Firefall

by Peter Watts

  Sengupta clicked and ticked and shook her head. “Not a mirror look at the hand the right hand.” She zoomed the feed to make it easy: a ragged line there, from the heel of the palm right up to the webbing between the index and ring fingers. As if something had torn Keeton’s hand apart, right down to the wrist, and glued it back together.

  Brüks glanced at Sengupta, trying to remember: “That’s not on Jim’s—”

  “Of course not that’s the whole fucking point isn’t—”

  A sudden strangled sound from somewhere in the network: Bicameral sounds, a host of complex harmonics that probably held volumes. All Brüks could decipher there was surprise: over at 27E—EXT. CORRIDOR. Eulali was charging up the passageway at full speed. Amina floated transfixed, staring straight at the camera—no, not at the camera. At that telltale shard floating in front of it.

  Everywhere, suddenly: pandemonium.

  The helmet feeds at the shrine were all in frantic motion, swinging like drunken pendulums and sweeping the scenery too fast to make out whatever had scared them. Off down 27E Eulali bounced off a bulkhead (Wait a second; had there even been a bulkhead there a moment ago?) and retreated back toward Amina; another instant and both were gone from third-person view, lost but for the frantic blurry sweep of their suit cams. Sengupta grabbed AUX/RECOMP and spread it front and center across the dome, a top-down view of the shrine and its resident deity and its misbegotten acolytes caroming off solid metal where an open hatchway had gaped only a few moments before. Portia lay quiet as clay along the condenser, its subtle mutilation of Siri Keeton glowing soft and steady as a child’s nightlight: the oily gray tentacle that lashed out toward Chinedum Ofoegbu sprouted from the far bulkhead, and Moore barely had time to push the monk out of the way.

  All in those final furious moments before the feeds went dark.

  Sengupta gibbered faintly to port. Brüks barely heard her. I know what that is, he thought as those last seconds played over in his head. I’ve seen these before, I’ve used these before, I know exactly what this is...​

  Magnetite and chromatophores and crypsis. Cages broken and painstakingly rebuilt. Footprints wiped clean, disturbing alien smells erased, sensors and samplers carefully planted and natural habitat reconstructed along all axes.

  This is a sampling transect.

  He yanked the quick-release buckle on his harness, floated free. “We’ve got to get them out.”

  Sengupta shook her head so hard Brüks thought it might come off. “No fucking way no fucking way we gotta get outta here—”

  He spun above the mirrorball, grabbed her by the shoulders—

  —“Don’t fucking touch me!”—

  —let her go but kept close, face-to-face, mere centimeters between them though she squirmed and turned her face away: “It doesn’t know we’re here, do you understand? You said it yourself, too dumb to track the camera too dumb to know we’re here, they never let us onto Icarus so it’s never seen us. We can take it by surprise—”

  “Roach logic that’s stupid that doesn’t mean anything man we gotta leave—”

  “Don’t leave. Do you hear me? Stay here if you want but don’t you fucking leave until I get back. Boot up the engines if the damn things even work yet, but stay put.”

  She shook her head. An arc of spittle spread from her lips and fanned through the air. “What are you gonna do huh they’re ten times smarter than you and they never even saw it coming—”

  Good question. “In some ways, Rakshi. They’re ten times dumber in others. They know all about quarks and amplituhedrons but they didn’t get nailed by a piece of quantum foam, do you understand? They got nailed by a goddamned field biologist. And that’s a game I know inside out.”

  He cupped her head in his hands and kissed her on the crown—

  —“Don’t leave.”—

  —and leapt into the attic.

  He shot through the rafters like a pinball, bouncing from strut to handhold, knocking aside straps and buckles and glistening blobs of oily water that splattered on contact. Brüks the baseline. Brüks the roach. Give it up, Danny-boy: don’t even try to think, you’ll only embarrass yourself in front of the grown-ups. Just nod and swallow what they feed you. Keep your mouth shut when Sengupta brushes off a discrepancy of a few millimeters as insignificant thermal expansion. Play it safe when Moore points out that Portia, wonder of wonders, grows; point to a puddle of candle wax on the machinery and dismiss it with a shrug. Don’t bother wondering whether the infiltration really stopped at such an obvious border. Forget that Portia computes and pattern-matches, forget its capacity to build mosaics of such intricate resolution that no meatball eye could tell the difference between a naked bulkhead and one sheathed in the thinnest layer of thinking plastic. Don’t let the results of your own half-assed research point you to the obvious: that Portia might coat everything like an invisible intelligent skin, that it’s there between whenever anyone boots up an interface or turns on the goddamn lights: watching everything we do, feeling every sequence our fingers tap against the panels. Just sit back and smile as the adults blunder innocently into an alien cage painted inside the man-made one.

