Peter Watts - Firefall

Angels again. Divine teleoperators, powerful creatures with neither soul nor will. God’s sock puppets.

Jim Moore was turning into one before his eyes.

“What if it’s not—Siri?” Brüks managed. His tongue seemed to be thawing a bit. “What if, what if it’s something else …”

The Colonel smiled again. “You don’t think I’d know my own son.”

“ It knows your son, Jim.” Of course it knows him, it mutilated him, can’t you remember the goddamn slide show? “It knows Siri, and Siri knows you, and—and it’s smart Jim, it’s so fucking smart…”

“So are you.” Moore eyed him curiously. “Smarter than you let on, anyway.”

If only .

He wasn’t smart enough to get out of this. Not smart enough to outthink some interstellar demon who could hack a man’s brain across five trillion kilometers and a six-month time lag, who could trickle its own parasitic subroutines into the host’s head and lead him around in real time. Assuming that Moore hadn’t just gone batshit crazy on his own, of course. That was probably the most parsimonious explanation.

Not that it mattered. Brüks wasn’t smart enough to get out of that, either.

Moore lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to do that, you know. She was a good person, she was just—misguided. I suppose I may have overreacted. I only did it to protect you.”

Behind him, up among the crossbeams that ribbed the ceiling, one shadow stirred among others. Brüks blinked and it was gone.

“I wonder if that was such a good idea…”

“It was,” Brüks croaked. “Really. It—”

Faster than he could finish: a shape detached itself from the ceiling, swayed silently against the light, and folded down over Moore like a praying mantis. Inhuman fingers, blurred in motion; silhouetted lips in motion.

Without any fuss at all, Moore stopped moving.

Valerie dropped soundlessly to the deck, crossed the room, stared down at Daniel Brüks as he slowly, painfully bent one knee. It was the closest thing to fight/flight left in him. She bent close and whispered—

“The tomb at Aramathea.”

His body unlocked.

He gulped air. The vampire stood, stepped back, gave him a small cryptic smile.

Brüks swallowed. “Saw you burn, ” he managed. Twice .

She didn’t even dignify it with an answer.

We expect a trick, and we find one, and we pat ourselves on the back. We find her pinned to the hull—think we do, anyway—and just stop looking. Of course she’s out there: there she is . There goes her hab and all its tripwires. Why look any further?

Why look inside the Crown ? Why check the hatches in the shuttle…?

He propped himself up on his elbows; the sodden jumpsuit peeled from the deck as if steeped in half-set epoxy. Valerie watched impassively as he got to his feet.

“So what now? You give me a ten-second head start to make it sporti—”

A blur and a hiss and he was off his feet, strangling and kicking a meter from the deck with her hand around his throat. In the next instant he was back on the floor, collapsed in a heap while Valerie grinned down with far too many teeth.

“All this experience,” she remarked while he gasped for breath, “and you’re still an idiot.”

Catch and release. Cat and mouse. Just having fun, he supposed. In her way.

“Aircraft are all dead,” Valerie said. “I find a ride in the moon pool, though. Get us to the mainland at least.”

“Us,” Brüks said.

“Swim if you’d rather. Or stay.” She dropped her chin in the direction of the statue frozen on its chair. “If you stay you should kill him, though. Or he kills you when he unlocks.”

“He’s my friend. He protected me, before—”

“Only part of him. OS conflict. It resolves soon enough, it’s resolving now .” Valerie turned toward the door. “Don’t wait too long. He’s on a mission from God.”

She stepped into the light. Brüks looked back at his friend: Jim Moore sat staring at the floor, face unreadable. He blinked, very slowly, as Brüks watched.

He did not cry out against his abandonment.

Brüks followed the monster along slanting corridors and companionways, down endless flights of emergency-lit stairs into the bowels of the gyland, unto its very anus: an airlock that would have felt too small at five times the size, given present company. The chamber beyond echoed like a cave and looked a little like one, too: pipes and hoses and cylinders of compressed gas jutted like stalactites from the angled ceiling. The room was half-underwater; the ocean had breached the banks of the moon pool as the gyland listed, flooded down to some temporary equilibrium halfway up the far bulkhead. Diffuse gray-green light filtered up from outside and wriggled dimly across every surface.

It was only a small port in the storm. There was probably a bay big enough to dock a Kraken or a Swordfish somewhere else on this floating behemoth, but here the berths were for smaller vehicles. A dozen parking racks hung from an overhead conveyor train, most of them empty. A two-person midwater scout rested snuggly in one clenched set of grappling claws, the end of a service crane still embedded in its shattered crystal snout. Another dangled precariously from the ceiling, nose submerged, tail entangled in its broken perch.

A third, apparently intact, floated just off the flooded deck: broad shark body, whale’s flat flukes, the great saucer eyes of some mesopelagic hatchetfish bridging the snout. Aspidontus , according to the letters etched just above the countershade line. It bumped gently against the edge of the moon pool—tail to the bulkhead, nose poking out over the hole in the floor—a waist-deep wade down the flooded incline.

A fucking cold wade, as it turned out. Valerie leapt the distance from a standing start, sailed over Brüks’s head and landed one step from the hatch. The vessel dipped and rolled under the impact; she didn’t even wobble. By the time Brüks had dragged his soaking legs and shriveled testicles onto the hull, she was inside and the little sub was humming awake.

Three seats. Brüks dropped into shotgun, pulled the hatch down overhead, dogged it. Valerie tapped the dashboard; Aspidontus shook herself, thrashed her flukes, humped forward half-stranded over loose canisters and bits of broken podmates. She hung balanced for a moment, belly scraping the submerged edge of the pool; her flukes slapped the water like a dolphin’s and she was free.

Still dark overhead, though, for all the hours that must have passed since sunrise. The derelict gyland loomed above them like the belly of a mountain, all too visible from underneath, ready to drop down and squash them flat without warning. There was nothing beyond the cockpit: no fish, no plankton swarms, no sun-dappled waves sending shafts of light dancing through the water. Not even the indestructible drifts of immortal plastic debris so ubiquitous from pole to pole. Nothing but heavy blackness above and dim green murk everywhere else. And Aspidontus : a speck embedded in glass.

And where to now? he wondered. Why did I even come along, why did she even take me, what am I to this thing other than a walking lunch? How the hell did I ever decide that Jim Moore was less dangerous than a goddamn vampire ?

But he knew it was a meaningless question. It was predicated on the assumption that the decision had ever been his to begin with.

Darkness receded above, encroached from below: Aspidontus was diving. A hundred meters. A hundred fifty. They were in the middle of the Pacific. The seabed was four kilometers down. There was nothing in between, unless Valerie had arranged a rendezvous with another submarine.