Titan's Fall Read online

  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.

  “The Pcholem don’t just live for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They won’t say. But they travel between the stars with time dilation. So, they have seen civilizations rise and fall, wars gutter out. And always they keep swimming between the stars. Long after I finally admit to death, long after you wither, human, this Pcholem will eat the dark between the stars.”

  With that said, Shriek waved at the dark, curving belly above us. He walked toward a black tongue of a ramp ahead of us, and the darkness at the end of it.

  “This is a war we are in. But even in the mud, and death, and shit, and blood, there is beauty, Devlin. Take a moment to come with me and meet a being that may have been navigating the depths of space before your species could even rub two sticks together.”

  We stepped onto the ramp. “Are we supposed to be going aboard?” I asked, looking back. There was no security, no Accordance telling me to get back to where I belonged. Just the dark maw ahead.

  “No one tells Pcholem what to do. They ask for a favor,” Shriek said, marching on ahead of me with purpose. “That seed I told you about, once it grows, the older Pcholem gather around it and bless it with upgrades. Like the nano-ink on your friend, or the armor around you. And with those grafts, it gets the ability to extend itself. They grow, change, adapt, as they find things they want or when they find new technologies that they value and will trade for more things to bolt onto themselves. They’ll come down into a gravity well, though they hate it here.”

  “And this one, it shuttles supplies around for the Arvani?”

  Shriek whistled. A derisive sound. “It decided to do this. To bring more supplies here to help Shangri-La. It must have its reasons to pull itself into such a small package of only a mile long, to slim its fields down until all we see is the core.”

  We walked into the darkness and stopped.

  A second later, a green glow suffused the air around us. The gothic arches and swoops of the interior loomed with ghastly shadows.

  Then the darkness around us faded away, the walls becoming translucent. Outside, carapoids continued plodding to unload cargo alongside other human contractors.

  “I apologize,” a voice said from the darkness above, echoing smoothly around us. “The last time you stood here, you flew from a burning world.”

  “Hello, Starswept,” Shriek said.

  “You know its name.” I was shocked. Shriek refused to learn names.

  “It is one of four in this system,” Shriek said. “I think it has come down here because it is smart. They value life abov
e all else. Particularly their own, for they are ancient and each life is a precious thing. They are down here to help the Accordance, to help humans. They’ll move us around like pieces on a checkerboard. Supply the pieces. But they won’t fight.”

  “They are pacifists,” I said.

  “Of a sort,” Shriek said. “Corner one, and it will do anything it can to live. But it avoids that corner at most costs.”

  “Then why are they part of the Accordance?” I asked loudly. “Why live under Arvani bootheels?”

  The answer came from the halls of the living ship as Starswept replied. “You have seen the Conglomeration’s evil. And Shriek has seen it as well, from this very spot. Is that not a will worth frustrating?”

  Something was coming down a hallway toward them in the dark. The green light finally glanced on the body of a carapoid, again with those strange carvings on its carapace. “I hear,” Starswept said from around us, “that you humans miss your own food, so the last time I was on Earth, I made a point of acquiring something for you.”

  The carapoid’s thorny arms broke free of the powerful armored wings to hand me a wicker basket filled with boxes of chocolates.

  “I’m told,” the Pcholem said, “that this is an appropriate gift between your kind. Is that so?”

  I held the basket as delicately as I could between my powered alien-alloy fingers, trying not to break it. “It is.”

  “I asked Shriek to bring you here,” the Pcholem said. “You killed the Conglomerate abomination that flew to the lunar satellite of your home world. This is a pure act. An act that Pcholem do not forget. We seek to see all such abominations the Conglomeration has made for interstellar travel destroyed. Know this: You are known among Pcholem, Devlin Hart!”

  “I—okay,” I said, stumbling over words. This was getting weird.

  In my earpiece, Amira’s voice suddenly kicked in. “Devlin, I need you to get out here. Now. I found something.”

  4

  I left Shriek holding a basket of chocolate, with orders to get it back to the platoon barracks. Ancient alien ship from beyond the stars or not, Amira finding something meant shit hitting the fan.

  Rifle in hand, riding a hopper out that I’d commandeered to bus me out with a grumpy-as-hell pilot, I headed out for her location.

  “You’re not going to like it,” she said. “Foster’s going to shit.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m way off base. I’m into Accordance zones of control. The nearest base is Needlepoint, one of the humans-not-­allowed places. It’s a jurisdictional mess.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “A weak spot in Conglomeration shielding. A buzz. A small bit of leakage. A mistake. But it’s under the rock. I got them. I fucking got them. They’re here.”

  “You make the call to HQ?”

  There was a pause. “Rubbed their fucking noses in it,” Amira said, no small amount of satisfaction in her voice. “Then phoned in to Accordance channels I’m not even supposed to know exist and gave them coordinates. There is a lot of traffic coming my way.”

  Even as we flared out over her positions, with the two squads ringing her, I could see even more vehicles converging on us in the sky.

  My earpiece started pinging. My helmet filled up with notes from HQ.

  Foster was shitting bricks. Accordance too.

  I jumped out of the hopper when it was still thirty feet up, cracking the ground underneath me as I landed. Somewhere underneath the rock was something. Something Conglomerate.

  Nearby, Accordance forms dropped to the ground as well. The beetle-like forms of several carapoids trundled toward us, massive energy cannons held in their spiky wing hands. Behind them, two squid-like Arvani officers in full armor scuttled over the ground toward us. Their legs kicked up ground-up pebbles in their haste.

