I shouted. “The Conglomerate is the worst threat. I'm here to make sure Earth survives.”

“Then do you want me sniffing out the Conglomerate threat, or dancing to orders because it makes you look good to HQ? Do you want me to pull back? We're the only platoon out here with a dedicated intelligence officer. I may be under you in rank, but we know what I am. I can go anywhere else and run intel for them, and they'd trip over themselves to have me. I expect this rules-following shit from Ken, not you.”

Why the hell did this always have to be so hard? “It's not rules,” I explained. “You need to know some of the names and faces who will have your back in the next firefight. They need to know you. That's how it works. We're trying to fashion a team out of all these human bits and pieces. I'll block for you while you go hunting, I just want you to take support with you, get them used to working with you. Alternate the new
squads in and out daily while you prowl. I want someone to have your back, is that so wrong?”

Amira turned and looked back out of Shangri-La. “You know, I could be jumping at shadows. Don't put yourself out there on my behalf, I can take the yelling if HQ gets pissed. Say I did it against your recommendation.”

“You and I both know there are a lot of shadows out in the universe that want us dead,” I told her. “Take the squads with you. I'll hold the line.”

3

Armored up and fresh after a day down, I took the Delta squad out for a roll with Alpha alongside. The new additions were adjusting to Titan gravity and getting a little jumpy. Which was understandable. They'd come screaming down out of orbit in a hurry, been shot out of the sky by Conglomerate crickets, stood their ground by a propane lake, and then flown into Shangri-La, where'd they'd met an unimpressed platoon.

Now it was time to stretch their legs and keep their attention focused forward. Amira had taken the other squad out past the hills on one of her glitch hunts, though she hadn't told them that. I'd ordered her to take them with her.

Far, far under our feet as we bounded about the Shangri-La plain, the civilian contractors worked to tend the heart of Shangri-La: an Accordance-made dark matter generator, half a mile deep in the rock. This would power everything from our EMP cannons to the skyscraper anti-spacecraft weapons, which we were told could vaporize a rock the size of Manhattan dropping on us.

Which led you to wonder if there would be any on their way anytime soon.

“The Canadian from up near the Arctic, Suqi,” I asked Ken, her wide eyes flashing back into memory, “she got bounced around. Is she okay?”

“Physically. She's still a bit wary of me, I think,” Ken said.

“You've watched too many movies. Leadership isn't just yelling.”

“And you need to stop letting them stare at you like some movie star,” Ken shot back. “You need to give them some tough orders, make them realize what it is we're in the middle of. We need them to be ready, not starstruck.”

A message from HQ pinged and scrolled down in the lower left of my helmet's visor. A request for a meeting. “Damn. HQ.”

“Yeah?” Ken asked.

“They want an in-person.”

“I can have Chef take lead and come with you,” Ken offered.

“Nah.” I shook my head, even though Ken couldn't see it. There was friction between me and Ken, no doubt. And we'd buried most of it back on the moon. But I still didn't want him to stand there and watch me get chewed out for something he'd warned me would be a problem with that “see, I told you so” look on his face. “It's Amira. They're going to chew on my head a bit, no reason for you to get backsplash. Plus, I need to get Shriek back to our barracks. Keep showing Delta the terrain. I want them to be able to bounce around the basin with their eyes closed. Every loose rock—”

“Every loose rock and every hidey-hole,” Ken interrupted, completing the sentence.

+  +  +  +

HQ, like our barracks, was just under the surface. So we could boil out on the basin like cockroaches from our crevices if the Conglomeration came at us. It was farther into the center of the basin, underneath the bulk of the Pcholem spaceship that had landed and come to dominate Shangri-La.

Major General Foster didn't spend a lot of time armored up; he was in Colonial Protection Forces gray BDUs, which almost matched the gray coming in at the temples, and he had a perpetually tired look. He stared at me as I clomped into his office. Behind him on the wall was the Icarus Corps logo, the moon and an Earthrise, surrounded by a sawblade-like sun.

Usually, shit ran downhill. Foster would yell at someone lower in rank, and then on down, and eventually a company captain would end up nervously having a “chat” with me. But most of the CPF captains had come in after I'd fought the Conglomeration at the Icarus crater. They didn't want to shout at the hero of the Darkside War.

So now I was standing in front of a major general.

“Lieutenant: why the hell are you wearing armor in my office? You can barely fit through the door.”

