Titan's Fall (7 page)

10

We built an impromptu camp at the corner of one of the sealed bays after the acceleration eased and the alarms cut out. Struthiform crew in harness uniforms came by with crude cots.

A veritable cross section of Accordance subjects crowded in around us. Struthiform soldiers in their own powered armor, carapoids lying along the back wall like large lumps of polished rock, and other humans with their gear.

One recognizable struthiform approached us, his scarred and half-machine face blinking at the bright, stadium-like lighting in the docking bay. “I heard your approach to the ship.”

Lilly Taylor jumped up. She'd shucked her armor. It was behind her, splayed open like something hungry and half machine, half biological, waiting to eat her again. The bright lights seemed to get soaked up by her skin as she went for Shriek's throat. “You bastard!” She'd spoken before with a more precise, almost British accent. Now I could hear the Kenyan accent coming out with her anger.

Min Zhao was on her feet, grabbing Taylor and spinning her off to the side.

Shriek seemed neither surprised nor concerned, regarding them both with his dinner-plate eyes.

I was on my feet too, leaving my armor behind to back Zhao up. “Thank you, Max.”

“Maria is gone. We died trying to get up here. Trying to
save
these civilians,” Taylor shouted.

Zhao wrapped Taylor up in a bear hug. “He's an alien, Taylor. We're alien to him. He's a lost soul and he's not going to look at it the same. But he still fixes us up, don't forget that. Okay?”

Taylor crumpled for a moment in Zhao's embrace.

Shriek looked back at me. “This is why I do not learn names,” he said coolly. “They die. Now I know the dead one was named Maria. What good is that now for me?”

I groaned. “Fuck, Shriek, now's not the time.”

“It's good that she grieves. You should all grieve. Grieve now and let each other go,” the cyborg struthiform said. He pointed toward one of the large high-definition displays on the bulkhead wall over our heads. “See that small dot there? The blue one? That is your world. Your Earth. I would find a place on this ship, or wherever we end up, to go and look at it one last time. Because the Conglomeration comes for it, and they'll burn it. And then, eventually, you too.”

I pulled Shriek away from the platoon. Alpha and Bravo were used to this shit and just looked annoyed. But Charlie and Delta were ready to kill the medic.

We needed a medic.

“I'm half ready to kill you myself, Shriek,” I said, out of earshot. “You might be an alien, but right now you're being a real asshole. Shut up about all that. Did you find Ken?”

“As you requested,” Shriek said. “He was shot. It happened on the surface, but he didn't report it to you. His armor kept him stable but was compromised. I assume he didn't want you to worry about taking him into pure vacuum.”

I let out a deep breath. “Let me go armor up and we'll go look at him.”

“The armor stays in the bay,” Shriek said. “Ship rules.”

“Rockhoppers don't shuck,” I said.

“You're on an Accordance carrier accelerating away from the field of battle,” Shriek said. “If you want me to take you to see Ken Awojobi, you shall leave your armor, like any other person who wishes to walk the ship.”

I bit my lip. “I'll get Amira.”

+  +  +  +

Ken was cocooned in a medical pod, its spider-like arms tucked neatly away. He sat up as he saw us, pulling coconut-­like fibers sinking into the skin on his back out to their limit. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“For what?” I shook my head. “Shut up, I don't want to hear about that. I'm just glad you're okay. When you stopped responding, and we didn't know where in the bay you were, we didn't know . . .”

“How is everything?” Ken asked. “How bad? I saw the whole side of the ship get sliced off.”

“Maria Lukin, one of the new soldiers,” I told him. “She was over there. She saved my life in the corridor, back on Titan. Shot Chef when the driver took him. Shook her up. She was a quick thinker.”

There was nowhere to sit. Apparently, aliens didn't expect bedside visitors. Amira folded her arms. “How you feeling?”

Ken nodded. “Better. I'm pretty drugged up. We'll see
when I get released how I really feel, because right now it is warm and very fuzzy, which doesn't feel right. We just barely got out alive. It doesn't even feel real to be sitting here, to be still.”

“Barely alive,” I agreed. “I think I believed that when the Accordance handed us some resources and weapons, we'd get in there and show them how fucking hard we could fight. I thought, maybe they just didn't have the warrior spirit. Weren't motivated enough. But that was a nightmare. We lost Saturn, and now Titan, too. What's it going to be like when they reach Earth?”

“I get that from Shriek,” Ken growled. “I don't want to hear it from you, too. Listen to me: I didn't almost die for nothing just now. We didn't fight for nothing. We're going to go back to Titan. We're going to go back and kick their asses, and I'm going to be first on the ground. Because the Accordance is not going to roll over and surrender. The Accordance is better than that. They are strong. We are lucky they are our allies.”

