Firefall

by Peter Watts

  Ambient superconductors. Compressed-ultrasound pingers. A read-write voxel array in black leather.

  “My old gaming mask,” Lianna announced. “I thought you could use an interface a little more user-friendly than Rakshi tends to be.”

  A gimp hood, for cripples confined to meatspace.

  “I mean, since you don’t have the imp—”

  “Thanks,” Brüks said. “I think I’ll stick with the smart paint if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s not just for gaming,” Lianna assured him. “It’s perfectly transparent for ConSensus, and it’s way faster than going through the paint. Plus it’ll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn. Whatever you like.” She closed the cube. “There’s really not much of anything it can’t do.”

  He took it from her. The material felt faintly oily in his hands. He turned it over, read the little logo that hovered a virtual centimeter off its surface: INTERLOPER ACCESSORIES.

  “It’s completely noninvasive,” Lianna told him. “All TMS and compressed ultrasound, even the opt—”

  “I’m familiar with the tech,” he told her. And then: “Thanks.”

  “And you know, if you ever are in the mood for gaming, I’m happy to buddy up.”

  No mention of his helplessness at Valerie’s hands. No mention of his panic attack. No impatience with his ignorance, no condescension over his lack of augments. Just an overture and a helping hand.

  Brüks tasted a mixture of shame and gratitude. I like this woman, he thought.

  “Thanks,” he said again, because he didn’t know anything else that fit.

  She flashed a goofy smile—“Anytime”—and pointed to something past his shoulder. “I think Jim wanted a word, right?”

  Brüks turned. Moore had dropped soundlessly onto the deck behind him. Now he stood there looking vaguely apologetic, the websack on his back bulging with curves and odd angles.

  “Should I—”

  “I gotta get back to the Hold anyway. He’s all yours.” Lianna vanished into the ceiling with a jump and a grab while Moore shrugged the sack off his shoulders and split the seal. Brüks watched him withdraw a roll of the same kind of webbing.

  Moore held it out. “For humping gear.”

  Brüks took it after a moment—“Thanks. Don’t seem to have brought much gear with me”—but the Colonel was already back in his rucksack. This time he extracted a long green bottle, turned it in his hands so Brüks could see the label: Glenmorangie.

  “Found it in one of the cubes,” he said. “Don’t ask me how it got there. Maybe it was some kind of retailer’s bonus for a big order. Maybe Chinedum just wanted to give me a doggie treat. All I know is, it’s a personal favorite—”

  He set it on the deck, reached back into the sack.

  “—and it came with a nice set of glasses.”

  He gestured to the sticky chairs. “Pull up a seat.”

  Moore cracked the bottle; the smell of peat and wood smoke swirled in the air. “Technically we shouldn’t be playing with open liquids even at one-third gee, but squeezebulbs make everything taste like plastic.”

  Brüks held out his glass.

  “If I had to guess”—Moore let a wobbling, low-gravity dram escape from the bottle—“I’d say you’re feeling a bit pissed off.”

  “Maybe,” Brüks admitted. “When I’m not crapping my pants with existential terror.”

  “One day you’re minding your own business on your camping trip—”

  “Field research.”

  “—the next you’re in the crossfire of a Tran war, the day after that you wake up on a spaceship with a bull’s-eye painted on its hull.”

  “I do wonder what I’m doing here. Every thirty seconds or so.”

  They clinked and swallowed. Brüks grunted appreciatively as the liquid set the back of his throat to smoldering.

  “There’s a risk in being here, certainly,” Moore admitted. “And for that I apologize. On the other hand, if we hadn’t taken you with us you’d most likely be dead already.”

  “Do we even know who’s chasing us?”

  “Not with any certainty. Could be any number of parties. Even cavemen.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “Sometimes Lianna doesn’t give us enough credit.”

  “But why?” A thought occurred to him: “The hive didn’t steal this thing, did they?”

