Peter Watts - Firefall

In that instant it changed .

Brüks wasn’t certain how, exactly. It would have happened too fast even if whirling debris and the grain of boosted photons hadn’t obscured the view. But it was as though the image of Daniel Brüks and his faithful steed split somehow, as if something inside was trying to shed its skin and break free, leaving a lizard-tail husk behind for the sky-beast to chew on. The maelstrom moved in, a blizzard of rock and dust obscuring any detail. The funnel was visibly weakening now but it still had enough suction to take its quarry whole.

Still had teeth enough to smash it to fragments.

The undead broke ranks.

It wasn’t a retreat. It didn’t even seem to be a coordinated exercise. The candles just stopped advancing and flickered back and forth in their windows, nine hundred meters out, directionless and Brownian. Far behind them the sated whirlwind weaved away to the north, a dissipating ropy thing, nearly exhausted.

“Dymic.” Slippers nodded knowingly. “Assub.”

Back on the pad a newborn vortex chafed at its restraints, smaller than its predecessor but angrier, somehow. Yellow icons blossomed across VEC/PRIME like rampant brush fires. Overhead, something was eating Gemini feetfirst.

Another window opened on the wall, a hodgepodge of emerald alphanumerics. Slippers blinked and frowned, as though the apparition was somehow unexpected. Greek equations, Cyrillic footnotes, even a smattering of English flowed across the new display.

Not telemetry. Not incoming. According to the status bar, this was an outgoing transmission; the Bicamerals were signaling someone. It all flickered by too fast for Brüks to have made much sense of it even if he had spoken Russian, but occasional fragments of English stuck in his eye. Theseus was one. Icarus another. Something about angels and asteroids flashed center stage for a moment and evaporated.

More glyphs, more numbers: three parallel columns this time, rendered in red. Someone talking back.

Out in the desert, the zombies stopped flickering.

“Huh,” Slippers said, and raised a finger to his right temple. For the first time Brüks noticed an old-fashioned earbud there, an audio antique from the days before cortical inlays and bone conduction. Slippers inclined his head, listening; up on the wall a flurry of red and green turned the ongoing exchange into a Christmas celebration.

Over on VEC/PRIME, orange and red icons downshifted to yellow. The chained vortex stopped thrashing on its pad and whirled smoothly at attention. Halfway to the horizon, the last vestiges of its older sibling dissipated in a luminous mist of settling dust.

The desert rested quietly beneath an invisible thing in the sky.

Just a few minutes ago, Dan Brüks had watched himself die out there. Or maybe escape in the nick of time. Something like him, anyway. Right up until that last moment when the maelstrom had chewed it up and spat it out. And right at that moment, the zombies had come—unglued…​

Assub, Slippers had said then. At least, that’s what Brüks had heard. Assub .

Ass —hub?

“A.S.?” he said aloud. Brother Slippers turned, raised an eyebrow.

“A.S.,” Brüks repeated. “What’s it stand for?”

“Artificial Stupidity. Grabs local surveillance archives to blend in. Chameleon response.”

“But why me? Why”—in the sky, invisible airships—“why anything ? Why not just cloak, like that thing up there?”

“Can’t cloak thermal emissions without overheating,” Slippers told him. “Not for long at least, not if you’re an endotherm. Best you can do is make yourself look like something else. Dynamic mimicry.”

Dymic.

Brüks snorted, shook his head. “You’re not even Bicameral, are you?”

Slippers smiled faintly. “You thought I was?”

“It’s a monastery. You spoke like…”

Slippers shook his head. “Just visiting.”

Acronyms. “You’re military,” Brüks guessed.

“Something like that.”

“Dan Brüks,” he said, extending a hand.

The other man looked at it for a moment. Reached out his own. “Jim Moore. Welcome to the armistice.”

“What just happened?”

“They came to terms. For the moment.”

“They?”

“The monks and the vampire.”

“I thought those were zombies.”

“ Those are.” Moore tapped the wall; a heat source appeared in the distance, a lone bright pinprick well behind the line. “ That isn’t. Zombies don’t do anything without someone pulling their strings. She’s coming in now.”

“Vampires,” Brüks said.

“Vam pire . Solitary op.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “Those things aren’t good in groups.”

“I didn’t even know we let them out. I actually thought we were pretty scrupulous about keeping them, you know. Contained.”

“So did I.” Pale flickering light washed the color from Moore’s face. “Not quite sure what her story is.”

“What’s she have against the Bicamerals?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did she stop?”

“Enemy of my enemy.”

Brüks let that sink in. “You’re saying there’s a bigger enemy out there. A, a common threat.”

“Potentially.”

Out in the desert, that dimensionless point of heat had grown large enough to move on visible legs. It did not appear to be running, yet somehow crossed the desert far faster than any baseline was likely to walk.

“So I guess I can go now,” Brüks said.

The old soldier turned to face him. Regret mingled with the tactical reflections in his eyes.

“Not a chance,” he said.

TWO GUARDS STOOD at the door halfway down the hall, one to each side, like a couple of dark golems in matching pajamas. Brüks had not been invited to the party inside but he followed Moore at a distance, hanging back along the edge of the corridor for want of any other destination. Bicamerals brushed past in both directions, going about whatever business involved the domestication of weaponized whirlwinds. They seemed unremarkable in the morning light slanting through the windows. No arcane ululations. No vestments or hooded robes, no uniforms of any kind that Brüks could make out. A couple wore denim. One, preoccupied with a tacpad as he passed, was stark naked except for the tattoo squirming along his chest: some kind of winged animal Brüks was pretty sure didn’t exist anywhere in the taxonomic database.

They still had stars in their eyes, though.

Ahead, Moore stepped between the guards and into the room. Brüks sidled up in his wake. The sentries stood still as stone, barefoot, faces forward, their beige coveralls identically featureless. Empty holsters hung from their belts.

Their lightless eyes wouldn’t stop moving. They jiggled and jerked in panicked little arcs, back and forth, up and down, as though terrified souls had been buried alive in wet cement. Someone coughed softly down the hall. All four eyes locked on that sound for the merest instant, froze in synchronized quadrascopic far focus: then broke, and resumed struggling in their sockets.

There was a market niche for zombies, Brüks had read, among those who still took their sex in the first person. He tried to imagine fucking any creature possessed of such eyes, and shuddered.

He passed by on the far side of the hall. Parallax served up a moving slice of the room behind the door: Jim Moore, a tabletop holo display in standby mode, a handful of Bicamerals nodding among themselves. A woman: lean as a greyhound beneath a mimetic body stocking, a bone-pale face under a spiky shock of short black hair, jawline just a bit more prognathous than any card-carrying prey might feel comfortable with. She turned her head as Brüks crept by. Her eyes flashed like a cat’s. She bared her teeth. On anyone else it would have been a smile.