  And when the traps snaps shut and all those pieces come together you can comfort yourself that the grown-ups didn’t see it, either, that these brain-damaged groupthink Bicamerals aren’t so smart after all. You can die smug and vindicated with the best of them in a mass grave swinging around the sun.

  The lamprey gaped ahead and to port, highlighting edges and angles in blue pastel. Three empty spacesuits floated in their alcoves. Brüks considered and dismissed them in an instant: by the time he wriggled into one of those things, everyone on Icarus might be pickled in whatever Portia used for formalin. Up past the ’lock, though, encircling the forward reaches of the docking bay: an array of tools sufficient to cut a ship in two and build it back again.

  Portia could obviously lock its molecules into something like armor: Ofoegbu was not a small man and yet the slime mold—stretched thin across the hatch, drawn tight in seconds—had bounced him back into the compartment without even bending. But Brüks had seen this fucker from the inside, close up. He’d seen the pieces that let Portia talk, and think, and blend in; he had a least a rough idea of how those parts were structured and what they were made of.

  He was pretty sure they couldn’t all be fireproof.

  He yanked a welding laser from its mount and pulled himself aft, flipping off the safety and wrapping the tether around his wrist as he moved. An electric insect whined faintly up toward the ultrasonic as the capacitors charged.

  Down the lamprey’s throat: a glowing semiflexible trachea, reinforced by skeletal hoops at three-meter intervals. Soft padded striations extending the length of the passageway, the ligaments and muscles that moved the tunnel during docking. A biosteel frame hove into view around the curve, a massive square hatch embedded within: Icarus’s main airlock, sealed and solid as a mountain, reassuringly industrial after all this squishy biotecture.

  Pressed into the alloy off to the side, a handle nested within a crimson dimple. Brüks grabbed it, braced himself with one foot to either side; turned; pulled. The dimple turned green around his fist. The airlock sighed open. He grabbed its edge, swung it back, ignored the yellow flashing of nervous smart paint warning against DUAL HATCH DISCONNECT: stared through an open inner hatch into the labyrinth beyond.

  Enemy territory. He had no way of knowing how far it extended. Maybe Portia was looking back at him now.

  He hefted the welder and pushed off.

  No animatics to guide him. No convenient schematics rotating in his head, no bright icon to pinpoint his location. He remembered the way from a dozen suit feeds, from his own solitary voyeurism. He didn’t know how useful those memories might be. Maybe they were as reliable as any roach’s. Maybe the very architecture had changed.

  Gross anatomy would get him to the sanctum: down the longitudinal notochord, right fork past the LEAR hoop, turn right again under the
coolant nexus. If he was lucky, someone would be making sounds to guide him the rest of the way.

  Should’ve grabbed a helmet, he thought, looking backward with perfect clarity. Should’ve brought something with a comm link. An extra laser or two for Jim and the boys.

  Shit shit shit.

  Sounds ahead, sounds to starboard, sounds behind: a glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye as he sailed past some side tunnel that had never made it onto his mental map. He grabbed at a passing rib; the laser sailed on, yanked him forward by the wrist, pulled him off balance and sent him tumbling into the bulkhead. His head cracked painfully against a strut; the laser, jerking at the end of its strap, recoiled through weightless space and punched him in the chest.

  Shouts from behind. A small chorus of wordless, panicky voices. An almost electrical slithering sound.

  Brüks cursed and launched himself back the way he’d come. The forgotten passageway slid toward him; he braked, grabbed, swung around the corner—

  —and nearly ran headlong into a wall congealing before him like a membrane of living clay.

  In the time it took him to stop and gibber to himself—

  —I almost touched it I almost touched it It almost got me—

  —the membrane had transmuted to biosteel, rigid and impenetrable and almost thick enough to muffle the sounds of carnage on the other side.

  Not biosteel, Brüks reminded himself. Not impenetrable.