  Moore chuckled. “Do you know how many basic patents the Order has its name on? They could probably buy a fleet of these ships out of petty cash if they wanted to.”

  “Then why? ”

  “The hive was classified as a threat—rightly—even when it was stuck in a desert at the bottom of the well. Now we’re on a ship that can take us anywhere from Icarus to the O’Neils.” He regarded his scotch. “The threat level isn’t going anywhere but up.”

  “That where we’re going? Icarus?”

  Moore nodded. “I don’t think our tail knows that yet. For all they know we could be cutting across the innersys on our way somewhere else. Probably why they’ve held back as long as they have.” He drained his glass. “Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”

  Brüks looked at the other man with new eyes. “You some kind of Buddhist, Jim?”

  “A Buddhist soldier.” Moore smiled and refilled their glasses. “I like that.”

  “Was Icarus part of—the magnifying glass?”

  “Not likely. Can’t rule it out, though. It’s in the confidence zone.”

  “So why are we going there?”

  “There’s that word again.” Moore set his glass down on the nearest cube. “Recon, basically.”

  “Recon.”

  “The Bicamerals would think of it as more of a—a pilgrimage, I suppose.” His mouth tightened at one corner: a small lopsided grimace. “You remember the Theseus mission.”

  It was too rhetorical for a question mark. “Of course.”

  “You know the fueling technology it used—uses.”

  Brüks shrugged. “Icarus cracks the antimatter, lasers out the quantum specs, Theseus stamps them onto its own stockpiles, boom. All the antiprotons you can eat.”

  “Close enough. What matters is that Icarus has been beaming fuel specs up to Theseus’s telematter drive for over a decade now. And lately there’s been some suggestion that something else has been coming down along the same beam.”

  “Wouldn’t you expect them to send back samples?”

  “Theseus’s fab channel went to a quarantine facility in LEO. I’m talking about the actual telematter stream.”

  “I didn’t know that was even possible,” Brüks said.

  “Oh, it’s quite possible. It was part of the design, in fact; fuel up, data down. Of course, the state of the art’s still light-years away from being able to handle complex structure, the receiver’s for—very basic stuff. Individual particles, exotic matter, nonbaryonic even. Stuff that might take a lot of energy to build.”

  Brüks sipped and swallowed. “What the hell were you expecting to find out there?”

  “We had no idea.” Moore shrugged. “Something alien, obviously. And the cost of sticking a condenser on the sun side was negligible next to the mission as a whole. At the very least they could use it for semaphore if the main channel went down. So they stuck one in. In case it proved useful.”

  “Which I’m guessing it did,” Brüks said.

  Moore eyed the empty glass at his side, as if weighing the wisdom of having set it down. After a moment he reached for the bottle.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said, refilling his glass. “Theseus got—decoyed en route, did you know that? Did they ever make that public?”

  Brüks shook his head. “There was somet
hing about course corrections out past Jupiter, new and better data coming down the pike.”

  “I can never keep it straight anymore,” Moore growled. “What we’ve admitted, what we’ve massaged, what we’ve covered up completely. But yes. After Firefall we were all staring at the sky so hard our eyeballs bled. Found something beeping out in the Kuiper Belt—that much you know—sent a squad of high-gee probes to check it out. Sent Theseus afterward, soon as we could slap her together. But she never made it that far. The probes got there first, caught a glimpse of something buried in a comet just before it blew up. All that way to get suckered by a—a decoy, as far as anyone could tell. Glorified land mine with a squawk box bolted on top. So we went back to our radio maps and our star charts and we found an X-ray spike buried in the archives, years before Firefall and never repeated. IAU called it an instrument glitch at the time but now it’s all we’ve got to go on. Theseus is already fifteen AUs out and headed the wrong way but you know, that’s the great thing about an unlimited fuel supply. We feed her a new course and she spins around and heads into the Oort and she finds something out there, tiny brown dwarf it looks like. She goes in for a look, finds something in orbit, starts to send back details, and pfsst—”

  He splayed the fingers of his free hand, brought them together at the tips, spread them again as if blowing out a candle.

