by Peter Watts
Maybe the zombie hadn’t known that, though. Maybe the homunculus behind the eyes had rebooted just in time to see what was coming, maybe it somehow wrested control back from all those shortcuts and back alleys and tried one last-ditch Hail Mary with nothing left to lose. Maybe Valerie had let it, watching, amused; maybe even played along, pretended to count each falling blade while her dinner turned the deck into a haphazard shag rug.
Maybe the zombie hadn’t even cared. Maybe it had just lain down on command and waited to be eaten. Maybe Valerie had just wanted a tablecloth.
The zombie’s throat had been slashed. It lay spread-eagled on its stomach, naked, face turned to the side. The right buttock had been carved away; the quads; one long strip of calf muscle. There was flesh above and flesh below: in between, a flensed femur connected the lower leg to the torso, socketed into the broad scraped spatula of the pelvic girdle.
There was very little blood. Everything had been cauterized.
“You never checked it out,” Brüks said.
Sengupta zoomed the view: the gory table setting expanded across the window. Blades of grass grew to the size of bamboo shoots; tooth marks resolved like jagged furrows on bared bloody bone.
Some kind of wire snaked through the grass—barely visible even at this magnification—and disappeared beneath the half-eaten corpse.
“Found eight wires don’t know what for exactly but that thing wasn’t exactly Secret Santa you know? Carnage said probably booby traps and Carnage is probably right for once. She wanted us to see this.”
“How do you know?”
“This is the only feed she didn’t break.” Sengupta waved the recording off the bulkhead.
“So you jettisoned the habs.”
She nodded. “Too risky to go in too risky to leave ’em there.”
Another feed abutted the first, a view down the truncated spoke that had once led to Valerie’s lair. It ended after only twenty meters now, in a pulsing orange disk flashing UNPRESSURIZED back up the tunnel at two-second intervals. Just like the Commons spoke opposite, cut loose in turn to keep the vectors balanced.
He remembered downhill conversations, the sound of glasses clinking together. “Shit,” he said.
“It’s not like they’re not all the same you know they all got the same plumbing and life support.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not like we’re gonna run out of food or air what with everybody being dead and—”
“I fucking know,” Brüks snapped, and was surprised when Sengupta fell immediately silent.
He sighed. “It’s just, the only half-decent moments I’ve had on this whole bloody trip were in Commons, you know?”
She didn’t speak for a moment; and when she did, Brüks couldn’t make out the words.
“What did you say?”
“You talked to him down there,” she mumbled. “I know that but it doesn’t matter even if it was still here he’s not. He just sits up in the attic and runs those signals over and over like he never even left Icarus...”
“He lost his son,” Brüks said. “It changed him. Of course it changed him.”
“Oh yah.” She barely spoke above a whisper. Something in that voice made Brüks long for the trademark hyena laugh. “It changed him all right.”
No excuses left. Nothing else to do.
He ascended into the Hub, breached its sky into the guts beyond: hissing bronchioles, cross-hatched vertebrae, straight-edged intestines. He moved like an old man, free fall and residual paralysis and the spacesuit he’d scavenged from the cargo-bay airlock all conspiring to take him to new depths of clumsiness. Up ahead, the paint around the docking hatch splashed the surrounding topography with the usual diffuse glow.
This is where the shadows come, Brüks realized. Every other corner of the Crown is bright as a swimming pool now that the Hold’s off-limits, now that Valerie’s cave has been cut loose. Shadows don’t have a chance back there.
They’ve got nowhere else to go...
“Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Jim Moore turned slowly in the rafters, just past the airlock. The lines of his face, the edges of limbs moved in and out of eclipse.
“This is living?” Brüks tried.
“This is the waiting list.”
He thought he might have seen a smile. Brüks pushed himself across the attic and pulled a welding torch from the tool rack: checked the charge, hefted the mass. Jim Moore watched from a distance, his face full of shadow.
“Uh, Jim. About—”
“Enemy territory,” Moore said. “Couldn’t be helped.”
“Yeah.” A fifth of the world’s energy supply, in the hands of an intelligent slime mold from outer space. Not a cost-benefit decision Brüks envied. “The collateral, though...”
Moore looked away. “They’ll make do.”
Maybe he was right. Firefall had slowed Earth’s headlong rush to offworld antimatter; a power cord stretched across a hundred fifty million kilometers was far too vulnerable for a universe in which godlike extraterrestrials appeared and vanished at will. There were backups in place, fusion and forced photosynthesis, geothermal spikes driven deep into the earth’s crust to tap the leftover heat of creation. Belts would be tightened, lives might be lost, but the world would make do. It always had: the beggars and the choosers and the spoiled insatiable generations with their toys and their power-hungry virtual worlds. They would not run out of air, at least. They would not freeze to death in the endless arid wastes between the stars.
For Moore so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Twice.
“Anyway,” Moore added, “we’ll know soon enough.”
Brüks chewed his lip. “How long, exactly?”
“Could be home in a couple of weeks,” Moore said indifferently. “You’d have to ask Sengupta.”
