Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“Firefall.” A lot of people had fled into Heaven after that. A lot of the Ascended had even come back.

But Moore was shaking his head. “Just before, actually. Literally minutes before. We all said good-bye, and then we went outside and I looked up…”

“Maybe she knew something.”

Moore smiled faintly, held out his arm. Brüks watched it drift back to his side, slow as a feather. “Almost—”

The hab lurched. Cubes and cartons teetered and wobbled against their mutual attraction; rogue containers lifted from the deck and bumped against the walls in a ponderous ballet. Brüks and Moore, tethered to their cargo straps, drifted like seaweed.

“—time to go.” Moore dialed open the inner hatch. Brüks pulled himself along in the other man’s wake.

“Jim.”

“Right here.” Moore pulled a spring-loaded clasp from a little disk at his waist. A bright thread unspooled behind it.

“Why were you here? When things went south ?”

“I was on patrol.” Fastening the clasp to a cleat on Brüks own suit. “Walking the perimeter.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” The inner hatch squeezed down behind them.

Brüks tugged on the thread while Moore went through the motions of depressurizing the ’lock: impossibly fine, impossibly strong. A leash of engineered spider silk.

“You’ve got a ConSensus feed in your head,” Brüks pointed out. “You can see any place on the network without getting off the toilet and you walk the perimeter ?”

“Twice a day. Going on thirty years. You should be thankful I’ve never seen any reason to stop.” One gauntleted hand made a small flourish toward the outer hatch. “Shall we go?”

Moore, you old warhorse.

I’m alive thanks to you . I pass out inside a tornado, I wake up with a smashed ankle on a space station with a broken back. You get me into this suit. You get me to natter on about my wife so I barely even notice the air bleeding away around us.

I bet you’ll never tell me how close we came, will you? Not your style. You were too busy distracting me from making a complete panicking ass of myself while you saved my life.

“Thank you,” he said softly, but if Moore—tapping out some incantation on the bulkhead interface—even heard him, he gave no sign.

The outer airlock irised open. The great wide universe waited beyond.

And the magnitude of all Jim Moore’s well-intentioned lies spread naked across the heavens for anyone to see.

“Welcome to the Crown of Thorns, ” Moore said from the other end of the universe.

The sun was too large, too blinding: Brüks saw that as soon as the outer hatch opened, in the instant before a polarizing disk bloomed on his faceplate—perfectly line of sight—to cut the glare. Of course, he thought at first, no atmosphere . Things were bound to be brighter in orbit.

And then he stumbled out in Moore’s wake, and toppled weightlessly around some lopsided center of mass while stars and vast structures spun around him.

The Earth was gone.

That wasn’t true, he knew in some distant hypothetical place that made absolutely no difference. It couldn’t be true. Earth was still out there somewhere; one of those billion bright shards lacerating the heavens on all sides. Unwinking pixels, all of them. Not a single one close enough to rise above zero dimensions, to actually assume a shape .

No ground to fall to.

His breath rasped in his ears, fast as a heartbeat. “You said we were in orbit .”

“We are. Not around Earth.”

The ship—the Crown of Thorns— spread before him like the bones of some city-size monster. The broken spoke hung directly ahead, a tangle of struts and tubes suffused in a glittering sharp-edged halo: bits of foil, crystals of frozen liquid, little shurikens of metal with nowhere else to go. Things moved in that mosaic of light and shadow. Metal spiders swarmed across the wreckage, spot-welding with incandescent mandibles, spinning webs to suture shattered pieces back together. Tiny starbursts sparkled across the metalscape in waves.

Not bent. Not torqued. Broken . Snapped clean off. Horrified, Brüks took in the sight of a slender silver cable, its diameter barely that of a human finger: a lone tendon, miraculously intact, emerging from the amputated stump and stretching across vacuum to anchor the massive barrel-shaped hab at his back. If not for that one frail thread…

“You knew about this, didn’t you?” He gulped air. “You’ve been hooked into ConSensus all along…”

Moore hung off a handhold, utterly unconcerned by the billions of light-years stretching away beneath his feet. “In my experience, it’s generally better to ease people into these situations a little at a time.”

“It’s not my exp—exper—” His tongue was swelling in his mouth. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Nowhere was up, nowhere was down—

“My air —”

Something smacked the sole of his boot; absurdly, down clicked back into place. Moore was in front of him, hands on his shoulders, squeezing through the suit: “It’s okay. It’s okay. Close your eyes.”

Brüks squeezed them tight.

“You’re just hyperventilating,” Moore said from the darkness. “The suit’ll thin the mix before you run any serious risk of passing out. You’re perfectly safe.”

Brüks almost laughed aloud at that. “You—” he managed, “are The Boy Who Cried Safe…”

“You must be feeling better,” Moore observed.

He was, a little.

“Try opening your eyes. Focus on the ship, not the stars. Take your time. Get your bearings.”

Brüks opened them a crack. Vacuum and vertigo came flooding in.

Focus on the ship .

Okay. The ship.

Start with this spoke. Truncated, cauterized, one of—one of six (the others apparently undamaged), radiating from a spherical hub like the skeleton of an impoverished bicycle wheel: no rim, nothing but a tin can at the end of each spoke. A few minutes ago those spokes had been slinging their habs around like stones on strings; now they just hung there. A smaller baton—a giant’s femur skewered through the midpoint—hung equally motionless just fore of the Hub. (Counterspinning flywheel, probably. To neuter the torque.)

Fifty meters long at least, those hollow bones. This insane Ferris wheel stretched over a hundred meters from side to side.

But it was an ephemeral contraption of twigs and straws next to the wall of metal looming behind it. The drive section. Seen from dead-on it would be a disk: a whole landscape turned on edge, a hard-edged topography of ridges and trenches and right angles. But out here on the wounded rim, Brüks could see the mass piled up behind that leading edge: not so much a disk as a core sample extracted from some artificial moon. The striated faces of sedimentary cliffs, carved in metal; monstrous gnarled arteries twisting along the patchwork hull, carrying rivers of fuel or coolant. The arc of a distant engine nozzle, peeking past that metal horizon like a dull sunrise.

A cylindrical silo squatted dead center atop the drive section. Cargo hold, perhaps. The Crown ’s backbone emerged from its apex like a sapling sprouting from the stump of a great redwood. All this forward superstructure—the Hub and its habs, the flywheel, a hemispherical nose assembly bristling with antennae—none of it mattered in the shadow of those engines. Just a few fragile twigs in which meat might huddle and breathe. Fleas clinging to the back of a captive sun.

“This thing is huge, ” Brüks whispered to Moore. But Moore wasn’t there anymore; he was sailing spread-eagled across the gap between this dangling hab and its severed spoke. Moore was deserting him for an army of spiders.