+  +  +  +

There was no food for humans aboard the carrier. By the end of the second day, the engineers were lying down and taking sleeping pills that Shriek offered them, while the rest of us armored up. The steady nutrient drip jacked into our spines was enough to stave off the worst, but it was strange to just mill around in full armor, conserving power and waiting.

Halfway through the third day, the monitors lit up with something other than the outer ship cameras.

A series of rocky asteroids connected by clear tubes and girders flashed on screen. “These are the Trojans,” a familiar voice explained. “These asteroids trail along Saturn in its orbit, and serve as something of a naval yard for our Saturn
operations and a rally point for Accordance ships engaged on the Saturn Front.”

The asteroid base faded away, and a familiar face appeared on the screen with the triangular CPF logo up behind him.

“It's Colonel Anais,” Amira muttered, with all the enthusiasm of someone who found dogshit on the heel of a shoe.

“Here at the Trojan naval base, we will begin preparations to defend against any incursion into trans-Jovian Accordance territory,” Anais said. “Your valued participation in the wars around Saturn has helped reduce Conglomeration forces. You have struck a great blow. Now please gather yourselves for the next stage.”

“What about Titan?” someone shouted, as if Anais could hear them. “We just leave them all there to die?”

Anais droned on more about future plans and the bravery of the CPF.

“We left a lot of people behind,” I muttered to Ken, now recovered and suited up. “What are we doing here? We should be going back to save them.”

“We're surviving,” Amira said. “We're still here. We can't help them.”

“Apparently,” Ken said bitterly. The news that we weren't going back to Titan seemed to have shaken him. His previous bravado had faded away as the drugs left his system. But I was still surprised. Ken had joined the CPF to get into the officer corps. He'd wanted this. Badly. He'd been a full believer. In the Accordance, in our role in it.

Looking over at the remains of Charlie and Delta squads, and the tired faces of my platoon, I realized Titan had left us all broken.

11

After several days crammed into a docking bay, filling it with the stench of human and the acrid odor of struthiforms and carapoids, the platoon was moved out from the carrier and into the rock of one the Trojans.

We were close to the surface. On the second day, one of the walls blew out and sucked half a dozen people away.

The Rockhopper's “no shucking” rule became ironclad. We walked around in armor or huddled together in the carved-out end of a tunnel.

“Millions of miles through outer space, kitted with cutting-­edge weapons, and we're sleeping in a cave,” Ken noted.

Seven plastic buckets spaced out around our spot captured water dripping slowly, like honey, from a broken pipeline over our heads. Accordance had installed a gravity plate somewhere so we could walk around the asteroid, but it was a third of Earth's gravity. And it was strung through the center of the rock, which meant weird things happened if you turned your neck too quickly or turned a corner.

All night long we lay and listened to the drip, drop, drip.

A few miners came by on the second day with a large auger and some baffles. They'd drilled through the rock, breaking out into the vacuum. As the air whistled away, they calmly installed the baffles, sealant, and then a simple plastic box over the hole.

“We now have an outhouse,” Ken pronounced in disbelief.

In full armor, we joined the morning mess call, surrounded by humans covered in dirt finishing their drill shifts. They looked exhausted, haggard. More like zombies than real people.

I remembered on the moon seeing Earth First slogans and general anti-Accordance graffiti.

These people didn't have the energy.

“These conditions are inhumane,” Ken muttered.

Amira raised an eyebrow. “You've never heard of the Paris work camps? LA?”

“Those are for terrorists,” Ken said. “Agitators.”

“This is the Accordance,” Amira said. “Half the people on my block were hauled away to work in worse places than this. This is a fucking hotel, Ken.”

“They created infrastructure in my country when no one else would bet on us,” Ken said. “They changed everything. The way things were before they came? My parents would have died. Of hunger. Or disease. The Accordance did many things for humanity; it's just that the little slice of a percent that stood on the backs of others before the Pacification are upset they are no longer Earth's royalty.”

I stood up with a ball of Accordance human-optimized feed in one hand, and a globule of water in the other. Since the retreat, with nothing to do, they'd been circling around each other. Amira, raised on the streets that fought back against occupation, black market nano-ink proudly marking her as
hostile, criminal, to the Accordance. Ken, raised by his family to be a part of the officer corps working for the Accordance.

Maybe our friendship had only been that of three people stuck in a foxhole together, trying to survive.

Now we were living in a cave that dripped, shitting into outer space, and eating Accordance glop while we waited for . . .

. . . I wasn't sure what I was waiting for.

