Echopraxia

HE AWOKE TO screams and gray blurry light, a kick in the side, a bolt of pain spiking up his left leg like an electric javelin. He cried out but his voice was lost in some greater cacophony: the sound of torquing metal, vast alloy bones shearing across unaccustomed stress lines. Gravity was all wrong. He was on his back but it tugged him sideways, pulled him feetfirst through some translucent rubbery amnion that enveloped his body. Vague shapes loomed and shifted beyond. Down near the subsonic the world groaned like a humpback whale, wounded, spiraling toward a distant seabed. Alarms shrieked on higher frequencies.

I’m in a body bag, he thought, panicking. They think I’m dead…

Maybe I am…

The pain settled excruciatingly in his ankle. Brüks brought up his hands; weak elastic forces resisted the motion. His veins and arteries were all on the outside, clinging to his skin. No, not arteries. Myoelectric tensors—

The world jerked down and sideways. Exhausted metal fell silent; the alarm seemed to bleat all the louder in the absence of competition. Something stabbed Brüks through the body bag, just below the knee. The pain vanished.

A blurry shadow leaned down. “Easy, soldier. I’ve got you.”

Moore.

The membrane split like an opening eye. The Colonel stood over him, leaning thirty degrees off true in a world sliding downhill. The world itself was tiny, a cylindrical bubble five meters across and maybe half that high, floor and walls and roof crazily askew. Something ran through its center like a wireframe spinal cord (Access ladder, Brüks realized dimly: this world had an attic, a basement). Towers of plastic cubes, a meter on a side—some white, some gunmetal, some darkly transparent (the blurry things inside glistened like internal organs) loomed on all sides like standing stones, geckoed one to another. A few had come loose and settled in an uneven pile at the downhill end of the chamber. Gravity urged Brüks to join them there; if his bag hadn’t been fastened to its pallet he would have slid right off the end.

Moore reached out and touched some control past Brüks’s line-of-sight; the alarms fell mercifully silent. “How you holding up?” the soldier asked.

“I’m—” Brüks shook his head, tried to clear it. “What’s happening?”

“Spoke must have torqued.” Moore reached down/across and peeled something off Brüks’s head: a second membranous scalp, a skullcap studded with a grid of tiny nubs. “Loose cube got you. Your ankle’s broken. Nothing we can’t fix once we get you out of here.”

There was grass on the walls—meter-wide strips of blue-green grass running from floor to ceiling, alternating with the pipes and grills and concave service panels that disfigured the rest of the bulkhead. (Amped phycocyanin, he remembered from somewhere.) Smart paint glowed serenely from any surface that wasn’t given over to photosynthesis. His pallet folded down from an indentation in the wall; a little stack of time-series graphs flickered there, reporting on the state of his insides.

“We’re in orbit,” he realized.

Moore nodded.

“We’re—they hit us—”

Moore smiled faintly. “Who, exactly?”

“We were under attack…”

“That was a while ago. On the ground.”

“Then—” Brüks swallowed. His ears popped. He’d never been to space before, but he recognized the layout: off-the-shelf hab module, two levels, common as dead satellites from LEO to geosync. You’d sling them around a centrifugal hub to fake gravity. Which would normally be vectored perpendicular to the deck, not—

He tried to keep his voice steady. “What’s going on?”

“Meteorite strike, maybe. Bad structural component.” Moore shrugged. “Alien abduction, for all I know. Anything’s possible when you don’t have any hard intel to go on.”

“You don’t—”

“I’m as blind as you are right now, Dr. Brüks. No ConSensus, no intercom. The line must’ve broken when the spoke torqued. I’ll be able to reconnect as soon as someone boosts the signal on the upstream node, but I imagine they have more important things on their minds right now.” He laid a hand on Brüks’s shoulder. “Relax, Doctor. Help is on the way. Can’t you feel it?”

“I—” Brüks hesitated, lifted one rubbery arm, let it drop down/sideways; it seemed to weigh a bit less than it had before.

“They’ve shut off the centrifuge,” Moore confirmed. “We’re spinning down smoothly. That suggests the rest of the ship is more or less okay.”

Brüks’s ears popped again. “We’re not. I think—I think there’s an air leak somewhere.”

“You noticed.”

“Shouldn’t we be patching it?”

“Have to find it first. Tell you what: I’ll move the cargo, you tear apart all these bulkheads.”

“But—”

“Or we can go downstairs, suit up, and get out of here.” He split Brüks’s cocoon open the rest of the way, helped steady him as he sat up. “Can you walk?”

Brüks swung his legs over the edge of the pallet, trying to ignore the subtle sense of pressure building behind his eyes. He gripped its edge to keep from staggering down the skewed deck. Myoelectric tattoos ran the length of his naked body like an impoverished exoskeleton. They traced the bones of his arms and legs, forked out along his toes and—(he flexed his right foot; the left hung insensate at the end of his ankle like a lump of clay)—over his heels and across his soles as well. Every movement met with rubber resistance. Every gesture was a small exercise.

Isometric muscle toner. They used them in Heaven sometimes, to keep the Ascended from curling into flabby fetuses. They still used them on those rare deep-space missions where the crew hadn’t been preseasoned with vampire genes, to help in the rearguard fight against the shortening of tendons, the wasting of muscles during hibernation.

Moore helped him stand, offered his body as a crutch. Brüks bounced uncertainly on his good foot, his arm around the other man’s shoulders. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Pseudograv pulled everything in the wrong direction but it was weak, and getting weaker.

“What am I doing here?” Hop-step-lean. Soft crimson light pulsed from the hole in the ceiling where the ladder emerged, staining the adjacent bulkhead.

“Getting to safety.”

“No, I mean—” He gestured with his free arm, took in the containers stacked on all sides. “Why am I in the hold?”

“The hold’s aft. We’re using this for the overflow.”

The rails of the ladder were the color of rawhide, and smooth as plastic; some elastic polymer that stayed taut along a range of lengths. Brüks reached out and grabbed a rung, looked up through the ceiling and discovered the source of that bloody glow: an emergency hatch sealed tight, flashing a warning to any who might be contemplating passage: UNPRESSURIZED.

“My point is—” He looked through the hole in the floor: more metacubes down there, assemblages of smaller units stuck together. “Why did you wake me up in the basement?”

“You weren’t supposed to wake up at all; we had you in a therapeutic coma.” Brüks remembered being scalped: that skullcap, stippled with electrodes. “You’re lucky I happened to be in the neighborhood when things went south.”

“Are you saying you stored me with—”

The hab lurched, jumped in some sideways direction Brüks’s inner ears couldn’t parse; suddenly the ladder was slipping diagonally past, suddenly he was falling through the floor (the edge of the hatch bit his ribs in passing). A giant’s building blocks, stacked together, would have snapped his spine under earth gravity; here they merely bent it and bounced him back into the air.

Moore caught him on the rebound: “Well, that’s one way of making the trip…”

Brüks thrashed in his arms, pushed him away: “Get the fuck off of me!”

“Calm down, sol—”

“I’m not your fucking soldier!” Brüks tried to stand in the crowded space; his wounded ankle twisted under him as though attached by rubber bands. “I’m a parasitologist, I was down in the goddamn desert minding my own business. I didn’t ask to get caught up in your gang war, I didn’t ask to get my ass shot into fucking orbit, and I sure as shit didn’t ask to get stored down in your basement like a box of Christmas ornaments!”

Moore waited until he’d run out of words. “Are you finished?”

Brüks fumed and glared. Moore took his silence for a yes. “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said drily. “Once things have calmed down a bit, maybe we can check in with your wife. Tell her you’re working late.”

Brüks closed his eyes. “I haven’t checked in with my wife,” he said through gritted teeth, “in years.” My real wife, anyway.

“Really.” Moore refused to take the hint. “Why not?”

“She’s in Heaven.”

“Huh.” Moore grunted. Then, more softly: “So’s mine.”

Brüks rolled his eyes. “Small world.” His ears popped again. “Are we going to get out of here before our blood starts boiling?”

“Let’s go, then,” Moore said.

Up past a leaning cityscape of cargo cubes, man-size alcoves flanked an ovoid airlock, two to each side. Spacesuits hung there like flensed silver skins, held in place by cargo straps. They billowed gently at the knees and elbows. Moore helped Brüks across the slanted deck, passed him a loose cargo strap to cling to while unbuckling the suit in the leftmost alcove; it sagged sideways into the soldier’s arms.

A breeze hissed softly against Brüks’s cheek. Moore held out the suit: gutted from crotch to neck, a split exoskeleton shed by some previous owner. Brüks stood angled and bouncing slightly on his good foot, let Moore guide his bad one into the suit. The low gravity helped; by now Brüks couldn’t have weighed more than ten kilos. He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.

An itch crawled across the back of his free hand; he held it up, eyed the blood-brown tracery of elastic filaments webbed across the skin. “Why—”

“So what’s she in for?” Moore asked, jerking Brüks’s leg hard to seat his injured foot in its boot. Bits of bone ground against each other down there—his tibia carried the vibration past whatever nerve block Moore had installed. It didn’t hurt. Brüks grimaced anyway.

“Uh, what?”

“Your wife.” The right leg was trickier, without the left to stand on; Moore offered himself as a crutch again. “What’s she in Heaven for?”

“That’s a strange way of putting it,” Brüks remarked.

I’m sick of it, she’d said softly, looking out the window. They’re alive, Dan. They’re sapient.

Moore shrugged. “Everyone’s running from something.”

They’re just systems, he’d reminded her. Engineered.

So are we, she’d said. He hadn’t argued with her; she’d known better. Neither of them had been engineered, not unless you counted natural selection as some kind of designer and neither of them was woolly-minded enough to entertain such sloppy thinking. She hadn’t wanted an argument anyway; she’d been long past the verbal jousts that had kept them sparking all those years. Now, she’d only wanted to be left alone.

“She—retired,” he told Moore as his right foot slid smoothly into its boot.

“From what?”

He’d respected her wishes. Left her alone when she’d lobotomized her last victim, left her alone to tender her resignation. He’d wanted to reach out when she’d started eyeing Heaven, would have done anything to keep her on his side of the afterlife, but by then it was long past being about what he wanted. So he’d left her alone even when she leased out her brain to pay her rent in the Collective Conscious, withdrew from the outer world to the inner. She’d left a link behind, at least. He could always talk to her, there on Styx’s farthest shore. She always honored her obligations. But he’d known that’s all it was, so even then—after she’d stopped slaughtering artificial systems and started being one—he left her alone.

“She was a cloud-killer,” Brüks said at last.

“Huh,” Moore grunted. Then, helping Brüks’s arms into their sleeves: “Not a very good one, I hope.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say that not every distributed AI’s emergent, and not every emergent AI’s rogue.” Moore handed over his gauntlets. “We don’t publicize it, but every now and then some of the better CKs have been known to pick targets we’d really rather they didn’t.”

Brüks swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry. “The fucked-up thing is, she agreed with them. The AI Rights idiots, I mean. She quit because she got sick of killing conscious beings whose only crime was—” How had she put it? “Growing up too fast.”

Suit zipped up. Gauntlets clicked into place. A solid yank on the boa-cord and the suit squirmed around him, cinching from flaccid to skintight in a few disquieting seconds. Moore handed him the helmet: “Seat it facing your three, turn counterclockwise until it clicks. Keep the visor up until I say.”

“Really?” Brüks was starting to feel light-headed. “The air seems a little—thin…”

“Plenty of time.” Moore grabbed another suit off the wall. “I don’t want your hearing compromised.” He bounced off the deck, brought knees to chest and spread his suit open with both hands. With one fluid motion he kicked his legs straight back onto the deck, suited to the waist. He bounced lightly.

“So she wasn’t afraid of the conscious AIs.” Moore shrugged arms into sleeves. “How about the smart ones?”

“W-What?”

“Smart AIs.” He clicked his own helmet into place. “Was she afraid of them?”

Brüks gulped oily alpine air and tried to concentrate. The smart ones. Past that minimum complexity threshold where networks wake up: past the Sapience Limit where they go to sleep again, where self-awareness dissolves in the vaster reaches of networks grown too large, in the signal lags that reduce synchrony to static. Up where intelligence continues to grow even though the self has been left behind.

“Those, she—was a little worried about,” he admitted, trying to ignore the faint roaring in his ears.

“Smart woman.” The Colonel’s voice was strangely tinny. He leaned over and checked Brüks’s seals and sockets with precise mechanical efficiency, nodded. “Okay, drop your visor,” he said, dropping his.

A louder hiss replaced the fainter one: a blessed wash of fresh air caressed Brüks’s face the moment his visor sealed. Relief flooded in a moment later. An arcane mosaic of icons and acronyms flickered to life across the crystal.

Moore’s helmet bumped against his own, his voice buzzing distantly across the makeshift connection: “It’s a saccadal interface. Comm tree’s upper left.” Sure enough an amber star blinked there: a knock at the door. Brüks focused his gaze just so and accepted the call.

“That’s better.” Suddenly, it was as though Moore was speaking from right inside Brüks’s helmet.

“Let’s get out of here,” Brüks said.

Moore held his arm out, watched it drop. “Not quite yet. Another minute or two.”

Out beyond Brüks’s helmet, the air—the lack of it, maybe—grew somehow hard. Through that impoverished atmosphere and two layers of convex crystal, Jim Moore’s face was calm and cryptic.

“What about yours?” he asked after a moment.

“My what?”

“Your wife. What was she—in for?”

“Yes. Helen.” A frown may have flickered across Moore’s face then, but it was gone in an instant and he was answering before Brüks had a chance to regret the question. “She just got—tired, I suppose. Or maybe scared.” His gaze dropped for a moment. “Twenty-first century’s not for everyone.”

“When did she ascend?”

“Almost fourteen years ago now.”

“Firefall.” A lot of people had fled into Heaven after that. A lot of the Ascended had even come back.

But Moore was shaking his head. “Just before, actually. Literally minutes before. We all said good-bye, and then we went outside and I looked up…”

“Maybe she knew something.”

Moore smiled faintly, held out his arm. Brüks watched it drift back to his side, slow as a feather. “Almost—”

The hab lurched. Cubes and cartons teetered and wobbled against their mutual attraction; rogue containers lifted from the deck and bumped against the walls in a ponderous ballet. Brüks and Moore, tethered to their cargo straps, drifted like seaweed.

“—time to go.” Moore dialed open the inner hatch. Brüks pulled himself along in the other man’s wake.

“Jim.”

“Right here.” Moore pulled a spring-loaded clasp from a little disk at his waist. A bright thread unspooled behind it.

“Why were you here? When things went south?”

“I was on patrol.” Fastening the clasp to a cleat on Brüks own suit. “Walking the perimeter.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” The inner hatch squeezed down behind them.

Brüks tugged on the thread while Moore went through the motions of depressurizing the ’lock: impossibly fine, impossibly strong. A leash of engineered spider silk.

“You’ve got a ConSensus feed in your head,” Brüks pointed out. “You can see any place on the network without getting off the toilet and you walk the perimeter?”

“Twice a day. Going on thirty years. You should be thankful I’ve never seen any reason to stop.” One gauntleted hand made a small flourish toward the outer hatch. “Shall we go?”

Moore, you old warhorse.

