Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“Then we better get started,” Moore said.

“That is easily the most unenlightening briefing I have ever attended,” Brüks grumbled, pulling himself back into the southern hemisphere. “And given the number of departmental committees I sit on, that’s saying something.”

“Yeah, I kind of got that.” Lianna looked back from a bulkhead handhold. “Come with me. Got something that might help.”

She turned like a fish and sailed through the nearest spokeway. The very sight made Brüks a bit queasy. He followed at his own awkward pace, back through the cube-infested southern hemisphere, into the ball-and-socket that had swallowed her. Lianna dropped easily ahead of him, fending off Coriolis with a push and a kick; she was ten meters down the spoke before she even grabbed a hoop. Fuck those acrobatics: Brüks grabbed his own hoop right off the top, swung around and fumbled his foot into another before he weighed more than a couple of kilograms. He couldn’t be bothered to work out the acceleration of free-falling bodies that gained weight with each meter, but down the length of the spoke he was pretty sure they all ended in splat .

Commons. Another hab identical to those he kept escaping: a two-level propane tank from his grandfather’s backyard barbecue, grown monstrous and pumped full of stale air. The upper level, at least, was less crowded than Repair and Maintenance: chairs, privacy screens, a half-dozen half-emptied cubes, a table. The usual bands of epiphytic astroturf. A framework of pencil-thin scaffolding extended from one wall. The facets of a personal tent—bone yellow, tough as tendons—stretched like latex between those vertices. A couple of sticky chairs faced each other amid the clutter.

Lianna was over by the fabber, rummaging through a freshly popped cube. “Got it.”

The cowl she held up looked a little like a bondage hood for plumbing fetishists, studded with washers and tiny screws that traced a fine grid across the skull. It left only the lower face exposed: mouth, jaw, the tip of the nose. Two especially prominent washers sat embedded over the eyes.

Ambient superconductors. Compressed-ultrasound pingers. A read-write voxel array in black leather.

“My old gaming mask,” Lianna announced. “I thought you could use an interface a little more user-friendly than Rakshi tends to be.”

A gimp hood, for cripples confined to meatspace.

“I mean, since you don’t have the imp—”

“Thanks,” Brüks said. “I think I’ll stick with the smart paint if it’s all the same to you.”

“It’s not just for gaming,” Lianna assured him. “It’s perfectly transparent for ConSensus, and it’s way faster than going through the paint. Plus it’ll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn. Whatever you like.” She closed the cube. “There’s really not much of anything it can’t do.”

He took it from her. The material felt faintly oily in his hands. He turned it over, read the little logo that hovered a virtual centimeter off its surface: INTERLOPER ACCESSORIES.

“It’s completely noninvasive,” Lianna told him. “All TMS and compressed ultrasound, even the opt—”

“I’m familiar with the tech,” he told her. And then: “Thanks.”

“And you know, if you ever are in the mood for gaming, I’m happy to buddy up.”

No mention of his helplessness at Valerie’s hands. No mention of his panic attack. No impatience with his ignorance, no condescension over his lack of augments. Just an overture and a helping hand.

Brüks tasted a mixture of shame and gratitude. I like this woman, he thought.

“Thanks,” he said again, because he didn’t know anything else that fit.

She flashed a goofy smile—“Any time,”—and pointed to something past his shoulder. “I think Jim wanted a word, right?”

Brüks turned. Moore had dropped soundlessly onto the deck behind him. Now he stood there looking vaguely apologetic, the websack on his back bulging with curves and odd angles.

“Should I—”

“I gotta get back to the hold anyway. He’s all yours.” Lianna vanished into the ceiling with a jump and a grab while Moore shrugged the sack off his shoulders and split the seal. Brüks watched him withdraw a roll of the same kind of webbing.

Moore held it out. “For humping gear.”

Brüks took it after a moment—“Thanks. Don’t seem to have brought much gear with me,”—but the Colonel was already back in his rucksack. This time he extracted a long green bottle, turned it in his hands so Brüks could see the label: Glenmorangie .

“Found it in one of the cubes,” he said. “Don’t ask me how it got there. Maybe it was some kind of retailer’s bonus for a big order. Maybe Chinedum just wanted to give me a doggie treat. All I know is, it’s a personal favorite—”

He set it on the deck, reached back into the sack.

“—and it came with a nice set of glasses.”

He gestured to the sticky chairs. “Pull up a seat.”

Moore cracked the bottle; the smell of peat and wood smoke swirled in the air. “Technically we shouldn’t be playing with open liquids even at one-third gee, but squeezebulbs make everything taste like plastic.”

Brüks held out his glass.

“If I had to guess”—Moore let a wobbling, low-gravity dram escape from the bottle—“I’d say you’re feeling a bit pissed off.”

“Maybe,” Brüks admitted. “When I’m not crapping my pants with existential terror.”

“One day you’re minding your own business on your camping trip—”

“Field research.”

“—the next you’re in the crossfire of a Tran war, the day after that you wake up on a spaceship with a bull’s-eye painted on its hull.”

“I do wonder what I’m doing here. Every thirty seconds or so.”

They clinked and swallowed. Brüks grunted appreciatively as the liquid set the back of his throat to smoldering.

“There’s a risk in being here, certainly,” Moore admitted. “And for that I apologize. On the other hand, if we hadn’t taken you with us you’d most likely be dead already.”

“Do we even know who’s chasing us?”

“Not with any certainty. Could be any number of parties. Even cavemen.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “Sometimes Lianna doesn’t give us enough credit.”

“But why?” A thought occurred to him: “The hive didn’t steal this thing, did they?”

Moore chuckled. “Do you know how many basic patents the Order has its name on? They could probably buy a fleet of these ships out of petty cash if they wanted to.”

“Then why?”

“The hive was classified as a threat—rightly—even when it was stuck in a desert at the bottom of the well. Now we’re on a ship that can take us anywhere from Icarus to the O’Neils.” He regarded his scotch. “The threat level isn’t going anywhere but up.”

“That where we’re going? Icarus?”

Moore nodded. “I don’t think our tail knows that yet. For all they know we could be cutting across the innersys on our way somewhere else. Probably why they’ve held back as long as they have.” He drained his glass. “ Why ’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”

Brüks looked at the other man with new eyes. “You some kind of Buddhist, Jim?”

“A Buddhist soldier.” Moore smiled and refilled their glasses. “I like that.”