It was true. In the uncertain lighting, in the drifting haze of particles above the ocean floor, it was hard to see, but as the tiny submersible hummed past one of those upthrusting towers, Jeff could see that its outline was blurred. Like some ancient, sunken wreck at the bottom of an Earthly ocean, the Singer was coated by Muscomimus and by other growths, things like seaweed that writhed and twisted with a life of their own, things like sea fans and bumpier, rougher things like coral growths. And, at closer hand, it was clear that the underlying structure was pitted and gouged and cratered in places, as though it had been subjected to eons of steady, gradual erosion and decay. Here, a needle-sharp spire had crumpled and fallen, dragging with it a lacy network of filaments now tufted with mosslike accretions. There, a low, flat arch, like a bridge a hundred meters across, had snapped in the middle, the span fallen through a delicate tracery of interlocking tubes far below.
The Singer’s song surrounded them…embraced them…
The Manta continued its climb. As Jeff watched that enigmatic city drop away into a glowing, blue-hued mist, he kept expecting…something. A tractor beam out of a science-fiction vid…a sudden bolt of searing energy…a giant hand…anything to indicate that the minute craft passing above this eldritch vista had been seen, had been noticed, by the godlike powers that must dwell within.
Kaminski screamed.
Kaminski
Falling…falling…falling down the endless, empty light-years…
Alone…so alone…so empty…
But there were voices within the empty loneliness…voices…shouts…hollow-ringing echoes…a cacophony…voices…unintelligible…words unknown, alien and harsh…yet each separate, exquisitely painful and throbbing syllable called forth…an image…
He understood so very little of what he saw, though he clutched at each image, each scene, each thought, a drowning man grasping at flotsam.
Stars…a vast and empty sea of blackness, strewn with stars and the wisp-fog veil of twisted nebulae.
His father…vast and terrifying in a drunken rage. “C’mere, you little snot, and get what you deserve!”
A…city? Was it a city…stone pyramids the size of mountains…no, carved from mountains, whole mountains shaped and reworked according to some colossal engineering scheme undreamed of by man…A pink ocean gently lapping the shoreline beneath a reddish sky…and…and men in this alien place…men and women in strange clothing with strangely angled faces, mingling with silently drifting, upright forms, all organic curves and undulations cast in shapes of crystal and plastic…but the red sky is filled with flame and bursting light…and the strange people are screaming and falling in the city streets…
And in the sky, the Ship blotted out the sun. Explosions…savage detonations shaking the mountains…People shrieking as the atmosphere field failed and the air exploded into near-vacuum.
His mother, eyes blackened, nose bloodied, sobbing hysterically on the sofa.
His first day of boot camp. Standing rigidly information. “You…miserable…worms have the unprintable expurgated gall to think you can be Marines…”
Major Garroway seated at the desk at Candor Chasma, on Mars, hard eyes pinning the three Marines to the spot where they stood at attention. “Very well. Corporal Slidell, Lance Corporal Fulbert, Lance Corporal Kaminski. You three have a choice…”
A tattered, faded American flag hung from a five-meter metal pole above the Cydonian encampment on Mars. Someone had used a thin strip of wire to stretch the fly out from the hoist in the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. Still, there was wind enough to ripple the cloth a bit. The fighting with the UN forces was almost over.
Voices…myriad voices…gibbering in the darkness.
Manta One
Between the Cadmus and
Asterias Linea
Europan Ocean
2250 hours Zulu
Kaminski’s shriek brought Jeff up out of the couch so quickly he painfully slammed his head into a section of conduit tubing in the overhead. Kaminski had slumped in his seat, eyes staring, a trickle of blood flowing steadily from his left nostril and smearing on his chin. Cartwright, Hastings, and Wojak had all gathered around him, holding his head, calling to him. Kaminski’s eyes, wide and staring, seemed to focus on something far beyond the barren confines of the Manta’s aft compartment.
There was no corpsman along. Jeff had ordered McCall to stay at the E-DARES and take care of the wounded there. There didn’t seem to be anything to do except pull his PAD from its thigh holster, open it, and call up Chesty with a touch. “Medical emergency, Chesty,” he said. “Give us a hand here.”