Peter Watts - Echopraxia

She was: the ’bot’s eye saw struts and plating more often than shadows within shadows. Sengupta was keeping her head down on approach. At the moment they could see nothing but the looming face of some small grated butte dead ahead.

“Right around the corner now this should do it.”

The drone farted hydrogen and drifted gently out of eclipse. Still nothing but faint amorphous yellow on infrared.

On StarlAmp, though: a silver body, legs straight arms spread, wired against the side of the ship. Boosted photons rendered the body in fragments: ridges of mirrored fabric glinting in thousand-year-old starlight, creases that swallowed any hint of mass or structure. The spacesuit was a patchwork of bright strips and dark absences, the shell of some tattered mummy with half its bandages ripped away and nothing at all underneath. But the right shoulder shone pale and clear: the double- E crest boasting the unsurpassed quality of Extreme Environments, Inc., protective gear; a name tag, programmable for the easy identification of multiple users.

LUTTERODT.

It can’t be, Brüks thought. I saw her, she was dead, her faceplate was in pieces. She was not unconscious. She was not stunned. That was not her I saw pounding on the hatch, awake again, running for her life, too frantic to notice that she’d awakened in someone else’s suit. It was not Lianna we left to burn, it was Valerie. It was Valerie. We abandoned no others who were not already dead.

We did not do this .

Sengupta was making noises somewhere between laughter and hysteria: “I told you I told you I told you.

“Not stupid at all . She knows what she’s doing.”

Out there all this time, Brüks thought. Hiding. I would never have found her. I would never have even looked.

Maybe Portia ’s hiding, too. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.

“We have to tell Jim,” he said.

“Will you look at that,” Moore remarked.

Lianna’s spacesuit flickered on the dome, a snapshot taken before Sengupta had pulled the drone back for fear of setting off alarms. Not that a live feed would have been any more dynamic.

“It’s Valerie it’s fucking Valerie —”

“Apparently.”

It can’t be, Brüks thought for the thousandth time, the voice in his head weaker with each iteration. By now it was barely whispering.

“I told you we can’t trust —”

“She seems harmless enough for now,” the Colonel remarked.

“ Harmless are you felching crazy don’t you remember what she—”

Moore cut her off: “There’s no way that suit could support an active metabolism all the way back to Earth and there’s no sign of any kind of octopus rig. She’s gone undead for the trip home. Probably expects to revive and jump ship when we dock in LEO. Waking up earlier wouldn’t accomplish anything except using up her O2.”

“ Good then I say we give the bot some teeth and go scrape her off the hull like a goddamn barnacle while we got the chance.”

“By all means, if you think she hasn’t set up any defenses against just that scenario. If you’re certain the hull isn’t booby-trapped with a nanogram of antimatter set to blow a hole in the ship if anything disturbs her. I assumed you realized that she’s smart . You certainly pulled your drone back fast enough.”

That gave her pause. “Whadda we do then?”

“She’s waiting for us to dock. So we don’t dock.” Moore shrugged. “We jump ship and let the Crown burn up on reentry.”

“And then what surf back through the atmosphere on top of a passing comsat? If I was supposed to pack a shuttle nobody told me.”

“One thing at a time. For now, just continue your hull crawl in case she’s left anything else out there for us to find. If you’ll excuse me”—he drifted around his own axis and pushed himself off the deck—“I have my own work to do.”

He disappeared into the attic. Brüks and Sengupta stayed at the mirrorball. Buried in the shadows of some obscure province on the hull, Valerie lay still as death in her stolen skin.

“What does she want ?” Brüks wondered.

“What all of them want I guess to touch the Face of God.”

The common enemy, he remembered. “That whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing went down the toilet the moment she slaughtered the Bicams. Whatever it was, she wanted sole access.”

“She’s got plans for God oh yah they all did. Too bad God had plans for them, too.”

Maybe she wasn’t happy just touching the Face of God, he mused. Maybe she wants to bring God home as a pet. Maybe, while we’ve been going crazy looking for Portia in here, it’s been out there all along sealed up in a ziplock bag.

Another good reason to burn this fucking ship. As if we needed one.

“Whatever those plans were,” he said, “they’re all dead in the water now.”

“Oh you think so huh?”

“Jim’s—”

“Oh Jim that’s a good one. Because vampires are no match for roach plans are they? So how did she get out then in the first place huh? How come she isn’t still strapped to a chair solving puzzles at SFU?”

Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn’t even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.

Valerie, walking blithely out of her cage one night and scaring the piss out of prey in a local bar for chrissakes and then walking back in again, just to show that she could.

“I don’t know,” Brüks admitted.

“I do.” A single, jerky nod. “It wasn’t just her there were others there were three other vampires in that lab and they worked together .”

He shook his head. “They’d never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they did meet they’d be more likely to tear out each other’s throats than draw up escape plans.”

“Oh they drew up their plans all right they all just did it alone .”

Brüks felt a contradiction rising on his tongue. Then it sunk in.

“ Shit, ” he said.

“Yah.”

“You’re saying they just knew what the others were going to do. They just—”

“ Elevated respiration from the short redhead prey consistent with conspecific encounter within the past two hundred breaths ,” Sengupta chanted. “ East south corridors public so exclude them; conspecific must have been moved twenty meters along the north tunnel no more than one hundred twenty five breaths ago . Like that.”

Each observing the most insignificant behavioral cues, the subtlest architectural details as their masters herded them from lab to cell to conference room. Each able to infer the presence and location of the others, to independently derive the optimal specs for a rebellion launched by X individuals in Y different locations at Z time. And then they’d acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they’d never met would have worked out the same scenario.

“How do you know ?” he whispered.

“It’s the only way I tried to make it work from every other angle but it’s the only model that fits . You roaches never stood a chance.”