Peter Watts - Firefall

Even Sengupta said nothing. There would have been no point.

Enemy territory. Couldn’t be helped.

Maybe Moore was even right. The world had been simmering for over a century. It had always only been a matter of time before it boiled over. Maybe he hadn’t done anything but advance the schedule by a few months.

“Got it,” Sengupta said. “Just came line of sight over the Aleutians whole lotta junk between there and here.”

A tactical profile flashed up on the horizon: a cylinder ten meters across and maybe thirty long, a great broad corona of solar panels deployed from the starside end and a cluster of mouth parts—microwave emitters, from the look of them—jutting down from the other. It looked like an old-style powersat, albeit in a very strange orbit. Which was, of course, the whole idea.

“Be tricky docking with that thing.” Off to one side a simulacrum of the Crown lazily lowered its remaining arms—spread-eagled but already spun down—into lockdown position.

“We don’t dock,” Moore reminded her.

“How long?” Brüks asked.

“Thirty minutes, give or take. We should bottle up.”

The attic was not designed to be a working environment during maneuvers but they’d made do, one survivor strapped into each of three suit alcoves directly across from the docking hatch. Brüks and Moore had welded it shut somewhere past Venus but it had been Sengupta who’d planted the thermite along those seams just six hours ago. There wasn’t much bulkhead to spare so Sengupta, still unwilling to let ConSensus into her head, had stripped the tool rack bare and slathered smart paint across the gecko boards. The microfibers fuzzed the image a little at high rez but the space was big enough to contain the windows she needed: radar profiles and trajectory overlays, engine vitals, throttles and brakes in shades of gold and emerald. A naked-eye view of Moore’s last ace up the sleeve, still posing a little too convincingly as decommissioned junk, swelling slowly against the deceptively blue-green crescent of a world falling into ever-greater depths of disrepair.

In a dedicated window, stage right: Valerie, still tied to the mast. She hadn’t moved in weeks; and yet there was still a vague sense of lethality in that frozen body, a sense of something spring-loaded and biding its time.

Its remaining time. Measured in minutes now.

A gentle nudge; a slow, steady pressure pushed Brüks against the side of the alcove. Over on the tool rack the Crown ’s avatar turned one hundred eighty ponderous degrees around its center of mass and coasted on to retrograde.

“Hang on,” Sengupta warned, and hit the brakes.

Mutilated, amputated, cauterized, the ship groaned and ground down the delta-vee. Deceleration pushed Brüks against the floor of his alcove. He staggered; the harness held him up against this final encore performance of down . Moore touched some unseen control and out across the vacuum his chameleon satellite split at the seams like an exploding schematic: solar panels and radiator vanes came apart in puffs of vapor turned instantly to snow. The shell fell apart as if drawn and quartered; body parts sailed silently in all directions. A great arrowhead, aimed at the earth, floated exposed where the false skin had come apart. It glinted in the rising sun, its stubby wings iridescent as a dragonfly’s.

Flying debris rattled across the Crown ’s hull like a hail of pebbles. Moore waited until the shower had passed and hit the switch.

Cracks of sunlight ignited around the hatch: the barrier there, welded shut, burned open and fell away. The hatch beyond dilated in an instant; a brief hurricane pulled the plating into space and Brüks toward the stars. The webbing held him fast for the moment it took Moore to snap the buckles. Then they were through and into a void silent but for the sound of fast harsh breathing, just this side of panic, filling Brüks’s helmet. The dark Earth spread out below: too convex for mere landscape, too vast and imminent to be a sphere. Weather systems laid dirty fingerprints across its face. Coastlines and continents shone like galaxies where civilization burned bright, flickered dull and intermittent orange where it had burned out.

It was such a long way down.

Sunlight turned the flotsam ahead into a blinding jigsaw, save for one brief instant when a great dark hand passed over the sun. Brüks flailed and turned to see the Crown of Thorns in passing, still huge in the sky, backlit against a risen sun and a bright spreading crescent. Her last frozen breath sparkled near the bow like a faint cloud of jewels.

He could not see Valerie’s hiding place from here.

Something yanked at his leash. Brüks spun to heel, to the shuttle swelling in his sights amid its cloud of debris. “ Focus, ” Moore hissed over comm.

“Sorry—”

They tumbled forward, Moore in the lead, the others dragged behind. The shuttle’s hatch gaped just behind the wraparound cockpit window, like a frog’s eardrum cut away and folded back against the head. Some magical spray-on ablative made the hull shimmer with oily rainbows.

A faint static of ice crystals whispered across Brüks’s helmet; then Moore was on the hull, dead on target, boots coming down between the edge of the hatch and a convenient handhold welded like a towel bar to the shuttle’s skin. His legs bent to absorb the impact; one gloved hand seized the handhold as if it had eyes of its own. Brüks sailed past overhead and splatted against the fuselage. He bounced, spun against the tether, grasped wildly at the recessed cone of some dormant maneuvering thruster just a few centimeters out of reach—finally felt his boots click home against the hull.

The Crown was well past and well below them now, drifting in a slow majestic tumble toward the terminator: forward momentum stalled, decelerating from the endless satellite fall around to the terminal incendiary fall into . Distance and the limits of vision had healed its scars. Now—torn apart, spliced back together, burned and broken—she looked almost pristine. You kept us alive, Brüks thought, and then: I’m sorry .

Moore yanked him out of one moment and into the next, reeling Brüks and Sengupta in together like fish on a line. Brüks spared a moment to envy the pilot’s composure; she hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t even breathed hard during their fall across the endless chasm. Only now, peering into her faceplate, did he see her lips move below tightly clenched eyelids. Only now, bumped helmet to helmet, could he hear her incantation.

“ —oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck —”

You little chickenshit. You turned off your comm…​

Moore bundled her through the open hatch. Brüks followed, pulling himself into the cabin: two racks, one behind the other, each holding six acceleration couches like a half-dozen eggs in the carton. The couches themselves were squashed nearly flat, each bent just enough at the ass and the knees to avoid being classified as cots ; the racks faced forward toward a pair of more conventional command chairs and a control horseshoe. Above those controls a visor of quartz glass ran around the front of the cockpit. No stars shone in that nose-down view; the world filled it from side to side, mostly dark, brightening to starboard.

That was pretty much it. One hatch in the aft bulkhead and a smaller one in the deck, both sealed. The first might have led to a cargo hold—a very modest one, given the size of the vessel—but that hole in the deck couldn’t have led to anything more spacious than a service crawlway. Contingency orbital extraction, Moore had said. Emergency planetfall for soldiers stranded in the wake of failed missions. This wasn’t a shuttle: it was a glorified parachute to be used once and thrown away.