Firefall

  That was pretty much it. One hatch in the aft bulkhead and a smaller one in the deck, both sealed. The first might have led to a cargo hold—a very modest one, given the size of the vessel—but that hole in the deck couldn’t have led to anything more spacious than a service crawlway. Contingency orbital extraction, Moore had said. Emergency planetfall for soldiers stranded in the wake of failed missions. This wasn’t a shuttle: it was a glorified parachute to be used once and thrown away.

  Moore had sealed the hatch and pushed himself into one of the command chairs; Sengupta, recovered from her brief catatonia, fumbled into the other. Brüks strapped himself into one of the hamburger racks behind as their ride booted up. Outside sounds came back to him, faint as a whisper at first, barely audible above the breath of his helmet regulator and the murmured recitation of preflight checklists coming over comm. The hiss of compressed gas. Tiny clicks and beeps, muffled as if under pillows. The snap of ancient switches in their sockets.

  70 KPA, HUD reported. He unsealed his visor and slid it back: cold as a glacier in his lungs, the taste of plastic monomers at the back of his throat. Breathable, though.

  Moore twisted against his straps, couldn’t quite turn to line of sight. “Better keep that down. This bird’s been up here a while; could be some leaks.”

  For the first time Brüks focused his attention on the dashboard: single-function LEDs, rows of manual switches big enough for hands wrapped in Mylar and urethane. Tactical displays trapped in embedded panes of crystal, instead of flowing freely across whatever real estate the moment required.

  He brought his visor back down. “This thing is ancient.”

  Moore grunted over comm. “Older it is, the better the odds everyone’s forgotten about it.”

  We’ve traded one derelict for another. Past the viewport something flared in the corner of Brüks’s eye: sunlight bouncing off a piece of orbital debris, maybe. Or perhaps the thrusters of some distant ship. But it burned too long for one and too low for the other, and the wrong color for either. When he turned to face it, squinting against the sun, he could almost swear he saw the core inside the contrail: a dark jagged patchwork coming apart in a line of fire etching its way across the face of the planet. Sticks and bones, turning to ash.

  “There she goes,” Moore said softly, and Brüks wasn’t quite sure whether he meant the monster or the machine.

  “Ignition,” Sengupta said as they too began to fall.

  The Crown burned cleanly. Nothing escaped. No spacesuited figure roused itself at the last moment to leap miraculously free of the hull, although Sengupta’s camera watched it until the end. A limb may have twitched, just before the feed died—a brief flicker of consciousness passing through a body just long enough to sense that something had gone wrong with its best-laid plans—but even that could have been a trick of the light. The anticlimax left a guilty lump in Brüks’s throat. The ease with which they’d murdered Valerie somehow made her less of a threat in hindsight, stole the justification from their crime.

  He barely remembered their descent: frictional incandescence flickering across the windshield like sheet lightning; static hissing on every channel until he remembered to shut down his radio. Fragments, really. Disconnected images. At some point weight returned, stronger and steadier than it had been for a hundred years; racks and acceleration couches and a lone cockroach folded up into conventional sitting positions against a vibrating deck that Brüks could finally perceive as a floor. Then they were gliding in a wide spiral over a steely gray ocean and the sun had dropped back below the horizon. Something listed on the seascape below, glimpsed in split-second snatches as it slipped back and forth across the windshield: a half-submerged jump-ramp for water-skiers; a flooded parking lot; the disembodied corner of an aircraft carrier, flickering with Saint Elmo’s fire. Brüks got no sense of scale from this altitude, and after a few moments the ocean dropped from sight as Sengupta lifted the nose for final approach.

  Something kicked them hard from behind, threw Brüks forward against the harness and brought the nose down with a slap. Walls of white spray geysered just past the port, split down the centerline; an instant later the view shattered and dissolved behind sheets of water running down the quartz. Something punched the shuttle under the chin; it bucked back and screamed along its length like an eviscerated banshee. Now they were climbing again. Now they were slowing. Now they were still.

