Firefall

  “There’s no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”

  Wow, Brüks thought, distantly amazed. Jim and his orthogonal networks. They really got your number.

  Why don’t you have mine?

  “What did they do to her? Why doesn’t she know me?”

  “Do...?” Moore shook his head, managed a half smile under listless eyes. “They didn’t do anything, son. Nobody does anything, we’re done to...”

  The lights were always low in the attic, the better for Moore to see the visions in his head. He was a half-seen half-human shape in the semidarkness, one arm tracing languid circles in the air, all other limbs entwined among the rafters. As though the Crown was incorporating him into her very bones, as though he were some degenerate parasitic anglerfish in conjugal fusion with a monstrous mate. The smell of old sweat and pheromones hung around him like a shroud.

  “She found out about Bridgeport,” Brüks hissed. “She found out about me, she had all my stats right up there on the screen, and she didn’t recognize me.”

  “Oh that,” Moore said, and nothing else.

  “This goes way beyond some tweak to protect state secrets. What did they do? What did you do?”

  Moore frowned, an old man losing track of seconds barely past. “I—I didn’t do anything. This is the first I’ve heard of it. She must have a filter.”

  “A filter.”

  “Cognitive filter.” The Colonel nodded, intact procedural memories booting up over corrupt episodic ones. “Selectively interferes with the face-recognition wetware in the fusiform gyrus. She sees you well enough in the flesh, she just can’t recognize you in certain...​contexts. Triggers an agnosia. Probably even mangles the sound of your name...”

  “I know what a cognitive filter is. What I want to know is why someone took explicit measures to keep Rakshi from recognizing me when nobody knew I was going to be on this goddamn ship. Because I just happened to go on sabbatical just before a bunch of postals decided to duke it out in the desert, right? Because I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I was wondering when you were going to figure that out,” Moore said absently. “I thought maybe someone had spiked your Cognital.”

  Brüks hit him in the face.

  At least he tried to. Somehow the blow went wide; somehow Moore was just a little left of where he’d been an instant before and his fist was ramming like a piston into Brüks’s diaphragm. Brüks sailed backward; something with too many angles and not enough padding cracked the back of his skull. He doubled over, breathless, floaters swarming in his head.

  “Unarmed biologist with no combat experience attacking a career solder with thirty years in the field and twice your mitochondrial count,” Moore remarked as Brüks struggled to breathe. “Not generally a good idea.”

  Brüks looked across the compartment, holding his stomach. Moore looked back through eyes that seemed a bit more focused in the wake of his outburst.

  “How far back, Jim? Did they drop some subliminal cue into my in-box to make me choose Prineville? Did they make me fuck up the sims and kill all those people just so I’d feel the urge to get lost for a while? Why did they want me along for the ride anyway, what possible reason could a bunch of superintelligent cancers have for taking a cockroach on their secret mission?”

  “You’re alive,” Moore said. “They’re not.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “We’re alive, then. The closer you are to baseline, the better your odds of surviving the mission.”

  “Tell that to Lianna.”

  “I wouldn’t have to. I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the Bicams at all,” Brüks said. “Maybe I’m Sengupta’s paycheck. That’s how you operate, isn’t it? You trade in ideology, you exploit passion. Sengupta does her job and you remove the blinders and let her loose to take her revenge.”

  “That’s not it,” Moore told him softly.

  “How do you know? Maybe you’re just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you’re running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet’s a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?”

  “Do you really think that’s a likely scenario?”

  “Scenario? I don’t even know what the goddamned goal is! No matter who’s pulling the strings, what have we accomplished other than nearly getting killed a hundred fifty million klicks from home?”

  Moore shrugged. “God knows.”

  “Oh, very clever.”

  “What do you want from me, Daniel? I’m not much more clued in than you are, no matter what Machiavellian motives you want to lay at my feet. The Bicamerals see God in everything from the Virgo Supercluster to a flushing toilet. Who knows why they might want us on board? And as for Rakshi’s filter—how do you know your own people didn’t do it?”

