Firefall

by Peter Watts

  But Brüks’s descent was slowing now, his miracle bungee cord stretching to its limits. Another great hatch yawned just below, flanked by grilles and service panels and a half-dozen spacesuit alcoves. An airlock puckered the bulkhead to one side like a secondary mouth, big enough to swallow two of him whole. It was the larger mouth that took him, though. The silver cord lowered him through like a mother putting her baby to bed, dropped him gently from light into darkness. It set him down on the floor of a great dim cavern where monsters and machinery loomed on all sides, and abandoned him there.

  So this is strategy, Brüks mused. This is foresight, these are countermeasures. This is intellect so vast it won’t even fit into language.

  This is suicide.

  “Have faith,” Lianna had said drily as they’d climbed into their suits. “They know what they’re doing.”

  The spacesuit wrapped around him like an asphyxiating parasite. His breath and his blood rasped loud in his helmet; the nozzle up his ass twitched like a feeding proboscis. He couldn’t feel the catheter in his urethra, which in a way was even worse; he had no way of knowing what it was doing in there.

  They know what they’re doing.

  They’d spent the past two hours in the Hold, lurking among the dim tangled shadows of dismembered machine parts while the rest of the ship froze down above them: habs, labs, spines and Hub all pumped dry and opened to vacuum. Until a few hours ago this cavernous space had been the exclusive domain of the afflicted Bicamerals, an improvised hyperbaric chamber where enemy anaerobes withered in poisonous oxygen, where the hive could lick their wounds and incant whatever spells they used to assemble the pieces of the puzzle they were building. Now all that arcane protomachinery was stacked and stored and strapped high against the walls. The Bicamerals, their tissues still saturated under the weight of fifteen atmospheres, had retreated into glass sarcophagi: personal decompression chambers with arms and legs. They stood arrayed on the deck like the opposite of deep-sea divers from a bygone age, barely mobile. Valerie’s zombies moved silently among them, apparently charged with their care. Grubs tended by drones.

  Now the Hold itself was freezing down, the Crown’s last pocket of atmosphere thinning around the assembled personnel. Bicamerals, baselines, monsters—those interstitial, indeterminate things who might be a little of each—they all stood watching as the flaccid pile of fabric in the center of the chamber unfolded into a great black sphere, some interlocking geodesic frame pushing out from under its skin like an extending origami skeleton. The hatching of a shadow.

  Moore had called it a thermos. Watching it inflate, Brüks was almost certain it was the same giant soccer ball that had carried them from the desert. New paint job, though.

  Lianna bumped him from the side, touched helmets for a private word: “Welcome to the Prineville class reunion.” Brüks managed a smile in return.

  They know what they’re doing.

  Brüks did, too, after a fashion. They were going to fall sideways. They were going to tumble past the exhaust, almost close enough to reach out and see your own arm vaporizing in a torrent of plasma blasting past at twenty-five kilometers per second. No option to fire maneuvering thrusters for a bit of extra forward momentum, no chance of putting a little distance between this soon-to-be-broken spine and the rapture of a half-dozen fusion bombs per minute. Newton’s First was a real bitch, not open to negotiation. Not even the Bicamerals could get her to spread her legs more than a crack, and even that grudging concession would be barely enough to mask the loss of their front end. There would be nothing left over for safe-distancing maneuvers.

  And of course, if they didn’t miscalculate by a micron or two—if this little sprig of struts and scaffolding didn’t just get sucked into the wake and shredded to ions—well, maybe the barrage of neutrons sleeting out in all directions might be able to find a way in.

  Rakshi Sengupta reached up and popped the thermos’s hatch. It sprang open and bumped back against the curve of the sphere, pneumatic and bouncy. Sengupta climbed up and in. Valerie’s automatons—even more interchangeable now, thanks to limited wardrobe options in the survival-gear department—formed a line and began passing the Bicamerals into that globe like worker ants carrying endangered eggs to safety.

  All aboard, Lianna mouthed from behind her faceplate.

