Peter Watts - Firefall

“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.

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 .