Firefall

by Peter Watts

  And the Gang of Four was on the other side.

  The grunts were on it immediately, lasers crackling through the air. Bates was yelling Get behind me! Stick to the walls!, kicking herself into space like an acrobat in fast-forward, taking some tactical high ground that must have been obvious to her, at least. I edged towards the perimeter. Threads of superheated plasma sliced the air, shimmering. Szpindel, at the corner of my eye, hugged the opposite side of the tunnel. The walls crawled. I could see the lasers taking a toll; the septum peeled back from their touch like burning paper, black oily smoke writhing from its crisping edges and—

  Sudden brightness, everywhere. A riot of fractured light flooded the artery, a thousand shifting angles of incidence and reflection. It was like being trapped in the belly of a kaleidoscope, pointed at the sun. Light—

  —and needle-sharp pain in my side, in my left arm. The smell of charred meat. A scream, cut off.

  Susan? You there, Susan?

  We're taking you first.

  Around me, the light died; inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head. Alarms chirped irritatingly in my helmet— breach, breach, breach—until the smart fabric of the suit softened and congealed where the holes had been. Something stung maddeningly in my left side. I felt as if I'd been branded.

  "Keeton! Check Szpindel!" Bates had called off the lasers. The grunts closed for hand-to-hand, reaching with fiery nozzles and diamond-tipped claws to grapple with some prismatic material glowing softly behind that burnt-back skin.

  Fibrous reflector, I realized. It had shattered the laser light, turned it to luminous shrapnel and thrown it back in our faces. Clever.

  But its surface was still alight, even with the lasers down; a diffuse glow, dipping and weaving, filtered through from the far side of the barrier while the drones chewed doggedly through the near one. After a moment it struck me: James's headlamp.

  "Keeton!"

  Right. Szpindel.

  His faceplate was intact. The laser had melted the Faraday mesh laminated onto the crystal, but the suit was sealing that tiny hole even now. The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity.

  "Well?" Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of post-mortem rebuilds.

  Barring brain damage. "No."

  The whine of drills and shredders stopped; the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel's remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum's fibrous underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side.

  A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening, haunted and dissonant. For a moment I thought Rorschach was whispering to us again; its walls seemed to contract slightly around me.

  "James?" Bates snapped. "James!"

  Not James. A little girl in a woman's body in an armored spacesuit, scared out of her wits.

  The grunt nudged her curled-up body back into our company. Bates took it gently. "Susan? Come back, Suze. You're safe."

  The grunts hovered restlessly, alert in every direction, pretending everything was under control. Bates spared me a glance—"Take Isaac."—and turned back to James. "Susan?"

  "N—n-no," whimpered a small voice, a little girl's voice.

  "Michelle? Is that you?"

  "There was a thing," the little girl said. "It grabbed me. It grabbed my leg."

  "We're out of here." Bates pulled the Gang back along the passage. One grunt lingered, watching the hole; the other took point.

  "It's gone," Bates said gently. "There's nothing there now. See the feed?"

  "You can't s-see it." Michelle whispered. "It's in—it's in—visible.."

  The septum receded around a curve as we retreated. The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged pupil of some great unblinking eye. It stayed empty as long as it stayed in sight. Nothing came out after us. Nothing we could see. A thought began cycling through my head, some half-assed eulogy stolen from an eavesdropped confessional, and try as I might I couldn't shut it down.

  Isaac Szpindel hadn't made the semifinals after all.

  ***

  Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not.

  We stripped wordlessly in the decon balloon. Bates, first out of her suit, reached for Szpindel but the Gang stopped her with a hand and a headshake. Personae segued one into another as they stripped the body. Susan removed helmet and backpack and breastplate. Cruncher peeled away the silvery leaded skin from collar to toe. Sascha stripped the jumpsuit and left the pale flesh naked and exposed. Except for the gloves. They left his feedback gloves in place; their fingertips forever tactile, the flesh inside forever numb. Through it all, Szpindel stared unblinking beneath the hole in his forehead. His glazed eyes focused on distant quasars.

  I expected Michelle to appear in her turn and close them, but she never did.

  I DON'T KNOW how to feel about this, I thought. He was a good man. He was decent, he was kind to me, even when he didn't know I was listening in. I didn't know him long— he wasn't a friend exactly— but still. I should miss him. I should mourn.

  I should feel more than this sick sinking fear that I could be next...

  Sarasti hadn't wasted any time. Szpindel's replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed, nicotine-scented. The rehydration of his flesh was ongoing— saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved.

  He looked past me and took the body. "Susan—Michelle...I—"

  The gang turned away.

  He coughed, began fumbling a body condom over the corpse. "Sarasti wants everyone in the drum."

