Firefall

by Peter Watts

  And Sperm liked this not.

  And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.

  I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

  To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.

  THERE WERE STORIES, before we left Earth, of a fourth wave: a fleet of deep-space dreadnoughts running silent in our wake, should the cannon fodder up front run into something nasty. Or, if the aliens were friendly, an ambassadorial frigate full of politicians and CEOs ready to elbow their way to the front of the line. Never mind that Earth had no deep-space dreadnoughts or ambassadorial spaceships; Theseus hadn't existed either, before Firefall. Nobody had told us of any such such contingent, but you never show the Big Picture to your front line. The less they know, the less they can betray.

  I still don't know if the fourth wave ever existed. I never saw any evidence of one, for whatever that's worth. We might have left them floundering back at Burns-Caulfield. Or maybe they followed us all the way to Big Ben, crept just close enough to see what we were up against, and turned tail before things got ugly.

  I wonder if that's what happened. I wonder if they made it back home.

  I look back now, and hope not.

  ***

  A giant marshmallow kicked Theseus in the side. Down swung like a pendulum. Across the drum Szpindel yelped as if scalded; in the galley, cracking a bulb of hot coffee, I nearly was.

  This is it, I thought. We got too close. They're hitting back.

  "What the—"

  A flicker on the party line as Bates linked from the bridge. "Main drive just kicked in. We're changing course."

  "To what? Where? Whose orders?"

  "Mine," Sarasti said, appearing above us.

  Nobody spoke. Drifting into the drum through the stern hatchway: the sound of something grinding. I pinged Theseus' resource-allocation stack. Fabrication was retooling itself for the mass production of doped ceramics.

  Radiation shielding. Solid stuff, bulky and primitive, not the controlled magnetic fields we usually relied on.

  The Gang emerged sleepy-eyed from their tent, Sascha grumbling, "What the fuck?"

  "Watch." Sarasti took hold of ConSensus and shook it.

  It was a blizzard, not a briefing: gravity wells and orbital trajectories, shear-stress simulations in thunderheads of ammonium and hydrogen, stereoscopic planetscapes buried under filters ranging from gamma to radio. I saw breakpoints and saddlepoints and unstable equilibria. I saw fold catastrophes plotted in five dimensions. My augments strained to rotate the information; my meaty half-brain struggled to understand the bottom line.

  Something was hiding down there, in plain sight.

  Ben's accretion belt still wasn't behaving. Its delinquency wasn't obvious; Sarasti hadn't had to plot every pebble and mountain and planetesimal to find the pattern, but he'd come close. And neither he nor the conjoined intelligence he shared with the Captain had been able to explain those trajectories as the mere aftermath of some past disturbance. The dust wasn't just settling; some of it marched downhill to the beat of something that even now reached out from the cloud-tops and pulled debris from orbit.

  Not all that debris seemed to hit. Ben's equatorial regions flickered constantly with the light of meteorite impacts—much fainter than the bright wakes of the skimmers, and gone in the wink of an eye—but those frequency distributions didn't quite account for all the rocks that had fallen. It was almost as though, every now and then, some piece of incoming detritus simply vanished into a parallel universe.

  Or got caught by something in this one. Something that circled Ben's equator every forty hours, almost low enough to graze the atmosphere. Something that didn't show up in visible light, or infrared, or radar. Something that might have remained pure hypothesis if a skimmer hadn't burned an incandescent trail across the atmosphere behind it when Theseus happened to be watching.

  Sarasti threw that one dead center: a bright contrail streaking diagonally across Ben's perpetual nightscape, stuttering partway a degree or two to the left, stuttering back just before it passed from sight. Freeze-frame showed a beam of light frozen solid, a segment snapped from its midsection and jiggled just a hair out of alignment.

  A segment nine kilometers long.

  "It's cloaked," Sascha said, impressed.

