Peter Watts - Firefall

“Don’t I.” She smiled. “Real fuckbuddies aren’t airbrushed. Got all these needs and demands that you can’t edit out. How can you blame anyone for saying no thanks to all that, now there’s a choice? You gotta wonder how our parents ever stayed together sometimes.”

You gotta wonder why they did . I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair, wondered again at this strange new sensation. Chelsea had said the dopamine was tweaked. That was probably it.

She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin. “But there are advantages too, once you learn the moves,” she said. “The body’s got a long memory. And you do realize that there’s no trickler under your left finger there, don’t you, Siri?”

I looked. My left arm was slightly extended, index finger touching one of the trickle pads; and my right had mirrored the motion while I wasn’t watching, its own finger tapping uselessly on blank tabletop.

I pulled it back. “Bit of a bilateral twitch,” I admitted. “The body creeps into symmetrical poses when I’m not looking.”

I waited for a joke, or at least a raised eyebrow. Chelsea just nodded and resumed her thread. “So if you’re game for this, so am I. I’ve never been entangled with a synthesist before.”

“Jargonaut’s fine. I’m not proud.”

“Don’t you just always know just exactly what to say.” She cocked her head at me. “So, your name. What’s it mean?”

Relaxed. That was it. I felt relaxed .

“I don’t know. It’s just a name.”

“Well, it’s not good enough. If we’re gonna to be swapping spit for any length of time you’ve gotta get a name that means something.”

And we were, I realized. Chelsea had decided while I wasn’t looking. I could have stopped her right there, told her what a bad idea this was, apologized for any misunderstanding. But then there’d be wounded looks and hurt feelings and guilt because after all, if I wasn’t interested why the hell had I even shown up?

She seemed nice. I didn’t want to hurt her.

Just for a while , I told myself. It’ll be an experience .

“I think I’ll call you Cygnus,” Chelsea said.

“The swan?” I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.

She shook her head. “Black hole. Cygnus X-1.”

I furrowed my brow at her, but I knew exactly what she meant: a dark, dense object that sucks up the light and destroys everything in its path.

“Thanks a whole fucking lot. Why?”

“I’m not sure. Something dark about you.” She shrugged, and gave me a great toothy grin. “But it’s not unattractive. And let me give you a tweak or two, I bet you’d grow right out of it.”

Pag admitted afterward, a bit sheepishly, that maybe I should have read that as a warning sign. Live and learn.

OUR SCOUT FELL towards orbit, watching Ben. We fell days behind, watching the scout. And that was all we did: sit in Theseus ’ belly while the system streamed telemetry to our inlays. Essential, irreplaceable, mission-critical—we might as well have been ballast during that first approach.

We passed Ben’s Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Major—a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way.

The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben’s surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.

“Lightning?” James wondered.

Szpindel shook his head. “Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood.”

“Wrong color,” Sarasti said. He was not physically among us—he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain—but ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.

Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben’s day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers.

“Meteorites.” Szpindel grinned. “Told ya.”

He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.

Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene.

One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben’s face directly ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.

And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions infinitely predictable at any time t . But the meteorite’s contrail jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to. Still. There was something wrong about it somehow, something about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness. Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept as natural —

The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn’t return.

“Probe’s fried,” Bates reported. “Spike there at the end. Like it hit a Parker Spiral, but with a really tight wind.”

I didn’t need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking about a magnetic field.

“It’s—” she began, and stopped as a number popped up in ConSensus: 11.2 Tesla .

“ Holy shit ,” Szpindel whispered. “Is that right?”

Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake. Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen.

Ben lurched and went out all over again.