  “My own people?”

  “Public Relations. Faculty Affairs. Whatever your academic institutions use to keep their dirty laundry out of the public eye. They did a lot of mopping up after Bridgeport; how do you know Rakshi’s tweak wasn’t just another bit of insurance? Preemptive damage control, as it were?”

  “I—” He didn’t actually. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Still doesn’t explain why we both ended up on the same mission,” he said at last.

  “Why.” The Colonel snorted softly. “We’re lucky if we even know what we’ve done. Any why simple enough for either of us to consciously understand would certainly be wrong.”

  “Just not enough room in the cache,” Brüks said bitterly.

  Moore inclined his head.

  “So it’s just God’s will. All these augments and all this technology and four hundred years of so-called enlightenment and you still just come around to God’s will.”

  “For all we know,” Moore said, “your presence on the mission is the last thing God wants. Maybe that’s the whole point.”

  Sengupta’s voice in his head: Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.

  Lazily, almost indifferently, Jim Moore disentangled himself from the rafters and moved spiderlike around the attic. Even in this artificial twilight Brüks could see the slow change in his eyes, the focus deepening in stages: into Brüks’s eyes, then past them; through the bulkhead, through the hull; past planets and ecliptics, past dwarfs and comets and transNeptunians, all the way out to some invisible dark giant lurking between the stars.

  He’s gone again, he thought, but not entirely: Moore dropped that distant gaze from Brüks’s face, took his hand, pointed to a freckle there that Brüks hadn’t noticed before.

  “Another tumor,” Brüks said, and Moore nodded distantly:

  “The wrong kind.”

  The sun diminished behind them; they jettisoned the parasol. Ahead, just a few degrees starboard, the Earth grew from dimensionless point to gray dot, edging infinitesimally closer to twelve o’clock with each arbitrary shipboard day. The solar wind no longer roared across every frequency; it spat and hissed and gave way to other voices, infinitely weaker but so much closer to the ear. Jim Moore continued to feed on the archives that carried his son; Sengupta squeezed signal from noise and insisted that other patterns lay embedded there, if she could only decipher them.

  But the ghost that called itself Siri Keeton was only one voice on the ether. There were others. Far too many for Brüks’s liking.

  The world they’d left behind had been almost voiceless, scared into silence by the memory of regimented apparitions burning in the sky. But the voices were coming back now: the rapid-fire click-trains of encrypted data; grainy approximations of faces and landscapes flickering along the six-hundred megahertz band; the hiss of carrier waves on reawakened frequencies, nominally active but hold
ing their tongues as if waiting for the firing of some starting pistol. A myriad of languages; a myriad of messages. Weather reports, newsfeeds rotten with static, personal calls connecting families scattered across continents. The content of the signals wasn’t nearly so troubling as their very existence, out here in the unshielded wastes. They should have been trapped in lasers and fiberop, should have been winking confidentially between lines of sight. These, these broadcasts were relics of another age. The airtight machinery of twenty-first century telecommunications had begun leaking at the seams; people were falling back into more patchwork technologies.

  It was what a brain might do, stunted for want of nutrients and oxygen. It was the predictable decoherence of any complex system starved of energy.

  But it was home, and they were almost there. There was groundwork to be laid; Moore and Sengupta attended to the details, each returning from whatever far-off places they ventured when not guiding the Crown into port. The warrior divided the rest of his time between his tent and the attic; the widow continued to sleep obliviously with the enemy. The vampire lay like a fossil on the hull, undisturbed by whatever alarms or tripwires she might have put in place. Brüks measured the time to Earth by the size of its disk and the incremental unclenching of his own gut. He thought about getting back into gaming, briefly. He slept and dreamt his lucid dreams, but Rhona would not come to him and he no longer had the heart to seek her out. The guts of the Crown continued to not grow tentacles.

  He finished the last of the Glenmorangie by himself, toasting his lab bench while they crossed lunar orbit. If anyone even noticed their return, they were too busy to send a welcoming committee.

