Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Moore’s voice.

There were two routes forward, two circular openings in the grate on opposite sides of the mirrorball. One was blocked by a retracted spiral staircase squashed almost flat, a black metal pie chart cut into staggered slices: a vital thoroughfare when the engines burned, when acceleration turned forward into up . A useless bit of lawn sculpture now, pulled up and out of the way.

The other was clear, though. Brüks kicked off from the bulkhead, sailed through the air with a mix of exhilaration and mild terror, flailed as the opening rotated lazily past and left him grabbing at the grille a couple of meters antispinward. Chastened, he clambered sideways and through like a crab emerging from its burrow, floated into the northern hemisphere between mirrored earth and smart-painted sky.

Moore stood barefoot, toes curled into the grating, attention focused on a tacband wrapped around his forearm. Mimetic G-couches disfigured the northern half of the mirrorball like body-cast impressions pressed into cookie dough. They ranged radially around the temperate zone, their headrests converging toward the pole. Anyone installed in one of those couches would find themselves looking forward onto the Hub’s northern hemisphere: the dome of an indoor sky, a featureless wash of smart paint save for one spot where yet another redundant ladder stretched from the grille to a hatch just to one side of the north pole.

A Hindian woman strapped into the mirrorball—late twenties perhaps, blunt dark bangs, nape shaved halfway to the crest of her skull—jerked her head away the moment Brüks tried to meet her eyes. Something seemed to catch her attention down by her right foot. “About fucking time.” She wore a chromaform vest over her orange jumpsuit ( We’re color-coded, Brüks realized): infinitely programmable, but all it showed now was a translucent render of the very couch she was strapped into. It turned her into a pair of arms and a floating head grafted to a ghostly body.

Lianna hovered off the grille on the far side of the compartment. She flashed a smile that broadcast welcome and apology in equal measure. “Dan Brüks, Rakshi Sengupta.”

Brüks took another look around the dome; “Uh, Valerie…”

“Won’t be joining us,” Lianna said.

“Fixing her arm, ” Sengupta added.

Thank Christ .

“So,” Moore began, clearly eager to cut to the chase now that the straggler had arrived. “What was it?”

Sengupta rolled her eyes. “Whaddya think they burned through the felching spoke it was an attack .”

Who, Brüks wondered, and held his tongue.

“I was hoping for a bit more detail,” Moore said mildly, unfazed.

Lianna obliged. “Basically they turned a magnifying glass on us. Focused microwave pulse, about half a gigawatt judging by the damage.”

“From where?” Moore asked.

Lianna bit her lip. “Sun. Northern hemisphere.”

“That’s it?”

“Even Bicams have limits, Jim. It’s pure hindsight; differential heat stress on different facets of the structure, spoke trajectory—basically they just back-calced how the different parts were lined up at the time, figured a bearing from the angle of the hit.”

“Coulda done that ourselves,” Sengupta grumbled.

“ Who? ” Brüks blurted out. “Who hit us?”

Nobody spoke. Sengupta regarded something in his general direction the way she might examine a bit of fecal matter scraped off her boot.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lianna said after a moment.

Moore pursed his lips. “So the hive didn’t see it coming.”

She shook her head, as if reluctant to admit to the shortcoming out loud.

“Tran, then.”

“It’d be one for the books if a baseline caught them with their pants down.”

Moore’s eyes flickered to stern. “Under normal circumstances, certainly. They’re not exactly operating at a hundred percent.”

Gray icons, clustered in the hold. “Uh—” Brüks cleared his throat. “What are they doing back there, exactly?”

“Convalescing,” Lianna said. “Bug hit them a lot harder than it hit us. We’ve pumped up the pressure to speed their recovery, but it’ll still be days.”

“So after the break,” Moore mused.

Break?

Lianna nodded. “We’ll have to boot up at least a week early on the other end. They want the option of going hands-on.”

“Hands-on where ?” Brüks wondered. “What bre —”

Sengupta cut him off with an exasperated whistle through clenched teeth, turned to Lianna: “Didn’t I tell you?”

“If you could hold on to your questions for the moment,” Moore suggested, “I’ll be happy to fill you in later.”

“When you won’t be wasting everyone else’s time,” Sengupta added.

“Rak,” Lianna began.

“Why is he even here does anyone expect him to actually do anything other than feel included ?”

“Is that what I’m feeling,” Brüks remarked.

“It’s not exactly Dan who’s wasting our time right now,” Lianna pointed out.

Sengupta snorted.

Moore waited a beat before getting back to business. “Are there any weapons that could do this from that range?”

Lianna shrugged. “You’re the spook. You tell me.”

“I’m not talking about baseline tech.”

“This doesn’t look like a dedicated weapon. More likely someone hijacked a bunch of powersats to fire simultaneously at the same spot. Probably a one-shot deal, too; you don’t get that kind of output by staying inside the rated specs. Probably blew the circuits across the whole network, maybe even past their healing threshold.”

“Wouldn’t matter anyway with a twelve-minute lag. They had one chance to anticipate our position and they blew it. Rakshi, are—”

“Quarter-second thruster squirts random intervals between six and twelve minutes. You won’t even feel ’em but those fuckers won’t be forecasting me again.”

Twelve-minute light speed lag, Brüks reflected. From the sun and back. So we’re six light-minutes from the sun, which puts us, puts us…

One hundred eight million kilometers. Close as Venus, if he remembered his basic astronomy.

“—impact our tipping point?” Moore was asking

Lianna nodded. “But not enough to matter. They’re working through the revisions now. Another couple of hours, they say.”

“And what about our tail?”

Sengupta painted invisible strokes in the air. A window opened on the dome: some kind of plasma plot, three red spikes erupting from a landscape of violet foothills. The details wobbled in real time but those peaks stayed constant. Up in one corner arcane annotations nattered on about DISCRIMINANT COMPLEX and INFRARED OCCLUSION and MICROLENSING.

Heatprints of some kind, Brüks guessed. Cloaked, judging from the annotations, but apparently Sengupta had magic fingers.

They were being followed. This just keeps getting better.

“So.” Moore considered. “Two prongs or two players?”

“Prongs, probably. The Bicams think the shot was meant to disable us enough to let them catch up.” Lianna hmmed. “I wondered why they didn’t just throw a missile at us…”

Sengupta: “Maybe they will now their big trip wire went kaput.”

“We could use that,” Moore mused. “Rakshi, how much warning would we get if they fired on us?”

“Fired what you want the whole catalog?”

“Standard ass-cracker. Ballpark’s fine.”

She wiggled her fingers, for all the world as if she were counting on them. “Seven hours eight minutes if the range doesn’t change. Give or take.”