Peter Watts - Echopraxia

It wasn’t English. Brüks supposed it wasn’t even language, not the way he’d define it at least. But somehow he knew exactly what Eulali had meant.

You first .

Two hours later four of the Bicamerals and a couple of Valerie’s zombies were on the hull crawling forward along the Crown ’s spine with a retinue of maintenance spiders, hauling torches and lasers and wrenches behind them. Two hours to start making half a ship whole again.

Three days to screw up the courage to go anywhere else.

Oh, they laid the groundwork. Sengupta did cam-by-cams of the whole frozen array, hijacked a couple of maintenance bots and sent them through every accessible corner and cranny. Brüks couldn’t make out any angels on the feeds. No asteroids either, for that matter. He was starting to wonder if that code-name hadn’t been a red herring—a phrase set loose across the ether so pursuers wouldn’t think twice when the Crown relit her engines halfway through the innersys and accelerated away to some farther destination.

Squinting as hard as she could, all Sengupta could see was a small dark suspicion that disappeared when you laid an error bar across it: “Station allometry’s off by a few millimeters but it’d be weirder if you didn’t get shrinkage and expansion with all the heat flux.” The hive huddled together and passed occasional instructions through Lianna: Bring the condenser up to twenty atmospheres. Freeze the chamber. Heat the chamber. Turn out the lights. Turn them on again. Vent the condenser back to vacuum. Here, fab this SEM and bot it over.

The elephant in the room refused to rise to any flavor of bait. After three days, Brüks was itching for action.

“They want you to stay here,” Lianna said apologetically. “For your own safety.”

They floated in the attic, the Crown ’s viscera hissing and gurgling about them as a procession of Bicamerals climbed into spacesuits at the main airlock. A globe of water, held together by surface tension, wobbled in midair just off the beaten path. The soft light spilling from the lamprey’s mouth washed everything in robin’s egg.

“ Now they’re interested in my safety.”

She sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dan.”

Valerie emerged from the Hub and bared her teeth as she sailed past. Her fingers trailed along a bundle of coolant pipes, lightly tapping an arrhythmic tattoo. Brüks glanced at Lianna; Lianna glanced away. Up the attic, Ofoegbu plunged his hands into the water; pulled them out; rubbed them together before donning his gauntlets.

“You’re going, though,” Brüks observed. To work side by side with the creature who had nearly killed her without so much as a glance in her direction. He’d edged around the subject in casual conversation, what little of that there’d been lately. She hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it.

“It’s my job,” she said now. “But you know, we’re even keeping Jim pretty much in the background.”

That surprised him. “Really?”

“We might bring him over once we’re a little more sure of our footing—he was ground control for the Theseus mission, after all—but even then he’ll mostly be remoting in from the Crown. The Bicams don’t want to expose anyone to unnecessary risk. Besides—” She shrugged. “What would you do over there anyway?”

Brüks shrugged. “Watch. Explore.” Farther up the hall, the blob shuddered afresh as the node called Jaingchu washed away her sins. Why do all the bodies do that, he wondered, if there’s only one mind behind them all?

“You’ll get better real-time intel back here.”

“I guess.” He shook his head. “You’re right, of course. They’re right. I’m just—going a bit stir-crazy in here.”

“I’d have thought you’d want less excitement in your life. The way things have been going lately, boredom’s something we should be aspiring to.” She managed a smile, laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll be good as there. Looking right over my shoulder.”

Sengupta grunted from her couch as he drifted back into the Hub. “So they won’t let you out to play.”

“They will not,” he admitted, and settled in beside her.

“Better view from here.” One foot tapped absently against the deck. “Wouldn’t wanna be over there anyway, not with that lot can’t even talk to them they got shitty manners in case you hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t go over there if you paid me.”

“Thanks,” Brüks said.

“For what?”

For trying. For the comforting scritch between the ears.

Sengupta waved her hand as if spreading a deck of cards: a row of camera windows bloomed left to right across the dome. Gloved hands, visors, the backs of helmets; tactical overlays describing insides and outsides in luminous time-series.

The lamprey opened its mouth. The Bicameral entourage swam innocently down its throat.

Brüks pulled on his hood and booted up the motion sensors.

He wasn’t entirely useless. They set him to work reseeding the astroturf panels; scraping away the dead brittle stuff that had been sacrificed to cold and vacuum on the way down; spraying fresh nutrigel into the bulkhead planters; spraying, in turn, a mist of microscopic seeds into the gel. The treated surfaces began to green up within the hour, but rather than watch the grass grow he looked on from a distance while Bicams and zombies swarmed across Icarus like army ants, carving great cookie-cutter chunks of polytungsten from its flanks and hauling them back to that jagged gaping stump where the Crown had been torn in two. Eventually they let him outside; the array itself was still off-limits but they let him help out closer to home, tutored him in the use of heavy machinery and set him loose on the Crown ’s hull. He torched pins and struts on command, helped shear the parasol free from its mooring at the bow and haul it aft; helped cut precise holes in its center for improvised thrusters that could stare down the heat of ten suns.

Other times he sat restlessly in the Hub while Sengupta ran numbers across the wall, this many tonnes and that many kiloNewtons and so much Isp thrust. He’d tap into AUX/RECOMP and watch Valerie and Ofoegbu and Amina at work, scientific and religious paraphernalia floating about their heads as they attempted communion with an impossible slime mold from the stars. He’d capture their movements and their incantations, feed them to a private database he’d been building since before the Crown had docked. Sometimes Jim Moore would be there; other times Brüks would catch him sequestered in some far-off corner of the Crown, adrift on a sea of old telemetry that had nothing to do with his son, nothing at all, just facts on the ground.

The Colonel was always civil, these days. Never more.

When the sight of people in more productive roles failed to satisfy, Brüks abandoned Icarus’s bustling tourist district and went off by himself, cam by cam: stepped through views of empty crawlspaces and frozen habs, an endless dark maze of tunnels connecting the uninhabited and the unexplored. Sometimes there was atmosphere, and frost sparkling on bulkheads. Sometimes there was only vacuum and girders and rails along which prehensile machinery scuttled like platelets in a mechanical bloodstream.

Once there were stars where no stars should have been: a great hole bitten out of Icarus’s carapace where it would do the least damage. Brüks could see incendiary Bicameral teeth through the gap, brilliant blue pinpoints taking another bite farther down the hull. Even filtered by the camera, they made him squint.

Next stop.

Ah. AUX/RECOMP again, more crowded than before: Moore had joined Valerie and the Bicamerals at play.