  LOW FAST ORBIT over a world in flames.

  A thousand cool political conflicts had turned hot while they’d been away. Twice as many epidemiological and environmental ones. A myriad of voices cried out on long-forgotten radio bands from kilohertz to giga, tightbeams swamped, planetary gag orders rescinded or forgotten. The O’Neils were under quarantine. The space elevator had collapsed; burning wreckage still fell from orbit, wrought untold havoc along a splatter cone wrapped around a third of the equator. Jet-stream geoengineering had finally buckled beneath the weight of an insatiable atmosphere. Atlas had lost the strength to hold the heavens from the earth; atmospheric sulfates were plummeting and firestorms sparkled endlessly across six continents. Pretoria, Bruges, a hundred other cities had been overrun by zombies, millions reduced to fight/flight/fuck and the authorities weren’t even trying to control anything inside the hot zones. There was no end to the claims or the confusion. Icarus had fallen. The Fireflies had returned. The invasion had begun. The Realists had struck. The Bicamerals had destroyed the world.

  Moore listened to the tsunami along with Brüks and Sengupta—all three of them strapped into the mirrorball on approach—and his face was impassive as a corpse’s. This is your doing, Brüks did not say. This was a world just making ends meet until you snatched away its biggest asset. All those millions kept barely watered by power-hungry desalinators; all those uprisings kept barely in check by the threat of institutional force; all those environmental catastrophes kept barely at bay by the sheer overwhelming application of brute-force technologies. Icarus carried a solid fifth of our civilization on its back: what did you think would happen when you threw it into the sun?

  Even Sengupta said nothing. There would have been no point.

  Enemy territory. Couldn’t be helped.

  Maybe Moore was even right. The world had been simmering for over a century. It had always only been a matter of time before it boiled over. Maybe he hadn’t done anything but advance the schedule by a few months.

  “Got it,” Sengupta said. “Just came line of sight over the Aleutians whole lotta junk between there and here.”

  A tactical profile flashed up on the horizon: a cylinder ten meters across and maybe thirty long, a great broad corona of solar panels deployed from the starside end and a cluster of mouth parts—microwave emitters, from the look of them—jutting down from the other. It looked like an old-style powersat, albeit in a very strange orbit. Which was, of course, the whole idea.

  “Be tricky docking with that thing.” Off to one side a simulacrum of the Crown lazily lowered its remaining arms—spread-eagled but already spun down—into lockdown position.

  “We don’t dock,” Moore reminded her.

  “How long?” Brüks asked.

  “Thirty minutes, give or take. We should bottle up.”

  The attic was not designed to be a working environment during maneuvers but they’d made do, one survivor strapped into each of three suit alcoves directly across from the docking hatch. Brüks and Moore had welded it shut somewhere past Venus but it had been Sengupta who’d planted the thermite along those seams just six hours ago. There wasn’t much bulkhead to spare so Sengupta, still unwilling to let ConSensus into her head, had stripped the tool rack bare and slathered smart paint across the gecko boards. The microfibers fuzzed the image a little at high rez but the space was big enough to contain the windows she needed: radar profiles and trajectory overlays, engine vitals, throttles and brakes in shades of gold and emerald. A naked-eye view of Moore’s last ace up the sleeve, still posing a little too convincingly as decommissioned junk, swelling slowly against the deceptively blue-green crescent of a world falling into ever-greater depths of disrepair.

  In a dedicated window, stage right: Valerie, still tied to the mast. She hadn’t moved in weeks; and yet there was still a vague sense of lethality in that frozen body, a sense of something spring-loaded and biding its time.

  Its remaining time. Measured in minutes now.

  A gentle nudge; a slow, steady pressure pushed Brüks against the side of the alcove. Over on the tool rack the Crown’s avatar turned one hundred eighty ponderous degrees around its center of mass and coasted on to retrograde.

  “Hang on,” Sengupta warned, and hit the brakes.