  I grimaced as they approached.

  “Fucking told you so,” Amira said on the common channel to everyone arriving.

  + + +

  The Accordance information specialists called it ghost sign. The trace of Conglomerate systems somewhere out there, hidden away. Hinting at the presence of something else on Titan with us.

  In the common room, hours later, shucked down and out of armor, Amira held up a cup of a fruit juice and gave a rare celebratory shout. The nano-ink tattoos on her cheeks glinted in the bio-light, and her eyes fluoresced. “They may have kicked us off the site,” she said. “But at least they’re aware.”

  I placed the basket of chocolates on a coffee table. I pushed one of the boxes toward Suqi. “No tasteless alien food engineered merely to deliver a balanced nutrient mix for human consumption tonight,” I said. This was a party. Or as close as we got in the CPF when deployed.

  Suqi lit up. “Is that real chocolate?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “I’m sorry to drag you all out with me for so long,” Amira said to everyone. “Consider the juice a thank-you.”

  One of the new platoon members, Patel, held up his paper cup of fruit punch. “How the hell did you get this?”

  Amira smiled. “Don’t ask me.”

  “But seriously, this is real,” Patel said, awed.

  Amira gave him a blank look, the smile gone. “What’d I say?” She looked around at the new platoon members. “Newbies. I swear, no one say shit, or I’ll break fingers.”

  Patel laughed, but Ken shook his head. “She’s not kidding.”

  The smiles died away and the celebratory mood with it.

  Ken raised his cup. “Captain Foster is still angry. We are going to be cleaning toilets for weeks, Rockhoppers. My only regret is that we do not have something alcoholic to put in these drinks.”

  I nodded. Ken hadn’t been the one to get the calls from Foster. And the next morning, I had a meeting. To face HQ anger in all its glory. “Something to make the juice kick, yes,” I said. “We could have used Boris.”

  Ken slumped a little bit. “Yes,” he said quietly. I had to lean forward to hear him. “Boris would have figured out how to brew something or smuggle it in.”

  Even the veteran Rockhoppers glanced at each other, not sure who Boris was.

  Ken shook his head and tossed back the fruit juice. “I’m going to turn in,” he said softly.

  Amira walked over to me and jammed an elbow into my side. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.

  “I didn’t think it would hit him that hard,” I whispered.

  “Don’t talk about Boris around him yet. He’s not ready for that.”

  “I’m sorry.” I looked down at my empty paper cup. This was turning into a dud of a party.

  “Also, quit staring at Suqi Kimmirut,” Amira said, her voice even lower. “That would really fuck up morale. You’re not going to climb the CPF chain of command effectively that way.”

  I did my best to look outraged. “Since when are you all rules and regs?”

  “Look, we don’t shit where we eat.” Amira’s eyes flashed silver and black over her brown cheeks.

  “That’s crude,” I protested.

  “Doesn’t make it less true.”

  I changed the subject. “You did good out there. With the Accordance really paying attention, maybe they’ll find something instead of it finding them.”

  “Welcome to the real war,” Amira said. “Still think I’m too obsessed with hunting for Conglomerate ghosts?”

  “Do you think I’d be happy about getting my face chewed off by HQ if I didn’t believe you?” I said.

  “Thank you for doing your job, Lieutenant.” Amira rolled her eyes. But she grabbed my paper cup and refilled it. As close to a thanks as I would ever really get.

  And good enough for me.

  + + +

  Lights out, which meant smacking my shins into the bunk bed in the tiny room next to the common area. My armor loomed
by the head, Ken’s by the foot, and Ken stirred when I hit the double bunks. “Sorry,” I whispered.

  To accommodate the new squads, we’d shifted things around, gotten more cramped. Lots of doubled bunks. I’d given up my quarters to one of the new squads and moved into a room with Ken and Amira until we could get some extra rooms for the platoon.

  Ken started softly snoring again, back to sleep after my jolting the bed.

  I could hear Amira hitting her own bunk. As I lay down and looked up at the metal bars above my face, I thought about her CPF chain-of-command jab. Did she think I was a lifer? I raised the triangle-and-globe tattoo of the CPF on my forearm into the air and squinted in the relative dark at it.

  The thing was something I didn’t want burned into me. I was here because the Conglomeration was worse, because I’d seen them kill on the moon. I’d seen their tools at work in the skies of Saturn.

  I hadn’t talked to my parents since the war started. I wondered what they thought of their son, the Accordance hero. The last time I heard about them, one of the CPF intelligence officers, Colonel Anais, had told me they’d joined an Earth First group demanding that humans not fight the Conglomeration until the Accordance offered independence.

  I could see why they believed that. They hadn’t seen the Conglomeration burn through one of their friends. The pilot, Alexis, wasn’t going to be memorialized by them. They’d never seen a cloud of crickets darken the sky.

  Never would, if I could do anything to stop it.

  But that wasn’t going to stop them from trying to do something crazy back on Earth.

  I rubbed my face. I hated this moment. Lying here, waiting to fall asleep, while my brain began to spin and spin.

  At least the wind wasn’t howling outside, like it had been on Saturn. The refinery we’d taken had never let us sleep due to that constant howl of wind. Left us jumpy, exhausted, making mistakes.

  This bed was pleasant.

  I looked up at my armor. Almost close enough to reach out and touch. Ammo and rifle at its feet. A guardian knight, recharging itself with its chest open wide and waiting for me to slam on in, looking over me in my sleep.