Min Zhao waited for me as I got back to our cave and shucked out of the armor. When I stepped out, my paper underclothes soaked and stained with sweat, she said, “We need to figure out how to divide the squads. Charlie . . .”

“Not now, Max. I just need to sit and eat my human kibble.”

I sat on my cot and nibbled at the tasteless ball of gray playdough.

Zhao shot me a look, and I sighed. “Seriously, Zhao, leave me the fuck alone.”

Looking hurt, she nodded curtly and retreated back down the cave.

+  +  +  +

Shriek came to find us a few days later, once we'd fallen into a schedule of clomping over to the meals and then getting back to our cave. We cleaned it up as best we could, but we were jockeying against every other soldier among a variety of species stuck in the warrens inside the asteroids the Accordance had pulled together to make the yard.

We were still showering with wet napkins and flushing them out the crude space toilet. Welcome to the Trojan point, where clumps of asteroids followed the majestic ringed planet around in the same orbit. And humans flushed their waste and trash out into the same trailing orbit.

“What are we waiting for?” Ken had asked, and no one had an answer for him.

The Accordance had us in storage for now. We'd been saved from Titan, and now we weren't needed as the spaces on the board got rearranged.

“You need to take advantage of this time,” Shriek said. “I can give Amira directions to the human holds. There are places to drink, eat, and enjoy the company of the other humans here. You are no longer on the front wing of the attack, and you need to realize this.”

“We've been fighting for a long time, Shriek. You don't need to lecture us,” I said.

“You barely survived a full evacuation. You need to spin about in the wind and realize that, just for now, being alive is its own amazing moment,” the struthiform said. “Because if you do not, what was the point of trying so hard to stay alive.”

“Ostrich ET's gotta point,” Amira said.

“Alright, armor up,” I said. “We'll go over, check things out.”

“No armor,” Shriek said.

“Rockhoppers don't shuck,” I said.

“Then you stay here, in this damp cave, by yourselves. Well done, humans, you have made staying alive as exciting as a scabby infection.”

But I knew with certainty that leaving armor meant leaving us vulnerable. “Bravo, Charlie, Amira, Ken. Let's go investigate.”

Groans floated through the cave.

“Tomorrow we switch,” I said. “We need people standing by the armor. We will not leave it alone.”

Shriek clicked approvingly and led us off through the tunnels and warrens of the asteroid. “This will be good, my little adopted humans,” he said happily. “Follow along, follow along.”

I was counting the turns back.

Just in case.

Our party came out of the tunnels into a large cavern filled with shanty structures made of leftover plastic panels, recycled paper partitions, all of it rigged with lights clamped onto angular, leaning structures.

People stared out suspiciously from behind peepholes, while in the makeshift alleyways the sound of chatter bounced around.

Due to the low gravity, some of the buildings looked like kids' experimental popsicle-stick buildings. Stories high and bundled together by twine. Yet standing.

Shriek led us through the dense clusters of leaning buildings and into the first floor of a wicker dome with a neon sign that blazed the name from the apex:
THE PARLIAMENT
.

Inside, where it was hazy due to the light gravity, low-­circulating air, and total lack of carbon dioxide scrubbers, people crammed up against tables and the bar.

“What do they serve?” Amira asked. “More Accordance gloop?”

“No,” Shriek said. “Rocket fuel.”

“What?”

“Or,” Shriek said, “more like station-adjustment fuel. I believe there are rockets that use forms of alcohol. Someone, somewhere, managed to confuse the purchase ordering forms for rocket fuel and get alcohol delivered instead. Then the humans handling the loading diverted it.”

“How is it that the alien in our platoon figured out where the bar was?” Ken asked.

“When you know you are going to die, you spend time seeking out finer moments,” Shriek explained.

“Shriek, shut up,” I said. “Before you undo all the goodwill.”

Amira looked around the whole bar. “We don't have much to trade.”

Shriek swept a wing hand toward the bar at the very center, a circular table filled with humans shifting to and from it. “I have opened a tab for the platoon under my auspices.”

Zhao grabbed Shriek's half-metal, half-struthiform head in two hands and kissed the top of the wrinkled, ruined skin. “I've always liked this feathered freak. Haven't I always said I love him?”

“You have never said such a thing,” the alien medic protested.

“Oh, well, remember that Min Zhao says she loves you.
Min Zhao!
Come on, Shriek, say my name!”

Shriek shoved her away with an angry hiss.

Aran Patel and Suqi Kimmirut stared at us as we laughed. “Serves the fucking walking chicken right for ditching us,” Greg Vorhis muttered from behind Zhao.

“Shriek doesn't want to learn our names,” I explained to Suqi. “It upsets him.”