  It wasn’t just the radiance of the drive that would give them away. Even the heatprint of minimal life support would shine like a beacon against a cosmic background that barely edged above absolute zero. There were ways around that, of course. You don’t notice a candle held up against the sun, and the Crown of Thorns had been keeping itself line of sight between Sol’s edge and any pursuing telescopes: close enough to bury her heatprint in solar glare, not so close that she’d show up the moment someone threw an occlusion filter in front of their scanner. Another approach was to keep any warm bodies nested inside so much insulation that they’d be outside any reasonable search radius by the time their heatprint made it to the surface.

  The Bicamerals didn’t like to take chances. They were doing both.

  It was the same soccer ball all right.

  Same webbing inside. Same ambience—Victorian Whorehouse Red, he thought with a grimace—shadows and wavelengths long enough to make even a corpse look pretty. Same company, with edits.

  A clutch of umbilicals hung from an overhead plexus and spread throughout the webbing. Brüks grabbed the nearest and locked it into his helmet’s octopus socket. Lianna reached down from overhead, double-checked the connection, gave him a thumbs-up. Brüks sacc’ed comm and whispered a thank-you over the chorus of quiet breathing that flooded his helmet. Lianna smiled back behind tinted glass.

  Moore climbed into the womb and sealed the hatch as the longwave dimmed around them. By the last of the light Brüks saw the soldier reach for his own umbilical. Then darkness swallowed them all.

  Valerie was in here, too, hidden inside one of these mercurial disguises. Brüks hadn’t seen her enter—hadn’t even seen her on the deck—but then again, she could do that. She had to be in here somewhere, maybe in that suit, or that one over there.

  He eyed the countdown on his HUD: two minutes now. One fifty-nine.

  He yawned.

  They’d told him it would be easier this time. No seat-of-the-pants improvising, no panic-inducing suffocation. Just a breeze of fresh, cool anesthetic gas wafting through the helmet reg, putting him gently to sleep before the H2S strangled his very cells from the inside.

  They know what they’re doing.

  Fifty-five seconds.

  An icon winked into existence next to the countdown: external camera booting up. Brüks blinked at it and—

  “Let there be light,” Lianna whispered over the channel, and there was light: a blinding yellow sun, the size of Brüks’s fist held at arm’s length, blazing in a black sky. Brüks squinted up against the glare: a jagged sunlit tangle of beams and parallelograms hung overhead, sliced along a dozen angles by sharp-edged fissures of shadow.

  Let there be a little less light, he amended, dialing back the brightness. The sun dimmed; the stars came out. They filled the void on all sides, a million bright motes that only managed to accentuate the infinite blackness between them. They disappeared directly overhead, eclipsed where the habs and girders of the Crown loomed like a junkyard in the sky. The sun turned the ship’s lit edges into a bright jigsaw; the rest was visible only by inference, a haphazard geometry of negative space against the stars.

  The sky lurched.

  Here we go...​

  Another lurch. A sense of slow momentum, building. Somewhere behind them, the ligaments that held the Crown together were burning through. Up ahead, the view listed to port.

  They know what they’re doing.

  The bow of the ship began to topple, slow and majestic as a falling redwood. Sunlight and shadow played across its facets, hiding and highlighting myriad angles as the stars arced past. The universe turned around them. The sun rose, reached zen
ith, fell.

  Something glowed to stern, a corona peeking around a great black shape that blocked out the stars to stern: something finally tilting into view as a dozen insignificant rags of metal snapped and fell away. Brüks caught the briefest glimpse of dark mass, massive slabs of shielding, a great corrugated trunk thick as a skyscraper—

  (Shock absorbers, he realized.)

  —before a tsunami of white light struck him instantly, rapturously blind.

  Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish. Brüks blinked away tears, reflexively reached up, felt that strange, newly familiar inertia return to his arms—

  —Free fall—

  —before the sticky mesh released them to let his gloved hands swipe clumsily at his faceplate. He missed; his arms flailed, encountering nothing but the elastic bounce of the gee-web.