  “—gone.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Brüks said after a while.

  “I’d be worried if you did.”

  “I thought the mission was still en route. Nothing on any of the feeds about finding anything.” Brüks eyed his own glass. “So, what was it?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But if they’d started sending—”

  “Multiple contacts. Thousands. There was some evidence they might have been seeding the dwarf’s atmosphere with prebiotic organics—some kind of superjovian terraforming project, perhaps—but if they ever followed that up we never heard about it.”

  “Jesus,” Brüks whispered.

  “Maybe something else in there, too,” Moore added, staring at the deck. Staring through it. Staring all the way out to the Oort itself. “Something—hidden. Nothing definitive.”

  He didn’t seem to be entirely in the room. Brüks softly cleared his throat.

  Moore blinked and came back. “That’s all we know, really. The telemetry was noisy at best—that dwarf has one mother of a magnetic field, shouts over anything you try to send out. The Bicamerals have some amazing extraction algorithms, they were squeezing data out of clips I swore were nothing but static. But there are limits. Theseus went in and it was like, like watching a ship vanish into a fog bank. For all we know she could still be sending—they left a relay sat behind at least. It’s still active. As long as there’s hope, we’ll keep the feed going. But we’re not getting anything back from the ship itself. Can’t even get a signal through that soup.”

  “Except you’re getting a signal right now, you said. Coming in along—”

  “No.” Moore held up his hand. “If the system was operating normally we’d have seen it operating, and we didn’t. No handshaking protocols, no explicit transmissions, nobody from up there telling us they were sending something down here. None of the usual bells that are supposed to go off when a package arrives. At most we got a little hiccup that suggests that something might have started coming down, but the checksums didn’t pass muster so move along folks, nothing to see here. Mission Control didn’t even notice it. I didn’t notice it. Wasn’t until the Bicamerals helped me squeeze the archives through their born-again algorithms that I clued in, years after the fact.”

  “But if the stream isn’t even running its own protocols, how can it be—”

  “Ask them.” Moore jerked his chin toward a vague point beyond the bulkhead, some nexus of Bicameral insight. “I’m just along for the ride.”

  “So, something’s using our telematter stream,” Brüks said.

  “Or was, at least.”

  “And it’s not us.”

  “And whatever it is, it’s gone to great lengths to stay off the ’scope.”

  “What would it be sending?”

  “The Angels of the Asteroids.” Moore shrugged. “That’s what the Bicamerals are calling it, or at least that’s our closest approximation. Probably just their idea of an op code. But I don’t know if they really think anything’s down there. Maybe it’s just a glitch after all. Or some kind of long-distance hack that didn’t work out, and we can learn something about the hackers by studying their footprints.”

  “Suppose there is something down there, though,” Brüks said. “Something—physical.”

  Moore spread his hands. “Like what? A clandestine mist of dissociated atoms?”

  “I don’t know. Something that breaks the rules.”

  “Well,” Moore said, “in that case, I suppose...”

  He took a breath.

  “It’s had a few years to settle in.”

  THEY’D COME UP with this really great plan to keep their mysterious pursuers from blowing up the Crown: they were going to blow it up themselves first.

  They hadn’t asked Brüks for his input.

  Now he was back in Maintenance & Repair, taping himself up with another rubbery exoskeleton. It was easy enough to lay down the bands; all he had to do was follow the denuded template he’d stripped into existence less than two days before.

  Of course, by now there were no days left to while away. Judging by the chime that had just sounded, he only had about two minutes to burn.

  Two minutes to burn.

  Lianna dropped out of the ceiling. “Hey. Just so you know, Rak’s about ready to fold down the spokes. Didn’t want you falling over when the gravity shifted.”

