Peter Watts - Firefall

Tap three times, she’d said.

ConSensus bloomed at his touch, an impoverished interface for the augmentally impaired: Systems, Comm, Library. A little v3-D Crown of Thorns hovered to one side in an imaginary void. All waited to dance at his fingertips, but he took VOCAL INTERFACE AVAILABLE at its word and said, “Ship layout.”

The animation expanded smoothly into center stage, bristling with annotations. Engines and reactors and shielding swallowed at least three-quarters of the display: thrust cones, fusion reactors, the rippling toroidal contours of great rad-blocking magnetic fields. Shock absorbers and antiproton traps and great protective slabs of lithium hydride. Brüks had seen the tech thumbnailed for short attention spans on any number of popsci feeds. Antimatter microfusion , they called it. A nuclear pulse drive turbocharged with a judicious sprinkling of antiprotons. Give it a decent launch window and the Crown of Thorns could make it to Mars in a couple of weeks.

“What’s our heading?” he asked aloud.

NAV UNAVAILABLE, ConSensus replied.

“What’s our location?”

NAV UNAVAILABLE.

“What’s our destination, then?”

NAV UNAVAILABLE.

Huh.

The Crown ’s habitable reaches lay along a spine one hundred fifty meters long, a tube of alloy and atmosphere connecting bits of superstructure like beads on a nail. The Hub Valerie had dragged him through was two-thirds of the way from drive to prow. Its spokes were back in motion, sweeping through space in majestic counterpoint to the flywheel farther up. (Only the Hub’s aft hemisphere rotated, Brüks noticed. The other—COMMAND, according to ConSensus, as if any modern space vessel required anything as quaint as a bridge in physical space—seemed fixed to the spine.)

“Focus habitat.”

The Crown redrew herself from the inside, engines and shielding neatly excised, nothing left but the hollows of the Crown ’s forward section turning bright and front and center. Annotated constellations twinkled in those spaces like fireflies in a luminous gut. A cluster of gray icons glowed aft in the HOLD (enormous now, in the absence of its substrate): CHODOROWSKA, K.; EULALI, S.; OFOEGBU, C. Eight or nine others. MOORE, J.—green—glowed in the hab called DORM. LUTTERODT, L. was in the Hub, next to SENGUPTA, R. The hab containing BRÜKS, D. showed up as MED/MAINTENANCE, no matter what the sign on the hatch said; GALLEY/COMMONS occupied the hab immediately clockwise, LAB the one counter. STORES/TRIM, where he’d suffered his rude awakening, balanced out the wheel. Evidently it had already been reattached; but yellow neon highlighted distal injuries where the spoke was still under repair.

The last hab didn’t come with a label. Six stars shone there, though: five gray, one green. Only the green carried an ID, and it didn’t follow the usual format.

VALERIE, was all it said.

Fifty meters farther forward—past the Hub, past some kind of attic full of plumbing and circuitry and airlocks, way up past the main sensor array at the very front of the ship—ConSensus had drawn a hemispherical nose assembly and called it PARASOL. It appeared to be packed away for the time being but a translucent overlay showed it unfurled, a great flattened cone wide enough for the whole ship to hide behind. Brüks had no idea what it was. Space-dust deflector, maybe. Heat radiator. Magic Bicameral Cloak of Invisibility.

“Root.” The Crown dwindled on the wall, slipped back into line with the other thumbnails.

A Quinternet icon! He tore it open like a Christmas present. He didn’t have access to his preferences but even the Noosphere’s generic headlines were like water in the desert: ANARRES SECEDES, FFE KILLS VENTER, PAKISTAN’S ZOMBIE PREZ—

Just a cache, of course. A stale-dated abstract small enough to fit into the Crown ’s memory—unless someone was breaking silent-running protocols dating all the way back to Firefall, or tightbeaming updates directly to the Crown . Anything was possible.

Probably a cache, though. In which case all he had to do was sort the available content by posting date, and—

Twenty-eight days. Assuming they’d grabbed the cache on their way out the door, he’d been stashed in the basement for almost a month.

He snorted softly and shook his head, vaguely surprised at his own lack of surprise. I’m growing immune to revelation .

Still. Stale rations were better than none. And it wasn’t as though he had anyplace else to be.

The president of Pakistan had finally, to no one’s great surprise, been unmasked as an avatar: the original had succumbed to viral zombieism almost a year before, almost certainly an assassination although no one was claiming responsibility. Venter Biomorphics—the last of the old-time corporations—had finally lost the fight against entropy and been swept away. A few proximists pointed their fingers at China’s agricultural collapse (that nation was still nose-diving three years after Venter’s artificial pollinators had crashed), but smart money blamed the incandescent hand of Forest Fire Economics. Something called jitterbug —some kind of weaponized mirror-neuron thing that hijacked its victims’ motor-control circuits—was doing the rounds in Latin America. And way out at L-5 (way in, Brüks corrected himself; way back ), the Anarres colony had bolted a row of antique VASIM-R engines onto their belly and were preparing to take secession to new heights.

ConSensus chimed. “Roaches to the Hub,” the wall barked in its wake. A female voice, strangely familiar although Brüks couldn’t put his finger on it. He returned to the cache, searched for references to a disturbance in the Oregon desert.

Nothing.

No mention of a mysterious nighttime skirmish on the Prineville Reserve: no zombie assault on religious fortifications, no counterattacking tornadoes impossibly slaved to human commands. No reports of armed forces keeping low to the ground, bivouacked around some cultist bull’s-eye on the desert plain.

Odd.

Maybe their final hurried exodus from that arena never made it into the cache. Brüks had been unconscious at the time but he imagined the Crown might not have lingered in orbit long enough to refresh its memory with newborn updates. Still. Valerie’s assault, the armistice, the quarantine—at least thirty solid hours of activity that should have pushed the needle about ten standard deevs above background. Even if there’d been no eyes on Prineville that night, someone would have noticed the sudden redeployment of personnel from previous assignments. Even if Valerie had blinded all those skeyes up in geosynch, the disappearance of her hijacked carousel from its garage would have registered somewhere.

The world had too many windows. Every house was glass. It had been decades since any single entity—corporate, political, or synthetic—had been able to draw the blinds on all of them.

Maybe someone had just scrubbed the onboard cache. The same someone who had apparently locked him out of you-are-here .

Because this is all about you. Keeping you in the dark is everyone’s top priority.

He winced.

“ Roaches to the Hub . You think we’ve got nothing better to do than watch you fondle your dick?”

Brüks blinked, looked around. “What?”

“Uh, she means you, Dan,” Lianna said invisibly. “Kind of a briefing. Thought you might like to know what’s going on.”

“Oh. I—”

Roaches?

“—I’ll be right there.”

The ladder stretched through the center of the compartment like a strand of DNA stretched straight. Brüks leaned across the hatch from which it emerged—still a bit wobbly in the spin—grabbed its rails, and peered into the basement. Stacked crates down there, lengths of dismembered plumbing. He craned his neck; overhead, the ladder rose into pale blue light.