I’m alive thanks to you. I pass out inside a tornado, I wake up with a smashed ankle on a space station with a broken back. You get me into this suit. You get me to natter on about my wife so I barely even notice the air bleeding away around us.

I bet you’ll never tell me how close we came, will you? Not your style. You were too busy distracting me from making a complete panicking ass of myself while you saved my life.

“Thank you,” he said softly, but if Moore—tapping out some incantation on the bulkhead interface—even heard him, he gave no sign.

The outer airlock irised open. The great wide universe waited beyond.

And the magnitude of all Jim Moore’s well-intentioned lies spread naked across the heavens for anyone to see.

“Welcome to the Crown of Thorns,” Moore said from the other end of the universe.

The sun was too large, too blinding: Brüks saw that as soon as the outer hatch opened, in the instant before a polarizing disk bloomed on his faceplate—perfectly line of sight—to cut the glare. Of course, he thought at first, no atmosphere. Things were bound to be brighter in orbit.

And then he stumbled out in Moore’s wake, and toppled weightlessly around some lopsided center of mass while stars and vast structures spun around him.

The Earth was gone.

That wasn’t true, he knew in some distant hypothetical place that made absolutely no difference. It couldn’t be true. Earth was still out there somewhere; one of those billion bright shards lacerating the heavens on all sides. Unwinking pixels, all of them. Not a single one close enough to rise above zero dimensions, to actually assume a shape.

No ground to fall to.

His breath rasped in his ears, fast as a heartbeat. “You said we were in orbit.”

“We are. Not around Earth.”

The ship—the Crown of Thorns—spread before him like the bones of some city-size monster. The broken spoke hung directly ahead, a tangle of struts and tubes suffused in a glittering sharp-edged halo: bits of foil, crystals of frozen liquid, little shurikens of metal with nowhere else to go. Things moved in that mosaic of light and shadow. Metal spiders swarmed across the wreckage, spot-welding with incandescent mandibles, spinning webs to suture shattered pieces back together. Tiny starbursts sparkled across the metalscape in waves.

Not bent. Not torqued. Broken. Snapped clean off. Horrified, Brüks took in the sight of a slender silver cable, its diameter barely that of a human finger: a lone tendon, miraculously intact, emerging from the amputated stump and stretching across vacuum to anchor the massive barrel-shaped hab at his back. If not for that one frail thread…

“You knew about this, didn’t you?” He gulped air. “You’ve been hooked into ConSensus all along…”

Moore hung off a handhold, utterly unconcerned by the billions of light-years stretching away beneath his feet. “In my experience, it’s generally better to ease people into these situations a little at a time.”

“It’s not my exp—exper—” His tongue was swelling in his mouth. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Nowhere was up, nowhere was down—

“My air—”

Something smacked the sole of his boot; absurdly, down clicked back into place. Moore was in front of him, hands on his shoulders, squeezing through the suit: “It’s okay. It’s okay. Close your eyes.”

Brüks squeezed them tight.

“You’re just hyperventilating,” Moore said from the darkness. “The suit’ll thin the mix before you run any serious risk of passing out. You’re perfectly safe.”

Brüks almost laughed aloud at that. “You—” he managed, “are The Boy Who Cried Safe…”

“You must be feeling better,” Moore observed.

He was, a little.

“Try opening your eyes. Focus on the ship, not the stars. Take your time. Get your bearings.”

Brüks opened them a crack. Vacuum and vertigo came flooding in.

Focus on the ship.

Okay. The ship.

Start with this spoke. Truncated, cauterized, one of—one of six (the others apparently undamaged), radiating from a spherical hub like the skeleton of an impoverished bicycle wheel: no rim, nothing but a tin can at the end of each spoke. A few minutes ago those spokes had been slinging their habs around like stones on strings; now they just hung there. A smaller baton—a giant’s femur skewered through the midpoint—hung equally motionless just fore of the Hub. (Counterspinning flywheel, probably. To neuter the torque.)

Fifty meters long at least, those hollow bones. This insane Ferris wheel stretched over a hundred meters from side to side.

But it was an ephemeral contraption of twigs and straws next to the wall of metal looming behind it. The drive section. Seen from dead-on it would be a disk: a whole landscape turned on edge, a hard-edged topography of ridges and trenches and right angles. But out here on the wounded rim, Brüks could see the mass piled up behind that leading edge: not so much a disk as a core sample extracted from some artificial moon. The striated faces of sedimentary cliffs, carved in metal; monstrous gnarled arteries twisting along the patchwork hull, carrying rivers of fuel or coolant. The arc of a distant engine nozzle, peeking past that metal horizon like a dull sunrise.

A cylindrical silo squatted dead center atop the drive section. Cargo hold, perhaps. The Crown’s backbone emerged from its apex like a sapling sprouting from the stump of a great redwood. All this forward superstructure—the Hub and its habs, the flywheel, a hemispherical nose assembly bristling with antennae—none of it mattered in the shadow of those engines. Just a few fragile twigs in which meat might huddle and breathe. Fleas clinging to the back of a captive sun.

“This thing is huge,” Brüks whispered to Moore. But Moore wasn’t there anymore; he was sailing spread-eagled across the gap between this dangling hab and its severed spoke. Moore was deserting him for an army of spiders.

Something tugged on Brüks’s tether. He turned, icewater trickling along his spine, to see what new master held his leash.

“You come with me,” Valerie said.

She yanked him across the void like bait on a hook, faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time it reached out to snatch a passing holdfast—before it could even look around to find one—they were already arcing through clouds of jagged tinsel. Torn scaffolding reached out as he tumbled past; miraculously, none tore his suit.

He was falling down a well—Not a well. The spoke. The broken spoke. He could see its ragged mouth receding above him. He hit bottom, landed hard on his back; elastic inertia tried to bounce him off but a pile-driver slammed against his chest and held him fast. Blood-orange light pulsed at the edge of his eye. He sucked in great panicky gulps of air, turned his head.

The pile-driver extended from Valerie’s shoulder. Her other hand worked controls set into the dropgate they’d landed on. Crimson light flashed at two-second intervals around its edge.

“Moore—” Brüks gasped.

“Wastes too much time on you already, Cold Cut. He helps with repairs.” A hatch split open in the center of the dropgate. Valerie pitched him through one-handed. Something caught him like a catcher’s mitt on the other side: a resilient membrane, stretched between hoops of tensile ribbing. Vacuum sucked at that translucent skin, stretched it tightly convex between those reinforcements.

Valerie sealed the hatch behind them. The little tent inflated instantly, its skin relaxing as the gradient leveled.

Tingling in the fingers of Brüks’s left hand; clenched tight, he realized. He forced them open, was vaguely surprised to see a little piece of shrapnel floating on his palm. Its edges weren’t entirely jagged. The metal had flowed and congealed in spots, like candle wax.

He must have grabbed it in passing.

The tent split like a clamshell. Valerie dragged him out before it had fully opened, pulled him along a tunnel of pale watery light. A headless brown serpent convulsed along its length, coils slapping the bulkheads with random energy: some kind of elastic cord, thick as his wrist and intermittently studded with little hoops. The rungs of a ladder, too far apart for merely human reach, strobed past on the bulkhead. Occasional flourishes of yellow-and-black hazard striping, flashing by too quickly for any glimpse of whatever they warned against. Brüks craned his neck, eyes forward. Sometime in the past few seconds Valerie had raised her visor. Her face was gray in the shade of her helmet, all planes and angles. Bones and no flesh.

The spoke ended in a slotted dome, like one of those antique telescopes left to rot on mountaintops after astronomy had moved offworld. Most of that slot was blocked by the socket on the other side. They ricocheted through the gap that remained.

They emerged into the space between two concentric spheres: a silvery inner core, like a great blob of mercury three meters across; an outer shell, dull and unreflective, containing it. Some kind of grille split the space between into hemispheres, joined crust to core at the equator. Valerie dragged him across the bowl of the aft hemisphere: around a cubist landscape of cargo modules, past the mouth of a gaping tunnel at the south pole (the spine of the ship, Brüks realized; shadows and scaffolds receded down its throat); past the ball-and-socket assemblies of other spokes, arrayed around that opening like a corolla. Brüks caught flickers of motion through the equatorial grille—personnel in the other hemisphere, otherwise occupied as Valerie dragged him to his fate—but in the next instant they were diving down another one of the Crown’s long bones and the faint tinny voice he might have heard through his sealed helmet—

—Fuck me the roach is up!—

—could just as well have been imagination.

Another long fall; this time they were being towed. The serpent in this spoke was intact, a moving belt stretched pencil-thin between pulleys at each end. Valerie still gripped Brüks’s wrist with one iron hand. The other was locked around one of the hoops (handholds, Brüks realized; stirrups) on the conveyer’s outbound leg. The inbound line streamed past just a meter or two to his left, heading back to the Hub. In some hopeful parallel fantasy world, Brüks broke free and seized one of those hoops to make his escape.

Another terminus—this one innocent of shrapnel or wreckage, just a U-turn and a ledge around an open hatch festooned with a bit of signage:

Now they were through. Now he was free, floating in a hab like the one he’d just escaped. Bulkheads, panels, gengineered strips of photosynthetic foliage. Coffin-size outlines, subtly convex, on the bulkhead: pallets like the one he’d awakened on, folded into the wall while not in use. More of those ubiquitous cubes, stuck and stacked high enough to turn half the compartment into a burrow: a spectrum of colors, a riot of icons. Brüks recognized some of the symbols—power tools, fab-matter stockpiles, the stylized Asclepian staff that meant medical. Others might as well have been scribbled by aliens.

“Catch.”

He turned, flinched, brought his hands up barely in time to grab the box sailing toward him. It might have held a large pizza, judging by size and shape; maybe three of them, stacked. Scasers, adhesives, bladders of synthetic blood nestled in molded depressions under its lid. Some kind of bare-bones first-aid kit.

“Fix it.”

Somehow Valerie had already stripped down to her coverall, geckoed her abandoned spacesuit to the wall like a crumpled wad of aluminum foil. Her left arm was extended, wrist up, sleeve rolled back. Her forearm bent just slightly, halfway down its length. Not even vampires had joints there.

“What—how did—”

“The ship breaks. Shit happens.” Her lips drew back. Her teeth looked almost translucent in the glassy light. “Fix it.”

“But—my ankle—”

Suddenly they were eye to eye. Brüks reflexively dropped his gaze: a lamb in a lion’s presence, no recourse beyond obeisance, no hope beyond prayer.

“Two injured elements,” Valerie whispered. “One mission-critical, one ballast. Which gets priority?”

“But I don’t—”

“You’re a biologist.”

“Yes but—”

“An expert. On life.”

“Y—yes…”

“So fix it.”

He tried to meet her eyes, and couldn’t, and cursed himself. “I’m not a medical—”

“Bones are bones.” From the corner of his eye he saw her head tilt, as if weighing alternatives. “You can’t do this, what good are you?”

“There must be some kind of sick bay on board,” he stammered. “A, an infirmary.”

The vampire’s eyes flickered to the hatch overhead, to the label it framed: MAINTENANCE & REPAIR. “A biologist,” she said, something like mirth in her voice, “and you think there’s a difference.”

This is insane, he thought. Is this is some kind of test?

If so, he was failing it.

He held his breath and his tongue, kept his eyes on the injury: closed fracture, thank Christ. No skin breaks, no visible contusions. At least the break hadn’t torn any major blood vessels.

Or had it? Didn’t vampires—that’s right, they vasoconstricted most of the time, kept most of their blood sequestered in the core. This creature’s radial artery could be ripped wide open and she might never even feel it until she went into hunting mode…

Maybe give her prey a fighting chance, at least…

He tamped down on the thought, irrationally terrified that she might be able to see it flickering there in his skull. He focused on the bend instead: leave it, or try to reseat the bone? (Leave it, he remembered from somewhere. Keep movement to a minimum, reduce the risk of shredding nerves and blood vessels…)

He pulled a roll of splinting tape from the kit, snapped off a few thirty-centimeter lengths (long enough to extend past the wrist—it was starting to come back). He laid them down equidistantly around Valerie’s arm (God she’s cold), pressed gently into the flesh (Don’t hurt her, don’t fucking hurt her) until the adhesive took and hardened the splints into place. He backed away as the vampire flexed and turned and examined his handiwork.

“Not set straight,” she remarked.

He swallowed. “No, I thought—this is just temp—”

She reached across with her right hand and broke her own forearm like a sapling. Two of the splints snapped with a sound of tiny gunshots; the third simply ripped free of the flesh, tearing the skin.

The fascia beneath was bloodless as paraffin.

She extended the refractured arm. “Do it again.”

Holy shit, Brüks thought.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Not a test, he realized. Never a test, not with this thing. A game. A sick sadistic game, a cat playing with a mouse…

Valerie waited, patient and empty, less than two meters from his jugular.

Keep going. Don’t give her an excuse.

He took her arm in his hands again. He clenched tight to keep them from shaking; she didn’t seem to notice. The break was worse now, the bend sharper; bone pushed up from beneath the muscles, raised a knotty little hillock under the skin. A purple bruise was leaking into existence at its summit.

He still couldn’t meet her eyes.

He grabbed her wrist with one hand, braced against the cup of her elbow with the other, pulled. It was like trying to stretch steel: the cables in her arm seemed too tough, too tightly sprung for mere flesh. He tried again, yanked as hard as he could; he was the one who whimpered aloud.

But the limb stretched a little, and the broken pieces within ground audibly one against another, and when he let go the lumpy protuberance had disappeared.

Please let this be enough.

He left the broken splints in place, laid down new lengths of tape adjacent. Pressed and waited as they grew rigid.

“Better,” Valerie said. Brüks allowed himself a breath.

Crack. Snap.

“Again,” Valerie said.

“What’s wrong with you?” The words were out before he could catch them. Brüks froze in their wake, terrified at the prospect of her reaction.

She bled. The bone was visible now beneath stretched skin, like a jagged deadhead in murky water. The contusion around it expanded as he watched, a bloody stain spreading through wax. But no, not wax, not anymore; the pallor was fading from Valerie’s flesh. Blood was seeping from the core, perfusing the peripheral tissues. The vampire—warmed—

She’s vasodilating, he realized. She’s switching into hunting mode. Not a game after all, not even an excuse.

A trigger…

“I’ve got it,” said a voice from behind.

Brüks tried to turn. Valerie’s impassive gaze pinned him like a butterfly.

“No, really.” A pale flash, a beige jumpsuit. Lianna coasted into view and braked against the wall. “I can finish up here. I think your guys need some supervision out on the hull anyway.”

Valerie’s eyes flickered to her broken arm, back to Brüks. He blinked and she was gone.

“Let’s get you out of that suit,” Lianna said, unscrewing his helmet.

She’d cut her hair. Her dreads ended along the jawline now.

Brüks sagged and shook his head. “How can you talk to her like that?”

“What? I just—talk.” The helmet tumbled off across the compartment. Brüks fumbled with zippers and clasps, still quaking; Lianna unlocked his gauntlets. “Nothing special.”

“No, I mean—” He took a breath. “Doesn’t she scare the shit out of you?”

“Yeah, I suppose.” She glanced at the first-aid kit drifting to one side. “Holy shit, she had you using that?”

“That creature is fucking insane.”