  He wobbled gently, weightless, waiting for his vision to clear. By the time he could see again the panorama had been usurped by mere telemetry: an impoverished wraparound of numbers and contour plots and parabolic trajectories. Brüks squinted, tried to squeeze signal from noise through the cotton growing in his head: the Crown’s drive section was already kilometers to port and kilometers ahead, its lead increasing with each second per second. Tactical had laid a vast attenuate cone of light across the space before it, spreading from the abandoned drive like a searchlight. Ramscoop, Brüks realized after a second. A magnetic field to gather up ionized particles, a brake against the solar wind. A proxy for mass gone suddenly missing: no telltale change in acceleration, no suspicious easing back on the throttle. One measure among many, shoehorned in between the masking of heatprints and whatever stealthed this ship to radar. Moore had told him as much as he could understand, Brüks supposed. There would be more. Solutions to problems no baseline could even foresee, let alone solve. A careful clandestine exit stage left, while unwitting pursuers followed a bright burning decoy toward the land of the comets. All spread out across the curve of his own personal diving bell, numbers and diagrams and stick-figure animations for the retarded.

  He only understood half of it, and didn’t know if he could trust the other half.

  Maybe it’s not even real, he thought drowsily. Maybe it’s all just a comforting fantasy to keep me pacified in the backseat. Mommy and Daddy, telling nice stories to keep the children from crying.

  They were still alive, at least. The exhaust hadn’t vaporized them outright. Only time would tell if radiation sickness might. Time, or—

  He cast his eyes around the bubble of intel. He saw nothing that spoke obviously to the subject of gamma rays.

  It would take a while, of course. You wouldn’t feel anything at first, certainly not in the few minutes left before everyone went down for the...​night...​

  Fifty days to Icarus. Fifty days tumbling ass-over-entrails, powered down, ballistic, just another piece of inner system junk. Needle in a haystack, maybe, but nowhere near sharp enough to prick anyone who happens to look this way. Lots of time for those bright little shards to rot us out from the inside. We could die in our sleep and never know it.

  His eyelids felt incongruously heavy in the weightless compartment. He kept them open, peered around at all those faces under glass, looked for smiles or frowns or any telltale wrinkles of worry that might be creasing more-enlightened foreheads. Angles and optics turned half the helmets into warped mirrors, hiding the faces within. Some tiny part of Daniel Brüks furrowed its brow in confusion—Wait a minute...​aren’t the lights supposed to be off?—but somehow he could see Lianna, eyes already closed, her face smoothed either in sleep or resignation. He could see the back of Moore’s helmet, down past his own boots. He was almost certain that he could make out a pair of Bicameral eyes here and there, all closed, the mouths beneath moving in some silent synchronized chant.

  Nothing but breathing on comm.

  Maybe I’m asleep already, he thought, twisting in the web. Maybe I’m lucid.

  Valerie stared back at him. No trace of fatigue or anesthesia in that face.

  No metabolic hacks for her, Brüks thought as his eyes began to close. No rotten stench in the back of her throat, no CO or H2S clogging up her blood cells, no half-assed technology to keep her under. She doesn’t need our help. She was doing this twenty thousand years ago, she’d mastered the undead arts before we’d even started scratching stick figures on cave walls. She gorged on us and then she just went away while we bred back to sustainable levels, while we forgot she was real, while we turned her from predator to myth, myth to bedtime story...​

  A bullet hole appeared in the center of her breastplate. A line, growing vertically: a crack splitting her suit down the middle.

  All those years we took to convince ourselves she didn’t really exist after all, and all that time she was sleeping right under our feet. Right up until she got hungry again, and dug herself out of the dirt like some monstrous godforsaken cicada, and went hunting while we put ourselves to sleep in our own graves and called it Heaven...​

  Valerie twisted and squirmed and emerged naked from her silvery cocoon: white as a grub, lean as a mantis. She grinned needles and clambered across the web toward him.

  Like we’re sleeping now, Brüks thought, fading. While she smiles at me.