  "We're hot," Bates said. Even cut short, the excursion had piled up a lethal Seivert count. Faint nausea tickled the back of my throat.

  "Decontaminate later." One long pull of a zipper and Szpindel was gone, engulfed in an oily gray shroud. "You—" he turned in my direction, pointed at the scorched holes in my jumpsuit. "With me."

  Robert Cunningham. Another prototype. Dark-haired, hollow-cheeked, a jaw you could use as a ruler. Both smoother and harsher than the man he had replaced. Where Szpindel had ticced and jerked as if static-charged, Cunningham's face held all the expression of a wax dummy's. The wetware that ran those muscles had been press-ganged into other pursuits. Even the tremors that afflicted the rest of his body were muted, soothed by the nicotine he drew with every second breath.

  He held no cigarette now. He held only the shrouded body of his hard-luck primary and his ongoing, freshly thawed distaste for the ship's synthesist. His fingers trembled.

  Bates and the Gang moved silently up the spine. Cunningham and I followed, guiding the Shroud of Szpindel between us. My leg and side were stinging again, now that Cunningham had reminded them to. There wouldn't be much he could do about them, though. The beams would have cauterized the flesh on their way through, and if they'd hit anything vital I'd have been dead already.

  At the hatch we broke into single-file: Szpindel first, Cunningham pushing at his heels. By the time I emerged into the drum Bates and the gang were already down on deck and taking their usual seats. Sarasti, in the flesh, watched them from the end of the conference table.

  His eyes were naked. From this angle the soft, full-spectrum light of the drum washed the shine from them. If you didn't look too closely, for too long, you might almost think those eyes were Human.

  BioMed had been spun down for my arrival. Cunningham pointed to a diagnostic couch on a section of the stilled deck that served as our infirmary; I floated over and strapped myself in. Two meters away, past a waist-high guard rail that had risen from the deck, the rest of the drum rolled smoothly past. It slung Bates and the Gang and Sarasti around like weights on a string.

  I tapped ConSensus to hear them. James was speaking, quietly and without expression. "I noticed a new pattern in the form-constants. Something in the grating.
It looked like a signal. It got stronger as I went down the tunnel, I followed it, I blacked out. I don't remember anything more until we were on our way back. Michelle filled me in, as much as she could. That's all I know. I'm sorry."

  A hundred degrees away in the no-gee zone, Cunningham maneuvered his predecessor into a coffin with different options than those up front. I wondered if it would embark on an autopsy during the debriefing. I wondered if we'd be able to hear the sounds it made.

  "Sascha," Sarasti said.

  "Yeah." Sascha's trademark drawl infected the voice. "I was riding Mom. Went deaf dumb and stark fucking blind when she passed out. I tried to take over but something was blocking me. Michelle, I guess. Never thought she had it in her. I couldn't even see."

  "But you don't lose consciousness."

  "I was awake the whole time, far as I know. Just completely in the dark."

  "Smell? Tactile?"

  "I could feel it when Michelle pissed in the suit. But I didn't notice anything else."

  Cunningham was back at my side. The inevitable cigarette had appeared between his lips.

  "Nothing touches you," the vampire surmised. "Nothing grabs your leg."

  "No," Sascha said. She didn't believe Michelle's stories about invisible monsters. None of us did; why bother, when dementia could so easily explain anything we experienced?

  "Cruncher."

  "Don't know anything," I still wasn't used to the maleness of the voice now emanating from James's throat. Cruncher was a workaholic. He hardly ever surfaced in mixed company.

  "You're there," Sarasti reminded him. "You must remember some—"

  "Mom sent me patterns to parse. I was working on them. I'm still working on them," he added pointedly. "I didn't notice anything. Is that all?"

  I'd never been able to get a good read on him. Sometimes Cruncher seemed to have more in common with the dozens of nonconscious modules working in James's head than with sentient hubs comprising the rest of the Gang. "You feel nothing?" Sarasti pressed.

  "Just the patterns."

  "Anything significant?"

  "Standard phenomath spirals and gratings. But I haven't finished. Can I go now?"

  "Yes. Call Michelle, please."

  Cunningham stabbed at my wounds with anabolisers, muttering to himself. Faint blue smoke curled between us. "Isaac found some tumors," he observed.

  I nodded and coughed. My throat was sore. The nausea had grown heavy enough to sink below my diaphragm.

  "Michelle." Sarasti repeated.

  "I see some more here," Cunningham continued. "Along the bottom of your brain pan. Only a few dozen cells so far, they're not worth burning yet."

  "Here." Michelle's voice was barely audible, even through ConSensus, but at least it was the voice of an adult. "I'm here."

  "What do you remember, please?"