Lianna shrugged. “By human standards, sure. Then again—” She tapped the bulkhead with her toe: a diagnostic pallet unfolded from its dimple in the wall. “Not much point in bringing them all the way back from the Pleistocene if their brains worked just like ours, right?”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Guess I was, in a way. I mean, predator-prey, right? Gut response.”

“Exactly.”

“Chinedum said there was nothing to worry about.” She gestured him over to the pallet; he floated into place, let her strap him down around the waist. Biotelemetry readouts bloomed across the bulkhead.

“And you believed him. Them.” It. Whatever the pronoun was for Hive.

“Of course.” She ran her finger down the stack of biosigns, winced at something she saw there. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”

She cast her gaze around the compartment (“We should really get around to unpacking this stuff sometime”), opened a silver crate tagged with medical icons. A few seconds of rummaging turned up a scaffolding gun from the instrument trays stacked within. She dialed it to OSTEO and set the muzzle against his broken ankle. “You’re nerve-blocked, right?”

He nodded. “Jim shot me up with something.”

“Good. ’Cause otherwise this would really hurt.” She fired. Brüks’s leg jumped reflexively; he caught a glimpse of black filaments, fine as filaria, lashing frantic tails before they burrowed into his flesh and disappeared.

“Might itch for a bit once the block wears off.” Lianna was already scanning the compartment for other treasures. “Takes a while for the mesh to line itself up when you’re dealing with all those little bones—ah.” An off-ivory cube, this time—no, a transparent one. It took its color from the viscous casting putty inside: the stuff quivered like gelatin when she cracked the lid.

There must have been enough in there to put ten people into full-body casts. Brüks glanced around while Lianna scooped up a handful; at least a half dozen other crates were filled with the same stuff.

The putty squirmed in Lianna’s hand, aroused by her body heat. “Where are we going?” Brüks wondered. “How many broken bones are you expecting when we get there?”

“Oh, they don’t expect anything. They just like being prepared.” She slapped the goop onto his ankle. “Hold still until it sets.” It slithered around the joint like a monstrous amoeba, fused to itself, crept a few centimeters up his calf and down around his heel before slowing and hardening in the oxygen atmosphere.

“There.” Lianna was back at the cube, resealing it before the rest of its contents crusted over. “You’ll have to wear that for a few days, I’m afraid. Normally we’d have it off in eight hours but you’re still fighting traces of the bug. Might stage a comeback if we crank your metabolism too high.”

The bug.

Luckett, screaming in agony. A lawn littered with twisted bodies. A disease so merciless, so fast that it didn’t even wait for its victims to die before throwing them into rigor mortis.

Brüks closed his eyes. “How many?”

“What—”

“Did we leave behind.”

“You know, Dan, I wouldn’t write those guys off. I know how bad it looked, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you don’t second-guess the Bicams. They’re always ten steps ahead, and they’ve always got plans within plans.”

He waited until the voice beyond his eyelids finished talking. Then he asked again.

It didn’t answer at first. Then: “Forty-four.”

“Ten steps ahead,” he repeated in his own personal darkness. “You believe that.”

“I do,” the voice said solemnly.

“They expected forty-four deaths. They planned it. They wanted it.”

“They didn’t want—”

“And when they brought that—that monster along for the ride, they knew exactly what they were doing. They have it all under control.”

“Yes. They do.” There wasn’t the slightest hint of doubt in the voice.

Brüks took a breath, let it out again, reflected on the faint unexpected scent of growing things at the back of his throat.

“I get the sense that faith doesn’t come easily to you,” the voice said gently after a few moments. “But sometimes things are just, you know. God’s will.”

He opened his eyes. Lianna stared at him, kind and gentle and utterly delusional.

“Please don’t say that,” Brüks said.

“Why not?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Because you can’t possibly believe—because it’s a fairy tale, and it’s been used to excuse way too much…”

“It’s not a fairy tale, Dan. I believe in a creative force beyond the physical realm. I believe it gave rise to all life. You can’t blame it for all the horrible shit that’s been done in its name.”

Faint tingling in his fingers. A tide of saliva rising at the back of his throat. His tongue seemed to swell in his mouth.

“Could you—I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind,” he said softly.

Lianna blinked. “Uh… sure, I guess. You can ditch the mesh any time. I brought you a fresh jumpsuit, it’s over there on the pad. ConSensus is hooked in to the paint job if you need anything, just tap three times. The interface is pretty—”

I’m going to throw up, he thought. “Please,” he managed. “Just go.” And closed his eyes again, and clenched his teeth, and choked back the rising nausea until the sounds of her retreat faded away and all he could hear were the voices of machines and the roaring in his head.

He did not throw up. He drew his legs to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them, and held them tight against the sudden uncontrollable shaking of his body. He kept his eyes clenched against the new world, against this microcosmic prison into which he’d awakened: infested by freaks and hungry predators, an insignificant bubble spinning farther from home with each passing second. Earth was only a memory now, lost and receding in an infinite void; and yet Earth was right here in his head, inescapable, a desert garden strewn with twisted corpses.

Every one had Luckett’s face.

EVENTUALLY THE PANIC receded. Eventually he had to come back.

He wasn’t sure how long he floated there. For the present he was content to take refuge in the darkness behind his own eyelids, in the hiss of ventilators and the soft beeping voices of medical monitors. Some kind of alarm chimed in the middle distance; it sounded five times and fell silent. A moment later the world lurched to the right and gentle pressure began to build against his shoulder blades, against his calves and heels. Up and down returned.

Brüks opened his eyes. The view hadn’t changed.

He sat up, turned, let this new gravity drop his legs over the side of the pallet (his vitals vanished from the bulkhead as he rose). He fought off a threat of dizziness from his inner ears, held his hand out in front of him, watched until it stopped shaking.

The exoskeleton vibrated ecstatically as he peeled it away, each strip snapping back to some elastic minimum as he set it free. They took body hair and skin cells with them, left denuded strips along his body. He left it trembling on the deck, a tangled ball of rubbery ligaments that shivered and twitched as if alive.

He found his way to a lav that peeked around a small mountain of in-flight luggage, raided the bulkhead food fabber on the way back. Sucking a squeezebulb full of electrolytes he peeled fresh folded clothing from the wall where Lianna had left it: a forest-green jumpsuit, preemptively custom-fabbed by some onboard printer. He wobbled precariously while pulling on the pants, but the pseudograv was weak and forgiving. Finally he was finished: clothed, upright, his batteries beginning to soak up charge from the nutrients in his gut. He folded the pallet back into its alcove. Its smart-painted underside bulged subtly from the wall, softly luminescent.

Tap three times, she’d said.

ConSensus bloomed at his touch, an impoverished interface for the augmentally impaired: Systems, Comm, Library. A little v3-D Crown of Thorns hovered to one side in an imaginary void. All waited to dance at his fingertips, but he took VOCAL INTERFACE AVAILABLE at its word and said, “Ship layout.”

The animation expanded smoothly into center stage, bristling with annotations. Engines and reactors and shielding swallowed at least three-quarters of the display: thrust cones, fusion reactors, the rippling toroidal contours of great rad-blocking magnetic fields. Shock absorbers and antiproton traps and great protective slabs of lithium hydride. Brüks had seen the tech thumbnailed for short attention spans on any number of popsci feeds. Antimatter microfusion, they called it. A nuclear pulse drive turbocharged with a judicious sprinkling of antiprotons. Give it a decent launch window and the Crown of Thorns could make it to Mars in a couple of weeks.

“What’s our heading?” he asked aloud. NAV UNAVAILABLE, ConSensus replied.

“What’s our location?” NAV UNAVAILABLE.

“What’s our destination, then?”

NAV UNAVAILABLE.

Huh.

The Crown’s habitable reaches lay along a spine one hundred fifty meters long, a tube of alloy and atmosphere connecting bits of superstructure like beads on a nail. The Hub Valerie had dragged him through was two-thirds of the way from drive to prow. Its spokes were back in motion, sweeping through space in majestic counterpoint to the flywheel farther up. (Only the Hub’s aft hemisphere rotated, Brüks noticed. The other—COMMAND according to ConSensus, as if any modern space vessel required anything as quaint as a bridge in physical space—seemed fixed to the spine.)

“Focus habitat.”

The Crown redrew herself from the inside, engines and shielding neatly excised, nothing left but the hollows of the Crown’s forward section turning bright and front and center. Annotated constellations twinkled in those spaces like fireflies in a luminous gut. A cluster of gray icons glowed aft in the HOLD (enormous now, in the absence of its substrate): CHODOROWSKA, K.; EULALI, S.; OFOEGBU, C. Eight or nine others. MOORE, J.—green—glowed in the hab called DORM. LUTTERODT, L. was in the Hub, next to SENGUPTA, R. The hab containing BRÜKS, D. showed up as MED/MAINTENANCE, no matter what the sign on the hatch said; GALLEY/COMMONS occupied the hab immediately clockwise, LAB the one counter. STORES/TRIM, where he’d suffered his rude awakening, balanced out the wheel. Evidently it had already been reattached; but yellow neon highlighted distal injuries where the spoke was still under repair.

The last hab didn’t come with a label. Six stars shone there, though: five gray, one green. Only the green carried an ID, and it didn’t follow the usual format.

VALERIE, was all it said.

Fifty meters farther forward—past the Hub, past some kind of attic full of plumbing and circuitry and airlocks, way up past the main sensor array at the very front of the ship—ConSensus had drawn a hemispherical nose assembly and called it PARASOL. It appeared to be packed away for the time being but a translucent overlay showed it unfurled, a great flattened cone wide enough for the whole ship to hide behind. Brüks had no idea what it was. Space-dust deflector, maybe. Heat radiator. Magic Bicameral Cloak of Invisibility.

“Root.” The Crown dwindled on the wall, slipped back into line with the other thumbnails.

A Quinternet icon! He tore it open like a Christmas present. He didn’t have access to his preferences but even the Noosphere’s generic headlines were like water in the desert: ANARRES SECEDES, FFE KILLS VENTER, PAKISTAN’S ZOMBIE PREZ—

Just a cache, of course. A stale-dated abstract small enough to fit into the Crown’s memory—unless someone was breaking silent-running protocols dating all the way back to Firefall, or tightbeaming updates directly to the Crown. Anything was possible.

Probably a cache, though. In which case all he had to do was sort the available content by posting date, and—

Twenty-eight days. Assuming they’d grabbed the cache on their way out the door, he’d been stashed in the basement for almost a month.

He snorted softly and shook his head, vaguely surprised at his own lack of surprise. I’m growing immune to revelation.

Still. Stale rations were better than none. And it wasn’t as though he had anyplace else to be.

The president of Pakistan had finally, to no one’s great surprise, been unmasked as an avatar: the original had succumbed to viral zombieism almost a year before, almost certainly an assassination although no one was claiming responsibility. Venter Biomorphics—the last of the old-time corporations—had finally lost the fight against entropy and been swept away. A few proximists pointed their fingers at China’s agricultural collapse (that nation was still nose-diving three years after Venter’s artificial pollinators had crashed), but smart money blamed the incandescent hand of Forest Fire Economics. Something called jitterbug—some kind of weaponized mirror-neuron thing that hijacked its victims’ motor-control circuits—was doing the rounds in Latin America. And way out at L-5 (way in, Brüks corrected himself; way back), the Anarres colony had bolted a row of antique VASIM-R engines onto their belly and were preparing to take secession to new heights.

ConSensus chimed. “Roaches to the Hub,” the wall barked in its wake. A female voice, strangely familiar although Brüks couldn’t put his finger on it. He returned to the cache, searched for references to a disturbance in the Oregon desert.

Nothing.

No mention of a mysterious nighttime skirmish on the Prineville Reserve: no zombie assault on religious fortifications, no counterattacking tornadoes impossibly slaved to human commands. No reports of armed forces keeping low to the ground, bivouacked around some cultist bull’s-eye on the desert plain.

Odd.

Maybe their final hurried exodus from that arena never made it into the cache. Brüks had been unconscious at the time but he imagined the Crown might not have lingered in orbit long enough to refresh its memory with newborn updates. Still. Valerie’s assault, the armistice, the quarantine—at least thirty solid hours of activity that should have pushed the needle about ten standard deevs above background. Even if there’d been no eyes on Prineville that night, someone would have noticed the sudden redeployment of personnel from previous assignments. Even if Valerie had blinded all those skeyes up in geosynch, the disappearance of her hijacked carousel from its garage would have registered somewhere.

The world had too many windows. Every house was glass. It had been decades since any single entity—corporate, political, or synthetic—had been able to draw the blinds on all of them.

Maybe someone had just scrubbed the onboard cache. The same someone who had apparently locked him out of you-are-here.

Because this is all about you. Keeping you in the dark is everyone’s top priority.

He winced.

“Roaches to the Hub. You think we’ve got nothing better to do than watch you fondle your dick?”

Brüks blinked, looked around. “What?”

“Uh, she means you, Dan,” Lianna said invisibly. “Kind of a briefing. Thought you might like to know what’s going on.”

“Oh. I—”

Roaches?

“—I’ll be right there.”

The ladder stretched through the center of the compartment like a strand of DNA stretched straight. Brüks leaned across the hatch from which it emerged—still a bit wobbly in the spin—grabbed its rails and peered into the basement. Stacked crates down there, lengths of dismembered plumbing. He craned his neck; overhead, the ladder rose into pale blue light.

The only way out was up. He took a breath and raised his foot.

The ladder left him at the bottom of the spoke, on a circular ledge framing the hatch. Another ladder opposite stretched up into the distance like an exercise in perspective geometry. He had not been hallucinating before: its rungs were easily a meter apart, unclimbable in Earth gravity. An easy enough reach here, though, under half that pull.

Not that it mattered. The ladder was only a fallback. The conveyer belt descended smoothly into its burrow to his left, passed around some hidden wheel beneath his feet, rose again toward the Hub. Its stirrup-handholds swept past at two-meter intervals, thoughtfully spaced for a foot and a hand. Going up; going down.

Going up.

Even under power the ascent seemed light-years long, an infinite regression of rungs and rings and bulkheads that almost seemed to breathe when he wasn’t looking. The belt drew him up through a series of telescoping segments; hazard striping highlighted the spots where each handed off to the next, where the bore of the tunnel increased by some fractional increment. Little readouts, logarithmically spaced along the bulkhead, pegged the gravity—0.3, 0.25, 0.2—as he rose.

Halfway up, the panic returned.

He had a few seconds’ warning: a sudden formless disquiet spreading through the gut, an anxiety that his civilized neocortex tried to write off as simple acrophobia. In the next instant it metastasized into a bone-chilling terror that froze him solid. Suddenly his breathing was fast as a hummingbird’s heartbeat; suddenly his fingers were clenched tight as old roots around a rock.

He waited, paralyzed, for some nameless horror to rise in his sight and tear him limb from limb. Nothing did. He forced himself to move. His head turned like a rusted valve, creaked left, right; his eyes rolled frantically in search of threats.

Nothing. An intersegmental gasket passed around him. The rungs of the ladder ticked unremarkably by. Something flickered at the corner of—but no. Nothing there.

Nothing at all.

Over endless seconds time resumed its normal flow; the panic slouched back to the bottom of his brain. Brüks looked back down the way he’d come. His stomach stirred uneasily, but he saw nothing to provoke the slightest unease.

