Eclipse Phase- After the Fall

by Jaym Gates

  Sváfa returned her attention to Ólafsson. The mission director was white. He’d lost most of his blood through a gaping wound in his chest cavity. The wound had the weird, eaten look characteristic of nanotrauma—as if flesh, bone, and organs had been dissolved by acid, but without the chemical burns or paths of puckered tissue runnels of acid would leave. The gradue of loose particulate and undifferentiated bodily fluids typical of nanotrauma had largely been scraped away by the doctor bot during its autopsy, but images from the crime scene before they’d moved the body showed it clearly.

  “No attempt at resuscitation, I take it?” she said. It wasn’t exactly a question.

  “We didn’t find him nearly soon enough,” Antigua said.

  “The stack?” she asked. She started to turn Ólafsson over.

  “Disassembled,” said Ragnarsson, helping her.

  Indeed. The nanobots, wherever they’d come from, had eaten through the chest cavity, up into the neck, and come out the nape. Where Ólafsson’s cortical stack ought to be was a ten centimeter-wide hole. Something was unusual, though. It was nanotrauma, but not what she’d have expected from, say, a subverted disassembler swarm. She peered closely at the wound, magnifying her vision again.

  “Do you have any bush robots on the gear manifest?” she asked.

  “Plans only,” Antigua said, “None instanced. Most of what the researchers use out there is imaging equipment—minimally invasive.”

  Minimally provocative, she might as well have said. The research station occupied a junction in the network of precisely cylindrical, uniformly white ice tunnels that formed a sprawling, three-dimensional lattice beneath Iapetus’s thirteen kilometer-high equatorial ridge. The tunnels connected what remained of the most massive TITAN project yet discovered—an apparent attempt to convert much of the mass of Iapetus into a planet-scale computer. Exploring the nervous system of a TITAN artifact required a host of precautions. The research station was designed to emit as little electromagnetic energy as possible. The researchers kept radio silence outside of it, and they avoided physically disturbing the tunnels beyond laying down lighting strips.

  Sváfa straightened, zoomed out to normal vision. “The pattern of nanotrauma isn’t consistent with a swarm or a hand tool. The doctor bot didn’t note this?”

  Januszczak finally spoke up. “It’s a bot. That’s why we have you. What do you think it means?”

  Sváfa scowled, studied the ceiling. “Something put a fist full of fractal branching digits through his chest and took apart enough of his vital organs to kill him.”

  Ragnarsson grunted. “So what’s our murder weapon?”

  She considered. “I don’t know. You don’t have a bush robot, and I’ve never heard of fractal digits as an implant on a biomorph. For now, it’s an open question. When was his last backup?”

  “Three months ago,” Antigua said, “There aren’t any ego bridges on site.”

  “Never know what we might dig up, down here,” Ragnarsson said.

  “Of course,” Sváfa said, “Containment protocol.” Good in a TITAN attack, but bad during a murder investigation.

  Januszczak said, “Are we sure the stack isn’t hidden somewhere?”

  “The doc bot found a quantity of near-molecular diamond dust consistent with a cortical stack in the gradue collected from under the corpse,” Antigua said.

  Sváfa pulled the sheet back over Ólafsson’s vacant-eyed morph. “Let’s assume for now the victim wasn’t carrying a stack-sized lump of diamond for some other reason,” she said.

  Januszczak frowned. “I want to review the doc bot logs in any case.”

  “Fine,” Sváfa said. She’d been here half an hour and she already resented Fleet looking over her shoulder. They had a clear interest, though. The research station belonged to the Science Ministry, but security of the moon as a whole fell to Fleet. That Sváfa quietly freelanced for Firewall potentially complicated relations even further. “I think we’re otherwise done here. Let’s have a look at the crime scene.”

  “It’s out in the tunnels,” Ragnarsson said.

  —

  A featureless tunnel, white and even as porcelain, led from the airlock of the research station. Bluish-white strip lighting installed by the research team glared from the tunnel floor, casting their shadows on the ceiling. The researchers had chosen a major tunnel junction to site the station. Januszczak, bringing up the rear behind Sváfa and Antigua, played out a thin comm tether behind them. Through it they could contact Ragnarsson, who’d remained in the hab module. Among themselves they kept radio silence, communicating instead via suit-mounted laser links. They’d gone armed, but neither this nor knowing that Fleet’s marines had patrolled these tunnels for months and found nothing but frozen corpses reassured Sváfa.