  "Not very well." Bates emerged from the forward hatch and sailed spinward. "Pretty obvious refractory artefact." She caught stairs halfway to the deck, used the torque of spin-against-spam to flip upright and plant her feet on the steps. "Why didn't we catch that before?"

  "No backlight," Szpindel suggested.

  "It's not just the contrail. Look at the clouds." Sure enough, Ben's cloudy backdrop showed the same subtle dislocation. Bates stepped onto the deck and headed for the conference table. "We should've seen this earlier."

  "The other probes see no such artefact," Sarasti said. "This probe approaches from a wider angle. Twenty-seven degrees."

  "Wider angle to what?" Sascha said.

  "To the line," Bates murmured. "Between us and them."

  It was all there on tactical: Theseus fell inwards along an obvious arc, but the probes we'd dispatched hadn't dicked around with Hohmann transfers: they'd burned straight down, their courses barely bending, all within a few degrees of the theoretical line connecting Ben to Theseus.

  Except this one. This one had come in wide, and seen the trickery.

  "The further from our bearing, the more obvious the discontinuity," Sarasti intoned. "Think it's clearly visible on any approach perpendicular to ours."

  "So we're in a blind spot? We see it if we change course?"

  Bates shook her head. "The blind spot's moving, Sascha. It's—"

  "Tracking us." Sascha sucked breath between her teeth. "Motherfucker."

  Szpindel twitched. "So what is it? Our skimmer factory?"

  The freeze-frame's pixels began to crawl. Something emerged, granular and indistinct, from the turbulent swirls and curlicues of Ben's atmosphere. There were curves, and spikes, and no smooth edges; I couldn't tell how much of the shape was real, and how much a fractal intrusion of underlying cloudscape. But the overall outline was that of a torus, or perhaps a collection of smaller jagged things piled together in a rough ring; and it was big. Those nine klicks of displaced contrail had merely grazed the perimeter, cut across an arc of forty or fifty degrees. This thing hiding in the shadow of ten Jupiters was almost thirty kilometers from side to side.

  Sometime during Sarasti's executive summary we'd stopped accellerating. Down was back where it belonged. We weren't, though. Our hesitant maybe-maybe-not approach was a thing of the past: we vectored straight in now, and damn the torpedoes.

  "Er, that's thirty klicks across," Sascha pointed out. "And it's invisible. Shouldn't we maybe be a little more cautious now?"

  Szpindel shrugged. "We could second-guess vampires, we wouldn't need vampires, eh?"

  A new facet bloomed on the feed. Frequency histograms and harmonic spectra erupted from flatline into shifting mountainscapes, a chorus of visible light.

  "Modulated laser," Bates reported.

  Szpindel looked up. "From that?"

  Bates nodded. "Right after we blow its cover. Interesting timing."

  "Scary timing," Szpindel said. "How'd it know?"

  "We changed course. We're heading right for it."

  The lightscape played on, knocking at the window.

  "Whatever it is," Bates said, "it's talking to us."

  "Well then," remarked a welcome voice. "By all means let's say hello."

  Susan James was back in the driver's seat.

  ***

  I was the only pure spectator.

  They all performed what duties they could. Szpindel
ran Sarasti's sketchy silhouette through a series of filters, perchance to squeeze a bit of biology from engineering. Bates compared morphometrics between the cloaked artefact and the skimmers. Sarasti watched us all from overhead and thought vampire thoughts deeper than anything we could aspire to. But it was all just make-work. The Gang of Four was on center stage, under the capable direction of Susan James.

  She grabbed the nearest chair, sat, raised her hands as if cueing an orchestra. Her fingers trembled in mid-air as she played virtual icons; her lips and jaw twitched with subvocal commands. I tapped her feed and saw text accreting around the alien signal:

  RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ -23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ -23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHI

  She'd decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:

  Theseus to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach.

  HELLO THESEUS. WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

  She'd had less than three minutes. Or rather, they'd had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.

  Up to now I had never fully convinced myself that even survival was sufficient cause.

