He shook his head to clear it. Lianna vanished again—
“Hey—”
—and reappeared.
Brüks hauled himself to his feet, pulled the gimp mask off his face as the pain settled in his left shin. “There’s something wrong with this thing. It’s screwing with my eyes.”
She reached out and took it. “Looks okay. What were you doing?”
“Just trawling the cache. Thought I’d bookmarked an article but I can’t find the damn thing.”
“You encrypt the search?”
Brüks shook his head. Lianna far-focused into ConSensus. “Szpindel et al? ‘Gamma-protocadherin and the role of the PCDH11Y ortholog’”?
“That’s the one.”
“It’s right here.” She frowned, handed back the gimp hood. “Try again.”
He pulled it back on over his head. Search results reappeared in the air before him, but Szpindel wasn’t among them. “Still nothing.”
“Hmm,” Lianna said, and vanished.
“Where are you? You just dis—”
She leaned back into view from nowhere in particular.
“—appeared.”
“There’s the problem,” she said, and peeled the gimp hood back off his scalp. “Induced hemineglect. Probably a bad superconductor.”
“Hemineglect?”
“See why you should get augged? You could just pull up a subtitle, know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“See why I don’t?” Brüks conjured up a definition out of smart paint. “Nobody has to cut my head open to replace a bad superconductor.”
Broken brains that split the body down the middle and threw half of it away: an inability to perceive anything to the left of the body’s midline, to even conceive of anything there. People who only combed their hair on the right side with their right hands, who only saw food on the right side of their plates. People who just forgot about half the universe.
“That is fucked,” Brüks said, quietly awed.
Lianna shrugged. “Like I said, a bad superconductor. We got spares, though; faster’n fabbing a replacement.”
He followed her through the ceiling. “So you never told me why you were so old school,” she said over her shoulder.
“Fear of vivisection. When superconductors go bad. We covered this.”
“The reason that stuff goes bad is because it’s crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.”
“So they’ll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year’s supply of bubble bath for cats.”
“Hey, at least the augs are firewalled. It’s way easier to hack a raw brain, if that’s what you’re worried about.
“Then again,” she added, “I don’t think it is.”
He sighed. “No. I guess it isn’t.”
“What, then?”
They emerged into the southern hemisphere. Their reflections, thin as eels, slid across the mirrorball as they passed.
“Know what a funnel-web spider is?” Brüks asked at last.
After the barest hesitation: “I do now.” And a moment later, “Oh. The neurotoxins.”
“Not just any neurotoxins. This one was special. Pharm refugee maybe, or just some open-source hobby that got loose. Might have even been beneficial under other circumstances, for all I know. The little fucker got away. But I felt a nip, right about here”—he spread the fingers of one hand, tapped the webbing between thumb and forefinger with the other—“and I was flat on my back ten seconds later.” He snorted softly. “Taught me not to go sampling without gloves, anyway.”
They crossed the equator, single file. No one in the northern hemisphere.
“Didn’t kill you though,” Lianna observed shrewdly.
“Nah. Just induced the mother of all allergic responses to nanopore antiglials. Any kind of direct neural interface finishes what that little bugger started.”
“They could fix that, you know.” Lianna bounced off the deck and glided along the forward ladder, Brüks clambering in her wake.
“Sure they could. I could take some proprietary drug for the rest of my life and let FizerPharm squeeze my balls every time they change their terms and conditions. Or I could get my whole immune system ripped out and replaced. Or I can take a couple of pills every day.”
The attic.
A warren of pipes and conduits, an engineering subbasement at the top of the ship. Plumbing, docking hatches, great wraparound bands full of tools and spacesuits and EVA accessories. Stone Age control panels in the catastrophic event that anyone might need to take manual control. A stale breeze caressed Brüks’s face from some overhead ventilator; he tasted oil and electricity. Up ahead the docking airlock bulged to starboard like a tinfoil hubcap three meters across; a smaller lock, merely man-size, played sidekick across the compartment. Spacesuits drifted in their alcoves like dormant silver larvae. Portals and panels crowded the spaces between struts and LOX tanks and CO2 scrubbers: lockers, bus boards, a head gimbaled for variable gee.
Lianna cracked one of the lockers and began rummaging about inside.
Yet another ladder climbed farther forward, out of the attic and up along a spire of dimly lit scaffolding. Afferent sensor array up there, according to the map. Maneuvering thrusters. And the parasol: that great wide conic of programmable metamaterial the Crown would hide behind when the sun got too close. Photosynthetic, according to the specs. Brüks didn’t know whether it would shuttle enough electrons to run whatever backup drive the Bicamerals were putting together, but at least hot showers were always an option.
“Got it.” Lianna held up a greasy-looking gray washer, smiling.
For a moment. The look of triumph drained from her face while Brüks watched; the expression left behind was bloodless and terrified.
“Lee…?”
She sucked in breath, and didn’t let it out. She stared past his right shoulder as if he were invisible.
He spun, expecting monsters. Nothing to see but the airlock. Nothing to hear but the clicks and sighs of the Crown of Thorns , talking to itself.
“Do you hear that?” she whispered. Her eyes moved in terrified little saccades. “That— ticking …”
He heard the sigh of recycled air breathed into cramped spaces, the soft rustle of empty spacesuits stirring in the breeze. He heard faint muffled sounds of movement from below: a scrape, a hard brief footfall. Brüks looked around the compartment, swept his eyes past alcoves and airlocks—
Now he heard something: sharp, soft, arrhythmic. Not a ticking so much as a clicking, a sound like, like a clicking tongue perhaps. A hungry sound, from overhead.
His stomach dropped away.
He didn’t have to look. He didn’t dare to. Somehow he could feel her up there in the rafters: a dark predatory shadow, watching from places where the light couldn’t quite reach.
The sound of teeth tapping together.
“ Shit, ” Lianna whispered.
She can’t be up there, Brüks thought. He’d checked the board before leaving the Commons. He always checked. Valerie’s icon had been down in her hab where it always was, a green dot among gray ones. She must have really moved.
Of course, they could do that.
Now those clicking teeth were so loud he didn’t know how he could have missed them. There was no pattern to that sound, no regular predictable rhythm. The silences between clicks stretched forever, drove him insane with trivial suspense; or snapped unexpectedly closed after a split second.
“Let’s—” Brüks swallowed, tried again. “Let’s get…”
But Lianna was already headed aft.
The Hub was bright light and sterile reflections: the soft glow of the walls chased Brüks’s fears back to the basement where they belonged. He looked at Lianna a bit sheepishly as they rounded the mirrorball.
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