Firefall

by Peter Watts

  The last hab didn’t come with a label. Six stars shone there, though: five gray, one green. Only the green carried an ID, and it didn’t follow the usual format.

  VALERIE, was all it said.

  Fifty meters farther forward—past the Hub, past some kind of attic full of plumbing and circuitry and airlocks, way up past the main sensor array at the very front of the ship—ConSensus had drawn a hemispherical nose assembly and called it PARASOL. It appeared to be packed away for the time being but a translucent overlay showed it unfurled, a great flattened cone wide enough for the whole ship to hide behind. Brüks had no idea what it was. Space-dust deflector, maybe. Heat radiator. Magic Bicameral Cloak of Invisibility.

  “Root.” The Crown dwindled on the wall, slipped back into line with the other thumbnails.

  A Quinternet icon! He tore it open like a Christmas present. He didn’t have access to his preferences but even the Noosphere’s generic headlines were like water in the desert: ANARRES SECEDES, FFE KILLS VENTER, PAKISTAN’S ZOMBIE PREZ—

  Just a cache, of course. A stale-dated abstract small enough to fit into the Crown’s memory—unless someone was breaking silent-running protocols dating all the way back to Firefall, or tightbeaming updates directly to the Crown. Anything was possible.

  Probably a cache, though. In which case all he had to do was sort the available content by posting date, and—

  Twenty-eight days. Assuming they’d grabbed the cache on their way out the door, he’d been stashed in the basement for almost a month.

  He snorted softly and shook his head, vaguely surprised at his own lack of surprise. I’m growing immune to revelation.

  Still. Stale rations were better than none. And it wasn’t as though he had anyplace else to be.

  The president of Pakistan had finally, to no one’s great surprise, been unmasked as an avatar: the original had succumbed to viral zombieism almost a year before, almost certainly an assassination although no one was claiming responsibility. Venter Biomorphics—the last of the old-time corporations—had finally lost the fight against entropy and been swept away. A few proximists pointed their fingers at China’s agricultural collapse (that nation was still nose-diving three years after Venter’s artificial pollinators had crashed), but smart money blamed the incandescent hand of Forest Fire Economics. Something called jitterbug—some kind of weaponized mirror-neuron thing that hijacked its victims’ motor-control circuits—was doing the rounds in Latin America. And way out at L-5 (way in, Brüks corrected himself; way back), the Anarres colony had bolted a row of antique VASIM-R engines onto their belly and were preparing to take secession to new heights.

  ConSensus chimed. “Roaches to the Hub,” the wall barked in its wake. A female voice, strangely familiar although Brüks couldn’t put his finger on it. He returned to the cache, searched for references to a disturbance in the Oregon desert.

  Nothing.

  No mention of a mysterious nighttime skirmish on the Prineville Reserve: no zombie assault on religious fortifications, no counterattacking tornadoes impossibly slaved to human commands. No reports of armed forces keeping low to the ground, bivouacked around some cultist bull’s-eye on the desert plain.

  Odd.

  Maybe their final hurried exodus from that arena never made it into the cache. Brüks had been unconscious at the time but he imagined the Crown might not have lingered in orbit long enough to refresh its memory with newborn updates. Still. Valerie’s assault, the armistice, the quarantine—at least thirty solid hours of activity that should have pushed the needle about ten standard deevs above background. Even if there’d been no eyes on Prineville that night, someone would have noticed the sudden redeployment of personnel from previous assignments. Even if Valerie had blinded all those skeyes up in geosynch, the disappearance of her hijacked carousel from its garage would have registered somewhere.

  The world had too many windows. Every house was glass. It had been decades since any single entity—corporate, political, or synthetic—had been able to draw the blinds on all of them.

  Maybe someone had just scrubbed the onboard cache. The same someone who had apparently locked him out of you-are-here.

  Because this is all about you. Keeping you in the dark is everyone’s top priority.

  He winced.

  “Roaches to the Hub. You think we’ve got nothing better to do than watch you fondle your dick?”

  Brüks blinked, looked around. “What?”

  “Uh, she means you, Dan,” Lianna said invisibly. “Kind of a briefing. Thought you might like to know what’s going on.”

  “Oh. I—”

  Roaches?

  “—I’ll be right there.”

  The ladder stretched through the center of the compartment like a strand of DNA stretched straight. Brüks leaned across the hatch from which it emerged—still a bit wobbly in the spin—grabbed its rails, and peered into the basement. Stacked crates down there, lengths of dismembered plumbing. He craned his neck; overhead, the ladder rose into pale blue light.

  The only way out was up. He took a breath and raised his foot.

  The ladder left him at the bottom of the spoke, on a circular ledge framing the hatch. Another ladder opposite stretched up into the distance like an exercise in perspective geometry. He had not been hallucinating before: its rungs were easily a meter apart, unclimbable in Earth gravity. An easy enough reach here, though, under half that pull.

  Not that it mattered. The ladder was only a fallback. The conveyor belt descended smoothly into its burrow to his left, passed around some hidden wheel beneath his feet, rose again toward the Hub. Its stirrup-handholds swept past at two-meter intervals, thoughtfully spaced for a foot and a hand. Going up; going down.

  Going up.

  Even under power the ascent seemed light-years long, an infinite regression of rungs and rings and bulkheads that almost seemed to breathe when he wasn’t looking. The belt drew him up through a series of telescoping segments; hazard striping highlighted the spots where each handed off to the next, where the bore of the tunnel increased by some fractional increment. Little readouts, logarithmically spaced along the bulkhead, pegged the gravity—0.3, 0.25, 0.2—as he rose.

  Halfway up, the panic returned.