  Request permission to approach, the Gang sent. Simple and straightforward: just facts and data, thank you, with as little room as possible for ambiguity and misunderstanding. Fancy sentiments like we come in peace could wait. A handshake was not the time for cultural exchange.

  YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY. SERIOUSLY. THIS PLACE IS DANGEROUS.

  That got some attention. Bates and Szpindel hesitated momentarily in their own headspaces and glanced into James'.

  Request information on danger, the gang sent back. Still keeping it concrete.

  TOO CLOSE AND DANGEROUS TO YOU. LOW ORBIT COMPLICATIONS.

  Request information on low orbit complications.

  LETHAL ENVIRONMENT. ROCKS AND RADS. YOU'RE WELCOME. I CAN TAKE IT BUT WE'RE LIKE THAT.

  We are aware of the rocks in low orbit. We are equipped to deal with radiation. Request information on other hazards.

  I dug under the transcript to the channel it fed from. Theseus had turned part of the incoming beam into a sound wave, according to the color code. Vocal communication, then. They spoke. Waiting behind that icon were the raw sounds of an alien language.

  Of course I couldn't resist.

  "Anytime between friends, right? Are you here for the celebration?"

  English. The voice was human, male. Old.

  "We are here to explore," replied the Gang, although their voice was pure Theseus. "Request dialog with agents who sent objects into near-solar space."

  "First contact. Sounds like something to celebrate."

  I double-checked the source. No, this wasn't a translation; this was the actual unprocessed signal coming from—Rorschach, it had called itself. Part of the signal, anyway; there were other elements, nonacoustic ones, encoded in the beam.

  I browsed them while James said, "Request information about your celebration": standard ship-to-ship handshaking protocols.

  "You're interested." The voice was stronger now, younger.

  "Yes."

  "You are?"

  "Yes," the Gang repeated patiently.

  "You are?"

  The slightest hesitation. "This is Theseus."

  "I know that, baseline." In Mandarin, now. "Who are you?"

  No obvious change in the harmonics. Somehow, though, the voice seemed to have acquired an edge.

  "This is Susan James. I am a—"

  "You wouldn't be happy here, Susan. Fetishistic religious beliefs involved. There are dangerous observances."

  James chewed her lip.

  "Request clarification. Are we in danger from these observances?"

  "You certainly could be."

  "Request clarification. Is it the observances that are dangerous, or the low-orbit environment?"

  "The environment of the disturbances. You should pay attention, Susan. Inattention connotes indifference," Rorschach said.

  "Or disrespect," it added after a moment.

  ***

  We had four hours before Ben got in the way. Four hours of uninterrupted nonstop communication made vastly easier than anyone had expected. It spoke our language, after all. Repeatedly it expressed polite concern for our welfare. And yet, for all its facility with Human speech it told us very little. For four hours it managed to avoid giving a straight answer on any subject beyond the extreme inadvisability of closer contact, and by the time it fell into eclipse we still didn't know why.

  Sarasti dropped onto the deck halfway through the exchange, his feet never touching the stairs. He reached out and grabbed a railing to steady himself on landing, and staggered only briefly. If I'd tried that I'd have ended up bouncing along the deck like a pebble in a cement mixer.

  He stood still as stone for the rest of the session, face motionless, eyes hidden behind his onyx visor. When Rorschach's signal faded in midsentence he assembled us around the Commons table with a gesture.

  "It talks," he said.

  James nodded. "It doesn't say much, except for asking us to keep our distance. So far the voice has manifested as adult male, although the apparent age changed a few times."

  He'd heard all that. "Structure?"

  "The ship-to-ship protocols are perfect. Its vocabulary is far greater than you could derive from standard nav chatter between a few ships, so they've been listening to all our insystem traffic—I'd say for several years at least. On the other hand, the vocabulary doesn't have anywhere near the range you'd get by monitoring entertainment multimede, so they probably arrived after the Broadcast Age."

  "How well do they use the vocabulary they have?"