  When they’d gone about six hundred meters, the airlock receded to a tiny, gray dot, then to nothing. Sváfa, looking ahead and then behind, felt as if she were looking into a pair of mirrors set opposite one another. There was no sound in the vacuum of the corridor. Only their tacnet maps indicated distance from the station. Sváfa was accustomed to the yawning openness of space, the dizzying sensory disconnect that came with motion in orbit, the closeness of asteroid warrens, but nothing had prepared her for the combination of claustrophobia and spatial disorientation brought on by a long walk in Iapetus’s tunnels.

  [It opens into a circuit junction in half a klick,] Antigua said, [We’ll have to climb up two levels.]

  [Why did Ólafsson go out alone?] Januszczak asked.

  [Wait ‘til you see what he found,] Antigua said, [The video in our report isn’t as impressive as the reality.]

  They were headed toward an unusual junction in the circuitry. Even as Antigua sent the message, Sváfa caught the shimmer of light reflected off what must have been the largest mass of exposed TITAN circuitry she’d yet seen.

  Januszczak said, [Careless. Ólafsson’s backup will have to go through psych before he’s re-certified.]

  One doesn’t speak ill of the dead, Sváfa thought. But their backups are another matter.

  They reached the junction. The bottom quarter of the tunnel was still nearly opaque, white ice, but the other three quarters were circuitry. Until now they’d bounded along, using their hands as well as their feet to push themselves forward and avoid hitting their heads on the ceiling. Antigua’s lithe bouncer morph had an easy time of this. For Sváfa and Januszczak in their hazer bodies, the movements came less readily. Now they slowed their pace, shuffling cautiously.

  The TITAN circuitry substrate formed dense whorls all around, the clear-as-glass ice etched in seemingly infinite layers that accumulated into patterns hurtful to the eye and brain, even as their crystalline beauty caught the light, entrancing Sváfa. Looking at the substrate made her slightly nauseous, and yet it also bore a weird and deeply uncomfortable familiarity. Sváfa realized the effect had an unsettling similarity to using her async talents.

  They entered a vaulted chamber, walled on all sides with glittering substrate. Only a few columns of the rougher, opaque ice climbed to the ceiling, and curving paths of it crisscrossed the floor. The chamber was perhaps fifteen meters wide and three times that in height, although it was difficult to tell, difficult to look upward at all without feeling nauseous, and Sváfa kept her eyes to the even white of the pathway as much as possible. They had to shuffle even more cautiously to avoid overshooting a step on the path and landing on the fragile circuitry—or in the five meter-wide shaft at the center of the room.

  [It is rather magnificent,] Januszczak said, [What do they think it is?]

  [You know the going theory on how the whole thing worked, yes?] Antigua replied.

  [Yes.]

  [They think the shaft is the terminus of one of the heat exchanges,] Antigua said.

  If “heat” were a fair word. But it was. Sváfa checked her suit’s readout. The
chamber was a few degrees warmer than the surrounding tunnels. Not enough to melt ice, but enough to yield a trickle of power to the trillions of thermoelectric couples theorized to have powered the matrioshka brain. Theorized, only, though: the actual circuitry devoured itself when the matrioshka shut down, leaving only a fine grit in the circuit pathways and the icy substrate itself, tantalizing as a fossil trilobite.

  The fossil is not the mechanism, she reminded herself. She’d messaged her Firewall contact, Tara Yu, when she found out she’d be going to Iapetus. So far this looked to Sváfa like a murder—and not of an unfamiliar type. The claustrophobic white uniformity of Iapetus’s tunnels and the cramped quarters in which the research team lived were a recipe for depression, withdrawal, and sudden violence. But Yu had let her in on more of what Firewall knew about Iapetus: the human inhabitants converted to exsurgent drones, then abandoned to starve when their goal here, whatever it had been, was completed. Every centimeter of these tunnels had been cut by once-human colonists. She’d never been so close to the enormity of the Fall.

