Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Valerie.

For a moment they stared at each other across a litter of corpses: predator with a look of distracted curiosity, prey because he simply couldn’t look away. Brüks didn’t know how long the moment lasted; it might have gone on forever if Valerie hadn’t lowered her faceplate. Maybe that was an act of mercy, the breaking of a headlight paralysis that would have kept him frozen right up until she tore him limb from limb. Maybe she just wanted to give him a sporting chance.

Brüks turned and fled.

Coolant clusters. Service tunnels. Sealed hatches leading to far-off places he’d never explored or long-since forgotten. He passed them unseeing, let instinct steer the meat while his global workspace filled with predator models and pants-pissing terror. He was passing a tertiary heat sink and he could see Valerie closing through the back of his head; he was at the Cache Hatch and he could see her lips drawn back in that gleaming predatory grin; he was fleeing up the notochord and he could feel her muscles bunching for the final killing blow.

In the lamprey now: No time to stop, no chance to bar the way, you even think about dogging that hatch and she’ll be on you before you even turn around. Don’t look back. Just keep running. Don’t think about where, don’t think about when: thirty seconds is a lifetime, two minutes is the far future, it’s the moment that matters, it’s now that’s trying to kill you . A voice ahead, as panicky as the one inside, echoing down the throat and getting louder: all shit shit shit and docking clamps and numbers going backward—but Don’t worry about that either, that’s for later, that’s for ten seconds from now if you’re still alive and—

The Crown .

End of line. Nowhere else to go, no more time to buy. All the future you have, right now.

Nothing left to lose.

Brüks turned and stared back down the throat; Valerie stood there, casually braced against the lip of Icarus’s inner hatch, looking up through the mirrored cyclops eye of her helmet. She might have been standing there for hours, just waiting for him to turn around and notice her.

Now that he had, she leapt.

He brought up the laser and snarled . Valerie sailed toward him; Brüks could have sworn she was laughing. He fired. The beam scattered off the reflective thermacele of the vampire’s spacesuit, shattered into a myriad emerald splinters bright as the sun. They scorched split-second tracks on random surfaces before Valerie darted out of the way.

Brüks lunged for the hatch controls, grabbed the lever, fumbled. The Crown clenched her front door a fraction, relaxed it again. Valerie closed for the kill, arms outspread. Somehow he could hear her: a mere whisper, impossibly audible even over Sengupta’s panicked chanting on comm. A voice as clear as if she were murmuring at his shoulder, as if she were right inside his head:

I want you to imagine something: Christ on the cross…

Electricity sang, deep down in his bones. Synapses snapped like blown circuits. Brüks’s flesh hummed like a tuning fork, every muscle thrown instantly into tetanus. Wet warmth bloomed at his crotch. He couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, could barely even breathe. Some distant part of him worried briefly about that last fact, then realized that it probably didn’t matter. Valerie was bound to kill him long before he had a chance to suffocate.

In fact here she came now, reaching out—

—and careening away, struck from behind. Jim Moore loomed up in her stead, his face utterly reptilian, eyes dancing frantic little jigs in the dark cavern of his open helmet. He pushed Brüks into the bay, slammed the airlock shut behind them both; his fist came down on Brüks’s chest not quite hard enough to crack the sternum through the suit. Something broke in there, though; something unlocked, and Brüks was sucking back great tidal washes of recycled air. By the time he stopped gasping Moore had webbed him into an empty alcove for safekeeping, an occupied suit next to empty ones.

There were plenty of those.

The Crown was a symphony orchestra, warming up: the creak and groan of stressed metal, the distant cough of awakening engines, the random percussion of buckles clanking against bulkheads pushed into grudging motion. Sengupta’s vocals, crackling out panicked numbers. A rogue droplet of oil floated in place while the ship shifted around it, splashed against Brüks’s cheek with a whiff of benzene.

From somewhere very far away, the roar of an ocean.

Moore’s hands brought up an interface on the bulkhead. His fingers played those controls with inhuman precision. A window opened to one side, an exterior feed rendered in smart paint: a smear of ragged blue light lashing back and forth, the lamprey torn free and recoiling into some distant burrow. A play of stars and shadow and knife-edged geometries blocking out the heavens. Dim red constellations flashed along wire-frame gantries: cliffs of black alloy stretched far and wide to their own horizons.

Valerie’s helmet, blocking the view. Fists pounding against the hull, any possible sound drowned out by the vibration of the engines. Sunrise, sudden and scalding: the whole universe burst into flame as the Crown of Thorns lumbered out of eclipse. Somewhere Sengupta was cursing; somewhere else, thrusters fired. For one brief instant Valerie was a black writhing shadow against a blinding sky: then burst into flame an instant before the pickup fried.

Moore’s fingers never stopped dancing.

It took endless seconds for the backup camera to kick in. By the time it did they were back in hiding, huddled in Icarus’s shadow, the starless black silhouette of the radiator spire sliding past to port. A gentle hand began to nudge Brüks down against the bottom of the alcove, mass-times-acceleration pulling him out against the webbing. The dim zodiac of the array’s streetlights receded slowly to stern—but other lights ignited back there as he watched, a pentagon of hot blue novae flaring silently in the darkness. It was only then that another silence registered: Moore had stopped talking to the wall, stilled the machine-gun staccato of his fingers against metal. Brüks could barely make out a fuzzy shape at the edge of vision; it took a Herculean effort to move his eyes even a fraction of a degree, to bring the Colonel into focus. He never did succeed completely. But he squeezed enough from his peripheral vision to see the old warrior standing still as stone against the deck, one hand half-raised to his face. He thought he heard a soft intake of breath caught halfway, and decided to call it the sound of a returning soul.

Icarus shrank away. The sun burst back into view around it. Five blue sparks still flickered even in the light of that blinding corona: five bright dots in a dwindling black disk in a sea of fire. Stabilizing thrusters, Brüks realized distantly, and wondered why they burned so long and so bright, and wished that the answer hadn’t come to him so quickly.

The newborn gravity kept putting on weight. It pulled Brüks ever harder against his restraints, leaned him out of the alcove and angled over the deck. His knees did not buckle under the strain; his body did not collapse. He was breathing statuary, and some gut sense stronger than logic knew that he would not crumple if those straps gave way: he would topple to the deck and shatter .

The spacesuits beside him had disappeared. Rotting corpses hung in their stead, slivers of gray flesh dangling through the mesh, maggots dripping like rice grains from empty eye sockets. Grinning mandibles clicked and clattered and uttered incomprehensible sounds. REM paralysis, one part of Brüks said to another, although he was not asleep. Hallucination . The corpses laughed like something less dead, coughing through mud.