Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Something tugged on Brüks’s tether. He turned, icewater trickling along his spine, to see what new master held his leash.

“You come with me,” Valerie said.

She yanked him across the void like bait on a hook, faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time it reached out to snatch a passing holdfast—before it could even look around to find one—they were already arcing through clouds of jagged tinsel. Torn scaffolding reached out as he tumbled past; miraculously, none tore his suit.

He was falling down a well— Not a well . The spoke. The broken spoke . He could see its ragged mouth receding above him. He hit bottom, landed hard on his back; elastic inertia tried to bounce him off but a pile-driver slammed against his chest and held him fast. Blood-orange light pulsed at the edge of his eye. He sucked in great panicky gulps of air, turned his head.

The pile-driver extended from Valerie’s shoulder. Her other hand worked controls set into the dropgate they’d landed on. Crimson light flashed at two-second intervals around its edge.

“Moore—” Brüks gasped.

“Wastes too much time on you already, Cold Cut. He helps with repairs.” A hatch split open in the center of the dropgate. Valerie pitched him through one-handed. Something caught him like a catcher’s mitt on the other side: a resilient membrane, stretched between hoops of tensile ribbing. Vacuum sucked at that translucent skin, stretched it tightly convex between those reinforcements.

Valerie sealed the hatch behind them. The little tent inflated instantly, its skin relaxing as the gradient leveled.

Tingling in the fingers of Brüks’s left hand; clenched tight, he realized. He forced them open, was vaguely surprised to see a little piece of shrapnel floating on his palm. Its edges weren’t entirely jagged. The metal had flowed and congealed in spots, like candle wax.

He must have grabbed it in passing.

The tent split like a clamshell. Valerie dragged him out before it had fully opened, pulled him along a tunnel of pale watery light. A headless brown serpent convulsed along its length, coils slapping the bulkheads with random energy: some kind of elastic cord, thick as his wrist and intermittently studded with little hoops. The rungs of a ladder, too far apart for merely human reach, strobed past on the bulkhead. Occasional flourishes of yellow-and-black hazard striping, flashing by too quickly for any glimpse of whatever they warned against. Brüks craned his neck, eyes forward. Sometime in the past few seconds Valerie had raised her visor. Her face was gray in the shade of her helmet, all planes and angles. Bones and no flesh.

The spoke ended in a slotted dome, like one of those antique telescopes left to rot on mountaintops after astronomy had moved offworld. Most of that slot was blocked by the socket on the other side. They ricocheted through the gap that remained.

They emerged into the space between two concentric spheres: a silvery inner core, like a great blob of mercury three meters across; an outer shell, dull and unreflective, containing it. Some kind of grille split the space between into hemispheres, joined crust to core at the equator. Valerie dragged him across the bowl of the aft hemisphere: around a cubist landscape of cargo modules, past the mouth of a gaping tunnel at the south pole (the spine of the ship, Brüks realized; shadows and scaffolds receded down its throat); past the ball-and-socket assemblies of other spokes, arrayed around that opening like a corolla. Brüks caught flickers of motion through the equatorial grille—personnel in the other hemisphere, otherwise occupied as Valerie dragged him to his fate—but in the next instant they were diving down another one of the Crown ’s long bones and the faint tinny voice he might have heard through his sealed helmet—

— Fuck me the roach is up! —

—could just as well have been imagination.

Another long fall; this time they were being towed. The serpent in this spoke was intact, a moving belt stretched pencil-thin between pulleys at each end. Valerie still gripped Brüks’s wrist with one iron hand. The other was locked around one of the hoops (handholds, Brüks realized; stirrups) on the conveyer’s outbound leg. The inbound line streamed past just a meter or two to his left, heading back to the Hub. In some hopeful parallel fantasy world, Brüks broke free and seized one of those hoops to make his escape.

Another terminus—this one innocent of shrapnel or wreckage, just a U-turn and a ledge around an open hatch festooned with a bit of signage:

Now they were through. Now he was free, floating in a hab like the one he’d just escaped. Bulkheads, panels, gengineered strips of photosynthetic foliage. Coffin-size outlines, subtly convex, on the bulkhead: pallets like the one he’d awakened on, folded into the wall while not in use. More of those ubiquitous cubes, stuck and stacked high enough to turn half the compartment into a burrow: a spectrum of colors, a riot of icons. Brüks recognized some of the symbols—power tools, fab-matter stockpiles, the stylized Asclepian staff that meant medical . Others might as well have been scribbled by aliens.

“Catch.”

He turned, flinched, brought his hands up barely in time to grab the box sailing toward him. It might have held a large pizza, judging by size and shape; maybe three of them, stacked. Scasers, adhesives, bladders of synthetic blood nestled in molded depressions under its lid. Some kind of bare-bones first-aid kit.

“Fix it.”

Somehow Valerie had already stripped down to her coverall, geckoed her abandoned spacesuit to the wall like a crumpled wad of aluminum foil. Her left arm was extended, wrist up, sleeve rolled back. Her forearm bent just slightly, halfway down its length. Not even vampires had joints there.

“What—how did—”

“The ship breaks. Shit happens.” Her lips drew back. Her teeth looked almost translucent in the glassy light. “Fix it.”

“But—my ankle—”

Suddenly they were eye to eye. Brüks reflexively dropped his gaze: a lamb in a lion’s presence, no recourse beyond obeisance, no hope beyond prayer.

“Two injured elements,” Valerie whispered. “One mission-critical, one ballast. Which gets priority?”

“But I don’t—”

“You’re a biologist.”

“Yes but—”

“An expert. On life.”

“Y—yes…”

“So fix it .”

He tried to meet her eyes, and couldn’t, and cursed himself. “I’m not a medical—”

“Bones are bones.” From the corner of his eye he saw her head tilt, as if weighing alternatives. “You can’t do this, what good are you?”

“There must be some kind of sick bay on board,” he stammered. “A, an infirmary.”

The vampire’s eyes flickered to the hatch overhead, to the label it framed: MAINTENANCE & REPAIR. “A biologist,” she said, something like mirth in her voice, “and you think there’s a difference .”

This is insane, he thought. Is this is some kind of test?

If so, he was failing it.

He held his breath and his tongue, kept his eyes on the injury: closed fracture, thank Christ. No skin breaks, no visible contusions. At least the break hadn’t torn any major blood vessels.

Or had it? Didn’t vampires—that’s right, they vasoconstricted most of the time, kept most of their blood sequestered in the core. This creature’s radial artery could be ripped wide open and she might never even feel it until she went into hunting mode…

Maybe give her prey a fighting chance, at least…

He tamped down on the thought, irrationally terrified that she might be able to see it flickering there in his skull. He focused on the bend instead: leave it, or try to reseat the bone? ( Leave it, he remembered from somewhere. Keep movement to a minimum, reduce the risk of shredding nerves and blood vessels …)