Peter Watts - Firefall

The septum receded around a curve as we retreated. The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged pupil of some great unblinking eye. It stayed empty as long as it stayed in sight. Nothing came out after us. Nothing we could see. A thought began cycling through my head, some half-assed eulogy stolen from an eavesdropped confessional, and try as I might I couldn’t shut it down.

Isaac Szpindel hadn’t made the semifinals after all.

Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not.

We stripped wordlessly in the decon balloon. Bates, first out of her suit, reached for Szpindel but the Gang stopped her with a hand and a headshake. Personae segued one into another as they stripped the body. Susan removed helmet and backpack and breastplate. Cruncher peeled away the silvery leaded skin from collar to toe. Sascha stripped the jumpsuit and left the pale flesh naked and exposed. Except for the gloves. They left his feedback gloves in place; their fingertips forever tactile, the flesh inside forever numb. Through it all, Szpindel stared unblinking beneath the hole in his forehead. His glazed eyes focused on distant quasars.

I expected Michelle to appear in her turn and close them, but she never did.

I DON’T KNOW how to feel about this , I thought. He was a good man. He was decent, he was kind to me, even when he didn’t know I was listening in. I didn’t know him long—he wasn’t a friend exactly—but still. I should miss him. I should mourn.

I should feel more than this sick sinking fear that I could be next…

Sarasti hadn’t wasted any time. Szpindel’s replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed, nicotine-scented. The rehydration of his flesh was ongoing—saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved.

He looked past me and took the body. “Susan—Michelle… I—”

The gang turned away.

He coughed, began fumbling a body condom over the corpse. “Sarasti wants everyone in the drum.”

“We’re hot,” Bates said. Even cut short, the excursion had piled up a lethal Seivert count. Faint nausea tickled the back of my throat.

“Decontaminate later.” One long pull of a zipper and Szpindel was gone, engulfed in an oily gray shroud. “You—” he turned in my direction, pointed at the scorched holes in my jumpsuit. “With me.”

Robert Cunningham. Another prototype. Dark-haired, hollow-cheeked, a jaw you could use as a ruler. Both smoother and harsher than the man he had replaced. Where Szpindel had ticced and jerked as if static-charged, Cunningham’s face held all the expression of a wax dummy’s. The wetware that ran those muscles had been press-ganged into other pursuits. Even the tremors that afflicted the rest of his body were muted, soothed by the nicotine he drew with every second breath.

He held no cigarette now. He held only the shrouded body of his hard-luck primary and his ongoing, freshly thawed distaste for the ship’s synthesist. His fingers trembled.

Bates and the Gang moved silently up the spine. Cunningham and I followed, guiding the Shroud of Szpindel between us. My leg and side were stinging again, now that Cunningham had reminded them to. There wouldn’t be much he could do about them, though. The beams would have cauterized the flesh on their way through, and if they’d hit anything vital I’d have been dead already.

At the hatch we broke into single-file: Szpindel first, Cunningham pushing at his heels. By the time I emerged into the drum Bates and the gang were already down on deck and taking their usual seats. Sarasti, in the flesh, watched them from the end of the conference table.

His eyes were naked. From this angle the soft, full-spectrum light of the drum washed the shine from them. If you didn’t look too closely, for too long, you might almost think those eyes were Human.

BioMed had been spun down for my arrival. Cunningham pointed to a diagnostic couch on a section of the stilled deck that served as our infirmary; I floated over and strapped myself in. Two meters away, past a waist-high guard rail that had risen from the deck, the rest of the drum rolled smoothly past. It slung Bates and the Gang and Sarasti around like weights on a string.

I tapped ConSensus to hear them. James was speaking, quietly and without expression. “I noticed a new pattern in the form-constants. Something in the grating. It looked like a signal. It got stronger as I went down the tunnel, I followed it, I blacked out. I don’t remember anything more until we were on our way back. Michelle filled me in, as much as she could. That’s all I know. I’m sorry.”

A hundred degrees away in the no-gee zone, Cunningham maneuvered his predecessor into a coffin with different options than those up front. I wondered if it would embark on an autopsy during the debriefing. I wondered if we’d be able to hear the sounds it made.

“Sascha,” Sarasti said.

“Yeah.” Sascha’s trademark drawl infected the voice. “I was riding Mom. Went deaf dumb and stark fucking blind when she passed out. I tried to take over but something was blocking me. Michelle, I guess. Never thought she had it in her. I couldn’t even see .”

“But you don’t lose consciousness.”

“I was awake the whole time, far as I know. Just completely in the dark.”

“Smell? Tactile?”

“I could feel it when Michelle pissed in the suit. But I didn’t notice anything else.”

Cunningham was back at my side. The inevitable cigarette had appeared between his lips.

“Nothing touches you,” the vampire surmised. “Nothing grabs your leg.”

“No,” Sascha said. She didn’t believe Michelle’s stories about invisible monsters. None of us did; why bother, when dementia could so easily explain anything we experienced?

“Cruncher.”

“Don’t know anything,” I still wasn’t used to the maleness of the voice now emanating from James’s throat. Cruncher was a workaholic. He hardly ever surfaced in mixed company.

“You’re there,” Sarasti reminded him. “You must remember some—”

“Mom sent me patterns to parse. I was working on them. I’m still working on them,” he added pointedly. “I didn’t notice anything. Is that all?”

I’d never been able to get a good read on him. Sometimes Cruncher seemed to have more in common with the dozens of nonconscious modules working in James’s head than with sentient hubs comprising the rest of the Gang. “You feel nothing?” Sarasti pressed.

“Just the patterns.”

“Anything significant?”

“Standard phenomath spirals and gratings. But I haven’t finished. Can I go now?”

“Yes. Call Michelle, please.”

Cunningham stabbed at my wounds with anabolisers, muttering to himself. Faint blue smoke curled between us. “Isaac found some tumors,” he observed.

I nodded and coughed. My throat was sore. The nausea had grown heavy enough to sink below my diaphragm.

“Michelle.” Sarasti repeated.

“I see some more here,” Cunningham continued. “Along the bottom of your brain pan. Only a few dozen cells so far, they’re not worth burning yet.”

“Here.” Michelle’s voice was barely audible, even through ConSensus, but at least it was the voice of an adult. “I’m here.”

“What do you remember, please?”

“I—I felt—I was just riding Mom, and then she was gone and there was no one else, so I had to—take over…”

“Do you see the septum close?”

“Not really. I felt it going dark, but when I turned around we were already trapped. And then I felt something behind me, it wasn’t loud or harsh it just sort of bumped , and it grabbed me, and—and—