“Rockhoppers shuck for sleep and showers,” I told him. “Never more than ten feet from armor.”

Foster stared at me. “You telling me you don't trust how secure my base is?”

“Rockhoppers shuck for sleep and showers,” I repeated neutrally.

We stared levelly at each other. Foster may have been my superior and my elder. But my Rockhoppers didn't shuck for anything but sleep and showers.

“Fuck it. I really want to talk about Sergeant Amira Singh,” he said, a sour look on his face.

HQ was a giant circle filled with pie slice–shaped offices.
What looked more like the bridge of a spaceship occupied the center: consoles for comms, massive holographic displays with maps of Titan and Shangri-La, as well as theater maps of the whole system. Soldiers coming in and out from various parts of Shangri-La. When I shuffled around Foster's office, I turned my back to all that.

One thing I liked about it: few aliens over us. Our overlords, the Accordance, had basically given Shangri-La over to human oversight.

To Foster's oversight.

Foster didn't like me. He'd worked hard to get human oversight. He'd worked hard to get the Arvani off his back and he didn't want that to change. I was something that might fubar everything he'd gotten set up.

“Amira is—” I began.

“I've explained,” Captain Foster said, tapping his glass desk. “You've agreed. She can't be haring off on some intuition based on her unauthorized networking and hacking abilities. I said no unnecessary trips out past our defensive coverage.”

“Absolutely, sir,” I said, as flat and mechanical as I could.

For a month, Foster'd been demanding that Amira focus on beefing up security. Adding trips to the network against outside interference.

But she'd been doing her own patrols. Heading out past the basin, scouring the plains and lakes in her spare time.

“In two weeks, the farms below go operational. We become a real damn fortress here on Titan. Supplies can't be hit.” Foster worried about that a lot. “With EMP cannons up, the anti-ship batteries, our emplacements on the hills, we are Fortress Shangri-La. We have ammo foundries now. Foundries. We are dug in like a tick on the ass of Titan and we will not be dislodged.”

“I get that, sir.”

“I don't want a loss of focus. Everyone stays behind the walls. Secure. Safe. We destroy anything that comes over the hills. We keep beefing up the hills. The aliens trying to kill us won't be able to touch us. And the aliens that took over Earth, well, maybe they'll leave us alone as well. This is important!”

That was new. I hadn't pegged Foster, a lifer, as having any ill will toward the Accordance. He was old enough to remember Occupation. The accommodations Earth had made to the aliens as they came down to Earth and changed everything.

Apparently, he saw this base as a place to carve out some space from the Accordance.

That made Foster somehow slightly more likable. I wasn't a lifer. I'd been forced into the CPF because my parents were pacifist protestors against Accordance rule. Join the CPF and they lived under comfortable house arrest. If I hadn't, they would have been executed.

“If you don't rein Sergeant Singh in,” Foster warned, getting back to the subject. “I will. Demote her, toss her in a brig, something. I'm done. I have no more patience. Shut her down.”

“Absolutely, sir,” I said, lying through my teeth.

+  +  +  +

Up from HQ a level, several carapoids had trundled down out of the Pcholem ship. The pony-sized beetles thudded as they walked, natural armor making them something you gave a wide berth as they unloaded new batches of armor onto carts.

Old-fashioned manual labor: a carapoid could easily lift all several hundred pounds of an entire suit of armor.

Several of the carapoids had chiseled symbols on their backs. Swooping letters and what appeared to be umlauts to
my human eyes. I'd never seen that on the carapoids down on Earth. They'd been painted official colors, depending on their roles in the Accordance, to match the uniforms of other Accordance members.

I hung back a bit, thinking to ask, but the carapoids kept busy and didn't slow for an instant as they trucked back up toward the surface. They'd by cycling into the outside without any gear. The carapoids could fold their carapaces tight to themselves and pass up to an hour in some extremely hostile environments. I'd seen them fighting hand to hand out in the clouds of Saturn when stripped of suits by the enemy.

I ranged through a few more tunnels, nodding and stepping aside for officers.

Shangri-La's medical facilities were located inside a spotless white cavern. The Accordance didn't see much point in private rooms for general care; most of their technology resided in the ovoid pods stretched in rows by the hundreds. The floors were grilled, the better to flush away any fluids, and could heat up to render the floor sterile again.

A couple of nearby pods were open, the articulated cutting arms inside flung open, as if the moving scalpels wanted an embrace.

I instinctively veered away.