Down had disappeared by the time he reached top; Coriolis, pulling him gently sideways, persisted a few moments longer. He emerged near the bottom of the southern hemisphere, from one of the six teardrop protuberances ringing the south pole. The tunnel he’d glimpsed there before was sealed now, a waist-high railing around its perimeter, a great foil hatch squeezed tight as a sphincter across its mouth. An iris with no pupil. Its fish-eye reflection turned the mirrorball opposite into a blind chrome eyeball.

He turned to face the grille bisecting the Hub: the rings of some mercurial Saturn, closed in a tight hug. Fragments, flickers of motion were visible through that rotating mesh (stationary mesh, he corrected himself: it was this lower hemisphere that turned): the bottoms of bare feet, a flash of yellow rendered in a fractured mosaic. An insect’s-eye view.

Soft voices filtered back through the grille. The yellow fragments moved like a school of fish. “Come on up.”

Moore’s voice.

There were two routes forward, two circular openings in the grate on opposite sides of the mirrorball. One was blocked by a retracted spiral staircase squashed almost flat, a black metal pie chart cut into staggered slices: a vital thoroughfare when the engines burned, when acceleration turned forward into up. A useless bit of lawn sculpture now, pulled up and out of the way.

The other was clear, though. Brüks kicked off from the bulkhead, sailed through the air with a mix of exhilaration and mild terror, flailed as the opening rotated lazily past and left him grabbing at the grille a couple of meters antispinward. Chastened, he clambered sideways and through like a crab emerging from its burrow, floated into the northern hemisphere between mirrored earth and smart-painted sky.

Moore stood barefoot, toes curled into the grating, attention focused on a tacband wrapped around his forearm. Mimetic G-couches disfigured the northern half of the mirrorball like body-cast impressions pressed into cookie dough. They ranged radially around the temperate zone, their headrests converging toward the pole. Anyone installed in one of those couches would find themselves looking forward onto the Hub’s northern hemisphere: the dome of an indoor sky, a featureless wash of smart paint save for one spot where yet another redundant ladder stretched from the grille to a hatch just to one side of the north pole.

A Hindian woman strapped into the mirrorball—late twenties perhaps, blunt dark bangs, nape shaved halfway to the crest of her skull—jerked her head away the moment Brüks tried to meet her eyes. Something seemed to catch her attention down by her right foot. “About fucking time.” She wore a chromaform vest over her orange jumpsuit (We’re color-coded, Brüks realized): infinitely programmable, but all it showed now was a translucent render of the very couch she was strapped into. It turned her into a pair of arms and a floating head grafted to a ghostly body.

Lianna hovered off the grille on the far side of the compartment. She flashed a smile that broadcast welcome and apology in equal measure. “Dan Brüks, Rakshi Sengupta.”

Brüks took another look around the dome; “Uh, Valerie…”

“Won’t be joining us,” Lianna said.

“Fixing her arm,” Sengupta added.

Thank Christ.

“So,” Moore began, clearly eager to cut to the chase now that the straggler had arrived. “What was it?”

Sengupta rolled her eyes. “Whaddya think they burned through the felching spoke it was an attack.”

Who, Brüks wondered, and held his tongue.

“I was hoping for a bit more detail,” Moore said mildly, unfazed.

Lianna obliged. “Basically they turned a magnifying glass on us. Focused microwave pulse, about half a gigawatt judging by the damage.”

“From where?” Moore asked.

Lianna bit her lip. “Sun. Northern hemisphere.”

“That’s it?”

“Even Bicams have limits, Jim. It’s pure hindsight; differential heat stress on different facets of the structure, spoke trajectory—basically they just back-calced how the different parts were lined up at the time, figured a bearing from the angle of the hit.”

“Coulda done that ourselves,” Sengupta grumbled.

“Who?” Brüks blurted out. “Who hit us?”

Nobody spoke. Sengupta regarded something in his general direction the way she might examine a bit of fecal matter scraped off her boot.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lianna said after a moment.

Moore pursed his lips. “So the hive didn’t see it coming.”

She shook her head, as if reluctant to admit to the shortcoming out loud.

“Tran, then.”

“It’d be one for the books if a baseline caught them with their pants down.”

Moore’s eyes flickered to stern. “Under normal circumstances, certainly. They’re not exactly operating at a hundred percent.”

Gray icons, clustered in the hold. “Uh—” Brüks cleared his throat. “What are they doing back there, exactly?”

“Convalescing,” Lianna said. “Bug hit them a lot harder than it hit us. We’ve pumped up the pressure to speed their recovery, but it’ll still be days.”

“So after the break,” Moore mused.

Break?

Lianna nodded. “We’ll have to boot up at least a week early on the other end. They want the option of going hands-on.”

“Hands-on where?” Brüks wondered. “What bre—”

Sengupta cut him off with an exasperated whistle through clenched teeth, turned to Lianna: “Didn’t I tell you?”

“If you could hold on to your questions for the moment,” Moore suggested, “I’ll be happy to fill you in later.”

“When you won’t be wasting everyone else’s time,” Sengupta added.

“Rak,” Lianna began.

“Why is he even here does anyone expect him to actually do anything other than feel included?”

“Is that what I’m feeling,” Brüks remarked.

“It’s not exactly Dan who’s wasting our time right now,” Lianna pointed out.

Sengupta snorted.

Moore waited a beat before getting back to business. “Are there any weapons that could do this from that range?”

Lianna shrugged. “You’re the spook. You tell me.”

“I’m not talking about baseline tech.”

“This doesn’t look like a dedicated weapon. More likely someone hijacked a bunch of powersats to fire simultaneously at the same spot. Probably a one-shot deal, too; you don’t get that kind of output by staying inside the rated specs. Probably blew the circuits across the whole network, maybe even past their healing threshold.”

“Wouldn’t matter anyway with a twelve-minute lag. They had one chance to anticipate our position and they blew it. Rakshi, are—”

“Quarter-second thruster squirts random intervals between six and twelve minutes. You won’t even feel ’em but those fuckers won’t be forecasting me again.”

Twelve-minute light speed lag, Brüks reflected. From the sun and back. So we’re six light-minutes from the sun, which puts us, puts us…

One hundred eight million kilometers. Close as Venus, if he remembered his basic astronomy.

“—impact our tipping point?” Moore was asking

Lianna nodded. “But not enough to matter. They’re working through the revisions now. Another couple of hours, they say.”

“And what about our tail?”

Sengupta painted invisible strokes in the air. A window opened on the dome: some kind of plasma plot, three red spikes erupting from a landscape of violet foothills. The details wobbled in real time but those peaks stayed constant. Up in one corner arcane annotations nattered on about DISCRIMINANT COMPLEX and INFRARED OCCLUSION and MICROLENSING.

Heatprints of some kind, Brüks guessed. Cloaked, judging from the annotations, but apparently Sengupta had magic fingers.

They were being followed. This just keeps getting better.

“So.” Moore considered. “Two prongs or two players?”

“Prongs, probably. The Bicams think the shot was meant to disable us enough to let them catch up.” Lianna hmmed. “I wondered why they didn’t just throw a missile at us…”

Sengupta: “Maybe they will now their big trip wire went kaput.”

“We could use that,” Moore mused. “Rakshi, how much warning would we get if they fired on us?”

“Fired what you want the whole catalog?”

“Standard ass-cracker. Ballpark’s fine.”

She wiggled her fingers, for all the world as if she were counting on them. “Seven hours eight minutes if the range doesn’t change. Give or take.”

“Then we better get started,” Moore said.

“That is easily the most unenlightening briefing I have ever attended,” Brüks grumbled, pulling himself back into the southern hemisphere. “And given the number of departmental committees I sit on, that’s saying something.”

“Yeah, I kind of got that.” Lianna looked back from a bulkhead handhold. “Come with me. Got something that might help.”

She turned like a fish and sailed through the nearest spokeway. The very sight made Brüks a bit queasy. He followed at his own awkward pace, back through the cube-infested southern hemisphere, into the ball-and-socket that had swallowed her. Lianna dropped easily ahead of him, fending off Coriolis with a push and a kick; she was ten meters down the spoke before she even grabbed a hoop. Fuck those acrobatics: Brüks grabbed his own hoop right off the top, swung around and fumbled his foot into another before he weighed more than a couple of kilograms. He couldn’t be bothered to work out the acceleration of free-falling bodies that gained weight with each meter, but down the length of the spoke he was pretty sure they all ended in splat.

Commons. Another hab identical to those he kept escaping: a two-level propane tank from his grandfather’s backyard barbecue, grown monstrous and pumped full of stale air. The upper level, at least, was less crowded than Repair and Maintenance: chairs, privacy screens, a half-dozen half-emptied cubes, a table. The usual bands of epiphytic astroturf. A framework of pencil-thin scaffolding extended from one wall. The facets of a personal tent—bone yellow, tough as tendons—stretched like latex between those vertices. A couple of sticky chairs faced each other amid the clutter.

Lianna was over by the fabber, rummaging through a freshly popped cube. “Got it.”

The cowl she held up looked a little like a bondage hood for plumbing fetishists, studded with washers and tiny screws that traced a fine grid across the skull. It left only the lower face exposed: mouth, jaw, the tip of the nose. Two especially prominent washers sat embedded over the eyes.

Ambient superconductors. Compressed-ultrasound pingers. A read-write voxel array in black leather.

“My old gaming mask,” Lianna announced. “I thought you could use an interface a little more user-friendly than Rakshi tends to be.”

A gimp hood, for cripples confined to meatspace.

“I mean, since you don’t have the imp—”

“Thanks,” Brüks said. “I think I’ll stick with the smart paint if it’s all the same to you.”

“It’s not just for gaming,” Lianna assured him. “It’s perfectly transparent for ConSensus, and it’s way faster than going through the paint. Plus it’ll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn. Whatever you like.” She closed the cube. “There’s really not much of anything it can’t do.”

He took it from her. The material felt faintly oily in his hands. He turned it over, read the little logo that hovered a virtual centimeter off its surface: INTERLOPER ACCESSORIES.

“It’s completely noninvasive,” Lianna told him. “All TMS and compressed ultrasound, even the opt—”

“I’m familiar with the tech,” he told her. And then: “Thanks.”

“And you know, if you ever are in the mood for gaming, I’m happy to buddy up.”

No mention of his helplessness at Valerie’s hands. No mention of his panic attack. No impatience with his ignorance, no condescension over his lack of augments. Just an overture and a helping hand.

Brüks tasted a mixture of shame and gratitude. I like this woman, he thought.

“Thanks,” he said again, because he didn’t know anything else that fit.

She flashed a goofy smile—“Any time,”—and pointed to something past his shoulder. “I think Jim wanted a word, right?”

Brüks turned. Moore had dropped soundlessly onto the deck behind him. Now he stood there looking vaguely apologetic, the websack on his back bulging with curves and odd angles.

“Should I—”

“I gotta get back to the hold anyway. He’s all yours.” Lianna vanished into the ceiling with a jump and a grab while Moore shrugged the sack off his shoulders and split the seal. Brüks watched him withdraw a roll of the same kind of webbing.

Moore held it out. “For humping gear.”

Brüks took it after a moment—“Thanks. Don’t seem to have brought much gear with me,”—but the Colonel was already back in his rucksack. This time he extracted a long green bottle, turned it in his hands so Brüks could see the label: Glenmorangie.

“Found it in one of the cubes,” he said. “Don’t ask me how it got there. Maybe it was some kind of retailer’s bonus for a big order. Maybe Chinedum just wanted to give me a doggie treat. All I know is, it’s a personal favorite—”

He set it on the deck, reached back into the sack.

“—and it came with a nice set of glasses.”

He gestured to the sticky chairs. “Pull up a seat.”

Moore cracked the bottle; the smell of peat and wood smoke swirled in the air. “Technically we shouldn’t be playing with open liquids even at one-third gee, but squeezebulbs make everything taste like plastic.”

Brüks held out his glass.

“If I had to guess”—Moore let a wobbling, low-gravity dram escape from the bottle—“I’d say you’re feeling a bit pissed off.”

“Maybe,” Brüks admitted. “When I’m not crapping my pants with existential terror.”

“One day you’re minding your own business on your camping trip—”

“Field research.”

“—the next you’re in the crossfire of a Tran war, the day after that you wake up on a spaceship with a bull’s-eye painted on its hull.”

“I do wonder what I’m doing here. Every thirty seconds or so.”

They clinked and swallowed. Brüks grunted appreciatively as the liquid set the back of his throat to smoldering.

“There’s a risk in being here, certainly,” Moore admitted. “And for that I apologize. On the other hand, if we hadn’t taken you with us you’d most likely be dead already.”

“Do we even know who’s chasing us?”

“Not with any certainty. Could be any number of parties. Even cavemen.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “Sometimes Lianna doesn’t give us enough credit.”

“But why?” A thought occurred to him: “The hive didn’t steal this thing, did they?”

Moore chuckled. “Do you know how many basic patents the Order has its name on? They could probably buy a fleet of these ships out of petty cash if they wanted to.”

“Then why?”

“The hive was classified as a threat—rightly—even when it was stuck in a desert at the bottom of the well. Now we’re on a ship that can take us anywhere from Icarus to the O’Neils.” He regarded his scotch. “The threat level isn’t going anywhere but up.”

“That where we’re going? Icarus?”

Moore nodded. “I don’t think our tail knows that yet. For all they know we could be cutting across the innersys on our way somewhere else. Probably why they’ve held back as long as they have.” He drained his glass. “Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”

Brüks looked at the other man with new eyes. “You some kind of Buddhist, Jim?”

“A Buddhist soldier.” Moore smiled and refilled their glasses. “I like that.”

“Was Icarus part of—the magnifying glass?”

“Not likely. Can’t rule it out, though. It’s in the confidence zone.”

“So why are we going there?”

“There’s that word again.” Moore set his glass down on the nearest cube. “Recon, basically.”

“Recon.”

“The Bicamerals would think of it as more of a—a pilgrimage, I suppose.” His mouth tightened at one corner: a small lopsided grimace. “You remember the Theseus mission.”

It was too rhetorical for a question mark. “Of course.”

“You know the fueling technology it used—uses.”

Brüks shrugged. “Icarus cracks the antimatter, lasers out the quantum specs, Theseus stamps them onto its own stockpiles, boom. All the antiprotons you can eat.”

“Close enough. What matters is that Icarus has been beaming fuel specs up to Theseus’s telematter drive for over a decade now. And lately there’s been some suggestion that something else has been coming down along the same beam.”

“Wouldn’t you expect them to send back samples?”

“Theseus’s fab channel went to a quarantine facility in LEO. I’m talking about the actual telematter stream.”

“I didn’t know that was even possible,” Brüks said.

“Oh, it’s quite possible. It was part of the design, in fact; fuel up, data down. Of course, the state of the art’s still light-years away from being able to handle complex structure, the receiver’s for—very basic stuff. Individual particles, exotic matter, nonbaryonic even. Stuff that might take a lot of energy to build.”

Brüks sipped and swallowed. “What the hell were you expecting to find out there?”

“We had no idea.” Moore shrugged. “Something alien, obviously. And the cost of sticking a condenser on the sun side was negligible next to the mission as a whole. At the very least they could use it for semaphore if the main channel went down. So they stuck one in. In case it proved useful.”