  Sheets of water contracted to runnels, to droplets. The shuttle squinted past them to a few fading stars in a steel sky. Way off to the left, almost past line of sight, something flickered in and out of view like a half-remembered dream. Some kind of antennae, perhaps. A wire-frame tree.

  Moore dislocated his helmet and let it roll to the deck. “Here we are.”

  Someone had carved a landing strip out of thin air.

  It hung four or five meters above the waves, a scorched scarred tongue of alloy with the shuttle at its tip. It extended back to solid land like some kind of absurd diving board—except the substrate wasn’t land, and it wasn’t solid. It emerged from the ocean as gradually as a seashore; electric blue sidewinders writhed and sparked along the waterline, followed the swells as they surged up and down the slope. The surface seemed gray as cement in the predawn half-light, and almost as featureless except for the scored tracks the shuttle had left. But while it rose from the sea as unremarkably as a boat ramp at one end, it did not subside or drop off or reimmerse at the other: it just faded away, a massive slab of listing alloy big as a parking lot, segueing from solid undeniable opacity to spectral translucence to nothing at all over a distance of maybe a meter and a half.

  Except for this runway, freshly sculpted by the screaming friction of a hot landing.

  Moore had already shed his spacesuit and was standing on thin air, ten meters ahead of the grounded shuttle. Bitter gray swells marched past below his feet. Every couple of seconds a wire-frame structure flickered into existence nearby, towering six meters over his head and infested with parabolic antennae.

  Brüks leaned out the hatch and took it all in. The frigid Pacific wind blew through his jumpsuit as though he were naked. The earth pulled at him with a force he’d almost forgotten; his arms, bracing him against the bulkhead, seemed made of rubber.

  Sengupta poked him from behind. “Hurry up roach you never seen chromatophores before?”

  In fact, he had. Chroaks were basically just a subspecies of smart paint. But he’d never encountered one on this scale before. “How big is this thing?”

  “Pretty small only a klick across look you want to get off before the damn thing sinks the rest of the way?”

  He squatted, grabbed the lip of the hatch, clambered overboard. Gravity almost tipped him on the landing but he managed to keep his feet under him, stood swaying with one hand braced against the hull (still warm enough for discomfort, even after being soaked by an ocean). This close to the shuttle the cloak had been thoroughly scored away, but a half-dozen uncertain steps took him onto a substrate clearer than glass. He looked down onto a wave-tossed sea, and fought the urge to flail his arms.

  Instead, he walked carefully toward Moore as Sengupta climbed down behind him. Flickering orange light caught his eye as he rounded the nose of the shuttle: fire in the near distance, a guttering line of flames atop an incongruous levitating patch of scorched earth. Brüks could make out superstructure silhouetted there: low flat-topped rectangles, a radio dome cracked open like an eggshell, the barely visible crosshatch of railings and fence posts against the fire. Maybe something moving, ant-size with distance.

  Not your average gyland, this. Not a refugee camp or a city-state, no iffy commercial venture with a taste for the forgiving regulatory climate of International Waters. This was a place for Moore and his kind: a staging ground for covert military actions. A lookout on the high seas, patrolling the whole Northern Gyre. Clandestine.

  Not clandestine enough, apparently.

  He shivered at Moore’s shoulder. “What happened her
e?”

  The Colonel shrugged. “Something convenient.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s been abandoned. We won’t have to talk our way in.”

  “Is it still plugged in? What if it—”

  Moore shook his head. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Nobody who’d have done this would care about Heaven.” He pointed at the distant flames. “That way.”

  Brüks turned as Sengupta came up behind them; the shuttle cooled in the background, half-melted ablative oozing like candle wax around its belly. “Huh,” he remarked. “I’d have thought there’d be, you know. Landing gear.”

  “Too expensive,” Moore told him. “Everything’s disposable.”

  You got that right.