  Mutilated, amputated, cauterized, the ship groaned and ground down the delta-vee. Deceleration pushed Brüks against the floor of his alcove. He staggered; the harness held him up against this final encore performance of down. Moore touched some unseen control and out across the vacuum his chameleon satellite split at the seams like an exploding schematic: solar panels and radiator vanes came apart in puffs of vapor turned instantly to snow. The shell fell apart as if drawn and quartered; body parts sailed silently in all directions. A great arrowhead, aimed at the earth, floated exposed where the false skin had come apart. It glinted in the rising sun, its stubby wings iridescent as a dragonfly’s.

  Flying debris rattled across the Crown’s hull like a hail of pebbles. Moore waited until the shower had passed and hit the switch.

  Cracks of sunlight ignited around the hatch: the barrier there, welded shut, burned open and fell away. The hatch beyond dilated in an instant; a brief hurricane pulled the plating into space and Brüks toward the stars. The webbing held him fast for the moment it took Moore to snap the buckles. Then they were through and into a void silent but for the sound of fast harsh breathing, just this side of panic, filling Brüks’s helmet. The dark Earth spread out below: too convex for mere landscape, too vast and imminent to be a sphere. Weather systems laid dirty fingerprints across its face. Coastlines and continents shone like galaxies where civilization burned bright, flickered dull and intermittent orange where it had burned out.

  It was such a long way down.

  Sunlight turned the flotsam ahead into a blinding jigsaw, save for one brief instant when a great dark hand passed over the sun. Brüks flailed and turned to see the Crown of Thorns in passing, still huge in the sky, backlit against a risen sun and a bright spreading crescent. Her last frozen breath sparkled near the bow like a faint cloud of jewels.

  He could not see Valerie’s hiding place from here.

  Something yanked at his leash. Brüks spun to heel, to the shuttle swelling in his sights amid its cloud of debris. “Focus,” Moore hissed over comm.

  “Sorry
—”

  They tumbled forward, Moore in the lead, the others dragged behind. The shuttle’s hatch gaped just behind the wraparound cockpit window, like a frog’s eardrum cut away and folded back against the head. Some magical spray-on ablative made the hull shimmer with oily rainbows.

  A faint static of ice crystals whispered across Brüks’s helmet; then Moore was on the hull, dead on target, boots coming down between the edge of the hatch and a convenient handhold welded like a towel bar to the shuttle’s skin. His legs bent to absorb the impact; one gloved hand seized the handhold as if it had eyes of its own. Brüks sailed past overhead and splatted against the fuselage. He bounced, spun against the tether, grasped wildly at the recessed cone of some dormant maneuvering thruster just a few centimeters out of reach—finally felt his boots click home against the hull.

  The Crown was well past and well below them now, drifting in a slow majestic tumble toward the terminator: forward momentum stalled, decelerating from the endless satellite fall around to the terminal incendiary fall into. Distance and the limits of vision had healed its scars. Now—torn apart, spliced back together, burned and broken—she looked almost pristine. You kept us alive, Brüks thought, and then: I’m sorry.

  Moore yanked him out of one moment and into the next, reeling Brüks and Sengupta in together like fish on a line. Brüks spared a moment to envy the pilot’s composure; she hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t even breathed hard during their fall across the endless chasm. Only now, peering into her faceplate, did he see her lips move below tightly clenched eyelids. Only now, bumped helmet to helmet, could he hear her incantation.

  “—oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck—”

  You little chickenshit. You turned off your comm...​

  Moore bundled her through the open hatch. Brüks followed, pulling himself into the cabin: two racks, one behind the other, each holding six acceleration couches like a half-dozen eggs in the carton. The couches themselves were squashed nearly flat, each bent just enough at the ass and the knees to avoid being classified as cots; the racks faced forward toward a pair of more conventional command chairs and a control horseshoe. Above those controls a visor of quartz glass ran around the front of the cockpit. No stars shone in that nose-down view; the world filled it from side to side, mostly dark, brightening to starboard.