“Which I’m guessing it did,” Brüks said.

Moore eyed the empty glass at his side, as if weighing the wisdom of having set it down. After a moment he reached for the bottle.

“Here’s the thing,” he said, refilling his glass. “Theseus got—decoyed en route, did you know that? Did they ever make that public?”

Brüks shook his head. “There was something about course corrections out past Jupiter, new and better data coming down the pike.”

“I can never keep it straight anymore,” Moore growled. “What we’ve admitted, what we’ve massaged, what we’ve covered up completely. But yes. After Firefall we were all staring at the sky so hard our eyeballs bled. Found something beeping out in the Kuiper Belt—that much you know—sent a squad of high-gee probes to check it out. Sent Theseus afterward, soon as we could slap her together. But she never made it that far. The probes got there first, caught a glimpse of something buried in a comet just before it blew up. All that way to get suckered by a—a decoy, as far as anyone could tell. Glorified land mine with a squawk box bolted on top. So we went back to our radio maps and our star charts and we found an X-ray spike buried in the archives, years before Firefall and never repeated. IAU called it an instrument glitch at the time but now it’s all we’ve got to go on. Theseus is already fifteen AUs out and headed the wrong way but you know, that’s the great thing about an unlimited fuel supply. We feed her a new course and she spins around and heads into the Oort and she finds something out there, tiny brown dwarf it looks like. She goes in for a look, finds something in orbit, starts to send back details and pfsst—”

He splayed the fingers of his free hand, brought them together at the tips, spread them again as if blowing out a candle.

“—gone.”

“I didn’t know that,” Brüks said after a while.

“I’d be worried if you did.”

“I thought the mission was still en route. Nothing on any of the feeds about finding anything.” Brüks eyed his own glass. “So, what was it?”

“We don’t know.”

“But if they’d started sending—”

“Multiple contacts. Thousands. There was some evidence they might have been seeding the dwarf’s atmosphere with prebiotic organics—some kind of superjovian terraforming project, perhaps—but if they ever followed that up we never heard about it.”

“Jesus,” Brüks whispered.

“Maybe something else in there, too,” Moore added, staring at the deck. Staring through it. Staring all the way out to the Oort itself. “Something—hidden. Nothing definitive.”

He didn’t seem to be entirely in the room. Brüks softly cleared his throat.

Moore blinked and came back. “That’s all we know, really. The telemetry was noisy at best—that dwarf has one mother of a magnetic field, shouts over anything you try to send out. The Bicamerals have some amazing extraction algorithms, they were squeezing data out of clips I swore were nothing but static. But there are limits. Theseus went in and it was like, like watching a ship vanish into a fog bank. For all we know she could still be sending—they left a relay sat behind at least. It’s still active. As long as there’s hope, we’ll keep the feed going. But we’re not getting anything back from the ship itself. Can’t even get a signal through that soup.”

“Except you’re getting a signal right now, you said. Coming in along—”

“No.” Moore held up his hand. “If the system was operating normally we’d have seen it operating, and we didn’t. No handshaking protocols, no explicit transmissions, nobody from up there telling us they were sending something down here. None of the usual bells that are supposed to go off when a package arrives. At most we got a little hiccup that suggests that something might have started coming down, but the checksums didn’t pass muster so move along folks, nothing to see here. Mission Control didn’t even notice it. I didn’t notice it. Wasn’t until the Bicamerals helped me squeeze the archives through their born-again algorithms that I clued in, years after the fact.”

“But if the stream isn’t even running its own protocols, how can it be—”

“Ask them.” Moore jerked his chin toward a vague point beyond the bulkhead, some nexus of Bicameral insight. “I’m just along for the ride.”

“So, something’s using our telematter stream,” Brüks said.

“Or was, at least.”

“And it’s not us.”

“And whatever it is, it’s gone to great lengths to stay off the ’scope.”

“What would it be sending?”

“The Angels of the Asteroids.” Moore shrugged. “That’s what the Bicamerals are calling it, or at least that’s our closest approximation. Probably just their idea of an op code. But I don’t know if they really think anything’s down there. Maybe it’s just a glitch after all. Or some kind of long-distance hack that didn’t work out, and we can learn something about the hackers by studying their footprints.”

“Suppose there is something down there, though,” Brüks said. “Something—physical.”

Moore spread his hands. “Like what? A clandestine mist of dissociated atoms?”

“I don’t know. Something that breaks the rules.”

“Well,” Moore said, “in that case, I suppose…”

He took a breath.

“It’s had a few years to settle in.”

THEY’D COME UP with this really great plan to keep their mysterious pursuers from blowing up the Crown: they were going to blow it up themselves first.

They hadn’t asked Brüks for his input.

Now he was back in Maintenance and Repair, taping himself up with another rubbery exoskeleton. It was easy enough to lay down the bands; all he had to do was follow the denuded template he’d stripped into existence less than two days before.

Of course, by now there were no days left to while away. Judging by the chime that had just sounded, he only had about two minutes to burn.

Two minutes to burn.

Lianna dropped out of the ceiling. “Hey. Just so you know, Rak’s about ready to fold down the spokes. Didn’t want you falling over when the gravity shifted.”

Yeah, always concerned about the roaches, Brüks reflected wryly. That sounds just like Rakshi Sengupta.

On cue, the bulkheads shivered. The hab trembled with the sudden faint roar of a distant ocean. A squeezebulb rolled a few centimeters along the cube where someone had left it.

Brüks swallowed. His knitting ankle itched maddeningly. He resisted the urge to scratch; it wouldn’t help anyway, not through the cast.

“Nothing to worry about,” Lianna assured him. “Right-side up goes out of whack by a couple of degrees for a couple of minutes. Not even enough to spill your drink. If you were drinking.”

He wished he was.

Down edged out from between his feet like a lazy pendulum, came to rest half a meter off his centerline: the Crown’s hollow bones folding back along the spine like the ribs of a closing umbrella, the spin that threw them out slowing in a precise and delicate handoff to acceleration building from behind. All those thousands of tonnes in slow motion, all those vectors playing one against another, and Brüks could feel nothing but a brief polite disagreement between his inner ears. Even now, down was edging back to where it belonged.

It really was pretty impressive, he decided. Still: “It’s not the burn that bothers me. It’s the coma afterward.”

“You won’t even feel it.”

“That’s what I mean. If I’m going to fall into the sun I’d at least like to be awake enough to jump into an escape pod if things go south.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. No escape pods.”

The hab jumped a bit, to the solid omnipresent thud of great docking clamps snapping shut. The ’bulb on the table wobbled back and forth. The Crown of Thorns, tied down and rigged for sail.

She tossed him his jumpsuit, pointed to the ceiling. “Shall we go?”

No effortless sail through a tunnel of light, this time. No easing ascent from pseudograv into free fall. The Crown was on fire now, engines alight, habs flattened back against her flanks; there was no escape from mass-times-acceleration. Every rung ascended left him heavy as the last, each hoop of hazard tape left him with that much farther to fall.

For some reason he couldn’t identify, that almost made it easier.

They emerged into the Hub, into the bottom of a bowl: a place as gravity-bound now as any other on the ship. The great iris at the south pole was fixed and dilated. Needles of mercury drooled from the mirrorball above like strings of gluey saliva, descending through the open pupil. Freight elevator, apparently. To the hold, and maybe beyond: to cubbies and crawlspaces where circuits could be wrestled manually in the event of some catastrophic systems failure; to the colossal neutron-spewing engines themselves.

Brüks edged forward and leaned over the railing. The depths of the Crown’s hollow spine receded like an optical illusion, like God’s own trachea. (Only a hundred meters, Brüks reminded himself. Only. A hundred meters.) Signs of activity down there: flickers of motion, the faint clank of metal on metal. Liquid mirror-ropes vibrating like bowstrings in response to whatever tugged at their ends.

He jumped at a touch on his shoulder. Lianna held two lengths of silver cord in her hand; a stirrup had miraculously opened at the end of each, like hypertrophic needle’s eyes. She handed him one line, pointed her foot through the loop in the other. “Grab and jump,” she said, stepping lightly onto the guardrail.

She dropped away in slow motion—under a quarter-gee burn they weighed even less than under spin—and picked up speed with distance. Brüks hooked his own foot, grabbed his line with one hand (like wrapping your fingers around glassy rubber) and followed her down. The filament stretched and thinned in his grip as he descended. He raised his eyes and thought he might have glimpsed tiny shock waves rippling out from the point at which this miracle cord extruded from the mirrorball’s surface; but speed and distance robbed him of a second look.

He dropped into pastel twilight, past biosteel struts and annular hoops and padded iridescent bulkheads. Conduit bundles lined the throat like vocal cords; silvery metal streams blurred in passing. The end of Lianna’s discarded line snapped past going the other way, recoiling back up the shaft like a frog’s tongue.

Only a quarter gee. Still dead easy to break your neck at the bottom of a hundred meters.

But Brüks’s descent was slowing now, his miracle bungee cord stretching to its limits. Another great hatch yawned just below, flanked by grilles and service panels and a half-dozen spacesuit alcoves. An airlock puckered the bulkhead to one side like a secondary mouth, big enough to swallow two of him whole. It was the larger mouth that took him, though. The silver cord lowered him through like a mother putting her baby to bed, dropped him gently from light into darkness. It set him down on the floor of a great dim cavern where monsters and machinery loomed on all sides, and abandoned him there.

So this is strategy, Brüks mused. This is foresight, these are countermeasures. This is intellect so vast it won’t even fit into language.

This is suicide.

“Have faith,” Lianna had said drily as they’d climbed into their suits. “They know what they’re doing.”

The spacesuit wrapped around him like an asphyxiating parasite. His breath and his blood rasped loud in his helmet; the nozzle up his ass twitched like a feeding proboscis. He couldn’t feel the catheter in his urethra, which in a way was even worse; he had no way of knowing what it was doing in there.

They know what they’re doing.

They’d spent the past two hours in the hold, lurking among the dim tangled shadows of dismembered machine parts while the rest of the ship froze down above them: habs, labs, spines and Hub all pumped dry and opened to vacuum. Until a few hours ago this cavernous space had been the exclusive domain of the afflicted Bicamerals, an improvised hyperbaric chamber where enemy anaerobes withered in poisonous oxygen, where the hive could lick their wounds and incant whatever spells they used to assemble the pieces of the puzzle they were building. Now all that arcane protomachinery was stacked and stored and strapped high against the walls. The Bicamerals, their tissues still saturated under the weight of fifteen atmospheres, had retreated into glass sarcophagi: personal decompression chambers with arms and legs. They stood arrayed on the deck like the opposite of deep-sea divers from a bygone age, barely mobile. Valerie’s zombies moved silently among them, apparently charged with their care. Grubs tended by drones.

Now the hold itself was freezing down, the Crown’s last pocket of atmosphere thinning around the assembled personnel. Bicamerals, baselines, monsters—those interstitial, indeterminate things who might be a little of each—they all stood watching as the flaccid pile of fabric in the center of the chamber unfolded into a great black sphere, some interlocking geodesic frame pushing out from under its skin like an extending origami skeleton. The hatching of a shadow.

Moore had called it a thermos. Watching it inflate, Brüks was almost certain it was the same giant soccer ball that had carried them from the desert. New paint job, though.

Lianna bumped him from the side, touched helmets for a private word: “Welcome to the Prineville class reunion.” Brüks managed a smile in return.

They know what they’re doing.

Brüks did, too, after a fashion. They were going to fall sideways. They were going to tumble past the exhaust, almost close enough to reach out and see your own arm vaporizing in a torrent of plasma blasting past at twenty-five kilometers per second. No option to fire maneuvering thrusters for a bit of extra forward momentum, no chance of putting a little distance between this soon-to-be-broken spine and the rapture of a half-dozen fusion bombs per minute. Newton’s First was a real bitch, not open to negotiation. Not even the Bicamerals could get her to spread her legs more than a crack, and even that grudging concession would be barely enough to mask the loss of their front end. There would be nothing left over for safe-distancing maneuvers.

And of course, if they didn’t miscalculate by a micron or two—if this little sprig of struts and scaffolding didn’t just get sucked into the wake and shredded to ions—well, maybe the barrage of neutrons sleeting out in all directions might be able to find a way in.

Rakshi Sengupta reached up and popped the thermos’s hatch. It sprang open and bumped back against the curve of the sphere, pneumatic and bouncy. Sengupta climbed up and in. Valerie’s automatons—even more interchangeable now, thanks to limited wardrobe options in the survival-gear department—formed a line and began passing the Bicamerals into that globe like worker ants carrying endangered eggs to safety.

All aboard, Lianna mouthed from behind her faceplate.

It wasn’t just the radiance of the drive that would give them away. Even the heatprint of minimal life support would shine like a beacon against a cosmic background that barely edged above absolute zero. There were ways around that, of course. You don’t notice a candle held up against the sun, and the Crown of Thorns had been keeping itself line of sight between Sol’s edge and any pursuing telescopes: close enough to bury her heatprint in solar glare, not so close that she’d show up the moment someone threw an occlusion filter in front of their scanner. Another approach was to keep any warm bodies nested inside so much insulation that they’d be outside any reasonable search radius by the time their heatprint made it to the surface.

The Bicamerals didn’t like to take chances. They were doing both.

It was the same soccer ball all right.

Same webbing inside. Same ambience—Victorian Whorehouse Red, he thought with a grimace—shadows and wavelengths long enough to make even a corpse look pretty. Same company, with edits.

A clutch of umbilicals hung from an overhead plexus and spread throughout the webbing. Brüks grabbed the nearest and locked it into his helmet’s octopus socket. Lianna reached down from overhead, double-checked the connection, gave him a thumbs-up. Brüks sacc’ed comm and whispered a thank-you over the chorus of quiet breathing that flooded his helmet. Lianna smiled back behind tinted glass.

Moore climbed into the womb and sealed the hatch as the longwave dimmed around them. By the last of the light Brüks saw the soldier reach for his own umbilical. Then darkness swallowed them all.

Valerie was in here, too, hidden inside one of these mercurial disguises. Brüks hadn’t seen her enter—hadn’t even seen her on the deck—but then again, she could do that. She had to be in here somewhere, maybe in that suit, or that one over there.

He eyed the countdown on his HUD: two minutes, now. One fifty-nine.

He yawned.

They’d told him it would be easier this time. No seat-of-the-pants improvising, no panic-inducing suffocation. Just a breeze of fresh, cool anesthetic gas wafting through the helmet reg, putting him gently to sleep before the H2S strangled his very cells from the inside.

They know what they’re doing.

Fifty-five seconds.

An icon winked into existence next to the countdown: external camera booting up. Brüks blinked at it and—

“Let there be light,” Lianna whispered over the channel, and there was light: a blinding yellow sun, the size of Brüks’s fist held at arm’s length, blazing in a black sky. Brüks squinted up against the glare: a jagged sunlit tangle of beams and parallelograms hung overhead, sliced along a dozen angles by sharp-edged fissures of shadow.

Let there be a little less light, he amended, dialing back the brightness. The sun dimmed; the stars came out. They filled the void on all sides, a million bright motes that only managed to accentuate the infinite blackness between them. They disappeared directly overhead, eclipsed where the habs and girders of the Crown loomed like a junkyard in the sky. The sun turned the ship’s lit edges into a bright jigsaw; the rest was visible only by inference, a haphazard geometry of negative space against the stars.