“A couple—but the trip down took—”
“Using an I-CAN running on half a tank, and keeping our burns to an absolute minimum. We’re on purebred beamed-core antimatter now. We could make it to Earth in a few days if we opened the throttle. We’d just be going too fast to stop when we got there. End up braking halfway to Centauri.”
Or somewhere in between, Brüks thought.
He looked across the compartment. Moore pinwheeled slowly through light and shadow and looked back. This time the smile was as unmistakable as it was cryptic.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“About...?”
“We’re not headed for the Oort. I’m not taking you away on some misguided desperate search for my dead son.”
“I—Jim, I didn’t—”
“There’s no need. My son is alive.”
Maybe six months ago. Maybe even now. I suppose it’s possible. Not in six months, though. Not after the telematter stream winks out and leaves Theseus to freeze in the dark.
Not after you cut him adrift...
“Jim...”
“My son is alive,” Moore said again. “And he’s coming home.”
Brüks didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “How do you know?”
“I know.”
Brüks pushed the torch with one hand into the other, felt the solid reality of mass and inertia without: the fragility of aching body parts within. “Okay. I, um, I should take some samples—”
“Of course. Sengupta and her invading slime mold.”
“Doesn’t cost anything to check it out.”
“ ’Course not.” Moore reached out a casual hand, anchored himself to an off-duty ladder. “I take it the suit’s a condom.”
“No point in taking chances.” Watching Moore in his yellow paper jumpsuit, the Colonel’s naked hand clenched on untested territory.
“No helmet,” Moore observed.
“No point in going overboard, either.” If Portia ran on ambient thermal, it wouldn’t be getting enough joules from the bulkhead to sprout any pseudopods on short notice. Besides, Brüks felt stupid enough as it
was.
Under Moore’s bemused gaze he positioned himself to one side of the hatch and dialed the beam down to short focus. Smart paint sparked and blistered along the lip of the hatch. Nothing screamed or recoiled. No tentacles extruded from the metal in frantic acts of self-defense. Brüks scraped a sample from the scored periphery of the burn. Another from the untouched surface a few centimeters farther out. He moved systematically around the edge of the hatch, taking a sample every forty centimeters or so.
“Will you be using that on me?” Moore wondered behind him.
I should. “I don’t think that’s necessary just yet.”
Moore nodded, his face impassive. “Well. Change your mind, you know where I am.”
Brüks smiled.
I wish I did, my friend. I really wish I did.
But I don’t have a fucking clue.
Out of the attic into the Hub.
Looks like the Hub, anyway. Could be a lining. Could be a skin.
Through the equator, from frozen north to pirouetting south. Try not to touch the grate on your way through.
Could be watching me right now. I could be swimming through an eyeball.
Don’t be an idiot, Brüks. Portia had years in Icarus; you were there for three weeks. Not nearly enough time to grow enough new skin to—
Unless it didn’t grow new lining, unless it just redistributed the old. Unless it spent all those years building up extra postbiomass as an investment against future expansion.
It couldn’t just ooze through the front door and down the throat without anyone noticing. (Coasting between an eyeball and an iris now: one open, one shut, both silver. Both blind.) No kinetic waste heat, no mass alarms—
Unless it moved slowly enough to blend in with the noise. Unless it happens to know a little more about the laws of thermodynamics than we do...
Down the spoke, putting on weight, staring hard at the gloved fingers clenched around their handhold. Alert for subtle mycelia threading between suit and stirrup. Eyes open for any bead of moisture there, some meniscus of surface tension that might belie a film in motion.
You’re being paranoid. You’re being an idiot. This is just a precaution against a remote possibility. That’s all this is.
Don’t go off the deep end. You’re Dan Brüks.
You’re not Rakshi Sengupta.
You only made her.
He heard her moving in the basement as he fed samples into the holding tray. He tried to ignore her foot taps and mutterings as the scrapings cycled through quarantine, as he gave in to reawakened hunger and wolfed down whatever the lab hab’s bare-bones galley disgorged, swallowing not quite fast enough to stay ahead of the Spirulina aftertaste.
Finally, though, he gave in: pushed from above by Moore’s matter-of-fact dissonance, pulled from below by Sengupta’s compulsive scuttling. He climbed down out of the lab, maneuvered around the giant seedpod obstruction of Sengupta’s tent beside his own. The pilot was running ConSensus on the naked bulkhead between two impoverished bands of astroturf. The Crown of Thorns rotated there in animatic real time, two of her limbs amputated at the elbow. We keep going at this rate and we’re going to be three spacesuits and a tank of O2 by the time we get home, Brüks mused.
A dot on the map: MOORE, J. floated safely distant in the attic. Other readouts formed a sparse mosaic across the bulkhead; Brüks couldn’t understand them all but he was pretty sure that one or two involved the blocking of intercom feeds.
She turned as his feet hit the deck, stared expectantly at his lapel.
“Jim,” he said.
“Yah.”
“You said he’d—changed...”
“Don’t have to take my word for it you saw it yourself he’s been changing ever since we left LEO.”