  Januszczak edged closer to the shaft, close enough to set Sváfa’s incisors on edge. [Wouldn’t there be some type of cabling to exploit the temperature difference between here and the mantle?] he asked.

  [If transhumans designed it,] Antigua said, [And there might be cabling. Deeper. The theory is that closer to the surface, the entire system ran on waste heat.]

  [Without thermocouple arrays?]

  Antigua shrugged. [Any of the science team will be happy to go on about their pet theories. Really, they know nothing.]

  Sváfa was still looking at the ground. [Let’s keep moving?]

  [This way,] Antigua said. The researchers had installed a set of rungs on a section of white ice wall. The rungs climbed two thirds of the way up the wall before stopping at another horizontal corridor. [Careful,] Antigua said as she began hoisting herself, grasping the rungs with both feet and hands. [You don’t want to fall, even in this gravity.]

  Sváfa kept her eyes on the wall as she climbed. She had a weird urge to reach out and touch the TITAN circuitry substrate. It was in arm’s reach. She wondered what it would tell her.

  Nothing good, she suspected, coming back to herself. Sváfa had only met one other async while working for Firewall—a xenoarcheologist named Ngembe. He, too, possessed a talent for reading objects; he called it “grokking.”

  “Things call to you before you ever apply your mind to them, don’t they?” Ngembe had asked her.

  “That’s not a rational idea,” she’d answered him; she’d thought him mad. Now, though, her talent—her infection—nagged at her to probe the TITAN circuitry. It was easy to resist, but the gnawing sense of something other pushing her toward the burnt-out workings couldn’t be put aside.

  At the top of the ladder, they again found themselves in a white corridor. Where previously the white hallways had been disorienting, Sváfa now found them positively comforting.

  [You’re almost there,] Ragnarsson messaged.

  They came to a T junction. To the left, more identical corridor. To the right, the lighting strips ran for about fifty meters before ending. The smooth white of the corridor dimly reflected their lights for some distance before receding into blackness.

  In the center, the crime scene. Malformed ice, melted by an agonizer on roast mode and then refrozen again just as quickly, ran in one long trail for about ten meters down the floor of the corridor to the left. In one spot, it had crossed a lighting strip, burning it out. A shorter trail of malformed ice ran just a few meters along the floor.

  Sváfa knelt and released a nanoswarm directly onto the floor. Unable to fly in the vacuum, they’d spread slowly, but they were her only option for nanoscale detection. Her nanodetector, relying as it did on intake of air, would be useless here.

  [Not a very good shot,] Januszczak observed, [if he had to track it along the ground that far.]

  [He was a civilian,] Antigua said.

  [He didn’t do militia service?]

  [No,] Sváfa messaged, memory augmentations bringing Ólafsson’s file swiftly to mind. She had a dossier for everyone in the station, the product of two days’ stim-fueled research during her flight to Iapetus. [He opted for civil instead.]

  She pointed down the dark corridor. [Where does that go?]

  [Unexplored,] Antigua said.

  They were three, all armed and combat trained, yet the darkness beyond terrified her. She suppressed a shudder, activated her emotional dampers. It wouldn’t do for a detective of the Commonwealth Science Police to be shaking in her vacsuit. Iapetus was dead, was it not?

  She imaged the nearby ice using t-rays and lidar but found nothing other than ice and more circuit substrate beyond the walls.

  After several minutes, Thora, Sváfa’s muse, reported that the nanoswarm had sampled the whole area. [Particulate matches on vacsuits and gear worn/carried by Agent Januszczak, Officers Antigua and Ragnarsson, Director Ólafsson, and yourself.]

  [No one else?] she asked. Ragnarsson and Antigua had gone looking for Ólafsson and found the body. They’d done so at a suggestion from Nilsen, Ólafsson’s assistant, who’d found the thermal exchange and expected Ólafsson would be working there alone, documenting it. And Januszczak had arrived with her, dropped by a Fleet shuttle at the head of the Murmansk Shaft ice elevator atop the equatorial ridge.

  [No one,] Thora said.

