Firefall

  “Did what, exactly?”

  “You ever been scared roach?”

  All the time. “Rakshi, we almost died—”

  “Before that.” Sengupta head jerked back, forth. “Scared for no reason scared just going to the bathroom.”

  Something jumped in his stomach. “What did you find?”

  She threw a camera feed onto the wall: an eye in the attic, looking down along the empty compartment to the Hub hatch. Sengupta zoomed obliquely on a patch of bulkhead beside the secondary airlock. Someone had scrawled some kind of glyph across that surface, a tangle of multicolored curves and corners that might have passed for some Cubist’s rendition of a very simple neural circuit.

  “I don’t remember seeing that before,” Brüks murmured.

  “Yah you do you just don’t remember it. Only lasts two hundred milliseconds pure luck this showed up on a screen grab. You see it but you don’t remember it and it scares the shit out of you.”

  “Not scaring me now.”

  “This is just one frame roach it’s part of an animation but the cameras don’t scan fast enough and they’re all gone now. I had to sieve like a bugger to even get this much.”

  He stared at the image: a jagged little tangle of lines and arabesques, a piece of abstract graffiti maybe a hand’s-width across. It almost looked meaningful when spied from the corner of the eye, like a collection of letters on the verge of forming a word; it dissolved into gibberish when you looked at it. Even cut out of sequence, even spied from this oblique angle, it made his brain itch.

  “It’s like she painted—gang signs,” he said softly. “All over the ship.”

  “That’s not all she did the way she moved remember I said I didn’t like the way she moved all those little clicks and ticks—shit even that time she attacked me and then you I saw her whisper things in your ear what did she say to you huh?”

  “I—don’t know,” Brüks realized. “I don’t remember.”

  “Yah you do. Just like that time in Budapest, changed your wiring with vibrations like lining up a bunch of beer glasses pretty wild right?” Sengupta tapped her temple three times in rapid succession, hard. “Not even radical I mean you can’t hear a word or smell a fart without your brain rewiring at least a bit that’s how brains are everything reprograms you. She just figured out where to stamp on the floor to make you freeze up on command. Coulda happened to me just as easy.”

  “It did happen to you,” Brüks said. “Why did you attack her, Rak? I saw you in the Hub, you went at her like a rabid dog. What got into you?”

  “I dunno it was like she was making these noises they just really pissed me off I dunno couldn’t help myself.”

  “Misophonia.” Brüks barked a soft bitter laugh. “She gave you misophonia.”

  Images from Simon Fraser: Valerie strapped to a chair, tapping on the armrest...​Even back then she was doing it. Even when they were torturing her, she was—reprogramming them...​

  He couldn’t help laughing.

  “What?” Sengupta said. “What?”

  “You know the secret of a good memory?” He bit back another laugh. “You know what really kicks the hippocampus into overdrive, burns tracks into your brain faster and deeper than anything this side of direct neuroinduction?”

  “Roach you gotta—”

  “Fear.” Brüks shook his head. “All that time, playing the monster. I thought she was just into sadistic games, you know? I thought she just got off on scaring us. But she was never that—gratuitous. She was only cranking up the baud rate...”

  Sengupta smacked her lips and looked out the window.

  He snorted softly. “Even that time in the attic, Lee and I—we couldn’t even look. We just knew she was up there, but we were facing each other, Rak. We were each terrified by something to our left but we were facing each other—” Of course we were, it’s obvious. Why didn’t I see it before? “I bet she wasn’t there at all, it was just—temporoparietal hallucinations. Night hags. Sensed-presence bullshit.”

  “Roach remembers.” Sengupta was almost whispering. “Roach is starting to wake up...”

  “She was moving us around like checkers.” Brüks didn’t know whether to be awed or terrified. “The whole time...”

  “And what else did she program into us huh? We gonna start seeing things that aren’t there or go walking naked on the hull?”

  Brüks thought about it. “I don’t—think so. Not if she hacked us all the same way, anyway. Basic things, sure. Fear. Lust. Stuff that’s universal.” He smiled, a bit grimly, at the thought of the Crown’s surviving denizens sprouting preprogrammed hard-ons and spiked nipples. And that is really not a picture I need in my head right now. “You want to hack higher-level behavior, you’re getting into formative childhood experiences, specific memory pathways. Too many individual differences for one-size-fits-all.”

  Sengupta clicked her teeth. “That’s old roach talking new roach should know better. Who knows what that—”

  “She couldn’t hack the Bicamerals,” he said slowly.

  “What?”