  He had a few seconds’ warning: a sudden formless disquiet spreading through the gut, an anxiety that his civilized neocortex tried to write off as simple acrophobia. In the next instant it metastasized into a bone-chilling terror that froze him solid. Suddenly his breathing was fast as a hummingbird’s heartbeat; suddenly his fingers were clenched tight as old roots around a rock.

  He waited, paralyzed, for some nameless horror to rise in his sight and tear him limb from limb. Nothing did. He forced himself to move. His head turned like a rusted valve, creaked left, right; his eyes rolled frantically in search of threats.

  Nothing. An intersegmental gasket passed around him. The rungs of the ladder ticked unremarkably by. Something flickered at the corner of—but no. Nothing there.

  Nothing at all.

  Over endless seconds time resumed its normal flow; the panic slouched back to the bottom of his brain. Brüks looked back down the way he’d come. His stomach stirred uneasily, but he saw nothing to provoke the slightest unease.

  Down had disappeared by the time he reached top; Coriolis, pulling him gently sideways, persisted a few moments longer. He emerged near the bottom of the southern hemisphere, from one of the six teardrop protuberances ringing the south pole. The tunnel he’d glimpsed there before was sealed now, a waist-high railing around its perimeter, a great foil hatch squeezed tight as a sphincter across its mouth. An iris with no pupil. Its fish-eye reflection turned the mirrorball opposite into a blind chrome eyeball.

  He turned to face the grille bisecting the Hub: the rings of some mercurial Saturn, closed in a tight hug. Fragments, flickers of motion were visible through that rotating mesh (stationary mesh, he corrected himself; it was this lower hemisphere that turned): the bottoms of bare feet, a flas
h of yellow rendered in a fractured mosaic. An insect’s-eye view.

  Soft voices filtered back through the grille. The yellow fragments moved like a school of fish. “Come on up.”

  Moore’s voice.

  There were two routes forward, two circular openings in the grate on opposite sides of the mirrorball. One was blocked by a retracted spiral staircase squashed almost flat, a black metal pie chart cut into staggered slices: a vital thoroughfare when the engines burned, when acceleration turned forward into up. A useless bit of lawn sculpture now, pulled up and out of the way.

  The other was clear, though. Brüks kicked off from the bulkhead, sailed through the air with a mix of exhilaration and mild terror, flailed as the opening drifted lazily past and left him grabbing at the grille a couple of meters antispinward. Chastened, he clambered sideways and through like a crab emerging from its burrow, floated into the northern hemisphere between mirrored earth and smart-painted sky.

  Moore stood barefoot, toes curled into the grating, attention focused on a tacband wrapped around his forearm. Mimetic G-couches disfigured the northern half of the mirrorball like body-cast impressions pressed into cookie dough. They ranged radially around the temperate zone, their headrests converging toward the pole. Anyone installed in one of those couches would find themselves looking forward onto the Hub’s northern hemisphere: the dome of an indoor sky, a featureless wash of smart paint save for one spot where yet another redundant ladder stretched from the grille to a hatch just to one side of the north pole.

  A Hindian woman strapped into the mirrorball—late twenties perhaps, blunt dark bangs, nape shaved halfway to the crest of her skull—jerked her head away the moment Brüks tried to meet her eyes. Something seemed to catch her attention down by her right foot. “About fucking time.” She wore a chromaform vest over her orange jumpsuit (We’re color-coded, Brüks realized): infinitely programmable, but all it showed now was a translucent render of the very couch she was strapped into. It turned her into a pair of arms and a floating head grafted to a ghostly body.

  Lianna hovered off the grille on the far side of the compartment. She flashed a smile that broadcast welcome and apology in equal measure. “Dan Brüks, Rakshi Sengupta.”

  Brüks took another look around the dome; “Uh, Valerie...”

  “Won’t be joining us,” Lianna said.

  “Fixing her arm,” Sengupta added.

  Thank Christ.

  “So,” Moore began, clearly eager to cut to the chase now that the straggler had arrived. “What was it?”

  Sengupta rolled her eyes. “Whaddya think they burned through the felching spoke it was an attack.”

  Who, Brüks wondered, and held his tongue.

  “I was hoping for a bit more detail,” Moore said mildly, unfazed.

  Lianna obliged. “Basically they turned a magnifying glass on us. Focused microwave pulse, about half a gigawatt judging by the damage.”

  “From where?” Moore asked.

  Lianna bit her lip. “Sun. Northern hemisphere.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Even Bicams have limits, Jim. It’s pure hindsight; differential heat stress on different facets of the structure, spoke trajectory—basically they just back-calced how the different parts were lined up at the time, figured a bearing from the angle of the hit.”

  “Coulda done that ourselves,” Sengupta grumbled.

  “Who?” Brüks blurted out. “Who hit us?”

  Nobody spoke. Sengupta regarded something in his general direction the way she might examine a bit of fecal matter scraped off her boot.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lianna said after a moment.

  Moore pursed his lips. “So the hive didn’t see it coming.”

  She shook her head, as if reluctant to admit to the shortcoming out loud.

  “Tran, then.”

  “It’d be one for the books if a baseline caught them with their pants down.”

  Moore’s eyes flickered to stern. “Under normal circumstances, certainly. They’re not exactly operating at a hundred percent.”

  Gray icons, clustered in the Hold. “Uh—” Brüks cleared his throat. “What are they doing back there, exactly?”

  “Convalescing,” Lianna said. “Bug hit them a lot harder than it hit us. We’ve pumped up the pressure to speed their recovery, but it’ll still be days.”

  “So after the break,” Moore mused.

  Break?

  Lianna nodded. “We’ll have to boot up at least a week early on the other end. They want the option of going hands-on.”

  “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 Maintenance & Repair: 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.