Peter Watts - Echopraxia

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 wireframe 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.

“They’ve shut off the centrifuge,” Moore confirmed. “We’re spinning down smoothly. That suggests the rest of the ship is more or less okay.”

Brüks’s ears popped again. “We’re not. I think—I think there’s an air leak somewhere.”

“You noticed.”

“Shouldn’t we be patching it?”

“Have to find it first. Tell you what: I’ll move the cargo, you tear apart all these bulkheads.”

“But—”

“Or we can go downstairs, suit up, and get out of here.” He split Brüks’s cocoon open the rest of the way, helped steady him as he sat up. “Can you walk?”

Brüks swung his legs over the edge of the pallet, trying to ignore the subtle sense of pressure building behind his eyes. He gripped its edge to keep from staggering down the skewed deck. Myoelectric tattoos ran the length of his naked body like an impoverished exoskeleton. They traced the bones of his arms and legs, forked out along his toes and—(he flexed his right foot; the left hung insensate at the end of his ankle like a lump of clay)—over his heels and across his soles as well. Every movement met with rubber resistance. Every gesture was a small exercise.

Isometric muscle toner. They used them in Heaven sometimes, to keep the Ascended from curling into flabby fetuses. They still used them on those rare deep-space missions where the crew hadn’t been preseasoned with vampire genes, to help in the rearguard fight against the shortening of tendons, the wasting of muscles during hibernation.

Moore helped him stand, offered his body as a crutch. Brüks bounced uncertainly on his good foot, his arm around the other man’s shoulders. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Pseudograv pulled everything in the wrong direction but it was weak, and getting weaker.

“What am I doing here?” Hop-step-lean. Soft crimson light pulsed from the hole in the ceiling where the ladder emerged, staining the adjacent bulkhead.

“Getting to safety.”

“No, I mean—” He gestured with his free arm, took in the containers stacked on all sides. “Why am I in the hold?”

“The hold’s aft. We’re using this for the overflow.”

The rails of the ladder were the color of rawhide, and smooth as plastic; some elastic polymer that stayed taut along a range of lengths. Brüks reached out and grabbed a rung, looked up through the ceiling and discovered the source of that bloody glow: an emergency hatch sealed tight, flashing a warning to any who might be contemplating passage: UNPRESSURIZED.

“My point is—” He looked through the hole in the floor: more metacubes down there, assemblages of smaller units stuck together. “Why did you wake me up in the basement?”

“You weren’t supposed to wake up at all; we had you in a therapeutic coma.” Brüks remembered being scalped: that skullcap, stippled with electrodes. “You’re lucky I happened to be in the neighborhood when things went south.”

“Are you saying you stored me with— ”

The hab lurched, jumped in some sideways direction Brüks’s inner ears couldn’t parse; suddenly the ladder was slipping diagonally past, suddenly he was falling through the floor (the edge of the hatch bit his ribs in passing). A giant’s building blocks, stacked together, would have snapped his spine under earth gravity; here they merely bent it and bounced him back into the air.

Moore caught him on the rebound: “Well, that’s one way of making the trip…”

Brüks thrashed in his arms, pushed him away: “ Get the fuck off of me! ”

“Calm down, sol—”

“ I’m not your fucking soldier! ” Brüks tried to stand in the crowded space; his wounded ankle twisted under him as though attached by rubber bands. “I’m a parasitologist, I was down in the goddamn desert minding my own business. I didn’t ask to get caught up in your gang war, I didn’t ask to get my ass shot into fucking orbit, and I sure as shit didn’t ask to get stored down in your basement like a box of Christmas ornaments!”