  Not fireproof.

  He brought up the welder.

  No. Not fireproof at all.

  Portia squirmed where the beam hit, curled and blackened and iridesced like an oil slick. Brüks kept the focus tight, the beam as steady as free fall and nerves could keep it. It burned through, opened a hole that dilated like an eye: stretched elastic tissue split apart, recoiling from the hit. The beam weaved briefly, scoring inert metal on the other side, barely missing one of the figures beyond before Brüks’s killed the circuit.

  And stopped, blinking.

  Taken in during that endless, frozen moment: a tunnel with no deck and no ceiling, its walls buried behind an infestation of pipes and conduits, capped by a T-junction ten meters in. Five spacesuited figures, helmets open, halfway down that length. At least one shattered visor: a cloud of coppery crystal shards following their own small trajectories, some polished as new mirrors, others stained and splattered by a band of crimson mist that arced from a small silvered body turning in midair. Brüks knew who it was even before the face came into view, even before he saw those sightless eyes staring bone-white from a black mask.

  Lianna.

  The others moved under their own power. Amina, making desperately for the faint hope Brüks had just opened before her. Evans, flailing through the carnage in search of a handhold or a brace point, finding only the rag-doll embrace of a corpse entangled in passing. Azagba, the legless zombie: lashing out quick as a striking snake, spinning Amina around by the shoulder, driving the straightened fingers of one bladed hand pistonlike into her open helmet and turning her off in an instant. Another of Valerie’s zombies bounding forward like something arboreal, reaching out after Evans to do the same.

  Brüks fired the torch. The zombie saw it coming and twisted like an eel but she was trapped in midair, purely ballistic, wed to inertia for just that instant too long. The beam bounced briefly off her silver abdomen, flash-burned a slash of cauterized charcoal across her exposed face. Amazingly she stayed on target: burned and half-blind, one eye boiled and burst in its socket, she lashed out and crushed Evans’s throat in passing, bounced off metal viscera, grabbed the nearest handhold without even looking.

  Portia was there, too. It felt the clasp and returned it, wrapped glistening waxy pseudopods around that hand faster than even zombie reflexes could respond. Wisps of white vapor swirled at the seams where suit and slime fused together. The trapped zombie looked down with one dead dancing eye; but when she raised her head again there was something else in that face.

  “Jesus,” she breathed. She doubled over in a great wracking cough, hand embedded in the wall; blood and spittle swirled around her face. “What am I—oh God, what’s—”

  The light faded in her eye; the tics and stutters that reasserted themselves seemed dead even by zombie standards, the twitch of dying cells released on their own recognizance.

  Jim would know your name, Brüks thought.

  Something moved past her shoulder, past the drifting bodies, way down at the T-junction: behind the crack in the closet door, down in the space beneath the bed. Another glint of silver, moving with silent purpose: another figure, rounding the corner.

  Valerie.

  For a moment they stared at each other across a litter of corpses: predator with a look of distracted curiosity, prey because he simply couldn’t look away. Brüks didn’t know how long the moment lasted; it might have gone on forever if Valerie hadn’t lowered her faceplate. Maybe that was an act of mercy, the breaking of a headlight paralysis that would have kept him frozen right up until she tore him limb from limb. Maybe she just wanted to give him a sporting chance.

  Brüks turned and fled.

  Coolant clusters. Service tunnels. Sealed hatches leading to far-off places he’d never explored or long-since forgotten. He passed them unseeing, let instinct steer the meat while his global workspace filled with predator models and pants-pissing terror. He was passing a tertiary heat sink and he could see Valerie closing through the back of his head; he was at the Cache Hatch and he could see her lips drawn back in that gleaming predatory grin; he was fleeing up the notochord and he could feel her muscles bunching for the final killing blow.

  In the lamprey now: No time to stop, no chance to bar the way, you even think about dogging that hatch and she’ll be on you before you even turn around. Don’t look back. Just keep running. Don’t think about where, don’t think about when: thirty seconds is a lifetime, two minutes is the far future, it’s the moment that matters, it’s now that’s trying to kill you. A voice ahead, as panicky as the one inside, echoing down the throat and getting louder: all shit shit shit and docking clamps and numbers going backward—but Don’t worry about that, either, that’s for later, that’s for ten seconds from now if you’re still alive and—

  The Crown.