The sky lurched.

Here we go…

Another lurch. A sense of slow momentum, building. Somewhere behind them, the ligaments that held the Crown together were burning through. Up ahead, the view listed to port.

They know what they’re doing.

The bow of the ship began to topple, slow and majestic as a falling redwood. Sunlight and shadow played across its facets, hiding and highlighting myriad angles as the stars arced past. The universe turned around them. The sun rose, reached zenith, fell.

Something glowed to stern, a corona peeking around a great black shape that blocked out the stars to stern: something finally tilting into view as a dozen insignificant rags of metal snapped and fell away. Brüks caught the briefest glimpse of dark mass, massive slabs of shielding, a great corrugated trunk thick as a skyscraper—

(Shock absorbers, he realized.)

—before a tsunami of white light struck him instantly, rapturously blind.

Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish. Brüks blinked away tears, reflexively reached up, felt that strange, newly familiar inertia return to his arms—

—Free fall—

—before the sticky mesh released them to let his gloved hands swipe clumsily at his faceplate. He missed; his arms flailed, encountering nothing but the elastic bounce of the gee-web.

He wobbled gently, weightless, waiting for his vision to clear. By the time he could see again the panorama had been usurped by mere telemetry: an impoverished wraparound of numbers and contour plots and parabolic trajectories. Brüks squinted, tried to squeeze signal from noise through the cotton growing in his head: the Crown’s drive section was already kilometers to port and kilometers ahead, its lead increasing with each second per second. Tactical had laid a vast attenuate cone of light across the space before it, spreading from the abandoned drive like a searchlight. Ramscoop, Brüks realized after a second. A magnetic field to gather up ionized particles, a brake against the solar wind. A proxy for mass gone suddenly missing: no telltale change in acceleration, no suspicious easing back on the throttle. One measure among many, shoehorned in between the masking of heatprints and whatever stealthed this ship to radar. Moore had told him as much as he could understand, Brüks supposed. There would be more. Solutions to problems no baseline could even foresee, let alone solve. A careful clandestine exit stage left, while unwitting pursuers followed a bright burning decoy toward the land of the comets. All spread out across the curve of his own personal diving bell, numbers and diagrams and stick-figure animations for the retarded.

He only understood half of it, and didn’t know if he could trust the other half.

Maybe it’s not even real, he thought drowsily. Maybe it’s all just a comforting fantasy to keep me pacified in the back seat. Mommy and Daddy, telling nice stories to keep the children from crying.

They were still alive, at least. The exhaust hadn’t vaporized them outright. Only time would tell if radiation sickness might. Time, or—

He cast his eyes around the bubble of intel. He saw nothing that spoke obviously to the subject of gamma rays.

It would take a while, of course. You wouldn’t feel anything at first, certainly not in the few minutes left before everyone went down for the… night…

Fifty days to Icarus. Fifty days tumbling ass-over-entrails, powered down, ballistic, just another piece of inner system junk. Needle in a haystack, maybe, but nowhere near sharp enough to prick anyone who happens to look this way. Lots of time for those bright little shards to rot us out from the inside. We could die in our sleep and never know it.

His eyelids felt incongruously heavy in the weightless compartment. He kept them open, peered around at all those faces under glass, looked for smiles or frowns or any telltale wrinkles of worry that might be creasing more-enlightened foreheads. Angles and optics turned half the helmets into warped mirrors, hiding the faces within. Some tiny part of Daniel Brüks furrowed its brow in confusion—Wait a minute… aren’t the lights supposed to be off?—but somehow he could see Lianna, eyes already closed, her face smoothed either in sleep or resignation. He could see the back of Moore’s helmet, down past his own boots. He was almost certain that he could make out a pair of Bicameral eyes here and there, all closed, the mouths beneath moving in some silent synchronized chant.

Nothing but breathing on comm.

Maybe I’m asleep already, he thought, twisting in the web. Maybe I’m lucid.

Valerie stared back at him. No trace of fatigue or anesthesia in that face.

No metabolic hacks for her, Brüks thought as his eyes began to close. No rotten stench in the back of her throat, no CO or H2S clogging up her blood cells, no half-assed technology to keep her under. She doesn’t need our help. She was doing this twenty thousand years ago, she’d mastered the undead arts before we’d even started scratching stick figures on cave walls. She gorged on us and then she just went away while we bred back to sustainable levels, while we forgot she was real, while we turned her from predator to myth, myth to bedtime story…

A bullet hole appeared in the center of her breastplate. A line, growing vertically: a crack splitting her suit down the middle.

All those years we took to convince ourselves she didn’t really exist after all, and all that time she was sleeping right under our feet. Right up until the time she got hungry again, and dug herself out of the dirt like some monstrous godforsaken cicada, and went hunting while we put ourselves to sleep in our own graves and called it Heaven…

Valerie twisted and squirmed and emerged naked from her silvery cocoon: white as a grub, lean as a mantis. She grinned needles and clambered across the web toward him.

Like we’re sleeping now, Brüks thought, fading. While she smiles at me.

HE DESCENDED INTO Heaven’s dungeon, but the shackles were empty and his wife was nowhere to be seen.

He lay on his back in the desert, looked down and saw that he’d been gutted, crotch to throat. Spectral snakes surged eagerly from the gash, fled the confines of his body for the endless baked mud of a fossil seabed, free at last, free at last…

He soared through an ocean of stars, dimensionless pinpoints: abstract, unchanging, unreal. One of them broke the rules as he watched, a pixel unfolding into higher dimensions like some quantum flower blooming in time-lapse. Angles emerged from outlines; shadows stretched across surfaces turning on some axis Brüks couldn’t quite make out. Bones spun majestically at its midsection.

Monsters in there, waiting for him.

He tried to veer off, to brake. He pulled all those temporoparietal strings that turned dreams lucid. The Crown of Thorns continued to swell in his sights, serenely untroubled by his pitiful attempts to rewrite the script. A hab swept toward him like the head of a mace; he flailed and thrashed and closed his eyes but felt no impact. When he looked again he was inside, and Valerie was staring back.

Welcome to Heaven, Cold Cut.

Her monster eyes were fully dilated; like headlights, like balls of bright bloody glass lit from within. The mouth beneath split open like a fresh grinning wound.

Go back to sleep, she told him. Forget all your worries. Sleep forever.

Her voice was suddenly, strangely androgynous.

It’s your call.

He cried out—

—and opened his eyes.

Lianna leaned over him. Brüks raised his head, glanced frantically in all directions.

Nothing. No one but Lianna. They were back in Repair and Maintenance.

Better than Storage.

He settled back on the pallet. “I guess we made it?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?” His throat was parched.

She handed him a squeezebulb. “We’re where we’re supposed to be,” she said as he sucked like a starving newborn. “No obvious signs of pursuit. It’ll take a while before we can be sure but it’s looking good. The drive blew up a few hours after we separated, so as far as we know they know, they got us.”

“Whoever they are.”

“Whoever they were.”

“So. Next stop, Icarus?”

“Depends on you.”

Brüks raised his eyebrows.

“I mean yes, we’re going to Icarus. But you don’t have to be up for it if you’re not, you know, up for it. We could put you back under, next thing you know you’re back on Earth safe and sound. Since you’re not officially part of the expedition.”

One mission-critical. One ballast.

“Or you put me back under and I die in my sleep when your expedition goes pear-shaped,” he said after a moment.

She didn’t deny it. “You can die in your sleep anywhere. Besides, the Bicams would know better than any of us, and they’re pretty sure you’ll make it back.”

“They told you that, did they?”

“Not explicitly, but—yeah. I got that sense from them.”

“If they really knew what they were going to find down there,” Brüks mused, “they wouldn’t have to go in the first place.”

“There is that,” she said. And then, more cheerfully: “But if the mission does go pear-shaped, wouldn’t you rather die in your sleep than be wide awake and screaming when you get sucked into space?”

“You are the Queen of the Silver Lining,” Brüks told her.

She bowed, and waited.

A trip to the sun. A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market. The face of the unknown. What scientist would choose to sleep through that?

As if they’d ever let you get close to their precious Angel of the Asteroids, his inner companion sneered. As if you’d be able to make any sense of it if they did. Better to sit it out, better to let them carry you back home so you can pick up your life where you dropped it. You don’t belong out here anyway. You’re a roach on a battlefield.

Who could easily get squashed in his sleep. What soldier in combat, no matter how benign, ever gave a thought to the vermin underfoot?

Awake, at least, he might be able to scuttle clear of descending boots.

“You think I’d pass up the chance to do this kind of field work?” he said at last.

Lianna grinned. “Okay then. You know the drill, I’ll let you get yourself together.” She took a bouncing step toward the ladder.

“Valerie,” Brüks blurted out behind her.

She didn’t turn. “In her hab. With her entourage.”

“When the ship was breaking—I saw—”

She tilted her head, lowered her gaze to some point on the far bulkhead. “You see weird things when you go under, sometimes. Near-death experiences, you know?”

Too near. “This was no Tunnel of Light.”

“Hardly ever is.” Lianna reached for the railing. “Brain plays tricks when you turn it on and off. Can’t trust your own perceptions.”

She paused and turned, one hand on the ladder.

“Then again, when can you?”

Moore dropped unsmiling onto the deck as Brüks finished pulling on his jumpsuit. He held a personal tent in one hand, a rolled-up cylinder the size of his forearm. “I hear you’ll be joining us.”

“Try to control your enthusiasm.”

“You’re an extra variable,” the Colonel told him. “I have a great deal of work to do. And we may not have the luxury of keeping an eye on you if things get sticky. On the other hand—” He shrugged. “I can’t imagine deciding any differently, in your shoes.”

Brüks raised his left foot, balanced on his right to scratch at his freshly pinkened ankle (someone had removed the cast during his latest coma). “Believe me, getting in the way’s the last thing I want to do, but this isn’t exactly familiar territory for me. I don’t really know the rules.”

“Just—stay out of the way, basically.” He tossed the tent to Brüks. “You can set up your rack pretty much anywhere you want. The habs are a bit messy—we had to relocate a lot of inventory when they converted the hold—but we’ve also got fewer people living in them for the time being. So find a spot, set up your tent, buckle down. If you need something and the interface can’t help you, ask Lianna. Or me, if I’m not too busy. The Bicamerals will be coming out of decompression in a few days; try to keep out from underfoot. Needless to say that goes double for the vampire.”

“What if the vampire wants me underfoot?”

Moore shook his head. “That’s not likely.”

“She already went out of her way to—to provoke me…”

“How, exactly?”

“You see her arm, after the spoke broke?”

“I did not.”

“She broke it. She broke her own fucking arm. Repeatedly. Said I wasn’t setting it right.”

“But she didn’t attack you. Or threaten you.”

“Not physically. She really seemed to get off on scaring the shit out of me, though.”

The Colonel grunted. “In my experience, those things don’t have to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her.”

“She called me a cold cut.”

“And Rakshi Sengupta called you a roach. Unless I miss my guess you took that as an insult too.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Common Tran term. Means so primitive you’re unkillable.”

“I’m plenty killable,” Brüks said.

“Sure, if someone drops a piano on your head. But you’re also field-tested. We’ve had millions of years to get things right; some of those folks in the Hold are packing augments that didn’t even exist a few months ago. First releases can be buggy, and it takes time for the bugs to shake out—and by then, there’s probably another upgrade they can’t afford to pass up if they want to stay current. So they suffer—glitches, sometimes. If anything, roach connotes a bit of envy.”

Brüks digested that. “Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You’d think someone with all that brainpower would be able to cobble together a few social skills.”

“Funny thing”—Moore’s voice was expressionless—“Sengupta couldn’t figure out how someone with all your interpersonal skills could be so shitty at math.”

Brüks said nothing.

“Don’t take this personally,” the Colonel told him, “but try to keep in mind that we’re guests on this ship and your personal standards—whatever they might be—do not reign supreme here. Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat. These people are not baselines with a tweak here and there. They’re closer to, to separate cognitive subspecies. As far as Valerie goes, she and her—bodyguards—have pretty much stayed in their hab since the trip began. I expect that to continue. She finds the ambient lighting too bright, for one thing. I doubt you’ll have trouble as long as you don’t go looking for any.”

Brüks felt his mouth tighten at the corners. “So”—remembering the briefing in the Hub, in the company of the envious Rakshi Sengupta—“a week to Icarus?”

“Closer to twelve days,” Moore told him.

“Why so long?”

Moore looked grim. “That fiasco at the monastery. The Crown had to launch prematurely. The sep maneuver was always part of the plan—doesn’t take a hive to know a trip like this is going to draw attention—but the replacement drive’s still in pieces. They’re putting it together as we speak.”

Brüks blinked. “We’ve got no engines at all?”

“Maneuvering thrusters. Can’t use them yet, not without risking detection.” Moore saw the look on Brüks’s face, added: “Not that I expect we’ll need them in any event. The hive’s ballistic calculations are very accurate. And it’s just as well we’re taking the long way, given the medical situation. The bug was easy enough to fix once they nailed down its specs, but healing takes time and hibernation’s not the same thing as a medical coma. Last thing we want is to hit the zone with our core personnel compromised.” Moore’s face hardened at some grim insight, relaxed again. “My advice? Look on this as an extended sabbatical. Maybe you get a ringside seat to some amazing discoveries; maybe it’s a dead end and you’ll be bored out of your skull. Either way, you can weigh it against a painful death in the Oregon desert and call it a win on points.” He spread his hands. “Here endeth the lesson.”

The lights had been dimmed in the northern hemisphere. Climbing into the Hub Brüks could see a wash of arcane tacticals through the equatorial grille, a chromatic mishmash he knew would make no sense even with an unobstructed view.

“Wrong way,” said a familiar voice as he headed for the next spoke.

Sengupta.

“What?” He couldn’t see her, even through the grille; the mirrorball eclipsed the view. But her voice carried clearly around the chamber: “You visiting the vampire?”

“Uh, no.” God no.

“Then you’re going the wrong way.”

“Thanks.” He second-guessed himself, decided to risk it (hey, she’d started the conversation), swam through the air and bull’s-eyed the moving target of the doorway more through luck than skill.

She was still embedded in her acceleration couch. Her face turned away as soon as he came into view.

She kept up her end, though. “Where you going?”

I don’t know. I don’t have a clue. “Commons. Galley.”

“Other way. Two spokes over.”

“Thanks.”

She said nothing. Her eyes jiggled in their sockets. Every now and then a ruby highlight winked off her cornea as some unseen laser read commands there.

“Meatspace display,” Brüks tried after a moment.

“What about it?”

“I thought everyone here used ConSensus.”

“This is ConSensus.”

He tapped his temple. “I mean, you know. Cortical.”

“Wireless can bite my clit anyone can peek.”

The fruit of her labor sprawled across a good twenty degrees of the dome, a light storm of numbers and images and—over on the far left side—a stack of something that looked like voiceprints. It didn’t look like any kind of astrogation display Brüks had ever seen.

She was spelunking the cache.

“I can peek,” he said. “I’m peeking right now.”

“Why should I care about you?” Sengupta snorted.

Cats and dogs, he thought, and held his tongue.

He tried again. “So I guess I’ve got you to thank for that?”