  "I—I felt—I was just riding Mom, and then she was gone and there was no one else, so I had to—take over…"

  "Do you see the septum close?"

  "Not really. I felt it going dark, but when I turned around we were already trapped. And then I felt something behind me, it wasn't loud or harsh it just sort of bumped, and it grabbed me, and—and—

  "I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'm a bit—woozy..."

  Sarasti waited.

  "Isaac," Michelle whispered. "He..."

  "Yes." A pause. "We're very sorry about that."

  "Maybe—can he be fixed?"

  "No. There's brain damage." There was something like sympathy in the vampire's voice, the practiced affectation of an accomplished mimic. There was something else, too, an all-but-imperceptible hunger, a subtle edge of temptation. I don't think anyone heard it but me.

  We were sick, and getting sicker. Predators are drawn to the weak and injured.

  Michelle had fallen silent again. When she continued, her voice only faltered a little: "I can't tell you much. It grabbed me. It let me go. I went to pieces, and I can't explain why except that fucking place just does things to you, and I was—weak. I'm sorry. There's not much else to tell you."

  "Thank you," Sarasti said after a long moment.

  "Can I—I'd like to leave if that's okay."

  "Yes," Sarasti said. Michelle sank below the surface as the Commons rotated past. I didn't see who took her place.

  "The grunts didn't see anything," Bates remarked. "By the time we broke through the septum the tunnel behind was empty."

  "Any bogey would have had plenty of time to hightail," Cunningham said. He planted his feet on the deck and grabbed a handhold; the subdrum began to move. I drifted obliquely against my restraints.

  "I don't disagree," Bates said, "But if there's anything we've learned about that place, it's that we can't trust our senses."

  "Trust Michelle's," Sarasti said. He opened a window as I grew heavier: a grunt's-eye view of a fuzzy, bright blob weaving behind the translucent waxed-paper fibers of the skinned septum. James's headlight, from the wrong side of the barrier. The image wobbled a bit as the drone staggered through some local pocket of magnetism, then replayed. Wobbled, replayed. A six-second loop.

  "See something next to the Gang."

  Non-vampires saw no such thing. Sarasti froze the image, evidently realizing as much. "Diffraction patterns aren't consistent with a single light source in open space. I see dimmer elements, reflective elements. Two dark objects close together, similar size, scattering light here—" a cursor appeared at two utterly nondescript points on the image— "and here. One's the Gang. The other's unaccounted for."

  "Just a minute," Cunningham said. "If you can see it through all that, why didn't Su—why didn't Michelle see anything?"

  "Synesthesiac," Sarasti reminded him. "You see. She feels."

  BioMed jerked slightly, locking into spin-synch with the drum; the guard rail sank back into the deck. Off in some far-off corner, something without eyes watched me watching it.

  "Shit," Bates whispered. "There's someone home."

  ***

  They never really talked like that, by the way. You'd hear gibberish—a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms—if I spoke in their real voices.

  Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.

  Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she'd cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James's other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn't a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else.

  But that didn't matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated.

  I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap, and I'd bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what they meant, and it will mean as much to you as you can handle.

  Except for Susan James, linguist and Ringleader, whom I trust to speak for herself.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes to apogee: maximum safe distance, in case Rorschach decided to hit back. Far below, the artefact's magnetic field pressed into Ben's atmosphere like God's little finger. Great dark thunderheads converged behind it; turbulent moon-sized curlicues collided in its wake.

  Fifteen
minutes to apogee, and Bates was still hoping Sarasti would change his mind.

  In a way, this was her fault. If she had just treated this new travail as one more cross to bear, perhaps things would have gone on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope that Sarasti would have let us grit our teeth and keep on going, besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors as well as the usual gauntlet of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn't just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe.

  We're on the brink as it is, just surviving the baseline environment of this thing. If it's started taking deliberate countermeasures…I don't see how we can risk it.

  Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still regretting those words.

  On previous expeditions we'd charted twenty-six septa in various stages of development. We'd x-rayed them. We'd done ultrasound. We'd watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind the Gang of Four had been a whole different animal.

  And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just happened to also come with antilaser prismatics? That was no routine growth event. That thing was set for us.

  Set by…

  That was the other thing. Thirteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was worried about the tenants.

  It had always been breaking and entering, of course. That much hadn't changed. But when we'd jimmied the lock we'd thought we were vandalizing an empty summer cottage, still under construction. We'd thought the owners would be out of the picture for a while. We hadn't been expecting one of them to catch us on his way to take a late-night piss. And now that one had, and vanished into the labyrinth, it was natural to wonder what weapons it might keep stashed under the pillow…

  Those septa could spring on us any time. How many are there? Are they fixed, or portable? We can't proceed without knowing these things..