“I think,” Amira said, gently shoving at us, “we should get to the bar before Shriek changes his fickle little mind about that bar tab.”

I managed a seat next to Suqi and listened to the back-and-forth chatter. Aran and Suqi didn't join in, but they took to the simple glasses of clear alcohol quickly enough.

It numbed. It burned. Did what it needed to do. And maybe, if we kept going, we could leave Titan somewhere behind us.

Live for the moment, Shriek had told me. Because that moment is all you'll get.

Five glasses later, I was light-headed enough to realize I'd been carrying something on my back. An invisible weight that melted away, glass by glass.

Suqi was asking something.

“What?” I asked.

“Are you okay?”

I'd been staring at her, I realized. “I'm sorry,” I said. I reached out and touched her knee. Shriek was right. You only ever had that minor moment. The now. The now was all we had. Because there was nothing but an uncertain haze in the future.

Suqi's drawn-in breath jolted me. She yanked backward and stood up from the stool. “Sir . . .” She sounded embarrassed and wounded.

Yeah. Half her squad had died in front of her and someone who outranked her had just grabbed her knee.

“Shit, Kimmirut,” I mumbled. “I'm sorry.”

She shook her head and put the glass down. “I'm going back,” she said.

I stood up to follow her and wobbled. “Ah, fuck.”

I'd never been a hard partier. My parents had been more concerned with dragging me from tent camps and basements to protests. They organized walkouts and strikes, and there was no time for me to be stupid. Not when you were the Harts' son.

Here I was, playing soldier. Pretending to be a hard-­drinking veteran when I was just lucky to have escaped.

But it had been a nice few minutes. The alcohol burning out chains that held me to each of these individuals. Leader. I wasn't a leader, I realized as I stumbled toward Ken. I wasn't raised to be one. Or taught. I'd just lived through a Conglo­merate attack on the moon, and the Accordance used me as propaganda.

All I'd done was survive.

I tried to grab Ken's shoulder. To tell him. But Amira
intercepted me and slipped under my shoulder to steady me. “You don't look so good; let's get you back to the bar to lean on.”

“You were right,” I told her. “I fucked up.”

“Come over here and tell me about it.”

I twisted back around. Ken was in deep conversation with a monstrously tall man who had muscles on his muscles. The kind you handed the big guns to. “Ken has made a friend.”

“It's been hard for him since Boris,” Amira said, pushing me back to the bar. “I think he needs to connect. Maybe let off some steam. After all we went through, we all need to let off some steam.”

I looked at Amira and then back to Ken. “He's gay?”

“You didn't know?”

I shook my head.

“Devlin. Fuck. You don't pay close attention to the people you lead, do you?” Amira handed me another glass of the clear stuff.

“I didn't ask for it,” I said. “Any of it.”

“Yet here we are.”

I squinted at her. “If we all need to let off steam, have you?”

“Day we docked.” Amira sipped at the glass. She didn't say it with satisfaction or relish. There was a sudden grimness to her.

“Do you feel better?” I asked.

“I don't feel worse,” she said.

A group of miners off shift had been watching them. One of them got up from his table. “You assholes are here partying,” he said loudly, “while friends of mine working back on Titan are dead, you fucking collaborators.”

The air in the bar buzzed and snapped with voices that sounded like a set of electrical wires dropped on each other.

Amira let go of her glass and stepped forward. “What did you say?”

The fact that she hadn't sworn left me feeling suddenly sober.

The man had a certain ropiness to him. The muscles that came from spending long hours operating heavy tools deep inside the asteroid. He was covered in a gray dust, and his green eyes seemed ghostly behind all that dust.

“You pieces of shit need to crawl back into that cave you're hiding in,” the miner said. “Stay back in there and cower.”

I walked over. “Hey, man, we just want to drink in peace.”

“Drinks
we
got into this bar. Any of you know how hard that is? Know what's going on back on Earth while you march around for the Accordance? Food riots. Executions. They're standing on our backs for a war we didn't ask for. And here you all are, enjoying a drink on the tab of one of those damn ugly walking chickens. Bunch of fucking useless collaborators.”

“Hey,” I started to say. They were collaborators too, out here working for the Accordance.

Amira hit him in the chin with the heel of her hand. He stood a foot taller than her, but he went back and flopped onto the table, smacking into it and scattering glasses. She was, apparently, not interested in talking any further.

The miner's four friends launched themselves at us. I still had my hands up when I got hit in the face. I should have gone down. I was not a brawler; I'd barely struggled through training, with Ken constantly singling me out.

But something snapped in me. Trying to calm the situation was no longer an option.

And I wanted to fight. I wanted to break something.