Firefall

  Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually was a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insights—always ten steps ahead of our own— hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that it takes one to know one.

  Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?

  "You have other things to worry about," he said.

  He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creature's face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake.

  "Is Susan afraid of you?" the thing before me asked.

  "Su—why should she be?"

  "She has four conscious entities in her head. She's four times more sentient than you. Doesn't that make you a threat?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Then why should you feel threatened by me?"

  And suddenly I didn't care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. "Why? Maybe because you're my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and you can't even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reason—"

  "I can imagine what it's like," he said quietly. "Please don't make me do it again."

  I fell instantly silent.

  "I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."

  "It served me well enough." I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.

  "Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe."

  There were implications there I didn't dare to hope for. "Are you saying—"

  "Can't afford to let the truth trickle through. Can't give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocide's impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies."

  He'd played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my topology inside-out.

  I'd known something was going on. I just hadn't understood what.

  "I'd have seen right through it," I said, "if you hadn't made me get involved."

  "You might even read it off me directly."

  "That's why you—" I shook my head. "I thought that was because we were meat."

  "That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

  For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

  I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

  Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it…

  "Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked.

  "Vampires have folk tales?"

  He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Amanda is not planning a mutiny."

  "What? You know about—"

  "She doesn't even want to. Ask her if you like."

  "No—I—"

  "You value objectivity."

  It was so obvious I didn't bother answering.

  He nodded as if I had. "Synthesists can't have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else's. The crew holds you in contempt. Amanda wants me relieved of command. Half of us is you. I think the word is project. Although,"—he cocked his head a bit to one side—"lately you improve. Come."

  "Where?"

  "Shuttle bay. Time to do your job."

  "My—"

  "Survive and bear witness."

  "A drone—"

  "Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before it gets away. It can't convince anyone. It can't counter rationalizations and denials. It can't matter. And vampires—" he paused—"have poor communications skills."

  It should have been cause for petty, selfish rejoicing.

  "It all comes down to me," I said. "That's what you're saying. I'm a fucking stenographer, and it's all on me."

  "Yes. Forgive me for that."

  "Forgive you?"

  Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared.

  "I don't know what I'm doing."

  ***

  The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight.

  And counting.

  Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up. Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of revised projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben like a filamentous cocoon; Theseus was a naked speck in the middle distance.

  I expected any number of those lines to skewer us like needles through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though, the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths couldn't simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently they still had to ease into the curve.

  After Rorschach's dive, I'd been starting to think the laws of physics didn't apply.

  The trajectories were close enough, though. At least three skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their next orbits.

  Sarasti reached for his injector, the blood rising in his face. "Time to go. We refit Charybdis while you're sulking."

  He held the hypo to his throat and shot up. I stared at ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a streetlight.

  "Now, Siri."

  He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway, grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped.

  The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling the airspace, standing guard over the fab plants and shuttle 'locks, clinging like giant insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently, the spine itself was stretching.

  It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations flexed and relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more lab space.

  Or more infantry. Theseus was increasing the size of the battlefield.

  "Come." The vampire turned aft.

  Bates broke in from up front. "Something's happening."

  An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates' feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EM-enhanced equatorial quadrant only a few thousand klicks on a side. The clouds boiled down th
ere, a cyclonic knot of turbulence swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great mass, rising.

  Sarasti clicked.

  "DTI?" Bates said.

  "Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage.

  Theseus shuddered.

  We've been hit, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding expansion cranked into overdrive; the pleated wall lurched and accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed hatch receded up ahead—

  —receded overhead.

  The walls weren't moving at all. We were falling, to the sudden strident bleating of an alarm.

  Something nearly yanked my arm from its socket: Sarasti had reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech of torquing metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet.

  I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away: the ship was bending in the middle and down had started to climb the walls. Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisy-chain pendulum.

  "Bates! James!" The vampire roared. His grip on my wrist trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it.

  "Susan James has barricaded herself in the bridge and shut down autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless. "She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for at least twenty-seven minutes."

  The ship, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The Captain itself. On Public Address.

  That was unusual.

  "Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!"

  Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I couldn't make them out.

  Without warning, Sarasti let go.

  He dropped obliquely in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead waited to swat him like an insect. In half a second both his legs would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright—

  But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming at the mouth.

  "Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the wall.

  He's having a seizure, I realized.

  I released the ladder and pushed astern. Theseus swung lopsidedly around me. Sarasti convulsed in mid-air; clicks and hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints. The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl off.

  Ahead and behind, battlebots held their position and ignored us.

  "Bates!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!"

  Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows and protrusions on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of where Sarasti had been hanging.

  This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw him. Unless...

  Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs.

  "Bates!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging my commander to the infirmary by now. They waited stolid and immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there?" And then—in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you autonomous? Do you take verbal orders?"

  On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me, its voice posing as an alarm.

  Infirmary.

  I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed randomly against my head and shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I kicked off in his wake—

  —and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye—

  —and turned—

  —And dead center of ConSensus, Rorschach erupted from Ben's seething face like a breaching whale. It wasn't just the EM-enhance: the thing was glowing, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled itself into space, big as a mountain range.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Theseus lurched. The lights flickered, went out, came back on again. The turning bulkhead cuffed me from behind.

