Peter Watts - Firefall

Light from below.

You’d think that would have made it easier. Our kind has always feared the dark; for millions of years we huddled in caves and burrows while unseen things snuffled and growled—or just waited , silent and undetectable—in the night beyond. You’d think that any light, no matter how meager, might strip away some of the shadows, leave fewer holes for the mind to fill with worst imaginings.

You’d think.

We followed the grunt down into a dim soupy glow like blood-curdled milk. At first it seemed as though the atmosphere itself was alight, a luminous fog that obscured anything more than ten meters distant. An illusion, as it turned out; the tunnel we emerged into was about three meters wide and lit by rows of raised glowing dashes—the size and approximate shape of dismembered human fingers—wound in a loose triple helix around the walls. We’d recorded similar ridges at the first site, although the breaks had not been so pronounced and the ridges had been anything but luminous.

“Stronger in the near-infrared,” Bates reported, flashing the spectrum to our HUDs. The air would have been transparent to pit vipers. It was transparent to sonar: the lead grunt sprayed the fog with click trains and discovered that the tunnel widened into some kind of chamber seventeen meters further along. Squinting in that direction I could just make out subterranean outlines through the mist. I could just make out jawed things, pulling back out of sight.

“Let’s go,” Bates said.

We plugged in the grunts, left one guarding the way out. Each of us took another as a guardian angel on point. The machines spoke to our HUDs via laser link; they spoke to each other along stiffened lengths of shielded fiberop that unspooled from the hub trailing in our wake. It was the best available compromise in an environment without any optima. Our tethered bodyguards would keep us all in touch during lone excursions around corners or down dead ends.

Yeah. Lone excursions. Forced to either split the group or cover less ground, we were to split the group. We were speed-cartographers panning for gold. Everything we did here was an act of faith: faith that the unifying principles of Rorschach ’s internal architecture could be derived from the raw dimensions we’d grab on the run. Faith that Rorschach ’s internal architecture even had unifying principles. Earlier generations had worshipped malign and capricious spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil’s Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn’t been closer to the mark.

We moved along the tunnel. Our destination resolved to merely human eyes: not so much chamber as nexus , a knot of space formed by the convergence of a dozen tunnels angling in from different orientations. Ragged meshes of quicksilver dots gleamed along several glistening surfaces; shiny protrusions poked through the substrate like a scattershot blast of ball-bearings pressed into wet clay.

I looked at Bates and Sascha. “Control panel?”

Bates shrugged. Her drones panned the throats around us, spraying sonar down each. My HUD sketched a patchy three-d model from the echoes: swathes of paint thrown against invisible walls. We were dots near the center of a ganglion, a tiny swarm of parasites infesting some great hollowed host. Each tunnel curved away in a gradual spiral, each along a different orientation. Sonar could peep around those bends a few meters further than we could. Neither eyes nor ultrasonics saw anything to distinguish one choice from another.

Bates pointed down one of the passageways—“Keeton—” and another—“Sascha,” before turning to coast off down her own unbeaten path.

I looked uneasily down mine. “Any particular—”

“Twenty-five minutes,” she said.

I turned and jetted slowly down my assigned passageway. The passage curved clockwise, a long unremarkable spiral; after twenty meters that curvature would have blocked any view of its entrance even if the foggy atmosphere hadn’t. My drone kept point across the tunnel, its sonar clicking like the chattering of a thousand tiny teeth, its tether unspooling back to the distant drum in the nexus.

It was a comfort, that leash. It was short . The grunts could stray ninety meters and no further, and we were under strict orders to stay under their wings at all times. This dim infested burrow might lead all the way to hell, but I would not be expected to follow it nearly so far. My cowardice had official sanction.

Fifty meters to go. Fifty meters and I could turn and run with my tail between my legs. In the meantime all I had to do was grit my teeth, and focus, and record: everything you see , Sarasti had said. As much as possible of what you can’t . And hope that this new reduced time limit would expire before Rorschach spiked us into gibbering dementia.

The walls around me twitched and shivered like the flesh of something just-killed. Something darted in and out of sight with a faint cackle of laughter.

Focus. Record . If the grunt doesn’t see it, it’s not real.

Sixty-five meters in, one of the ghosts got inside my helmet.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to look away. But this phantom wasn’t flickering at the edge of vision; it hovered near the center of my faceplate, floating like a spot of swirling dizziness between me and the HUD. I gritted my teeth and tried to look past, stared into the dim bloody haze of the middle distance, watched the jerky unfolding travelogues in the little windows labeled Bates and James . Nothing out there. But in here , floating before my eyes, Rorschach ’s latest headfuck smeared a fuzzy thumbprint right in front of the sonar feed.

“New symptom,” I called in. “Nonperipheral hallucination, stable, pretty formless though. No spiking that I can—”

The inset marked Bates skidded hard about. “ Keet— ”

Window and voice cut out together.

Not just Bates’ window, either. Sascha’s inset and the drone’s-eye sonarscape flickered and died at the same moment, stripped my HUD bare except for in-suit feeds and a little red readout flashing Link Down. I spun but the grunt was still there, three meters off my right shoulder. Its optical port was clearly visible, a ruby thumbnail set into the plastron.

Its gun ports were visible too. Pointing at me.

I froze. The drone shivered in some local electromagnetic knot as if terrified. Of me, or—

Of something behind me…

I started to turn. My helmet filled with sudden static, and with what sounded—faintly—like a voice:

“—ucking move , Kee—not—”

“Bates? Bates? ” Another icon had bloomed in place of Link Down. The grunt was using radio for some reason—and though almost close enough to touch, I could barely make out the signal.

A hash of Batespeak: “—to your—right in front of—” and Sascha as well, a bit more clearly: “—an’t he see it?…”

“See what? Sascha! Someone tell me what—see what ?”

“—read? Keeton, do you read?”

Somehow Bates had boosted the signal; static roared like an ocean, but I could hear the words behind it. “Yes! What—”

“ Keep absolutely still , do you understand? Absolutely still. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged.” The drone kept me in its shaky sights, dark stereocam irises spasming wide, stuttering to pinpoints. “Wha—”

“There’s something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can’t you see it?”

“N-no. My HUD’s down—”