  A halting, freezing hike up a shallow slope. A walk on the water. An invisible bridge to the visible tip of a derelict iceberg. Gutted structures spread out before them like little pieces of Gehenna, some still aflame, others merely smoldering. Finally they reached the visible edge of that levitating island: little more than a patina of black greasy soot floating in midair. It was still a relief to see something underfoot; it was a greater relief to stop and catch his breath.

  Moore laid a sudden hand on his shoulder. Sengupta said, “Wha—” and fell silent.

  Ahead, barely visible through a curtain of oily smoke, things moved.

  They’d arrived at what had once been some kind of air-traffic hub: a low-slung control shack whose walls and roof came together in a wraparound band of soot-stained windows angled at the sky. Two dead helicopters and a one-winged jump jet littered a scorched expanse of tarmac and landing bull’s-eyes, barely visible beneath the scoring. The nozzles of retracted fuel lines poked through the deck here and there; one burned fitfully, a monstrous candle or a fuse set to detonate whatever reservoir fed the flame. In the middle of it all, bodies moved.

  The bodies were human. Their movements were anything but.

  Moore waved the others back against the shack, spared a backward glance and a raised hand: Stay here. Brüks nodded. Moore slipped around the corner and disappeared.

  A swirling gust blew sparks and acrid smoke into Brüks’s face. He suppressed a cough, eyes stinging, and squinted through the haze. Human, yes. Two, maybe three, near the edge of one of the bull’s-eyes. Gray coveralls, blue uniform, insignia impossible to make out from this distance.

  They were dancing.

  At least, that was the closest word Brüks could summon to describe the tableaux: movements both inhumanly precise and inhumanly fast, humanoid simulacra engaged in some somatic call-and-response unlike anything he’d ever seen. There was a lead, but it kept changing; there were steps, but they never seemed to repeat. It was ballet, it was semaphore, it was some kind of conversation that engaged every part of the body except the tongue. It was utterly silent but for the machine-gun staccato of boots on the deck, faint and intermittent through the soft roar of the wind and the crackling of the flames.

  And faintly familiar, somehow.

  Moore ended it all with a blow to the back of the head. One moment the dancing marionettes were alone on the stage; the next the Colonel had materialized from the smoke, his hand already blurring toward the target. The gray-clad dancer jerked and thrashed and collapsed twitching onto the deck, a disconnected puppet gone suddenly grand mal; the other threw himself down at the same instant, although Moore hadn’t touched him. He lay twisting beside his fallen partner, still in frantic clockwork motion but only twitching now, amplitude reined in to complement these new and unexpected steps brought so suddenly into the routine.

  “Echopraxia echofuckingpraxia,” Sengupta hissed at his shoulder.

  Moore was back. “This way.”

  A broken door gaped around the corner. Inside, brain-dead smart paint sparked and sizzled along those few control surfaces that hadn’t already been put to the flame.

  Brüks glanced over his shoulder. “What about—”

  “They’re in a feedback loop. We don’t have to worry until the mechanic comes back.” A companionway gaped from the far bulkhead. A fallen cabinet blocked the way. Moore pushed it aside.

  “Isn’t that bad for them?” Brüks wondered, and immediately felt like an idiot. “I mean, wouldn’t it be better if we broke the loop? Split them up?”

  Moore paused at the top of the stairs. “Best-case scenario, they’d do as well as you would if someone split you down the middle.”

  “Oh.” After a moment: “Worst-case?”

  “They wake up,” Moore said, “and come after us.”

  THEY CAME ACROSS a sloping commons area, dark and derelict but for a cone of emergency light spilling in from the corridor and a smattering of icons winking fitfully from the far bulkhead: a row of comm cubbies, snoozing until some lonely grunt chose to phone home or eavesdrop on the happening world. They could only access Main Street—no windows into anything that might require security clearance—but ConSensus and perscomm links floated free to one and all, serenely untroubled by whatever small apocalypse had taken out the upper deck.

  Moore moved on in search of greater privilege and darker secrets. Sengupta hung around long enough to make sure the links were solid before disappearing in his wake.

