Peter Watts - Firefall

Brüks felt his mouth tighten at the corners. “So”—remembering the briefing in the Hub, in the company of the envious Rakshi Sengupta—“a week to Icarus?”

“Closer to twelve days,” Moore told him.

“Why so long?”

Moore looked grim. “That fiasco at the monastery. The Crown had to launch prematurely. The sep maneuver was always part of the plan—doesn’t take a hive to know a trip like this is going to draw attention—but the replacement drive’s still in pieces. They’re putting it together as we speak.”

Brüks blinked. “We’ve got no engines at all ?”

“Maneuvering thrusters. Can’t use them yet, not without risking detection.” Moore saw the look on Brüks’s face, added: “Not that I expect we’ll need them in any event. The hive’s ballistic calculations are very accurate. And it’s just as well we’re taking the long way, given the medical situation. The bug was easy enough to fix once they nailed down its specs, but healing takes time and hibernation’s not the same thing as a medical coma. Last thing we want is to hit the zone with our core personnel compromised.” Moore’s face hardened at some grim insight, relaxed again. “My advice? Look on this as an extended sabbatical. Maybe you get a ringside seat to some amazing discoveries; maybe it’s a dead end and you’ll be bored out of your skull. Either way, you can weigh it against a painful death in the Oregon desert and call it a win on points.” He spread his hands. “Here endeth the lesson.”

The lights had been dimmed in the northern hemisphere. Climbing into the Hub, Brüks could see a wash of arcane tacticals through the equatorial grille, a chromatic mishmash he knew would make no sense even with an unobstructed view.

“Wrong way,” said a familiar voice as he headed for the next spoke.

Sengupta.

“What?”

He couldn’t see her, even through the grille; the mirrorball eclipsed the view. But her voice carried clearly around the chamber: “You visiting the vampire?”

“Uh, no.” God no.

“Then you’re going the wrong way.”

“Thanks.” He second-guessed himself, decided to risk it (hey, she’d started the conversation), swam through the air, and bull’s-eyed the doorway more through luck than skill.

She was still embedded in her acceleration couch. Her face turned away as soon as he came into view.

She kept up her end, though. “Where you going?”

I don’t know . I don’t have a clue. “Commons. Galley.”

“Other way. Two spokes over.”

“Thanks.”

She said nothing. Her eyes jiggled in their sockets. Every now and then a ruby highlight winked off her cornea as some unseen laser read commands there.

“Meatspace display,” Brüks tried after a moment.

“What about it?”

“I thought everyone here used ConSensus.”

“This is ConSensus.”

He tapped his temple. “I mean, you know. Cortical.”

“Wireless can bite my clit anyone can peek.”

The fruit of her labor sprawled across a good twenty degrees of the dome, a light storm of numbers and images and—over on the far left side—a stack of something that looked like voiceprints. It didn’t look like any kind of astrogation display Brüks had ever seen.

She was spelunking the cache.

“ I can peek,” he said. “I’m peeking right now.”

“Why should I care about you ?” Sengupta snorted.

Cats and dogs, he thought, and held his tongue.

He tried again. “So I guess I’ve got you to thank for that?”

“Thank for what?”

He gestured at weeks-old echoes plastered across the sky. “Grabbing that snapshot on the way out. Don’t know what I’d do for the next twelve days if I didn’t have some kind of Quinternet access.”

“Sure why not. You’re eating our food you’re huffing our O 2why not suck our data while you’re at it.”

I give up .

He turned and headed back to the exit. He felt Sengupta shift in the couch behind him.

“I hate that fucking vampire she moves all wrong.”

It was nice to know that basic predator-aversion subroutines survived the augments, Brüks reflected.

“And I wouldn’t trust Colonel Carnage either,” Sengupta added. “No matter how much he cozies up to you.”

He looked back. The pilot floated against the loose restraints of her couch, unmoving, staring straight ahead.

“Why’s that?” Brüks asked.

“Trust him then do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”

He waited a moment longer. Sengupta sat as still as a stick insect.

“Thanks,” he said at last, and dropped through the floor.

So that’s what I am, then . A parasite.

He descended into the Lab.

Some half-dead fossil, scooped up in passing from the battlefield. Patched together for no better reason than the firing of a few mirror neurons, some vestigial itch we might have once called pity.

The equipment wasn’t his, but the workbench provided some degree of plastic comfort: a bit of surrogate familiarity in a ship too full of long bones and strange creatures.

Worse than ballast: I suck their O 2and eat their supplies and take up precious airspace millions of klicks from the nearest real atmosphere. Less than a pet: they don’t want my company, feel no urge to scritch my ears, aren’t interested in any tricks I might know except staying invisible and playing dead.

Sequence/splicer, universal incubator, optoelectron nanoscope with a respectable thirty-picometer threshold. All reassuringly familiar in a world where he’d half expected the very dust to be built out of miracles and magic crystals. Maybe that was deliberate: a security blanket for strays who’d missed the Singularity.

Okay, then. I’m a parasite. Parasites are not destroyed by the powerful: parasites feed on them. Parasites use the powerful to their own ends.

The lower level was empty except for a short stack of folded chairs and half-dozen cargo cubes (fab-matter stockpiles, according to the manifest). Brüks unslung the tent and spread it across the deck against a curve of bulkhead.

A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.

The structure inflated into a kind of bulbous lozenge. It swelled igloolike toward the center of the compartment, molded itself against the walls and flooring behind. It wasn’t too different from his abandoned tent back in the desert; the piezoelectricity that buttressed the structure also powered the GUI sheathing its inner surface. Brüks ran an index finger down the center of the door. Its membranous halves snapped gently apart like a sheet of mesentery split down the middle.

Some go even farther. Some get the upper hand, dig down, and change the wiring right at the synapse. Dicrocoelium, Sacculina, Toxoplasma . Brainless things, all of them. Mindless creatures that turn inconceivably greater intellects into puppets.

He dropped to his knees and crawled inside. The built-in hammock clung to the inner surface of the tent, ready to peel free and inflate at a touch. The default config only provided enough headroom for a crouch but Brüks couldn’t be bothered to dial up the headroom. Besides, the tight confines were strangely comforting down here at the very bottom of the spoke, just a few layers of alloy and insulation from the whole starry drum of the heavens rolling past beneath his feet.