Peter Watts - Firefall

“Meteorites,” Bates said dryly.

The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been an insect or an asteroid. “How big?” I whispered, a split-second before the answer appeared on my inlays:

Four hundred meters along the major axis.

Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk centered in Theseus ’s forward viewfinder. But I remembered the close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing.

There’d been thousands of the things.

Theseus shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew how she felt.

We headed in and hedged our bets.

Theseus weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an orbit—or into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, molecule-thick parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display.

We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us. Susan James wondered why we hadn’t.

“Too risky,” Sarasti said, without elaboration.

Szpindel leaned in James’ direction. “Why give ’em something else to shoot at, eh?”

We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct. They couldn’t take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben. Theseus stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there, they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas at a million angles. We never saw them collide—not with each other, not with the cauldron of rock tumbling around Ben’s equator. Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat.

Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a conclusion around the front end: “Scramjet.”

We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days. That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into the void.

“The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn,” Szpindel pointed out. “Meat couldn’t handle that. I say they’re unmanned.”

“Meat’s reinforceable,” Sarasti said.

“If it’s got that much scaffolding you might as well stop splitting hairs and call it a machine anyway.”

Surface morphometrics were absolutely uniform. Four hundred thousand divers, every one identical. If there was an alpha male calling the shots among the herd, it couldn’t be distinguished on sight.

One night—as such things were measured on board—I followed a soft squeal of tortured electronics up to the observation blister. Szpindel floated there, watching the skimmers. He’d closed the clamshells, blocked off the stars and built a little analytical nest in their place. Graphs and windows spilled across the inside of the dome as though the virtual space in Szpindel’s head was insufficient to contain them. Tactical graphics lit him from all sides, turned his body into a bright patchwork of flickering tattoos.

The Illustrated Man. “Mind if I come in?” I asked.

He grunted: Yeah, but not enough to push it .

Inside the dome, the sound of heavy rainfall hissed and spat behind the screeching that had led me here. “What is that?”

“Ben’s magnetosphere.” He didn’t look back. “Nice, eh?”

Synthesists don’t have opinions on the job; it keeps observer effects to a minimum. This time I permitted myself a small breach. “The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.”

“Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s beautiful . Like old jazz.”

“I never got the hang of that either.”

He shrugged and squelched the upper register, left the rain pattering around us. His jiggling eyes fixed on some arcane graphic. “Want a scoop for your notes?”

“Sure.”

“There you go.” Light reflected off his feedback glove, iridescing like the wing of a dragonfly as he pointed: an absorption spectrum, a looped time-series. Bright peaks surged and subsided, surged and subsided across a fifteen-second timeframe.

Subtitles only gave me wavelengths and Angstroms. “What is it?”

“Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into the atmosphere.”

“How complex?”

“Hard to tell, so far. Faint traces, and they dissipate like that . But sugars and aminos at least. Maybe proteins. Maybe more.”

“Maybe life? Microbes?” An alien terraforming project…

“Depends on how you define life , eh?” Szpindel said. “Not even Deinococcus would last long down there. But it’s a big atmosphere. They better not be in any hurry if they’re reworking the whole thing by direct inoculation.”

If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating inoculates. “Sounds like life to me.”

“Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter.” He gave me a scary grin. “Something’s got a beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren’t gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered.”

Szpindel’s findings were front and center at our next get-together.

The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: “Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt’s still unsettled.”

“Haven’t seen any of the herd giving birth,” Szpindel remarked. “Any sign of a factory?”

Sarasti shook his head. “Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or the herd stops breeding at optimal N.”

“These are only the bulldozers,” Bates pointed out. “There’ll be tenants.”

“A lot of ’em, eh?” Szpindel added. “Outnumber us by orders of mag.”

James: “But they might not show up for centuries.”

Sarasti clicked. “Do these skimmers build Fireflies? Burns-Caulfield?”

It was a rhetorical question. Szpindel answered anyway: “Don’t see how.”

“Something else does, then. Something already local.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. James’ topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably younger was on top.

“Their habitat isn’t anything like ours, if they’re building a home way out here. That’s hopeful.”

Michelle. The synesthete.

“Proteins.” Sarasti’s eyes were unreadable behind the visor. Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us .

“Whoever these beings are, they don’t even live in sunlight . No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There’s no reason we shouldn’t get along just fine.”