  "Backups engaged," the Captain said calmly.

  "Captain! Sarasti's down!" I kicked off the nearest ladder, bumped into a grunt and headed forward after the vampire. "Bates isn't—what do I do?"

  "Nav offline. Starboard afferents offline."

  It wasn't even talking to me, I realized. Maybe this wasn't the Captain at all. Maybe it was pure reflex: a dialog tree, spouting public-service announcements. Maybe Theseus had already been lobotomized. Maybe this was only her brain stem talking.

  Darkness again. Then flickering light.

  If the Captain was gone, we were screwed.

  I gave Sarasti another push. The alarm bleated on. The drum was twenty meters ahead; BioMed was just the other side of that closed hatch. The hatch had been open before, I remembered. Someone had shut it in the last few minutes. Fortunately Theseus had no locks on her doors.

  Unless the Gang barricaded it before they took the bridge...

  "Strap in, people! We are getting out of here!"

  Who in hell…?

  The open bridge channel. Susan James, shouting up there. Or someone was; I couldn't quite place the voice...

  Ten meters to the drum. Theseus jerked again, slowed her spin. Stabilised.

  "Somebody start the goddamned reactor! I've only got attitude jets up here!"

  "Susan? Sascha?" I was at the hatch. "Who is that?" I pushed passed Sarasti and reached to open it.

  No answer.

  Not from ConSensus, anyway. I heard a muted hum from behind, saw the ominous shifting of shadows on the bulkhead just a moment too late. I turned in time to see one of the grunts raise a spiky appendage—curved like a scimitar, needle-tipped—over Sarasti's head.

  I turned in time to see it plunge into his skull.

  I froze. The metal proboscis withdrew, dark and slick. Lateral maxillipeds began nibbling at the base of Sarasti's skull. His pithed corpse wasn't thrashing now; it only trembled, a sack of muscles and motor nerves awash in static.

  Bates.

  Her mutiny was underway. No, their mutiny—Bates and the Gang. I'd known. I'd imagined it. I'd seen it coming.

  He hadn't believed me.

  The lights went out again. The alarm fell silent. ConSensus dwindled to a flickering doodle on the bulkhead and disappeared; I saw something there in that last instant, and refused to process it. I heard breath catch in my throat, felt angular monstrosities advancing through the darkness. Something flared directly ahead, a bright brief staccato in the void. I glimpsed curves and angles in silhouette, staggering. The buzzing crackle of shorting circuitry. Metal objects collided nearby, unseen.

  From behind the crinkle of the drum hatch, opening. A sudden beam of harsh chemical light hit me as I turned, lit the mechanical ranks behind; they simultaneously unclamped from their anchorages and floated free. Their joints clicked in unison like an army stamping to attention

  "Keeton!" Bates snapped, sailing through the hatch. "You okay?"

  The chemlight shone from her forehead. It turned the interior of the spine into a high-contrast mosaic, all pale surfaces and sharp moving shadows. It spilled across the grunt that had killed Sarasti; the robot bounced down the spine, suddenly, mysteriously inert. The light washed across Sarasti's body. The corpse turned slowly on its axis. Spherical crimson beads emerged from its head like drops of water from a leaky faucet.
They spread in a winding, widening trail, spot-lit by Bates' headlamp: a spiral arm of dark ruby suns.

  I backed away. "You—"

  She pushed me to one side. "Stay clear of the hatch, unless you're going through." Her eyes were fixed on the ranked drones. "Optical line of sight."

  Rows of glassy eyes reflected back at us down the passageway, passing in and out of shadow.

  "You killed Sarasti!"

  "No."

  "But—"

  "Who do you think shut it down, Keeton? The fucker went rogue. I could barely even get it to self-destruct." Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp.

  "Better," Bates said. "They should stay in line now. Assuming we don't get hit with anything too much stronger."

  "What is hitting us?"

  "Lightning. EMP." Drones sailed down to Fab and the shuttles, taking strategic positions along the tube. "Rorschach's putting out one hell of a charge and every time one those skimmers pass between us they arc."

  "What, at this range? I thought we were—the burn—"

  "Sent us in the wrong direction. We're inbound."

  Three grunts floated close enough to touch. They drew beads on the open drum hatch.

  "She said she was trying to escape—" I remembered.

  "She fucked up."

  "Not by that much. She couldn't have." We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case.

  "Not the Gang," Bates said.

  "But—"

  "I think there's someone new in there now. Bunch of submodules wired together and woke up somehow, I don't know. But whatever's in charge, I think it's just panicking."

  Stuttering brightness on all sides. The spinal lightstrips flickered and finally held steady, at half their usual brightness.

  Theseus coughed static and spoke: "ConSensus is offline. Reac—"

  The voice faded.

  ConSensus, I remembered as Bates turned to head back upstream.

  "I saw something," I said. "Before ConSensus went out."

  "Yeah."

  "Was that—"

  She paused at the hatch. "Yeah."

  I'd seen scramblers. Hundreds of them, sailing naked through the void, their arms spread wide.