  "They're using phrase-structure grammar, long-distance dependencies. FLN recursion, at least four levels deep and I see no reason why it won't go deeper with continued contact. They're not parrots, Jukka. They know the rules. That name, for example—"

  "Rorschach," Bates murmered, knuckles cracking as she squeezed her pet ball. "Interesting choice."

  "I checked the registry. There's an I-CAN freighter called Rorschach on the Martian Loop. Whoever we're talking to must regard their own platform the way we'd regard a ship, and picked one of our names to fit."

  Szpindel dropped into the chair beside me, fresh from a galley run. A bulb of coffee glistened like gelatin in his hand. "That name, out of all the ships in the innersys? Seems way too symbolic for a random choice."

  "I don't think it was random. Unusual ship names provoke comment; Rorschach's pilot goes ship-to-ship with some other vessel, the other vessel comes back with oh Grandma, what an unusual name you have, Rorschach replies with some off-the-cuff comment about nomenclatural origins and it all goes out in the EM. Someone listening to all that chatter not only figures out the name and the thing it applies to, but can get some sense of meaning from the context. Our alien friends probably eavesdropped on half the registry and deduced that Rorschach would be a better tag for something unfamiliar than, say, the SS Jaymie Matthews."

  "Territorial and smart." Szpindel grimaced, conjuring a mug from beneath his chair. "Wonderful."

  Bates shrugged. "Territorial, maybe. Not necessarily aggressive. In fact, I wonder if they could hurt us even if they wanted to."

  "I don't," Szpindel said. "Those skimmers—"

  The major waved a dismissive hand. "Big ships turn slowly. If they were setting up to snooker us we'd see it well in advance." She looked around the table. "Look, am I the only one who finds this odd? An interstellar technology that redecorates superJovians and lines up meteoroids like elephants on parade, and they were hiding? From us?"

  "Unless there's someone else out here," James suggested uneasily.

  Bates shook her head. "The c
loak was directional. It was aimed at us and no one else."

  "And even we saw through it," Szpindel added.

  "Exactly. So they go to Plan B, which so far amounts to nothing but bluster and vague warnings. I'm just saying, they're not acting like giants. Rorschach's behavior feels—improvised. I don't think they expected us."

  "'Course not. Burns-Caulfield was—"

  "I don't think they expected us yet."

  "Um," Szpindel said, digesting it.

  The major ran one hand over her naked scalp. "Why would they expect us to just give up after we learned we'd been sniped? Of course we'd look elsewhere. Burns-Caulfield could only have been intended as a delaying action; if I was them, I'd plan on us getting out here eventually. But I think they miscalculated somehow. We got out here sooner than they expected and caught them with their pants down."

  Szpindel split the bulb and emptied it into his mug. "Pretty large miscalculation for something so smart, eh?" A hologram bloomed on contact with the steaming liquid, glowing in soft commemoration of the Gaza Glasslands. The scent of plasticised coffee flooded the Commons. "Especially after they'd surveilled us down to the square meter," he added.

  "And what did they see? I-CANNs. Solar sails. Ships that take years to reach the Kuiper, and don't have the reserves to go anywhere else afterwards. Telematter didn't exist beyond Boeing's simulators and a half-dozen protypes back then. Easy to miss. They must've figured one decoy would buy them all the time they needed."

  "To do what?" James wondered.

  "Whatever it is," Bates said, "We're ringside."

  Szpindel raised his mug with an infirm hand and sipped. The coffee trembled in its prison, the surface wobbling and blobbing in the drum's half-hearted gravity. James pursed her lips in faint disapproval. Open-topped containers for liquids were technically verboten in variable-gravity environments, even for people without Szpindel's dexterity issues.

  "So they're bluffing," Szpindel said at last.

  Bates nodded. "That's my guess. Rorschach's still under construction. We could be dealing with an automated system of some kind."

  "So we can ignore the keep-off-the-grass signs, eh? Walk right in."