Peter Watts - Firefall

“Weren’t you afraid?”

She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Guess I was, in a way. I mean, predator-prey, right? Gut response.”

“Exactly.”

“Chinedum said there was nothing to worry about.” She gestured him over to the pallet; he floated into place, let her strap him down around the waist. Biotelemetry readouts bloomed across the bulkhead.

“And you believed him. Them.” It. Whatever the pronoun was for hive .

“Of course.” She ran her finger down the stack of biosigns, winced at something she saw there. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”

She cast her gaze around the compartment (“We should really get around to unpacking this stuff sometime”), opened a silver crate tagged with medical icons. A few seconds of rummaging turned up a scaffolding gun from the instrument trays stacked within. She dialed it to OSTEO and set the muzzle against his broken ankle. “You’re nerve-blocked, right?”

He nodded. “Jim shot me up with something.”

“Good. ’Cause otherwise this would really hurt.” She fired. Brüks’s leg jumped reflexively; he caught a glimpse of black filaments, fine as filaria, lashing frantic tails before they burrowed into his flesh and disappeared.

“Might itch for a bit once the block wears off.” Lianna was already scanning the compartment for other treasures. “Takes a while for the mesh to line itself up when you’re dealing with all those little bones—ah.” An off-ivory cube, this time—no, a transparent one. It took its color from the viscous casting putty inside: the stuff quivered like gelatin when she cracked the lid.

There must have been enough in there to put ten people into full-body casts. Brüks glanced around while Lianna scooped up a handful; at least a half-dozen other crates were filled with the same stuff.

The putty squirmed in Lianna’s hand, aroused by her body heat. “Where are we going?” Brüks wondered. “How many broken bones are you expecting when we get there?”

“Oh, they don’t expect anything. They just like being prepared.” She slapped the goop onto his ankle. “Hold still until it sets.” It slithered around the joint like a monstrous amoeba, fused to itself, crept a few centimeters up his calf and down around his heel before slowing and hardening in the oxygen atmosphere.

“There.” Lianna was back at the cube, resealing it before the rest of its contents crusted over. “You’ll have to wear that for a few days, I’m afraid. Normally we’d have it off in eight hours but you’re still fighting traces of the bug. Might stage a comeback if we crank your metabolism too high.”

The bug.

Luckett, screaming in agony. A lawn littered with twisted bodies. A disease so merciless, so fast that it didn’t even wait for its victims to die before throwing them into rigor mortis.

Brüks closed his eyes. “How many?”

“What—”

“Did we leave behind.”

“You know, Dan, I wouldn’t write those guys off. I know how bad it looked, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you don’t second-guess the Bicams. They’re always ten steps ahead, and they’ve always got plans within plans.”

He waited until the voice beyond his eyelids finished talking. Then he asked again.

It didn’t answer at first. Then: “Forty-four.”

“Ten steps ahead,” he repeated in his own personal darkness. “You believe that.”

“I do,” the voice said solemnly.

“They expected forty-four deaths. They planned it. They wanted it.”

“They didn’t want —”

“And when they brought that—that monster along for the ride, they knew exactly what they were doing. They have it all under control.”

“Yes. They do.” There wasn’t the slightest hint of doubt in the voice.

Brüks took a breath, let it out again, reflected on the faint unexpected scent of growing things at the back of his throat.

“I get the sense that faith doesn’t come easily to you,” the voice said gently after a few moments. “But sometimes things are just, you know. God’s will.”

He opened his eyes. Lianna stared at him, kind and gentle and utterly delusional.

“Please don’t say that,” Brüks said.

“Why not?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Because you can’t possibly believe—because it’s a fairy tale, and it’s been used to excuse way too much…”

“It’s not a fairy tale, Dan. I believe in a creative force beyond the physical realm. I believe it gave rise to all life. You can’t blame it for all the horrible shit that’s been done in its name.”

Faint tingling in his fingers. A tide of saliva rising at the back of his throat. His tongue seemed to swell in his mouth.

“Could you—I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind,” he said softly.

Lianna blinked. “Uh…​sure, I guess. You can ditch the mesh anytime. I brought you a fresh jumpsuit, it’s over there on the pad. ConSensus is hooked in to the paint job if you need anything, just tap three times. The interface is pretty—”

I’m going to throw up, he thought. “Please,” he managed. “Just go .” And closed his eyes again, and clenched his teeth, and choked back the rising nausea until the sounds of her retreat faded away and all he could hear were the voices of machines and the roaring in his head.

He did not throw up. He drew his legs to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them, and held them tight against the sudden uncontrollable shaking of his body. He kept his eyes clenched against the new world, against this microcosmic prison into which he’d awakened: infested by freaks and hungry predators, an insignificant bubble spinning farther from home with each passing second. Earth was only a memory now, lost and receding in an infinite void; and yet Earth was right here in his head, inescapable, a desert garden strewn with twisted corpses.

Every one had Luckett’s face.

EVENTUALLY THE PANIC receded. Eventually he had to come back.

He wasn’t sure how long he floated there. For the present he was content to take refuge in the darkness behind his own eyelids, in the hiss of ventilators and the soft beeping voices of medical monitors. Some kind of alarm chimed in the middle distance; it sounded five times and fell silent. A moment later the world lurched to the right and gentle pressure began to build against his shoulder blades, against his calves and heels. Up and down returned.

Brüks opened his eyes. The view hadn’t changed.

He sat up, turned, let this new gravity drop his legs over the side of the pallet (his vitals vanished from the bulkhead as he rose). He fought off a threat of dizziness from his inner ears, held his hand out in front of him, watched until it stopped shaking.

The exoskeleton vibrated ecstatically as he peeled it away, each strip snapping back to some elastic minimum as he set it free. They took body hair and skin cells with them, left denuded strips along his body. He left it trembling on the deck, a tangled ball of rubbery ligaments that shivered and twitched as if alive.

He found his way to a lav that peeked around a small mountain of in-flight luggage, raided the bulkhead food fabber on the way back. Sucking a squeezebulb full of electrolytes, he peeled fresh folded clothing from the wall where Lianna had left it: a forest-green jumpsuit, preemptively custom-fabbed by some onboard printer. He wobbled precariously while pulling on the pants, but the pseudograv was weak and forgiving. Finally he was finished: clothed, upright, his batteries beginning to soak up charge from the nutrients in his gut. He folded the pallet back into its alcove. Its smart-painted underside bulged subtly from the wall, softly luminescent.