Peter Watts - Firefall

Maybe it was right here, behind this door.

Brüks pushed it open.

Luckett. He squirmed like a hooked eelpout in a cell identical to the one where Brüks had slept, slid around on a floor slippery with his own fluids. Sweat turned his tunic into a soaked dishrag, ran in torrents from his face and limbs; darker stains spread from his crotch.

The hook hadn’t caught him by the mouth, though. It sprouted from a port at the back of his neck, a shivering fiber running to a socket low on the wall. Luckett convulsed. His head struck the edge of an overturned chair. The blow seemed to bring him back a little; the screaming stopped, the eyes cleared, something approaching awareness filtered through the dull animal pain that filled them.

“Brüks,” he moaned, “Brüks, get it— fuck it hurts…”

Brüks knelt, laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I—”

The acolyte thrashed away from the touch, screaming all over again: “Fucking hell that hurts—!” He flailed one arm: a deliberate gesture, Brüks guessed, an instruction trying to dig its way out past the roaring static of a million short-circuiting motor nerves. Brüks followed its path to a small glass-fronted cabinet set into the wall. Lozenges of doped ceramic rested in neat labeled rows behind the sliding pane: HAPPINESS, ORGASM, APPETITE SUPPRESSANT—

ANALGESIC.

He grabbed it off the shelf, dropped to Luckett’s side, grabbed the fiberop at the cervical end: fumbled as fingers misheard brain. Luckett screamed again, arched his back like a drawn bow. The smell of shit filled the room. Brüks gripped the plug, twisted. The socket clicked free. Seething light flooded the walls: camera feeds, spline plots, deserts painted in garish blizzards of false color. Some tame oracle, deprived of direct access to Luckett’s brain, continuing its conversation in meatspace.

Brüks jammed the painkiller home, click-twisted it into place. Luckett sagged instantly; his fingers continued to twitch and shiver, purely galvanic. For a moment Brüks thought the acolyte had lost consciousness. Then Luckett took a great heaving gulp of air, let it out again.

“That’s better,” he said.

Brüks eyed Luckett’s trembling fingers, eyed his own. “It’s not. This is—”

“Not my department,” Luckett coughed. “Not yours, either, thank your lucky stars.”

“But what is it? There’s got to be a fix.” He remembered: a rosette of monsters, the vampire at its heart, moving with frictionless efficiency through the dying fields. “Valerie—”

Luckett shook his head. “She’s on our side.”

“But she’s—”

“Not her.” Luckett turned his head, rested his eyes on an overhead real-time tactical of the surrounding desert: the monastery at the bull’s-eye, a perimeter of arcane hieroglyphics around the edges. “Them.”

We’ve been making moves all day.

“What did you do? What did you do? ”

“Do?” Luckett coughed, wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were here, my friend. We got noticed . And now we’re—reaping the whirlwind, you might say.”

“They wouldn’t just—” Then again, why wouldn’t they? “Wasn’t there some kind of, of ultimatum? Didn’t they give us a chance to surrender, or—”

The look Luckett gave him was an even mix of pity and amusement.

Brüks cursed himself for an idiot. Headaches for most of the day before. Moore’s aerosol delivery . But there’d been no artillery, no lethal canisters lobbed whistling across the desert. This thing had drifted in on the breeze, undetected. And not even engineered germs killed on contact. There was always an incubation period, it always took time for a few lucky spores to hatch out in the lungs and breed an army big enough to take down a human body. Even the magic of exponential growth took hours to manifest.

The enemy—

— People like you, Lianna had said—

—must have set this plan in motion the moment they’d set up their perimeter. It wouldn’t have mattered one good goddamn if the whole Bicameral Order had marched out across the desert with their hands in the air; the weapon was already in their blood, and it was blind to white flags.

“How could you let them do this?” Brüks hissed. “You’re supposed to be smarter than us, you’re post-fucking- singular, you’re supposed to be ten steps ahead of any plan we poor stupid cavemen could ever put together. How could you let them? ”

“Oh, but this is all according to plan.” Luckett patted him on the arm with one spastic, short-circuiting hand.

“What plan ?” Brüks choked back a hysterical giggle. “We’re dead already—”

“Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.” Luckett coughed again. “Not to worry, though. We planned for the things we couldn’t plan for…”

Faintly, through the open door—drifting down the corridor, through high narrow windows; through barred gates, through glass panes looking into deserts and gardens: a whistling sound, Doppler-shifted. The muffled thud of some nearby impact.

“Ah. The mopping-up begins.” Luckett nodded serenely. “No point being stealthy now, eh?”

Brüks put his head in his hands.

“Don’t worry, old chap. It’s not over yet, not for you anyway. Jim’s lair. He’s waiting for you.”

Brüks raised his head. “Jim—but—”

“I told you,” Luckett said. “According to plan.” Spasms rippled across his body. “ Go .”

And now Brüks heard another sound, a deeper sound, rumbling up the scale behind the hacking of the maimed and whistling shriek of inbound paralysis. He felt the vibration of great blades spinning up far down in the earth, heard the muffled hiss of steam injected into deep silos. He heard the growing drumbeat of an elemental monster straining against its chains.

“Now that, ” he said, “is more fucking like it.”

Moore was in his bunker, but he wasn’t running the show. No controls blinked on the smart paint, no sliders or dials or virtual buttons to press. The readouts were all one-way. Somewhere else, the Bicamerals were bringing their engine online; Moore was only watching from the bleachers.

He turned at Brüks’s approach. “They’re dug in.”

“Doesn’t matter, though, right? We’re gonna tear them to pieces.”

The soldier turned back to the wall and shook his head.

“What’s the problem? They out of range?”

“We’re not fighting.”

“ Not fighting? Have you seen what they’re doing to us?”

“I see.”

“Everyone’s dead or halfway there!”

“We’re not.”

“Right.” Nerves sang ominously in Brüks’s fingers. “And how long is that going to last?”

“Long enough. This bug was customized for Bicamerals. We’ve got more time.” Moore frowned. “You don’t engineer something like that in the field, not overnight. They’ve been planning this awhile.”

“They didn’t even fire a warning shot, for fucksake! They didn’t even try to negotiate!”

“They’re scared.”

“ They’re scared.”

“They’d assume that giving us any advance warning would put them at an unacceptable disadvantage. They don’t know what we’re capable of.”

“Then maybe it’s time we showed them.”

Moore turned back to face the other man. “Perhaps you’re not familiar with Bicameral philosophy. It’s predominantly nonviolent.”

“You and Luckett and all your friends can argue the philosophical subtleties of unilateral pacifism while we all turn into predominantly nonviolent corpses.” Friends. “Is Lianna—”