Brüks shook his head. “He was only—distracted before. Preoccupied. Never delusional.”
Sengupta ran her fingers down the wall; file listings flew by too fast for Brüks to make out. “He was transmitting into the Oort did you know that? Even before we left Earth he broke the law hell he helped make that law after Firefall nobody else could get away with it but man, he’s the great Jim Moore and he was—sending messages...”
“What kind of messages?”
“To Theseus.”
“Well, of course. He was with Mission Control.”
“And it talked back.”
“Rakshi. So what?”
“It’s talking to him now,” Sengupta said.
“Uh—what? Through all the interference?”
“We’re out of the solar static already most of it anyhow. But he’s been collecting those signals for way longer some of the timestamps go back seven years and they change. All the early stuff that’s all just telemetry you know? Lot of voice logs too but mainly just data, all the sensor records contingency analyses and about a million different scenarios that vampire that Sarasti was running when they were closing on target. It was dense there was noise all over the signal but the streams were redundant so you can make it out if you run it through the right filters right? And then Theseus goes dark you don’t hear anything for a while and then there’s this—”
She fell silent.
“There’s what, Rak?” Brüks prompted gently.
She took a breath. “There’s this other signal. Not tightbeam. Omnidirectional. Washing over the whole innersys.”
“He said Theseus went dark,” Brüks remembered. “They went in and lost contact and that was all anybody knew.”
“Oh he knew. It’s really thin and it’s so degraded you can barely make it out even with every filter and noise-correction algorithm in the arsenal I don’t think you’d even see it if you didn’t already know it was there but Colonel Carnage, man he knew. He picked it out and it’s...it’s...”
Her fingers danced and jittered in the air between them. The faintest breeze of static wafted through the hab: the moan of a distant ghost.
“That it?” Brüks asked.
“Almost but then you add the last couple of Fouriers and—”
—And a voice: thin, faint, sexless. There was no timbre to it, no cadence, no sense of any feeling behind the words. Any humanity it ever might have contained had been eroded away by dust and distance and the dull microwave rumble of a whole universe roaring in the background. There was nothing left but the words themselves, not reclaimed from static so much as built from the stuff. A whisper on the void:
Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection...record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty...feel your blood, syrupy...forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dil...flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack...udden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen...rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.
The hab fell silent.
“What the fuck was that?” Brüks whispered after a very long time.
“I dunno,” Sengupta drummed her fingers on her thigh. “The start of a story. It’s been coming through in bits and pieces, every few years according to the timestamps. I don’t think it’s finished, either, I think it’s still—in progress.”
“But what is—”
“I don’t know okay? It says it’s Siri Keeton. And there’s something underneath it too not words exactly I don’t know.”
“Can’t be.”
“Doesn’t matter what you or I think he thinks it’s Siri Keeton. And you know what he’s talking back to it I think he’s talking back.”
My son is alive.
“He’s got a while to wait. If that’s really coming from the Oort it’ll be a solid year before he can even think about getting an answer.”
Sengupta shrugged and looked at the wall.
He’s coming home.
NEGATIVE.
Negative.
Negative.
Torn lattices and broken nanowires and mangled micro
diodes. Eviscerated smart paint. Nothing else.
For hours now he’d let worst-case scenarios play out in his imagination. Portia had expanded into the Crown. Portia had spread past the attic. Portia had oozed invisibly across every bulkhead and every surface, coated the skins of tents and of crewmembers, wrapped itself around every particle of food each of them had taken into their mouths from the moment they’d docked. Portia enveloped him like a second skin; Portia was inside him, measuring and analyzing and corroding him from the outside in and the inside out. Portia was everywhere. Portia was everything.
Bullshit.
His neocortex knew as much, even as his brain stem stole its insights and twisted them to its most paranoid ends. Whatever Portia’s ultimate origin, it was the telematter system that had built it: lasers etching blank condensates into thinking microfilms that planned and plotted and spread across each new frontier like a plague of cognition. However far it had spread, however much or little had infiltrated the Crown, it couldn’t keep growing once severed from the engine of its creation. They hadn’t been docked that long: surely the enemy couldn’t have achieved anything but the most superficial penetration of the front line.
The samples were clean.
Which proved, of course, absolutely nothing.
Aboard Icarus it had sprung shut like a leg-hold trap—but it had had unlimited power to play with, and eight years to learn how to use it. One passive filter on the solar panels, damped by a thousandth of a percent. One short-circuited electrical line, sparking and heating the surrounding metal. That’s all it would have taken—just time, and a little Brownian energy to keep it fed.
What had Sengupta said so offhandedly, just before Portia had attacked? Little warm in there...
It can’t sprint without stockpiling energy, he mused. Maybe it builds up a detectable heatprint before it pounces...
Sengupta poked her head up through the floor. “Find anything?”
Brüks shook his head as she climbed onto the deck.
“Yah well I did. I found how that fucking vampire turned you to stone and better you than me, sorry but it coulda been me or Carnage either for all I know. I think she did it to all of us.”