by Peter Watts
“Hands-on where?” Brüks wondered. “What bre—”
Sengupta cut him off with an exasperated whistle through clenched teeth, turned to Lianna: “Didn’t I tell you?”
“If you could hold on to your questions for the moment,” Moore suggested, “I’ll be happy to fill you in later.”
“When you won’t be wasting everyone else’s time,” Sengupta added.
“Rak,” Lianna began.
“Why is he even here does anyone expect him to actually do anything other than feel included?”
“Is that what I’m feeling,” Brüks remarked.
“It’s not exactly Dan who’s wasting our time right now,” Lianna pointed out.
Sengupta snorted.
Moore waited a beat before getting back to business. “Are there any weapons that could do this from that range?”
Lianna shrugged. “You’re the spook. You tell me.”
“I’m not talking about baseline tech.”
“This doesn’t look like a dedicated weapon. More likely someone hijacked a bunch of powersats to fire simultaneously at the same spot. Probably a one-shot deal, too; you don’t get that kind of output by staying inside the rated specs. Probably blew the circuits across the whole network, maybe even past their healing threshold.”
“Wouldn’t matter anyway with a twelve-minute lag. They had one chance to anticipate our position and they blew it. Rakshi, are—”
“Quarter-second thruster squirts random intervals between six and twelve minutes. You won’t even feel ’em but those fuckers won’t be forecasting me again.”
Twelve-minute light speed lag, Brüks reflected. From the sun and back. So we’re six light-minutes from the sun, which puts us, puts us …
One hundred eight million kilometers. Close as Venus, if he remembered his basic astronomy.
“—impact our tipping point?” Moore was asking
Lianna nodded. “But not enough to matter. They’re working through the revisions now. Another couple of hours, they say.”
“And what about our tail?”
Sengupta painted invisible strokes in the air. A window opened on the dome: some kind of plasma plot, three red spikes erupting from a landscape of violet foothills. The details wobbled in real time but those peaks stayed constant. Up in one corner arcane annotations nattered on about DISCRIMINANT COMPLEX and INFRARED OCCLUSION and MICROLENSING.
Heatprints of some kind, Brüks guessed. Cloaked, judging from the annotations, but apparently Sengupta had magic fingers.
They were being followed. This just keeps getting better.
“So.” Moore considered. “Two prongs or two players?”
“Prongs, probably. The Bicams think the shot was meant to disable us enough to let them catch up.” Lianna hmmed. “I wondered why they didn’t just throw a missile at us…”
Sengupta: “Maybe they will now their big trip wire went kaput.”
“We could use that,” Moore mused. “Rakshi, how much warning would we get if they fired on us?”
“Fired what you want the whole catalog?”
“Standard ass-cracker. Ballpark’s fine.”
She wiggled her fingers, for all the world as if she were counting on them. “Seven hours eight minutes if the range doesn’t change. Give or take.”
“Then we better get started,” Moore said.
“That is easily the most unenlightening briefing I have ever attended,” Brüks grumbled, pulling himself back into the southern hemisphere. “And given the number of departmental committees I sit on, that’s saying something.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that.” Lianna looked back from a bulkhead handhold. “Come with me. Got something that might help.”
She turned like a fish and sailed through the nearest spokeway. The very sight made Brüks a bit queasy. He followed at his own awkward pace, back through the cube-infested southern hemisphere, into the ball-and-socket that had swallowed her. Lianna dropped easily ahead of him, fending off Coriolis with a push and a kick; she was ten meters down the spoke before she even grabbed a hoop. Fuck those acrobatics: Brüks grabbed his own hoop right off the top, swung around and fumbled his foot into another before he weighed more than a couple of kilograms. He couldn’t be bothered to work out the acceleration of free-falling bodies that gained weight with each meter, but down the length of the spoke he was pretty sure they all ended in splat.
Commons. Another hab identical to those he kept escaping: a two-level propane tank from his grandfather’s backyard barbecue, grown monstrous and pumped full of stale air. The upper level, at least, was less crowded than Repair and Maintenance: chairs, privacy screens, a half-dozen half-emptied cubes, a table. The usual bands of epiphytic astroturf. A framework of pencil-thin scaffolding extended from one wall. The facets of a personal tent—bone yellow, tough as tendons—stretched like latex between those vertices. A couple of sticky chairs faced each other amid the clutter.
Lianna was over by the fabber, rummaging through a freshly popped cube. “Got it.”
The cowl she held up looked a little like a bondage hood for plumbing fetishists, studded with washers and tiny screws that traced a fine grid across the skull. It left only the lower face exposed: mouth, jaw, the tip of the nose. Two especially prominent washers sat embedded over the eyes.
Ambient superconductors. Compressed-ultrasound pingers. A read-write voxel array in black leather.
“My old gaming mask,” Lianna announced. “I thought you could use an interface a little more user-friendly than Rakshi tends to be.”
A gimp hood, for cripples confined to meatspace.