  End of line. Nowhere else to go, no more time to buy. All the future you have, right now.

  Nothing left to lose.

  Brüks turned and stared back down the throat; Valerie stood there, casually braced against the lip of Icarus’s inner hatch, looking up through the mirrored cyclops eye of her helmet. She might have been standing there for hours, just waiting for him to turn around and notice her.

  Now that he had, she leapt.

  He brought up the laser and snarled. Valerie sailed toward him; Brüks could have sworn she was laughing. He fired. The beam scattered off the reflective thermacele of the vampire’s spacesuit, shattered into myriad emerald splinters bright as the sun. They scorched split-second tracks on random surfaces before Valerie darted out of the way.

  Brüks lunged for the hatch controls, grabbed the lever, fumbled. The Crown clenched her front door a fraction, relaxed it again. Valerie closed for the kill, arms outspread. Somehow he could hear her: a mere whisper, impossibly audible even over Sengupta’s panicked chanting on comm. A voice as clear as if she were murmuring at his shoulder, as if she were right inside his head:

  I want you to imagine something: Christ on the Cross...​

  Electricity sang, deep down in his bones. Synapses snapped like blown circuits. Brüks’s flesh hummed like a tuning fork, every muscle thrown instantly into tetanus. Wet warmth bloomed at his crotch. He couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, could barely even breathe. Some distant part of him worried briefly about that last fact, then realized that it probably didn’t matter. Valerie was bound to kill him long before he had a chance to suffocate.

  In fact here she came now, reaching out—

  —and careening away, struck from behind. Jim Moore loomed up in
her stead, his face utterly reptilian, eyes dancing frantic little jigs in the dark cavern of his open helmet. He pushed Brüks into the bay, slammed the airlock shut behind them both; his fist came down on Brüks’s chest not quite hard enough to crack the sternum through the suit. Something broke in there, though; something unlocked, and Brüks was sucking back great tidal washes of recycled air. By the time he stopped gasping Moore had webbed him into an empty alcove for safekeeping, an occupied suit next to empty ones.

  There were plenty of those.

  The Crown was a symphony orchestra, warming up: the creak and groan of stressed metal, the distant cough of awakening engines, the random percussion of buckles clanking against bulkheads pushed into grudging motion. Sengupta’s vocals, crackling out panicked numbers. A rogue droplet of oil floated in place while the ship shifted around it, splashed against Brüks’s cheek with a whiff of benzene.

  From somewhere very far away, the roar of an ocean.

  Moore’s hands brought up an interface on the bulkhead. His fingers played those controls with inhuman precision. A window opened to one side, an exterior feed rendered in smart paint: a smear of ragged blue light lashing back and forth, the lamprey torn free and recoiling into some distant burrow. A play of stars and shadow and knife-edged geometries blocking out the heavens. Dim red constellations flashed along wire-frame gantries: cliffs of black alloy stretched far and wide to their own horizons.

  Valerie’s helmet, blocking the view. Fists pounding against the hull, any possible sound drowned out by the vibration of the engines. Sunrise, sudden and scalding: the whole universe burst into flame as the Crown of Thorns lumbered out of eclipse. Somewhere Sengupta was cursing; somewhere else, thrusters fired. For one brief instant Valerie was a black writhing shadow against a blinding sky: then burst into flame an instant before the pickup fried.

  Moore’s fingers never stopped dancing.

  It took endless seconds for the backup camera to kick in. By the time it did they were back in hiding, huddled in Icarus’s shadow, the starless black silhouette of the radiator spire sliding past to port. A gentle hand began to nudge Brüks down against the bottom of the alcove, mass-times-acceleration pulling him out against the webbing. The dim zodiac of the array’s streetlights receded slowly to stern—but other lights ignited back there as he watched, a pentagon of hot blue novae flaring silently in the darkness. It was only then that another silence registered: Moore had stopped talking to the wall, stilled the machine-gun staccato of his fingers against metal. Brüks could barely make out a fuzzy shape at the edge of vision; it took a Herculean effort to move his eyes even a fraction of a degree, to bring the Colonel into focus. He never did succeed completely. But he squeezed enough from his peripheral vision to see the old warrior standing still as stone against the deck, one hand half-raised to his face. He thought he heard a soft intake of breath caught halfway, and decided to call it the sound of a returning soul.