  HE DESCENDED INTO Heaven’s dungeon, but the shackles were empty and his wife was nowhere to be seen.

  He lay on his back in the desert, looked down and saw that he’d been gutted, crotch to throat. Spectral snakes surged eagerly from the gash, fled the confines of his body for the endless baked mud of a fossil seabed, free at last, free at last...​

  He soared through an ocean of stars, dimensionless pinpoints: abstract, unchanging, unreal. One of them broke the rules as he watched, a pixel unfolding into higher dimensions like some quantum flower blooming in time-lapse. Angles emerged from outlines; shadows stretched across surfaces turning on some axis Brüks couldn’t quite make out. Bones spun majestically at its midsection.

  Monsters in there, waiting for him.

  He tried to veer off, to brake. He pulled all those temporoparietal strings that turned dreams lucid. The Crown of Thorns continued to swell in his sights, serenely untroubled by his pitiful attempts to rewrite the script. A hab swept toward him like the head of a mace; he flailed and thrashed and closed his eyes but felt no impact. When he looked again he was inside, and Valerie was staring back.

  Welcome to Heaven, Cold Cut.

  Her monster eyes were fully dilated; like headlights, like balls of bright bloody glass lit from within. The mouth beneath split open like a fresh grinning wound.

  Go back to sleep, she told him. Forget all your worries. Sleep forever.

  Her voice was suddenly, strangely androgynous.

  It’s your call.

  He cried out—

  —and opened his eyes.

  Lianna leaned over him. Brüks raised his head, glanced frantically in all directions.

  Nothing. No one but Lianna. They were back in Maintenance & Repair.

  Better than Storage.

  He settled back on the pallet. “I guess we made it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably?” His throat was parched.

  She handed him a squeezebulb. “We’re where we’re supposed to be,” she said as he sucked like a starving newborn. “No obvious signs of pursuit. It’ll take a while before we can be sure but it’s looking good. The drive blew up a few hours after we separated, so as far as we know they know, they got us.”

  “Whoever they are.”

  “Whoever they were.”

  “So. Next stop, Icarus?”

  “Depends on you.”

  Brüks raised his eyebrows.

  “I mean yes, we’re going to Icarus. But you don’t have to be up for it if you’re not, you know, up for it. We could put you back under, next thing you know you’re back on Earth safe and sound. Since you’re not officially part of the expedition.”

  One mission-critical. One ballast.
<
br />   “Or you put me back under and I die in my sleep when your expedition goes pear-shaped,” he said after a moment.

  She didn’t deny it. “You can die in your sleep anywhere. Besides, the Bicams would know better than any of us, and they’re pretty sure you’ll make it back.”

  “They told you that, did they?”

  “Not explicitly, but—yeah. I got that sense from them.”

  “If they really knew what they were going to find down there,” Brüks mused, “they wouldn’t have to go in the first place.”

  “There is that,” she said. And then, more cheerfully: “But if the mission does go pear-shaped, wouldn’t you rather die in your sleep than be wide awake and screaming when you get sucked into space?”

  “You are the Queen of the Silver Lining,” Brüks told her.

  She bowed, and waited.

  A trip to the sun. A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market. The face of the unknown. What scientist would choose to sleep through that?

  As if they’d ever let you get close to their precious Angel of the Asteroids, his inner companion sneered. As if you’d be able to make any sense of it if they did. Better to sit it out, better to let them carry you back home so you can pick up your life where you dropped it. You don’t belong out here anyway. You’re a roach on a battlefield.

  Who could easily get squashed in his sleep. What soldier in combat, no matter how benign, ever gave a thought to the vermin underfoot?

  Awake, at least, he might be able to scuttle clear of descending boots.

  “You think I’d pass up the chance to do this kind of fieldwork?” he said at last.

  Lianna grinned. “Okay, then. You know the drill, I’ll let you get yourself together.” She took a bouncing step toward the ladder.

  “Valerie,” Brüks blurted out behind her.