“I mean, since you don’t have the imp—”
“Thanks,” Brüks said. “I think I’ll stick with the smart paint if it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s not just for gaming,” Lianna assured him. “It’s perfectly transparent for ConSensus, and it’s way faster than going through the paint. Plus it’ll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn. Whatever you like.” She closed the cube. “There’s really not much of anything it can’t do.”
He took it from her. The material felt faintly oily in his hands. He turned it over, read the little logo that hovered a virtual centimeter off its surface: INTERLOPER ACCESSORIES.
“It’s completely noninvasive,” Lianna told him. “All TMS and compressed ultrasound, even the opt—”
“I’m familiar with the tech,” he told her. And then: “Thanks.”
“And you know, if you ever are in the mood for gaming, I’m happy to buddy up.”
No mention of his helplessness at Valerie’s hands. No mention of his panic attack. No impatience with his ignorance, no condescension over his lack of augments. Just an overture and a helping hand.
Brüks tasted a mixture of shame and gratitude. I like this woman, he thought.
“Thanks,” he said again, because he didn’t know anything else that fit.
She flashed a goofy smile—“Any time,”—and pointed to something past his shoulder. “I think Jim wanted a word, right?”
Brüks turned. Moore had dropped soundlessly onto the deck behind him. Now he stood there looking vaguely apologetic, the websack on his back bulging with curves and odd angles.
“Should I—”
“I gotta get back to the hold anyway. He’s all yours.” Lianna vanished into the ceiling with a jump and a grab while Moore shrugged the sack off his shoulders and split the seal. Brüks watched him withdraw a roll of the same kind of webbing.
Moore held it out. “For humping gear.”
Brüks took it after a moment—“Thanks. Don’t seem to have brought much gear with me,”—but the Colonel was already back in his rucksack. This time he extracted a long green bottle, turned it in his hands so Brüks could see the label: Glenmorangie.
“Found it in one of the cubes,” he said. “Don’t ask me how it got there. Maybe it was some kind of retailer’s bonus for a big order. Maybe Chinedum just wanted
to give me a doggie treat. All I know is, it’s a personal favorite—”
He set it on the deck, reached back into the sack.
“—and it came with a nice set of glasses.”
He gestured to the sticky chairs. “Pull up a seat.”
Moore cracked the bottle; the smell of peat and wood smoke swirled in the air. “Technically we shouldn’t be playing with open liquids even at one-third gee, but squeezebulbs make everything taste like plastic.”
Brüks held out his glass.
“If I had to guess”—Moore let a wobbling, low-gravity dram escape from the bottle—“I’d say you’re feeling a bit pissed off.”
“Maybe,” Brüks admitted. “When I’m not crapping my pants with existential terror.”
“One day you’re minding your own business on your camping trip—”
“Field research.”
“—the next you’re in the crossfire of a Tran war, the day after that you wake up on a spaceship with a bull’s-eye painted on its hull.”
“I do wonder what I’m doing here. Every thirty seconds or so.”
They clinked and swallowed. Brüks grunted appreciatively as the liquid set the back of his throat to smoldering.
“There’s a risk in being here, certainly,” Moore admitted. “And for that I apologize. On the other hand, if we hadn’t taken you with us you’d most likely be dead already.”
“Do we even know who’s chasing us?”
“Not with any certainty. Could be any number of parties. Even cavemen.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “Sometimes Lianna doesn’t give us enough credit.”
“But why?” A thought occurred to him: “The hive didn’t steal this thing, did they?”
Moore chuckled. “Do you know how many basic patents the Order has its name on? They could probably buy a fleet of these ships out of petty cash if they wanted to.”
“Then why?”
“The hive was classified as a threat—rightly—even when it was stuck in a desert at the bottom of the well. Now we’re on a ship that can take us anywhere from Icarus to the O’Neils.” He regarded his scotch. “The threat level isn’t going anywhere but up.”
“That where we’re going? Icarus?”
Moore nodded. “I don’t think our tail knows that yet. For all they know we could be cutting across the innersys on our way somewhere else. Probably why they’ve held back as long as they have.” He drained his glass. “Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”
Brüks looked at the other man with new eyes. “You some kind of Buddhist, Jim?”
“A Buddhist soldier.” Moore smiled and refilled their glasses. “I like that.”
“Was Icarus part of—the magnifying glass?”
“Not likely. Can’t rule it out, though. It’s in the confidence zone.”
“So why are we going there?”
“There’s that word again.” Moore set his glass down on the nearest cube. “Recon, basically.”
“Recon.”
“The Bicamerals would think of it as more of a—a pilgrimage, I suppose.” His mouth tightened at one corner: a small lopsided grimace. “You remember the Theseus mission.”
It was too rhetorical for a question mark. “Of course.”
“You know the fueling technology it used—uses.”
Brüks shrugged. “Icarus cracks the antimatter, lasers out the quantum specs, Theseus stamps them onto its own stockpiles, boom. All the antiprotons you can eat.”
“Close enough. What matters is that Icarus has been beaming fuel specs up to Theseus’s telematter drive for over a decade now. And lately there’s been some suggestion that something else has been coming down along the same beam.”
“Wouldn’t you expect them to send back samples?”
