Peter Watts - Firefall

Or somewhere in between, Brüks thought.

He looked across the compartment. Moore pinwheeled slowly through light and shadow and looked back. This time the smile was as unmistakable as it was cryptic.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“About…?”

“We’re not headed for the Oort. I’m not taking you away on some misguided desperate search for my dead son.”

“I—Jim, I didn’t—”

“There’s no need. My son is alive.”

Maybe six months ago. Maybe even now. I suppose it’s possible. Not in six months, though. Not after the telematter stream winks out and leaves Theseus to freeze in the dark.

Not after you cut him adrift…​

“Jim…”

“My son is alive,” Moore said again. “And he’s coming home.”

Brüks didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “How do you know?”

“I know.”

Brüks pushed the torch with one hand into the other, felt the solid reality of mass and inertia without: the fragility of aching body parts within. “Okay. I, um, I should take some samples—”

“Of course. Sengupta and her invading slime mold.”

“Doesn’t cost anything to check it out.”

“ ’Course not.” Moore reached out a casual hand, anchored himself to an off-duty ladder. “I take it the suit’s a condom.”

“No point in taking chances.” Watching Moore in his yellow paper jumpsuit, the Colonel’s naked hand clenched on untested territory.

“No helmet,” Moore observed.

“No point in going overboard, either.” If Portia ran on ambient thermal, it wouldn’t be getting enough joules from the bulkhead to sprout any pseudopods on short notice. Besides, Brüks felt stupid enough as it was.

Under Moore’s bemused gaze he positioned himself to one side of the hatch and dialed the beam down to short focus. Smart paint sparked and blistered along the lip of the hatch. Nothing screamed or recoiled. No tentacles extruded from the metal in frantic acts of self-defense. Brüks scraped a sample from the scored periphery of the burn. Another from the untouched surface a few centimeters farther out. He moved systematically around the edge of the hatch, taking a sample every forty centimeters or so.

“Will you be using that on me?” Moore wondered behind him.

I should. “I don’t think that’s necessary just yet.”

Moore nodded, his face impassive. “Well. Change your mind, you know where I am.”

Brüks smiled.

I wish I did, my friend. I really wish I did.

But I don’t have a fucking clue .

Out of the attic into the Hub.

Looks like the Hub, anyway. Could be a lining. Could be a skin.

Through the equator, from frozen north to pirouetting south. Try not to touch the grate on your way through.

Could be watching me right now. I could be swimming through an eyeball.

Don’t be an idiot, Brüks. Portia had years in Icarus; you were there for three weeks. Not nearly enough time to grow enough new skin to—

Unless it didn’t grow new lining, unless it just redistributed the old. Unless it spent all those years building up extra postbiomass as an investment against future expansion.

It couldn’t just ooze through the front door and down the throat without anyone noticing. (Coasting between an eyeball and an iris now: one open, one shut, both silver. Both blind.) No kinetic waste heat, no mass alarms—

Unless it moved slowly enough to blend in with the noise. Unless it happens to know a little more about the laws of thermodynamics than we do…​

Down the spoke, putting on weight, staring hard at the gloved fingers clenched around their handhold. Alert for subtle mycelia threading between suit and stirrup. Eyes open for any bead of moisture there, some meniscus of surface tension that might belie a film in motion.

You’re being paranoid . You’re being an idiot. This is just a precaution against a remote possibility. That’s all this is.

Don’t go off the deep end. You’re Dan Brüks.

You’re not Rakshi Sengupta.

You only made her.

He heard her moving in the basement as he fed samples into the holding tray. He tried to ignore her foot taps and mutterings as the scrapings cycled through quarantine, as he gave in to reawakened hunger and wolfed down whatever the lab hab’s bare-bones galley disgorged, swallowing not quite fast enough to stay ahead of the Spirulina aftertaste.

Finally, though, he gave in: pushed from above by Moore’s matter-of-fact dissonance, pulled from below by Sengupta’s compulsive scuttling. He climbed down out of the lab, maneuvered around the giant seedpod obstruction of Sengupta’s tent beside his own. The pilot was running ConSensus on the naked bulkhead between two impoverished bands of astroturf. The Crown of Thorns rotated there in animatic real time, two of her limbs amputated at the elbow. We keep going at this rate and we’re going to be three spacesuits and a tank of O 2by the time we get home, Brüks mused.

A dot on the map: MOORE, J. floated safely distant in the attic. Other readouts formed a sparse mosaic across the bulkhead; Brüks couldn’t understand them all but he was pretty sure that one or two involved the blocking of intercom feeds.

She turned as his feet hit the deck, stared expectantly at his lapel.

“Jim,” he said.

“Yah.”

“You said he’d—changed…”

“Don’t have to take my word for it you saw it yourself he’s been changing ever since we left LEO.”

Brüks shook his head. “He was only—distracted before. Preoccupied. Never delusional.”

Sengupta ran her fingers down the wall; file listings flew by too fast for Brüks to make out. “He was transmitting into the Oort did you know that? Even before we left Earth he broke the law hell he helped make that law after Firefall nobody else could get away with it but man, he’s the great Jim Moore and he was—sending messages…”

“What kind of messages?”

“To Theseus .”

“Well, of course. He was with Mission Control.”

“And it talked back .”

“Rakshi. So what ?”

“It’s talking to him now, ” Sengupta said.

“Uh—what? Through all the interference?”

“We’re out of the solar static already most of it anyhow. But he’s been collecting those signals for way longer some of the timestamps go back seven years and they change . All the early stuff that’s all just telemetry you know? Lot of voice logs too but mainly just data, all the sensor records contingency analyses and about a million different scenarios that vampire that Sarasti was running when they were closing on target. It was dense there was noise all over the signal but the streams were redundant so you can make it out if you run it through the right filters right? And then Theseus goes dark you don’t hear anything for a while and then there’s this—”

She fell silent.

“There’s what, Rak?” Brüks prompted gently.

She took a breath. “There’s this other signal. Not tightbeam. Omnidirectional . Washing over the whole innersys.”

“He said Theseus went dark,” Brüks remembered. “They went in and lost contact and that was all anybody knew.”

“Oh he knew. It’s really thin and it’s so degraded you can barely make it out even with every filter and noise-correction algorithm in the arsenal I don’t think you’d even see it if you didn’t already know it was there but Colonel Carnage, man he knew . He picked it out and it’s…​it’s…”