  Yeah, always concerned about the roaches, Brüks reflected wryly. That sounds just like Rakshi Sengupta.

  On cue, the bulkheads shivered. The hab trembled with the sudden faint roar of a distant ocean. A squeezebulb rolled a few centimeters along the cube where someone had left it.

  Brüks swallowed. His knitting ankle itched maddeningly. He resisted the urge to scratch; it wouldn’t help anyway, not through the cast.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Lianna assured him. “Right-side up goes out of whack by a couple of degrees for a couple of minutes. Not even enough to spill your drink. If you were drinking.”

  He wished he was.

  Down edged out from between his feet like a lazy pendulum, came to rest half a meter off his centerline: the Crown’s hollow bones folding back along the spine like the ribs of a closing umbrella, the spin that threw them out slowing in a precise and delicate handoff to acceleration building from behind. All those thousands of tonnes in slow motion, all those vectors playing one against another, and Brüks could feel nothing but a brief polite disagreement between his inner ears. Even now, down was edging back to where it belonged.

  It really was pretty impressive, he decided. Still: “It’s not the burn that bothers me. It’s the coma afterward.”

  “You won’t even feel it.”

  “That’s what I mean. If I’m going to fall into the sun I’d at least like to be awake enough to jump into an escape pod if things go south.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. No escape pods.”

  The hab jumped a bit, to the solid omnipresent thud of great docking clamps snapping shut. The ’bulb on the table wobbled back and forth. The Crown of Thorns, tied down and rigged for sail.

  She tossed him his jumpsuit, pointed to the ceiling. “Shall we go?”

  No effortless sail through a tunnel of light this time. No easing ascent from pseudograv into free fall. The Crown was on fire now, engines alight, habs flattened back against her flanks; there was no escape from mass-times-acceleration. Every rung ascended left him as heavy as the last, each hoop of hazard tape left him with that much farther to fall.

  For some reason he couldn’t identify, that almost made it easier.

  They emerged int
o the Hub, into the bottom of a bowl: a place as gravity-bound now as any other on the ship. The great iris at the south pole was fixed and dilated. Needles of mercury drooled from the mirrorball above like strings of gluey saliva, descending through the open pupil. Freight elevator, apparently. To the Hold, and maybe beyond: to cubbies and crawlspaces where circuits could be wrestled manually in the event of some catastrophic systems failure; to the colossal neutron-spewing engines themselves.

  Brüks edged forward and leaned over the railing. The depths of the Crown’s hollow spine receded like an optical illusion, like God’s own trachea. (Only a hundred meters, Brüks reminded himself. Only. A hundred meters.) Signs of activity down there: flickers of motion, the faint clank of metal on metal. Liquid mirror-ropes vibrating like bowstrings in response to whatever tugged at their ends.

  He jumped at a touch on his shoulder. Lianna held two lengths of silver cord in her hand; a stirrup had miraculously opened at the end of each, like hypertrophic needle’s eyes. She handed him one line, pointed her foot through the loop in the other. “Grab and jump,” she said, stepping lightly onto the guardrail.

  She dropped away in slow motion—under a quarter-gee burn they weighed even less than under spin—and picked up speed with distance. Brüks hooked his own foot, grabbed his line with one hand (like wrapping your fingers around glassy rubber), and followed her down. The filament stretched and thinned in his grip as he descended. He raised his eyes and thought he might have glimpsed tiny shock waves rippling out from the point at which this miracle cord extruded from the mirrorball’s surface; but speed and distance robbed him of a second look.

  He dropped into pastel twilight, past biosteel struts and annular hoops and padded iridescent bulkheads. Conduit bundles lined the throat like vocal cords; silvery metal streams blurred in passing. The end of Lianna’s discarded line snapped past going the other way, recoiling back up the shaft like a frog’s tongue.

  Only a quarter gee. Still dead easy to break your neck at the bottom of a hundred meters.