Peter Watts - Firefall

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 .

“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.

She didn’t turn. “In her hab. With her entourage.”

“When the ship was breaking—I saw—”

She tilted her head, lowered her gaze to some point on the far bulkhead. “You see weird things when you go under, sometimes. Near-death experiences, you know?”

Too near . “This was no Tunnel of Light.”

“Hardly ever is.” Lianna reached for the railing. “Brain plays tricks when you turn it on and off. Can’t trust your own perceptions.”

She paused and turned, one hand on the ladder.

“Then again, when can you?”

Moore dropped unsmiling onto the deck as Brüks finished pulling on his jumpsuit. He held a personal tent in one hand, a rolled-up cylinder the size of his forearm. “I hear you’ll be joining us.”

“Try to control your enthusiasm.”

“You’re an extra variable,” the Colonel told him. “I have a great deal of work to do. And we may not have the luxury of keeping an eye on you if things get sticky. On the other hand—” He shrugged. “I can’t imagine deciding any differently, in your shoes.”

Brüks raised his left foot, balanced on his right to scratch at his freshly pinkened ankle (someone had removed the cast during his latest coma). “Believe me, getting in the way’s the last thing I want to do, but this isn’t exactly familiar territory for me. I don’t really know the rules.”

“Just—stay out of the way, basically.” He tossed the tent to Brüks. “You can set up your rack pretty much anywhere you want. The habs are a bit messy—we had to relocate a lot of inventory when they converted the Hold—but we’ve also got fewer people living in them for the time being. So find a spot, set up your tent, buckle down. If you need something and the interface can’t help you, ask Lianna. Or me, if I’m not too busy. The Bicamerals will be coming out of decompression in a few days; try to keep out from underfoot. Needless to say that goes double for the vampire.”

“What if the vampire wants me underfoot?”

Moore shook his head. “That’s not likely.”

“She already went out of her way to—to provoke me…”

“How, exactly?”

“You see her arm, after the spoke broke?”

“I did not.”

“She broke it. She broke her own fucking arm. Repeatedly. Said I wasn’t setting it right.”

“But she didn’t attack you. Or threaten you.”

“Not physically. She really seemed to get off on scaring the shit out of me, though.”

The Colonel grunted. “In my experience, those things don’t have to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her.”

“She called me a cold cut .”

“And Rakshi Sengupta called you a roach . Unless I miss my guess you took that as an insult, too.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Common Tran term. Means so primitive you’re unkillable.”

“I’m plenty killable,” Brüks said.

“Sure, if someone drops a piano on your head. But you’re also field-tested . We’ve had millions of years to get things right; some of those folks in the Hold are packing augments that didn’t even exist a few months ago. First releases can be buggy, and it takes time for the bugs to shake out—and by then, there’s probably another upgrade they can’t afford to pass up if they want to stay current. So they suffer—glitches, sometimes. If anything, roach connotes a bit of envy.”

Brüks digested that. “Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You’d think someone with all that brainpower would be able to cobble together a few social skills.”

“Funny thing”—Moore’s voice was expressionless—“Sengupta couldn’t figure out how someone with all your interpersonal skills could be so shitty at math.”

Brüks said nothing.

“Don’t take this personally,” the Colonel told him, “but try to keep in mind that we’re guests on this ship and your personal standards—whatever they might be—do not reign supreme here. Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat. These people are not baselines with a tweak here and there. They’re closer to, to separate cognitive subspecies. As far as Valerie goes, she and her—bodyguards—have pretty much stayed in their hab since the trip began. I expect that to continue. She finds the ambient lighting too bright, for one thing. I doubt you’ll have trouble as long as you don’t go looking for any.”