“Do you require medical assistance?” a voice asked in Mandarin, Spanish, and then English.

I turned. A struthiform had approached me from behind. I'd never really shaken the image of them as somewhat stoic ostriches in Roman armor but with velociraptor-clawed legs that could gut you in a split second.

“I am looking for Shriek, of the One Hundred and Fourth Thunder Clutch,” I said. “He's assigned to my platoon.”

The struthiform cocked its head, feathers near its beak
shifting as it did so. I could hear the pitched squeak from it before the flattened box on the collar near its throat spoke, translating an alien birdlike language to English for me. “I do not know a Shriek,” it said. “And that clutch no longer exists. What do you truly need, human?”

I sighed. “Shriek is the one that refuses to learn names or give them. He has prosthetic limbs, and facial reconstruction, he . . .”

“Oh. That one. Yes, we are ready for him to return to you.”

The medic led me through to the quarantine wing, where there were actual offices and private rooms. A group of struthiforms clustered around a display, occasionally reaching out with a wing hand to manipulate a three-­dimensional image.

One struthiform stood out among the rest. His face had been reshaped, much of it artificial with matte-black patches of machinery. Synthetic leg, and prosthetic fingers on his wing hand whined as he moved. “Devlin!” he chirped, actually using his own vocal cords to call my name.

“He makes your name-sound,” the struthiform next to me muttered. “But he refuses to learn those of his own featherkind.”

“Don't be offended,” I whispered as Shriek left his fellow struthiforms to approach me. “He is deeply traumatized. He believes to learn someone's name will only lead to loss.”

“It is against my will that a creature as mentally unbalanced as he practices medicine,” the struthiform said. “But at least it is not on our own kind.”

“A pleasure to meet you, too,” I said, my grin at seeing Shriek fading.

“I've been learning more human biology,” Shriek said enthusiastically. “I did not realize you could not keep
yourselves clean without help of special materials. I will stop trying to cancel your shipments of head-feather-cleaning supplies.”

“
You're
the one messing up the shampoo rations,” I groaned.

Shriek shook out a wing hand. “I've learned a great deal of specifics about human biology studying here. I'll be a better surgeon for your kind now. Let's not hover overlong, looking at the past, arguing about such petty things as who canceled shampoos,” he said.

I was entirely planning to throw him under the bus when we got back to the platoon's quarters. Everyone had been griping about shampoo for weeks.

“Have you met the Pcholem yet?” Shriek asked, abruptly shifting conversational direction. “You should, you are famous. It would be delighted to meet someone exceptional.”

“I've never seen Pcholem before,” I said. “Where is the pilot?”

Shriek spread his wing hands wide, knocking me back. “You are an ignorant hatchling. Pcholem are not pilots; they are the ships themselves.”

Shriek began leading me upward.

“Imagine a seed born in space, unfurling its wings to feel the solar wind. Do you know there's a turtle in a zoo in one of your cities that the Accordance took over management of ? It's two hundred years old!”

“That's a jump in topics,” I pointed out. “I don't see your point.”

“There's the elephant and a fly,” Shriek continued. “The fly is tiny, it lives a single day. Very fast, quick in life. One single spin of your blue globe. And then, the great, larger elephant. It lives for decades of your solar years. Around and around the sun. And trees, well, there are trees that are thousands of years old. Great big slow things, they last longer. Do you follow me?”

“No, not really. Shriek, we're getting up to the surface. You need armor. Why the hell aren't you clad? You know the rule: Rockhoppers never—”

“You fear death, hatchling. Good for you. I died all those years ago when I watched the Conglomeration burn my planet. So imagine that seed I told you about stretches its newborn wings wide and soaks up light. It chews up dust from the nebulous vacuum around it, growing the natural biological fusion reactors deep inside its midnight-black skin. And it grows, ponderous and large. And it lasts and lasts, my human.”

I nervously checked the air as we walked through two airlock doors held open, a breach that should have led to a lot of rushing air and drama. I decided to leave my helmet down, recessed into the back of my armor.

“Where do they come from?” I asked.

“Where do they come from? We do not know. Maybe they don't come from anywhere. Maybe they are always swimming around. But we know when they're born, their souls are entangled on the quantum level, just like our secure communications equipment in our armor. They're always splitting souls, budding new ones.”

Shriek walked out onto the surface of Titan, and all around us a shimmering curtain held back the hydrocarbon atmosphere. We were under the belly of the ship. The Pcholem itself.