  “These tricks—they exploit classic pathways, they’d never work on someone who’d remixed their brain circuitry. She had to get them out of the way.” A thousand pieces fell suddenly, blindingly into place. “That’s why she attacked the monastery, that’s why she didn’t just knock on the front door with an offer. She wanted to goad them into getting noticed. She knew how the roaches would respond, right down to a weaponized biological just lethal enough to keep the hive out of the way for the trip but not lethal enough to derail the mission completely. Fuck.” He sucked in his breath at the thought.

  “You see the problem,” Sengupta said.

  I don’t see anything but problems. “Which one in particular?”

  “She’s a vampire she’s prepost-Human all wrapped up into one. These fuckers solve NP-complete problems in their heads and they drop us like go stones and she’s stupid enough to just accidentally get locked outside when we leave?”

  Brüks shook his head. “She burned. I saw her. Ask Jim.”

  “You ask him.” She turned, her eyes lifting from the deck the moment his face fell from view. “Go on. He’s right up there.”

  “No hurry,” Brüks said after a moment. “I’ll see him when he comes down.”

  To stern the transplanted parasol held back the sun: a great black shield, coruscations of flame still flickering intermittently past its edges. Ahead, the stars: one at least crawled with life and chaos, too distant yet to draw the eye, more hypothesis than hope but closing, closing. That was something.

  In between:

  A metal spine webbed in scaffolding, lumpy with metal tumors. Spokes and habs and cauterized stumps sweeping one way across the sky; a weighted baton sweeping the other to balance the vectors. The Hub. The Hold: a cylindrical cavern abutting the shield to stern, its back end ragged and gaping into space. Once it had been full of cargo and components and thinking cancers: now it was packed with tonnes of uranium and precious micrograms of antihydrogen and great toroidal superconductors big as houses.

  And shadows everywhere: webs and jigsaws cast by a hundred dim lanterns decorating the tips of antennae or the latches of access panels or mounted as porch lights around the edges of half-forgotten emergency airlocks. Sengupta had turned them all on and maxed them all out but they were waypoints, not searchlights: they didn’t so much illuminate the darkness as throw it into contrast.

  No matter. Her drone didn’t need light to see.

  She’d eschewed the usual maintenance ’bots that crawled spiderlike along the hull, patching and probing and healing the scars left by micrometeorites. Too obvious, she’d said. Too easy to hack. Instead she’d built one from scratch, remote-printed it on the fabricator still humming away in the refitted Hold: decompiled one of the standard bots for essential bits of lanthanum and thulium and built the rest from the Crown’s matter stockpile like Yahweh breathing life into clay. Now it made its painstaking way
over a landscape of struts and conduits, shadows and darkness overlaid with false-color maps on a dozen wavelengths.

  “There!” Sengupta cried for the fourth time in as many hours, and then “Fuck.”

  Just another pocket of outgassing. By now Brüks had learned not to worry about the myriad leaks in the hull. The Crown of Thorns was a sieve. Most ships were. Fortunately the holes in that mesh were pretty small: it would take years for the internal air pressure to decline significantly, barring a direct hit from anything larger than a lentil. They’d die of starvation or radiation sickness long before they had to worry about asphyxiation.

  “Felching hell another leak I swear...” Sengupta’s voice trailed off, rebooted: “Wait a second...”

  The telltales looked the same to Brüks: the faintest wisp of yellow on infrared, the kind of heat a few million molecules might retain for a moment or two after bleeding out from some warmer core. “Looks like more microgassing to me. Smaller than that last one, even.”

  “Yeah but look where it is.”

  Along one of the batwing struts where the droplet radiator sprouted from the spine. “So?”

  “No atmo there no tanks or lines either.”

  One long arm swept through the near distance, like the candle-lit vane of a skeletal windmill. Another.

  Sengupta played with herself. Her marionette picked a careful route through dark, jumbled topography. Something hunkered on the hull ahead, its visible outlines buried in shadow. Infrared showed nothing but that diaphanous micronebula dissipating across the hull.

  Can’t cloak thermal emissions, Brüks remembered. Not if you’re an endotherm. “That’s not enough of a heat trace—”

  “Not if you’re a cockroach. Plenty big enough if you can shut yourself off for a few decades...”

  “Just LIDAR it.”

  Sengupta jerked her head back and forth. “No chance nothing active there could be tripwires.”

  It can’t be her, Brüks told himself. I saw her burn...​“What about StarlAmp?” he wondered.

  “I’m using StarlAmp we just gotta get closer.”

  “But if she’s tripwired against active sensors—”

  “Proximity alert I know”—Sengupta nodded and tapped and kept her eyes on the prize—“but that would be active too and I could pick it up. Plus I’m hiding a lot.”

  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.”

  Jesus, Brüks thought.

  “Pretty good hack right?” Admiration mingled with the fear in Sengupta’s voice. “Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually could stand to be in the same room together?”

  He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. “That’s why we made sure they couldn’t.”