Peter Watts - Firefall

Jesus Christ, he thought. He couldn’t imagine a worse time or place for a fart. Under other circumstances it might have been funny. Now it only made him gag, stole whatever meager oxygen had remained.

“Here we go,” Moore murmured from behind. From below. From overhead.

He sounded almost sleepy .

The web slewed. Bodies jerked in unison one way, slung like pendulums back the other, flipped around some arbitrary unknowable center of gravity. They seemed to be accelerating in ten directions at once. Niagara roared in Brüks’s head.

“Can’t—breathe…”

“You’re not supposed to. Go with it.”

“What—”

“Isoflurane. Hydrogen sulfide.”

Whirling static engulfed the world from the outside in. Twenty bodies—barely visible through the maelstrom—threw themselves as one toward some unremarkable point on the far side of the compartment. They strained toward that point like iron filings drawn to a cyclotron, their elastic shackles strained almost to the breaking point.

So, Brüks mused as his vision failed. This is it. The final conscious experience.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

HE AWOKE TO screams and gray blurry light, a kick in the side, a bolt of pain spiking up his left leg like an electric javelin. He cried out but his voice was lost in some greater cacophony: the sound of torquing metal, vast alloy bones shearing across unaccustomed stress lines. Gravity was all wrong. He was on his back but it tugged him sideways, pulled him feetfirst through some translucent rubbery amnion that enveloped his body. Vague shapes loomed and shifted beyond. Down near the subsonic the world groaned like a humpback whale, wounded, spiraling toward a distant seabed. Alarms shrieked on higher frequencies.

I’m in a body bag, he thought, panicking. They think I’m dead…​

Maybe I am…​

The pain settled excruciatingly in his ankle. Brüks brought up his hands; weak elastic forces resisted the motion. His veins and arteries were all on the outside, clinging to his skin. No, not arteries. Myoelectric tensors—

The world jerked down and sideways. Exhausted metal fell silent; the alarm seemed to bleat all the louder in the absence of competition. Something stabbed Brüks through the body bag, just below the knee. The pain vanished.

A blurry shadow leaned down. “Easy, soldier. I’ve got you.”

Moore.

The membrane split like an opening eye. The Colonel stood over him, leaning thirty degrees off true in a world sliding downhill. The world itself was tiny, a cylindrical bubble five meters across and maybe half that high, floor and walls and roof crazily askew. Something ran through its center like a wire-frame spinal cord ( Access ladder, Brüks realized dimly: this world had an attic, a basement). Towers of plastic cubes, a meter on a side—some white, some gunmetal, some darkly transparent (the blurry things inside glistened like internal organs)—loomed on all sides like standing stones, geckoed one to another. A few had come loose and settled in an uneven pile at the downhill end of the chamber. Gravity urged Brüks to join them there; if his bag hadn’t been fastened to its pallet he would have slid right off the end.

Moore reached out and touched some control past Brüks’s line of sight; the alarms fell mercifully silent. “How you holding up?” the soldier asked.

“I’m—” Brüks shook his head, tried to clear it. “What’s happening?”

“Spoke must have torqued.” Moore reached down/across and peeled something off Brüks’s head: a second membranous scalp, a skullcap studded with a grid of tiny nubs. “Loose cube got you. Your ankle’s broken. Nothing we can’t fix once we get you out of here.”

There was grass on the walls—meter-wide strips of blue-green grass running from floor to ceiling, alternating with the pipes and grills and concave service panels that disfigured the rest of the bulkhead. ( Amped phycocyanin, he remembered from somewhere.) Smart paint glowed serenely from any surface that wasn’t given over to photosynthesis. His pallet folded down from an indentation in the wall; a little stack of time-series graphs flickered there, reporting on the state of his insides.

“We’re in orbit,” he realized.

Moore nodded.

“We’re—they hit us—”

Moore smiled faintly. “ Who, exactly?”

“We were under attack…”

“That was a while ago. On the ground.”

“Then—” Brüks swallowed. His ears popped. He’d never been to space before, but he recognized the layout: off-the-shelf hab module, two levels, common as dead satellites from LEO to geosync. You’d sling them around a centrifugal hub to fake gravity. Which would normally be vectored perpendicular to the deck, not—

He tried to keep his voice steady. “What’s going on?”

“Meteorite strike, maybe. Bad structural component.” Moore shrugged. “Alien abduction, for all I know. Anything’s possible when you don’t have any hard intel to go on.”

“You don’t—”

“I’m as blind as you are right now, Dr. Brüks. No ConSensus, no intercom. The line must’ve broken when the spoke torqued. I’ll be able to reconnect as soon as someone boosts the signal on the upstream node, but I imagine they have more important things on their minds right now.” He laid a hand on Brüks’s shoulder. “Relax, Doctor. Help is on the way. Can’t you feel it?”

“I—” Brüks hesitated, lifted one rubbery arm, let it drop down/sideways; it seemed to weigh a bit less than it had before.