Peter Watts - Firefall

“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 something 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.”