Peter Watts - Firefall

“She’s fine.”

“None of us are fine .” Brüks turned back to the stairs. Maybe he could find her before the ceiling crashed in. Maybe there was some broom closet he could hide in.

Moore’s hand closed on his shoulder and spun him as though he were made of balsa.

“We will not attack these people,” he said calmly. “We don’t know if they’re responsible.”

“You just said they’d been planning this,” Brüks croaked. “They were just waiting for some kind of excuse. You watched them lock and load. For all I know you listened in on their fucking comm chatter, you heard them give the orders. You know .”

“Doesn’t matter. Even if we were right there in their command center. Even if we could take their brains apart synapse by synapse and backtrace every neuron that went into the go-ahead. We would still not know.”

“Fuck you. I’m not going to suck your dick just because you trot out the old no free will shtick.”

“These people could have been used without their knowledge. They could be slaved to an implanted agenda and they’d swear they were making their own decisions the whole time. We will not kill cat’s-paws.”

“They’re not zombies, Moore.”

“Whole different species.”

“ They’re killing us .”

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this. Or”—Moore cocked his head, evidently amused—“we could leave you behind to hash it out with them personally.”

“Leave me—?”

“We’re getting out of here. Why do you think they’re warming up the engine?”

Someone had rolled a giant soccer ball into the compound. A dozen fallen monks twitched wide-eyed and tetanic around a geodesic sphere of interlocking padded pentagons, maybe four meters across at the equator. A door-size polygon bent back from that surface like a snapped fingernail.

Some kind of escape pod. No obvious means of propulsion. No onboard propulsion, anyway; but rising high above the walls of the enclosure, the funnel spun and roared like an angry jet engine. Brüks craned his neck in search of the top of the thing, and swallowed, and—

And looked again. Something was scratching an arc across the sky.

“Get in,” Moore said at his elbow. “We don’t have much time.”

Of course they know. They’ve got satellites, they’ve got microdrones, they can look right past these walls and see what we’re doing and just blow it all to shit…​

“ Missile…​, ” he croaked.

The sky shattered where he was pointing.

The contrail just stopped high overhead, its descending arc amputated halfway to the jet stream; a new sun bloomed at its terminus, a blinding pinpoint, impossibly small and impossibly bright. Brüks wasn’t sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky crinkled : wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky imploded and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.

A thunderclap split Brüks’s skull like an ice pick. The force of it lifted him off his feet, dangled him for an endless moment before dropping him back onto the grass. Something pushed him from behind. He turned; Moore’s mouth was moving, but the only sound Brüks could hear was a high-pitched ringing that filled the world. Past Moore’s shoulder, above the ramparts of the monastery, dark smoldering wreckage fell from the sky like the charred bones of some giant stick man. Its empty skin fled sideways across the sky in ragged pieces, great streamers of tinsel drawn toward the shackled tornado. The vortex engine seemed to draw strength from the meal: it grew thicker, somehow. Faster. Darker.

Valerie’s invisible airship. He’d forgotten. A hundred thousand cubic meters of hard vacuum directly in the path of the incoming missile: broken on impact, sucking cascades of desert air into the void.

Moore pushed him toward the sphere. Brüks climbed unsteadily into darkness and the web of some monstrous spider. It was already full of victims, tangled half-seen silhouettes. All hung cocooned in a mesh of broad flat fibers stretching chaotically across the structure’s interior.

“ Move. ” A tiny, tinny voice growling through a chorus of tuning forks. Brüks grabbed a convenient band of webbing, gripped as tightly as the sparks in his hand would allow, pulled himself up. Something bumped the side of his head. He turned and recoiled at the face of one of Valerie’s zombies, upside-down, eyes jittering, hanging in the mesh like an entangled bat. Brüks yanked back his hand; the webbing stuck as though he were a gecko. He pulled free, clambered up and away from those frantic eyes, that lifeless face.

Another face, not so dead, hung in the gloom behind its bodyguard. Brüks—irises still clenched against the morning sun—couldn’t make out details. But he could feel it watching him, could feel the predator grin behind the eyes. He kept moving. Sticky bands embraced at his touch, peeled gently free as he pulled away.

“Any empty spot,” Moore said, climbing up in his wake. The ringing in Brüks’s ears was fading at last, as if somehow absorbed by this obscene womb and its litter of freaks and monsters. “Try to keep away from the walls; they’re padded, but it’s going to be a rough ride.”

The hatch swung into place like the last piece of a jigsaw, sealed them in and cut off the meager light filtering from outside; instantly the air grew dense and close, a small stagnant bubble at the bottom of the sea. Brüks swallowed. The darkness breathed around him with unseen mouths, a quiet claustrophobic chorus muffled by air heavy as cement.

Vision and ventilation returned within a breath of each other: a stale breeze across his cheek, a dim red glow from the padded facets of the wall itself. Bicamerals blocked the light on all sides: some spread-eagled, some balled up, a couple of pretzel silhouettes that spoke either of superhuman flexibility or broken bones. Maybe a dozen all told.

A dozen monks. A prehistoric psychopath with an entourage of brain-dead killing machines. Two baseline humans. All hanging together in a giant cobwebbed uterus, waiting for some unseen army to squash them flat.

All part of the plan.

Brüks tried to move, found that the webbing had tightened around him once he’d stopped climbing. He could wriggle like a hooked fish, bring his hand up far enough to scratch his nose. Beyond that he wasn’t going anywhere.

His eyes were adapting to the longwave, at least. A face overhead resolved into welcome familiarity: “Lianna? Lianna, are you…”

Only her body was here. Its fingers tapped the side of its head with the telltale rhythm of someone tuned to a more distant reality.

“It’s okay.” Moore spoke quietly from somewhere nearby. “She’s talking to our ride.”

“This is it? Twenty people?” He gulped air, still strangely stale for all the efforts of the local life-support system.

“It’s enough.”

Brüks could barely catch his breath. The whole compartment hissed with the sound of forced ventilation, air washed across his face and still he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs.

He fought rising panic. “I think—there’s something wrong with the air conditioner…”

“The air’s fine. Relax.”

“No, it—”

Something kicked them, hard in the side. Suddenly up was sideways; suddenly sideways was down. Blood rushed to Brüks’s head. A giant stood on his chest. The air, already unbearably close, got closer: the stench of rotten eggs flooded Brüks’s sinuses like a tsunami.