“Thank for what?”

He gestured at weeks-old echoes plastered across the sky. “Grabbing that snapshot on the way out. Don’t know what I’d do for the next twelve days if I didn’t have some kind of Quinternet access.”

“Sure why not. You’re eating our food you’re huffing our O2 why not suck our data while you’re at it.”

I give up.

He turned and headed back to the exit. He felt Sengupta shift in the couch behind him.

“I hate that fucking vampire she moves all wrong.”

It was nice to know that basic predator-aversion subroutines survived the augments, Brüks reflected.

“And I wouldn’t trust Colonel Carnage, either,” Sengupta added. “No matter how much he cozies up to you.”

He looked back. The pilot floated against the loose restraints of her couch, unmoving, staring straight ahead.

“Why’s that?” Brüks asked.

“Trust him then do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”

He waited a moment longer. Sengupta sat as still as a stick insect.

“Thanks,” he said at last, and dropped through the floor.

So that’s what I am then. A parasite.

He descended into the Lab.

Some half-dead fossil, scooped up in passing from the battlefield. Patched together for no better reason than the firing of a few mirror neurons, some vestigial itch we might have once called pity.

The equipment wasn’t his, but the workbench provided some degree of plastic comfort: a bit of surrogate familiarity in a ship too full of long bones and strange creatures.

Worse than ballast: I suck their O2 and eat their supplies and take up precious airspace millions of klicks from the nearest real atmosphere. Less than a pet: they don’t want my company, feel no urge to scritch my ears, aren’t interested in any tricks I might know except staying invisible and playing dead.

Sequence/splicer, universal incubator, optoelectron nanoscope with a respectable thirty-picometer threshold. All reassuringly familiar in a world where he’d half expected the very dust to be built out of miracles and magic crystals. Maybe that was deliberate: a security blanket for strays who’d missed the Singularity.

Okay, then. I’m a parasite. Parasites are not destroyed by the powerful: parasites feed on them. Parasites use the powerful to their own ends.

The lower level was empty except for a short stack of folded chairs and half-dozen cargo cubes (fab-matter stockpiles, according to the manifest). Brüks unslung the tent and spread it across the deck against a curve of bulkhead.

A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.

The structure inflated into a kind of bulbous lozenge. It swelled igloolike toward the center of the compartment, molded itself against the walls and flooring behind. It wasn’t too different from his abandoned tent back in the desert; the piezoelectricity that buttressed the structure also powered the GUI sheathing its inner surface. Brüks ran an index finger down the center of the door. Its membranous halves snapped gently apart like a sheet of mesentery split down the middle.

Some go even farther. Some get the upper hand, dig down and change the wiring right at the synapse. Dicrocoelium, Sacculina, Toxoplasma. Brainless things, all of them. Mindless creatures that turn inconceivably greater intellects into puppets.

He dropped to his knees and crawled inside. The built-in hammock clung to the inner surface of the tent, ready to peel free and inflate at a touch. The default config only provided enough headroom for a crouch but Brüks couldn’t be bothered to dial up the headroom. Besides, the tight confines were strangely comforting down here at the very bottom of the spoke, just a few layers of alloy and insulation from the whole starry drum of the heavens rolling past beneath his feet.

So I’m a parasite? Fine. It is an honorable title.

Down here, nestled in this warm and self-regulating little structure, he was as heavy as the Crown would let him be. He felt almost stable, almost rooted. And while he wouldn’t quite call it safety, he almost managed not to notice how like a burrow his quarters were: how deep in the earth, how far removed from other inhabitants of this pocket ecosystem. And how Daniel Brüks huddled against the deck like a mouse squeezed into the farthest corner of a great glass terrarium full of cobras, the lights turned up as bright as they would go.

EVERY HAB STARTED out like every other: same stand-alone life support, same snap-and-stretch frame guides to subdivide the living space to personal preference. Same basic bulkhead galley panel with a toilet on the other side. They all came with the same emergency hibe hookups, compatible with most popular pressure suits and long-distance coffins (not included). It was Boeing’s most generic all-purpose personarium, plucked off the shelf, bought in bulk, stuck on the ends of the Crown’s spokes on short notice. In the almost inconceivable event that one of those spokes should snap and send a hab tumbling off on its own, corporate guarantees ensured that the bodies therein would keep fresh and breathing (if inert) for up to a year or until atmospheric reentry, whichever came first.

Which was not to say that custom features were out of the question. The fabber in Commons could whip up food with actual taste.

Moore was the only other warm body in evidence when Brüks climbed down for breakfast. The Colonel didn’t return the other man’s smile at first—Brüks recognized the thousand-meter stare of the ConSensused—but the sound of Brüks feet on the deck brought him back to the impoverished world of mere meatspace.

“Daniel,” he said.

“Didn’t mean to disturb you,” Brüks said, which was a lie. He’d waited until the sparse constellations arrayed across the Crown’s intercom had aligned just so—Lianna or Moore in the Commons, Valerie anywhere else—before venturing forth in search of forage.

Moore waved the apology away. “I could do with a break anyway.”

Brüks told the fabber to print him up a plate of French toast and bacon. “Break from what?”

“Theseus telemetry,” Moore told him. “What little there is of it. Brushing up for the main event.”

“There’s a main event? For us?”

“How do you mean?”

Brüks one-handed his meal to the Commons table (petroleum accents faintly adulterated the aroma of syrup and butter rising from the plate) and sat down. “Dwarves among giants, right? I didn’t get the sense there’d be any kind of active role for mere baselines.”

He tried a strip of bacon. Not bad.

“They have their reasons for being here,” Moore said mildly. “I have mine.” In a tone that said, And they’re not for sharing.

“You deal with these guys a lot,” Brüks guessed.

“These guys?”

“Bicams. Post-Humans.”

“They’re not post-Human. Not yet.”

“How can you tell?” It was only half a joke.

“Because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk to them at all.”

Brüks swallowed a bolus of faux French toast. “They could talk to us. Some of them, anyway.”

“Why would they bother? We’re on the verge of losing them as it is. And—do you have children, Daniel?”

He shook his head. “You?”

“A son. Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually. Nowhere near the far shore, but even so it’s been difficult to—connect, sometimes. And maybe this comparison won’t mean much to you, but—they’re all our children, Humanity’s children, and even now we can barely keep their interest . Once they tip over that edge…” He shrugged. “How long would it take you to decide you had better things to do than talk to a bunch of capuchins?”

“They’re not gods,” Brüks reminded him softly.

“Not yet.”

“Not ever.”

“That’s denial.”

“Better than genuflection.”

Moore smiled, a bit ruefully. “Come on, Daniel. You know how powerful science can be. A thousand years to climb from ghosts and magic to technology; a day and a half from technology back up to ghosts and magic.”

“I thought they didn’t use science,” Brüks said. “I thought that was the whole point.”

Moore granted it with a small nod. “Either way, you put baselines against Bicamerals and the Bicamerals are going to be a hundred steps ahead every time.”

“And you’re comfortable with that.”

“My comfort doesn’t enter into it. Just the way it is.”

“You seem so—fatalistic about it all.” Brüks pushed his empty plate aside. “The far shore, the gulf between giants and capuchins.”

“Not fatalism,” Moore corrected him. “Faith.”

Brüks glanced sharply across the table, trying to decide if Moore was yanking his chain. The soldier stared back impassively.

“The fact that something shot us,” Brüks continued deliberately. “And you yourself said they’re probably Tran.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Moore seemed to find that amusing. “Fortunately we’ve got a pretty good team of those in our own corner. Honestly, I wouldn’t worry.”

“You trust them too much,” Brüks said quietly.

“So you keep saying. You don’t know them the way I do.”

“You think you know them? You’re the one who called them giants. We don’t know their agendas any more than we know what those smart clouds are up to. At least smart clouds don’t open up your brain and dig around like, like…”

Moore didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Lianna.”

“You know what they did to her?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s exactly my point. No one does. Lianna doesn’t know. They shut her off for four days, and when she woke up she was some kind of Chinese Room savant. Who knows what they did to her brain? Who knows if she’s the same person?”

“She’s not,” Moore said flatly. “Change the wiring, change the machine.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“She agreed to it. She volunteered. She worked her ass off and elbowed her way to the front of the line just for the chance to make the cut.”

“It’s not informed consent.”

That raised eyebrow again. “How so?”

“How can it be, when the person giving it is cognitively incapable of understanding what she’s agreeing to?”

“So you’re saying she’s mentally incompetent,” Moore said.

“I’m saying we all are. Next to the hives, and the vampires, and the thumbwirers and that whole—”

“We’re children.”

“Yes.”

“Who can’t be trusted to make our own decisions.”

Brüks shook his head. “Not about things like this, no.”

“We need adults to make those choices on our behalf.”

“We—” He fell silent.

Moore watched him above the ghost of a smile. After a moment he pulled the Glenmorangie off the wall.

“Have a drink,” he said. “Helps the future go down easier.”

Crawling unseen through the viscera of its host, the parasite takes control.

Daniel Brüks drilled into the central nervous system of the Crown of Thorns and bent it to his will. Lianna, as usual, was back in the Hold with her helpless omnipotent masters. Sengupta’s icon glowed in the Hub. Moore was ostensibly in the Dorm but the feed from that hab put the lie to it: only his body was there, running on autopilot while his closed eyes danced through some ConSensual realm Brüks could only imagine.

He was going to be eating alone.

The anxiety had become chronic by now. It nagged at the bottom of his brain like a toothache, had become so much a part of him that it went unnoticed save for those times when some unexpected chill brought it all back. Panic attacks; in the spokes, in the habs, in his own goddamn tent. They didn’t happen often, and they never lasted long. Just often enough to remind him. Just long enough to keep him paranoid.

The blade began to twist as he ascended the spoke. Brüks gritted his teeth, briefly closed his eyes as the conveyer pulled him past the Zone of Terror (it helped, really it did), relaxed as the haunted zone receded beneath him. He released the handhold at the top of the spoke and coasted into the Hub, crossed the antarctic hatch (half contracted now, barely wide enough for the passage of a body) pushed himself toward—

A soft wet sound. A cough from the northern hemisphere, a broken breath.

Someone crying.

Sengupta was up there. Had been a few minutes ago, at least.

He cleared his throat. “Hello?”

A brief rustle. Silence and ventilators.

Ohhkay…

He resumed his course, crossed to the Commons spoke, twisted and jackknifed through. He allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation as he grabbed the conveyer and started down headfirst, smoothly swinging around the handhold until his feet pointed down; just two days ago all these drainpipes and variable-gravity straightaways would have left him completely disoriented.

Valerie tagged him halfway.

He never saw her coming. He had his face to the bulkhead. There may have been a flicker of overhead shadow, just a split second before that brief touch between his shoulder blades: like a knife’s edge sliding along his spine, like being unzipped down the back. His back brain reacted before he was even aware of the contact, flattened and froze him like a startled rabbit. By the time he could move again she was past and gone and Daniel Brüks was still alive.

He looked down, down that long tunnel she’d sailed headfirst and without a sound. She was waiting at the bottom of the spoke: white and naked and almost skeletal. Wiry corded muscle stretched over bone. Her right foot tapped a strange and disquieting pattern on the metal.

The conveyer was delivering him into her arms.

He released the handhold, lunged across the spoke for the static safety of the ladder. He missed the first rung he grabbed for, caught the second; leftover momentum nearly popped his shoulder from its socket. His feet scrabbled for purchase, finally found it. He clung to the ladder as the conveyer streamed past to each side, going up going down.

Valerie looked up at him. He looked away.

She just touched me for Christ’s sake. I barely even felt it. It was probably an accident.

No accident.

She hasn’t threatened you, she hasn’t raised a hand. She’s just—sitting there. Waiting.

Not in her hab. Not kept at bay by bright lights, no matter what comforting lies Moore had recited.

Brüks kept his eyes on the bulkhead. He swore he could feel the baring of her teeth.

She’s just another failed hominoid. That’s all she is. Without our drugs she couldn’t even handle a few right angles without going into convulsions. Just another one of nature’s fuckups, just another extinct monster ten thousand years dead.

And brought back to life. And chillingly, completely at home in the future. More at home than Daniel Brüks had ever felt.

She wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us. If we roaches hadn’t scraped up all those leftover genes and spliced them back together again. She had her day. She’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t be such a fucking coward.

“Coming?”

With effort he looked down, managed to fix his gaze on the edge of the hatch behind her, kept her eyes in that great comforting wash of low resolution that made up 95 percent of the human visual field. He even managed to answer, after a fashion: “I, um…”

His hands stayed locked on the ladder.

“Suit yourself,” Valerie said, and disappeared into the Commons.

Motion through the grille: the pixilated mosaic that was Rakshi Sengupta, returning from some place farther forward. The lav in the attic, perhaps. Brüks found it perfectly understandable that Sengupta might choose to leave for a piss at the same moment Valerie happened to be passing through.

She fell into eclipse behind the mirrorball. Brüks heard the sound of buckles and plugs clicking into place, a grunt that might have passed for a greeting: “Thought you were headed for Commons.”

He swam into the northern hemisphere. Sengupta was pulling a ConSensus glove over her left hand: middle finger, ring, index, little, thumb. Her hair stood out from her head, crackling faintly with static electricity.

“Valerie got there first,” he said.

“Room for two down there.” Right glove: middle, ring, index…

“There really isn’t.”

She still refused to look at him, of course. But the smile was encouraging.

“Nasty cunt doesn’t even use the galley.” Sengupta’s tone was conspiratorial. “Only comes out of her hab to scare us.”

“How’d she even end up here?” Brüks wondered.

Sengupta did something with her eyes, a little jiggle that said command interface. “There. Now we’ll see her coming.” Her elbows moved out from her body and back in, a precise stubby wingbeat. Brüks couldn’t tell whether it was interface or OCD. “Anyhow why ask me?”

“I thought you’d know.”

“You were there I just fished you all out of the atmosphere.”

“No, I mean—where’s she even from? Vampires are supposed to live in comfy little compounds where they fight algos and solve Big Problems and don’t threaten anybody. It’s not like anyone would be stupid enough to let them off the leash. So how does Valerie show up in the desert with a pack of zombies and an army aerostat?”

“Smart little monsters,” Sengupta said, too loud. (Brüks stole a nervous glance through the perforated deck.) “I’d start making crosses if I were you.”

“No good. They’ve got those drug pumps in their heads. AntiEuclideans.”

“Things change, baseline. Adapt or die.” Sengupta’s head bobbed like a bird’s. “I don’t know where she comes from. I’m working on it, though. Don’t trust her at all don’t like the way she moves.”

Neither do I, Brüks thought.

“Maybe her friends can tell us,” Sengupta said.

“What friends?”

“The ones she got away from, I’ve been looking and—hey you’re a big-time biologist right? You go to conferences and all?”

“One or two, maybe. I’m not that big-time.” Mostly he just virtualized; his grants weren’t big enough to let him jet his actual biomass around the planet.

Besides, these days most of his colleagues weren’t all that happy to see him anyway.

“Shoulda gone to this one,” Sengupta bit her lip and summoned a video archive onto the wall. It was a standard floatcam view of a typical meeting hall in a typical conference: she’d muted the sound but the sight was more than familiar. Seated rows of senior faculty decked out in thermochrome and conjoined flesh-sculpture; grad students dressed down in ties and blazers of dumbest synth. A little corral off to one side where a few dozen teleops stood like giant stick insects or chess pieces on treads, rented mechanical shells for the ghosts of those who couldn’t afford the airfare.