“Theseus’s fab channel went to a quarantine facility in LEO. I’m talking about the actual telematter stream.”
“I didn’t know that was even possible,” Brüks said.
“Oh, it’s quite possible. It was part of the design, in fact; fuel up, data down. Of course, the state of the art’s still light-years away from being able to handle complex structure, the receiver’s for—very basic stuff. Individual particles, exotic matter, nonbaryonic even. Stuff that might take a lot of energy to build.”
Brüks sipped and swallowed. “What the hell were you expecting to find out there?”
“We had no idea.” Moore shrugged. “Something alien, obviously. And the cost of sticking a condenser on the sun side was negligible next to the mission as a whole. At the very least they could use it for semaphore if the main channel went down. So they stuck one in. In case it proved useful.”
“Which I’m guessing it did,” Brüks said.
Moore eyed the empty glass at his side, as if weighing the wisdom of having set it down. After a moment he reached for the bottle.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, refilling his glass. “Theseus got—decoyed en route, did you know that? Did they ever make that public?”
Brüks shook his head. “There was something about course corrections out past Jupiter, new and better data coming down the pike.”
“I can never keep it straight anymore,” Moore growled. “What we’ve admitted, what we’ve massaged, what we’ve covered up completely. But yes. After Firefall we were all staring at the sky so hard our eyeballs bled. Found something beeping out in the Kuiper Belt—that much you know—sent a squad of high-gee probes to check it out. Sent Theseus afterward, soon as we could slap her together. But she never made it that far. The probes got there first, caught a glimpse of something buried in a comet just before it blew up. All that way to get suckered by a—a decoy, as far as anyone could tell. Glorified land mine with a squawk box bolted on top. So we went back to our radio maps and our star charts and we found an X-ray spike buried in the archives, years before Firefall and never repeated. IAU called it an instrument glitch at the time but now it’s all we’ve got to go on. Theseus is already fifteen AUs out and headed the wrong way but you know, that’s the great thing about an unlimited fuel supply. We feed her a new course and she spins around and heads into the Oort and she finds something out there, tiny brown dwarf it looks like. She goes in for a look, finds something in orbit, starts to send back details and pfsst—”
He splayed the fingers of his free hand, brought them together at the tips, spread them again as if blowing out a candle.
“—gone.”
“I didn’t know that,” Brüks said after a while.
“I’d be worried if you did.”
“I thought the mission was still en route. Nothing on any of the feeds about finding anything.” Brüks eyed his own glass. “So, what was it?”
“We don’t know.”
“But if they’d started sending—”
“Multiple contacts. Thousands. There was some evidence they might have been seeding the dwarf’s atmosphere with prebiotic organics—some kind of superjovian terraforming project, perhaps—but if they ever followed that up we never heard about it.”
“Jesus,” Brüks whispered.
“Maybe something else in there, too,” Moore added, staring at the deck. Staring through it. Staring all the way out to the Oort itself. “Something—hidden. Nothing definitive.”
He didn’t seem to be entirely in the room. Brüks softly cleared his throat.
Moore blinked and came back. “That’s all we know, really. The telemetry was noisy at best—that dwarf has one mother of a magnetic field, shouts over anything you try to send out. The Bicamerals have some amazing extraction algorithms, they were squeezing data out of clips I swore were nothing but static. But there are limits. Theseus went in and it was like, like watching a ship vanish into a fog bank. For all we know she could
still be sending—they left a relay sat behind at least. It’s still active. As long as there’s hope, we’ll keep the feed going. But we’re not getting anything back from the ship itself. Can’t even get a signal through that soup.”
“Except you’re getting a signal right now, you said. Coming in along—”
“No.” Moore held up his hand. “If the system was operating normally we’d have seen it operating, and we didn’t. No handshaking protocols, no explicit transmissions, nobody from up there telling us they were sending something down here. None of the usual bells that are supposed to go off when a package arrives. At most we got a little hiccup that suggests that something might have started coming down, but the checksums didn’t pass muster so move along folks, nothing to see here. Mission Control didn’t even notice it. I didn’t notice it. Wasn’t until the Bicamerals helped me squeeze the archives through their born-again algorithms that I clued in, years after the fact.”
“But if the stream isn’t even running its own protocols, how can it be—”
“Ask them.” Moore jerked his chin toward a vague point beyond the bulkhead, some nexus of Bicameral insight. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“So, something’s using our telematter stream,” Brüks said.
“Or was, at least.”
“And it’s not us.”
“And whatever it is, it’s gone to great lengths to stay off the ’scope.”
“What would it be sending?”
“The Angels of the Asteroids.” Moore shrugged. “That’s what the Bicamerals are calling it, or at least that’s our closest approximation. Probably just their idea of an op code. But I don’t know if they really think anything’s down there. Maybe it’s just a glitch after all. Or some kind of long-distance hack that didn’t work out, and we can learn something about the hackers by studying their footprints.”
“Suppose there is something down there, though,” Brüks said. “Something—physical.”
Moore spread his hands. “Like what? A clandestine mist of dissociated atoms?”
“I don’t know. Something that breaks the rules.”