  Sváfa said, [Someone’s run a cleaner swarm over this area.] No exsurgent bogeymen from the depths of Iapetus were involved, unless they were unusually fastidious.

  Januszczak said, [You’re sure?]

  [It’s difficult to say when a given particle was deposited here, but if anyone was here other than Ólafsson himself prior to Antigua and Ragnarsson finding him, they’d have left a trace.] She turned to Antigua. [Can you and Ragnarsson account for your vacsuits at the time the crime was committed?]

  [Yes,] she said. [We had them on. Regs on an SPD-protected site in a vacuum environment: suits on when you’re not in your bunk.]

  Sváfa knew that regulation. It wasn’t always enforced, but here they ran a tight ship. She took a sample of the gradue, just to be thorough. [We should get back,] she said.

  As they walked, Januszczak asked, [Who has access to cleaner swarms?]

  [Almost everyone,] Antigua said. [The hab module crawls with them.]

  —

  Sváfa set about interviewing the research team. She’d eliminated Antigua and Ragnarsson as subjects. They and five of the science team had all been in the hab module’s common area at the time of the murder. The module’s radio emissions proofing meant none of them could have committed the crime using a teleoperated robot. And for the scientists, professional rivalry was an unlikely motive. Their purpose was to investigate Iapetus’s gross physical properties, and though they’d been led by Ólafsson, a materials scientist, they all came from distinct fields.

  This left three suspects.

  Magda Nikkanen, programmer-archeologist and Titan Tech academic, had been absent from the common area and lacked a convincing alibi. She claimed to have been in her bunk, but spime records neither proved nor disproved this.

  Oleg Nilsen, Ólafsson’s assistant (and like Ólafsson a materials scientist), had also been absent—and he had a motive. Nilsen had led the tunnel crawl that initially discovered and documented the heat exchange shaft near the crime scene. Several days after the discovery, Nilsen and Ólafsson argued bitterly and, within a few days, word arrived that Nilsen would be transferred off the team.

  Finally, there was Mick Keegan, ice mining engineer, charged with analyzing stresses in the ice, preventing damage to the circuitry, and digging out if any cave-ins occurred. The TITANs apparently never intended for the matrioshka to last. They knew that faults in the ice would eventually degrade the machine’s performance beyond what even their inhuman technology could achiev
e. Iapetus’s interior had been reshaped for limited use, and now it was falling apart. Every team sent down had a mining engineer. Scientists dying to get their fingers into Iapetus were a dime a dozen, but ice mining engineers on Titan had no shortage of less hazardous work. The Science Ministry had scouted Keegan from off world.

  But Keegan had done more than engineering. When they found the body, Antigua and Ragnarsson immediately searched the station for weapons. They found none, but they did discover that Keegan had hidden away several slabs of TITAN circuitry substrate, crated and prepped to smuggle off the moon.

  —

  Sváfa started with Keegan. The engineer was ruggedly handsome, with unkempt black hair and a decidedly un-Titanian rakishness to his gear.

  Since her infection had manifested, Sváfa could see colors and textures rise and fall in a person’s face during conversation—even more so if the person were experiencing stress or strong emotion. She’d already been a highly trained kinesicist, but the infection afforded a higher level of certainty. She often suppressed this talent. The interplay of expression, muscle movement, blood circulation and … call it “probability” … in a speaking human face could be almost physically painful, as if the thing in her hated what it sensed. Nor was this occasional antipathy limited to transhumans; she often felt the same toward uplifts, even neo-octopi and neo-avians, whom most humans found closed and alien. It made it difficult at times to play the hard-nosed investigator.

  “They call you the Anarchist. You’re from Kronos Cluster?”

  He chuckled, smiled jaggedly. She hadn’t known they made bouncers with freckles … or crooked teeth. “Let’s not tarry, love,” he said, “I’m from Phelan’s, not Kronos, and I’m not an anarchist—I’m a capitalist.”

  By which he meant “criminal,” Sváfa gathered. “You’re glib for a man likely to serve a few decades in simulation.”

  “Commonwealth justice is a lamb compared to most.”

  “You’re also a talented engineer to be running a confidence scheme over chunks of ice,” she said.