  Brüks sat in the leaning darkness and did not move.

  What do I say to her? What do I say?

  Hey, you know how Icarus went away and the world fell apart? Funny story...​

  You know how we thought there was no God? Well, it’s worse than you think...​

  Hi, honey. I’m home.

  He took a deep breath.

  This is a stupid idea. We’re way past this. I should just—catch up with the others.

  Let it out again.

  Someone has to tell her. She needs to know.

  He felt the corners of his mouth pull back in a grimace of self-loathing.

  This isn’t even about her. This is about Dan Brüks and his imploding worldview. This is about running back to the only person who ever gave you any shred of comfort whether you deserved it or not...​

  He sacc’ed the interface.

  He tried four times before the system could even find the address; the lump in his throat grew with each attempt. The Quinternet was falling apart; everything was. But it had deep roots, old roots reaching back over a century: a design both completely uncephalized and massively redundant. Functionality in the face of overwhelming entropy had been built into its DNA from the start.

  LINK ESTABLISHED: WELCOME TO HEAVEN

  TIMMINS FRANCHISE

  VISITOR’S LOBBY

  Still there. Still online. Still alive. He hadn’t entirely believed it. “Uh, Rhona McLennan, November 13, 2086.”

  PINGING.

  Please pick up.

  PINGING

  Please be busy.

  PINGING

  “Dan.”

  Oh God. Here she is.

  I must be dreaming...​

  “Hi, Rho.”

  “I wondered where you’d got off to. Things have been so confused out there lately...”

  She was a voice in the darkness, distant, disembodied. There was no visual.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch...”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to get in touch.” Maybe there was warmth in her voice now. Wry amusement at least. “When was the last time you dropped by?”

  “You didn’t want me to drop by! You said—”

  “I said I wasn’t going to come back out, love. I said I didn’t want you to spend all our time together trying to change my mind.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m glad you did come by,” she said after a while. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I can’t see you,” he said softly.

  “Dan. What would be the point?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is it important? I could show you—something. If that would make it any easier.”

  “Rho, you can’t stay in there.”

  “I’m not having this argu
ment again, Dan.”

  “This is not the same argument! Things have changed...”

  “I know. I’m in Heaven, not Andromeda. I can see everything out there that I want to. Upheaval, rebellion, environmental collapse. Plus ça change.”

  “It’s a loss worse since Icarus went down.”

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Icarus.”

  “Everything’s stretched to the breaking point, there’re outages and brownouts everywhere you look. Took me four tries to even find you, did you know that? And Heaven’s hardly the most obscure address on the planet. The whole network’s—forgetting things...”

  “Dan, it’s been forgetting things for ages. That’s why we call it the Splinternet.”

  “I didn’t know you called it that,” he said, vaguely surprised.

  “How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?”

  “I—what?”

  “An elephant never forgets.”

  He said nothing.

  “That’s an AI joke,” she said after a while.

  “Could be the worst one I’ve ever heard.”

  “I got a million of ’em. You sure you want me to come back out?”

  More than ever.

  “But really, how long do you think you could stay sane if you remembered everything you’d ever experienced? It’s good to forget, no matter what kind of network you are. It’s not a breakdown, it’s an adaptation.”

  “That’s bullshit, Rho. Losing network addresses is a good thing? What’s next, the voltage protocols? What happens when the grid forgets to shunt power to Timmins?”

  “There are risks,” she said gently. “I get it. The backups could fail. The Realists could strike. The AIRheads probably still want me for war crimes just on general principles, and I can’t say I really blame them. Every day in here could be my last, and how’s that any different from life out there?” Some tiny lens sent her the sight of Daniel Brüks opening his mouth; she rushed on, preempting him: “I’ll tell you. I don’t have anything anyone could want. I’m not a threat to anyone. My footprint’s a tiny fraction of yours, even factoring in your kink for spending so much time in tents. I can experience literally everything in here that you can out there, and a billion other things besides. Oh, and one other thing.”