Peter Watts - Firefall

Something that wasn’t static moved in his headlight. Something uncoiled , just at the edge of the camera’s view.

The feed died.

Suddenly Bates and Sarasti were shouting in my helmet. I tried to brake. My stupid useless legs kicked against vacuum, obeying some ancient brainstem override from a time when all monsters were earthbound, but by the time I remembered to use my trigger finger the labhab was already looming before me. Rorschach reared up behind it in the near distance, vast and malign. Dim green auroras writhed across its twisted surface like sheet lightning. Mouths opened and closed by the hundreds, viscous as bubbling volcanic mud, any one of them large enough to swallow Theseus whole. I barely noticed the flicker of motion just ahead of me, the silent eruption of dark mass from the collapsed inflatable. By the time Cunningham caught my eye he was already on his way, backlit against the ghastly corpselight flickering on Rorschach ’s skin.

I thought I saw him waving, but I was wrong. It was only the scrambler wrapped around his body like a desperate lover, moving his arm back and forth while it ran the thrust pistol tethered to his wrist. Bye-bye , that arm seemed to say, and fuck you, Keeton .

I watched for what seemed like forever, but no other part of him moved at all.

Voices, shouting, ordering me back inside. I hardly heard them. I was too dumbfounded by the basic math, trying to make sense of the simplest subtraction.

Two scramblers. Stretch and Clench. Both accounted for, shot to pieces before my eyes.

“ Keeton, do you read? Get back here! Acknowledge! ”

“I—it can’t be,” I heard myself say. “There were only two—”

“ Return to the ship immediately. Acknowledge. ”

“I—acknowledged…”

Rorschach ’s mouths snapped shut at once, as though holding a deep breath. The artefact began to turn , ponderously, a continent changing course. It receded, slowly at first, picking up speed, turning tail and running. How odd , I thought. Maybe it’s more afraid than we are …

But then Rorschach blew us a kiss. I saw it burst from deep within the forest, ethereal and incandescent. It shot across the heavens and splashed against the small of Theseus ’ back, making a complete and utter fool of Amanda Bates. The skin of our ship flowed there, and opened like a mouth, and congealled in a soundless frozen scream.

I HAVE NO idea whether the scrambler made it back home with its hard-won prize. There was so much lost distance to make up, even if the emplacements didn’t pick it off en route. Cunningham’s pistol might have run out of fuel. And who knew how long those creatures could survive in vacuum anyway? Maybe there’d been no real hope of success, maybe that scrambler was dead from the moment it had gambled on staying behind. I never found out. It had dwindled and vanished from my sight long before Rorschach dove beneath the clouds and disappeared in turn.

There had always been three, of course. Stretch, and Clench, and the half-forgotten microwaved remains of a scrambler killed by an uppity grunt—kept on ice next to its living brethren, within easy reach of Cunningham’s teleops. I tried to dredge half-glimpsed details from memory, after the fact: had both of those escapees been spheres, or had one been flattened along one axis? Had they thrashed, waved their limbs the way some panicky human might with no ground beneath him? Or had one, perhaps, coasted lifeless and ballistic until our guns destroyed the evidence?

At this point, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that at long last, everyone was on the same page. Blood had been drawn, war declared.

And Theseus was paralysed from the waist down.

Rorschach ’s parting shot had punched through the carapace at the base of the spine. It had just missed the ramscoop and the telematter assembly. It might have taken out Fab if it hadn’t spent so many joules burning through the carapace, but barring some temporary pulse effects it left all critical systems pretty much operational. All it had done was weaken Theseus ’ backbone enough to make it snap in two should we ever burn hard enough to break orbit. The ship would be able to repair that damage, but not in time.

If it had been luck it would have been remarkable.

And now, its quarry disabled, Rorschach had vanished. It had everything it needed from us, for the moment at least. It had information: all the experiences and insights encoded in the salvaged limbs of its martyred spies. If Stretch-or-Clench’s gamble had paid off it even had a specimen of its own now, which all things considered we could hardly begrudge it. And so now it lurked invisibly in the depths, resting perhaps. Recharging.

But it would be back.

Theseus lost weight for the final round. We shut down the drum in a token attempt to reduce our vulnerable allotment of moving parts. The Gang of Four—uncommanded, unneeded, the very reason for their existence ripped away—retreated into some inner dialog to which other flesh was unwelcome. She floated in the observatory, her eyes closed as tightly as the leaded lids around her. I could not tell who was in control.

I guessed. “Michelle?”

“Siri—” Susan. “Just go.”

Bates floated near the floor of the drum, windows arrayed externally across bulkhead and conference table. “What can I do?” I asked.

She didn’t look up. “Nothing.”

So I watched. Bates counted skimmers in one window—mass, inertia, any of a dozen variables that would prove far too constant should any of those shovelnosed missiles come at our throat. They had finally noticed us. Their chaotic electron-dance was shifting now, hundreds of thousands of colossal sledgehammers in sudden flux, reweaving into some ominous dynamic that hadn’t yet settled into anything we could predict.

In another window Rorschach ’s vanishing act replayed on endless loop: a radar image receding deep into the maelstrom, fading beneath gaseous teratonnes of radio static. It might still be an orbit, of sorts. Judging by that last glimpsed trajectory Rorschach might well be swinging around Ben’s core now, passing through crushed layers of methane and monoxide that would flatten Theseus into smoke. Maybe it didn’t even stop there; maybe Rorschach could pass unharmed even through those vaster, deeper pressures that made iron and hydrogen run liquid.

We didn’t know. We only knew that it would be back in a little under two hours, assuming it maintained its trajectory and survived the depths. And of course, it would survive. You can’t kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

And only for a while.

A thumbnail inset caught my eye with a flash of color. At my command it grew into a swirling soap bubble, incongruously beautiful, a blue-shifted coruscating rainbow of blown glass. I didn’t recognize it for a moment: Big Ben, rendered in some prismatic false-color enhance I’d never seen before. I grunted softly.

Bates glanced up. “Oh. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“What’s the spectrum?”

“Longwave stuff. Visible red, infra, down a ways. Good for heat traces.”

“Visible red?” There wasn’t any to speak of; mostly cool plasma fractals in a hundred shades of jade and sapphire.

“Quadrochromatic palette,” Bates told me. “Like what a cat might see. Or a vampire.” She managed a half-hearted wave at the rainbow bubble. “Sarasti sees something like that every time he looks outside. If he ever looks outside.”