The speaker of the hour stood behind the usual podium. The usual flatscreen stretched out behind him; the usual corporate hologram spun lazily above it all, reminding the assembled of where they were and whose generous sponsorship had made it all possible:

“Not really my thing,” Brüks admitted. “I’m more into—”

“There!” Sengupta crowed, and froze the feed.

At first he couldn’t see what she was getting at. The man at the podium, petrified in midmotion, gestured at a matrix of head shots looming behind him on the screen. Just another one of those eye-glazing group dioramas that infested academic presentations the world over: I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those wonderful folks who assisted in this research because there’s no fucking way I’ll ever give them actual coauthorship.

Then Brüks’s eyes focused, and his gut clenched a little.

Not collaborators, he saw: subjects.

He could tick off the telltales in his head, one by one: the pallor, the facial allometry, the angles of cheekbone and mandible. The eyes: Jesus Christ, those eyes. An image filtered through three generations, a picture of a picture of a picture, fractions of faces degraded down to a few dark pixels and they still sent cold tendrils up his spine.

All these things he could itemize, given time. But the brainstem chill shrank his balls endless milliseconds before his gray matter could have ever told him why.

The Uncanny Valley on steroids, he thought.

For the first time he noticed the text glowing on the front of the podium, the thumbnailed intel of a talk already in progress: Paglino, R. J., Harvard—Evidence of Heuristic Image Processing in the Vampire Retina.

Sengupta drummed her fingers, fed the roach a clue: “Second row third column.”

Valerie’s face. Oh yes.

“They make ’em hard to track,” she complained. “Keep changing ID codes move them around. All proprietary information and filing errors and can’t let the vampire liberation front know where the kennels are but I got her now I got her now I got the first piece of the puzzle.”

Valerie the vampire. Valerie the lab rat. Valerie the desert demon, mistress of the undead, scorched-earth army of one. Rakshi Sengupta had her.

“Good luck,” Brüks said.

But the pilot had already brought up another window, a list of names and affiliations. Authors and attendees, it looked like. Some were flagged. Brüks squinted at the list, scanned it for whatever commonality might bind those highlighted names together.

Ah. Resident Institution: Simon Fraser.

“She had friends,” Sengupta murmured, almost to herself. “I bet she got away from ’em.

“I bet they want her back.”

JIM MOORE WAS dancing.

There was no floor to speak of. No partner. Not even any witnesses until Daniel Brüks climbed into the Hub; the command deck was uncharacteristically quiet, no tapping toes or clicking tongues, none of the staccato curses that Sengupta barked out when some command or interface didn’t see things her way. Moore was alone in the cluttered landscape, leaping from a stack of cargo cubes, rebounding off some haphazard plateau halfway down, hitting the deck for just a split-second in a perfect barefoot crouch before bouncing back into the air: one arm tight across his chest, the other jabbing at some invisible partn—

Opponent, Brüks realized. Those open-handed strikes on empty air, that heel coming down with a snap against a passing bulkhead; those were combat moves. Whether he was interacting with a virtual partner in ConSensus or merely faking it old school, Brüks had no idea.

The dancing warrior caught a loose strap of cargo webbing floating from the grille, swung legs overhead and planted them against the bulkhead: hands pulling against strap in lieu of gravity, legs pushing back from the grille in opposition, a human tripod planted against the wall like a three-legged spider. Brüks could clearly see his face. Moore wasn’t even breathing through the mouth.

“Nice moves,” Brüks said.

Moore looked right past him and lifted his feet without a word, turning slowly around the strap like a windmill in a light breeze.

“Uh…”

“Shhh.”

He jumped a little at the hand on his arm. “You don’t want to wake him up,” Lianna said softly.

“He’s asleep?” Brüks looked back at the ceiling; Moore was spinning more quickly now, head out, legs spread in a V, the strap winding tighter between man and metal. In the next instant he was airborne again.

“Sure.” Lianna’s dreads bobbed gently in the wake of her nod. “What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don’t find it, um, boring?”

He didn’t know whether she was taking a shot at the thought of Dan Brüks coming equipped with some kind of sleepwalking option, or the equally ludicrous thought of Dan Brüks working out.

“Why do it at all? A dose of AMPK agonist and he’s a hardbody even if he lies in bed snarfing bonbons all day.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to depend on augments that can be hacked. Maybe the endorphins give him happier dreams. Maybe old habits die hard.”

Moore sailed over their heads, stabbing the air. Brüks ducked despite himself.

Lianna chuckled. “Don’t worry about that. He can see us just fine.” She caught herself: “Something in there can, anyway.” A kick and a glide took her to the port staircase. “Anyway, don’t waste your time with that loser—the moment he wakes up he’ll just dive back into his Theseus files.” She jerked her chin. “I’ve got some time to kill. Come play with me instead.”

“Play w—” But she’d already turned like a fish and darted down the spoke. He followed her back to the heavy quarters, to the Commons where Moore’s green bottle and his own abandoned gimp hood clung to the bulkhead between bands of minty astroturf.

“Play what?” he asked, catching up. “Tag?”

She grabbed his hood off the wall and tossed it to him, flumping into a convenient hammock in a single smooth motion. “Anything you want. Deity Smackdown. Body-swap boxing is kinda fun. Oh, and there’s a Kardashev sim I’m pretty good at, but I promise to go easy on you.”

He turned the Interloper Accessory over in his hands. The frontal superconductors stared up at him like a pair of startled eyes.

“You do remember that’s mainly a gaming hood, right?”

He shook his head. “I don’t game.”

Lianna eyed him as though he’d just claimed to be a hydrangea. “Why ever not?”

Of course he couldn’t tell her. “It’s not real.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” she explained, surprisingly patient. “That’s what makes them games.”

“Doesn’t feel real.”

“Yeah it does.”

“Not to me.”

“Yeah it does.”

“Not to—”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, Oldschool, but Yes it does.”

“Don’t lecture me about my own perceptions, Lee.”

“It’s the same neurons! The same signal running up the same wiring, and there’s absolutely no way your brain can tell the difference between an electron that came all the way from your retina and one that got injected midstream. Absolutely no way.”

“Doesn’t feel real,” he insisted. “Not to me. And I’m not playing Porn Star Cat Wars with you.”

“Just try, man.”

“Play the AI. It’ll give you a better run for your money anyway.”

“It’s not the sa—”

“Hah!”

Lianna’s face fell. “Fuck. Skewered by my own position statement.”

“By a roach, no less. How’s it feel?”

“Like I just punched myself in the nose,” she admitted.

Neither spoke for a moment.

“Just once? For me?”

“I don’t game.”

“Okay, okay. No harm in asking.”

“Now you’ve asked.”

“Okay.” She swung back and forth in the hammock for a few seconds. (There was something a little off about that motion, a hinted half-spiral oscillation. Coriolis was a subtle trickster.)

“If it makes you feel any better,” she said after a while, “I kinda know what you mean.”

“About?”

“About things not seeming real. I actually feel that way all the time. Gaming’s the only time I don’t feel that way.”

“Huh,” Brüks grunted, a little surprised. “I wonder why.”

And after a moment’s thought: “Probably the company you keep.”

Someone had set up a second tent next to his, stuck it like an engorged white blood cell right at the base of the ladder. Brüks had to effect a half hop sideways off the second rung to avoid bumping it. Something rustled and muttered inside.

“Hello?”

Sengupta stuck her head out, stared at the deck. “Roach.”

Brüks coughed. “You know, that doesn’t actually sound as much like a compliment as you might think.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “You should see this,” she said, and withdrew.

And poked her head out again after a few seconds: “Well come on.”

He hunkered gingerly down into the tent. Sengupta crouched at its center. Patches of flickering intelligence swarmed across the fabric: columns of numbers; crude plastic-skinned portraits rendered by some computer sketch artist struggling with insufficient eye-witness data; rows of—home addresses, from the look of it.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing you care about.” Reflected lightning played across her face. “Just some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.” She waved one hand and the collage disappeared.

“You do realize they’ve got a whole hab set up as a dorm,” Brüks said.

“That’s too crowded nobody uses this one.”

“I use—” Never mind.

A roommate might not be so bad, he reflected. He’d have never sought one out—good parasites do not draw attention to themselves, no matter how lonely the lifestyle—but if things went south, maybe Valerie would eat Rakshi first. Buy him some time.

“Watch this best party trick ever.”

She threw a video feed onto the wall: rowdy voices, flashing lights, a mag-lev table wobbling at an insane angle thanks to the drunken asshole trying to dance on the damn thing. Campus bar. The student ambience would be a dead giveaway anywhere on the planet but Brüks was pretty sure it was somewhere in Europe. The subtitler was off but he caught snatches of German and Hungarian at least.

A couple of grad students had randomly arranged a dozen empty beer glasses on a table. A crowd of others cheered and chanted and pulled chairs away, clearing a surrounding space. Something was happening stage left, just out of camera range: an antidisturbance, a sudden contagious quelling of noise and commotion that drew eyes and spread around the circle in an instant. The camera turned toward the eye in the storm. Brüks sucked in his breath.

Valerie again.

She stalked into the cleared floor space like a spring-loaded panther, unleashed, autonomous. She wore the cheap throwaway smart-paper weave ubiquitous to lab rats and convicts the world over; it seemed absurd against the jostling background of blazers and holograms and bioluminescent tattoos. Valerie didn’t seem to notice her own violation of the dress code; didn’t notice the way the front lines pushed back against the crowd as she passed, or the way the murmuring horde fell silent when she got too close. She had eyes only for the glasses on the table.

What kind of suicidal idiot would take a vampire to a bar? How zoned had these people been, to not be fleeing for the exits?

“Where did you get—”

“Shut up and watch!”

Valerie circled the table, once. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes unfocused, something that might almost have been a smile playing across her lips.

In the next instant, she sprang.

She came down on one bare foot, almost three meters from a standing start; snapped the other down with a stomp, spun and stamped again and jumped—arcing backward this time, over the table itself, flipping in midair and landing in a four-point crouch (left foot right foot right knee left hand) before hopping to the left (stomp), hand-springing forward to land chest-to-face with some semisober sessional who still had enough animal sense to turn greeny-white under a face loaded with retconned chloroplasts. Straight up, now: a vertical one-meter leap with a one-legged landing; about-face (stomp), two diagonal steps toward the table (stomp). Both elbows, one knee crashing simultaneously against ancient floorboards that bounced her smoothly back into a standing position. Finis. After a moment, the camera, shaking despite the very best image-stabilization algorithms a student budget could buy, panned back to the table.

The glasses were arranged in a perfectly straight, evenly spaced line.

“Hard to find this one someone snuck her out the back door you take a vampire out without authorization and your career is over so they really kept the evidence locked up I think it was an initiation or something…”

The view hovered over the tableaux for a long, disbelieving moment. Swung back to the monster who had created it. Valerie stared straight through the camera and a thousand kilometers beyond, smiled that patented bone-chilling smile. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

Everyone else was, though. Reality was finally cutting through the drinks and the drugs and the sheer idiotic bravado of spoiled children raised on promises of immortality. They were in the presence of black magic. They were in the presence of something whose most trivial efforts turned the very laws of motion into feats of telekinesis. And one sodden instant behind all that awe and stunned disbelief, perhaps, the realization of just what all that vast intelligence, all those superconducting motor skills had evolved in the service of.

Hunting.

It didn’t matter what bedtime stories these privileged brats had been told. They were not immortal in such a presence. They were only breakfast. And it was obvious to Brüks—from the way they pulled back and muttered their excuses, the way they edged for doors while keeping their backs to walls, the way even those pretending to be in charge averted their eyes as they scuttled sidelong up to Valerie and told her in weak and shaking voices that it was time to come in now—that they finally knew it.

It was also obvious, in hindsight, that Brüks had been uncharitable to the baselines who’d stolen their rat from its cage for one wild night out. Whoever they were, they hadn’t been suicidal. They hadn’t been idiots. No matter what they might have told themselves before or after, no matter who remembered having the idea.

It hadn’t really been their decision at all.

The gimp hood did amp his learning curve. Brüks had to admit that much.

Data once forced to timeshare the cramped real estate between bands of astroturf stretched luxuriously around him along three axes and three hundred sixty degrees of infinite space. Options he would have had to make eye contact with on a smart-paint display leapt front and center the moment he so much as thought about them. Information that he’d normally have to read, and repeat, and review—it seemed to just stick in the brain with a glance and a swallow. He was used to cognitive enhancers, of course, but this had to be Bicameral tech; he couldn’t imagine that even surgical augments would deliver a bigger boost.

Three trillion nodes and a ten-thousand-link search radius was a pretty impoverished echo of the actual Quinternet, but you could still dig for a thousand lifetimes and never reach its edge. Instant expertise in a million disciplines. Interactive novels you didn’t even have to play, first-person eidetic memories that planted themselves directly into your head if you had the interface (Brüks didn’t, but this came close), served up all the thrills and wonder and experience of just having played without even needing to set aside the time to inhabit the story in real time. Indelible footprints of all the things the Noosphere deemed worthy of remembrance.

Even after fourteen years, Theseus was all over it.

The shock, the disbelief in the wake of Firefall. Riots in every color of the rainbow: terrified hordes fleeing the coming apocalypse, not knowing which way to run; demonstrations against movers and shakers who’d always known more than they let on; looters with short attention spans, thinking only of all that swag left undefended while panicked populations hid under their beds or lashed back against uniforms whose guns and drones and area-denial weaponry were finally, after uncounted decades of casual and brutal unaccountability, just not up to the challenge. Tens of thousands returning from Heaven, fearful of new threats from the real world. Millions more fleeing into it, for pretty much the same reason.

And then, Theseus: the Mother Of All Megaprojects. A mission, a metaphor, a symbol of a shattered world reunited against the common threat. The brave souls who manned her, that small select force standing for Humanity against the cosmos. Amanda Bates, champion of countless WestHem campaigns: her skills so broad, her talents so highly classified that no one had even heard of her before her ascension to the Dream Team. Lisa Takamatsu, Nobel laureate, linguist and den mother to a half dozen separate personalities living in her own head. Jukka Sarasti, the noble vampire, the lion who’d lain down with lambs and was ready to give his life on their behalf. Siri Keeton, synthesist, ambassador to ambassadors, bridge between—

Wait a second—Siri?

He’d heard that name before. He sifted through dusty old memories laid down before the upgrade. Bulletins and biography washed over them in the meantime: Siri Keeton, synthesist, top of a field consisting exclusively of people at the top of their field. Possessed by demons at the age of six, some convulsive virus straight out of the Middle Ages that lit up his brain with electrical storms. It would have killed him outright if radical surgery hadn’t snatched him back from the brink, patched him up, left him scarred and scared and possessed of something altogether new: a fierce never-say-die dedication to beating the odds, the world, to beating his own mutinous brain into submission and getting the job done, all the way out to the very edge of the solar system and beyond.

(Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually…)

Almost nothing about his home life. No home vids, no leaked grade-school psych work-ups. An only child, apparently. Mother not mentioned at all, father left unnamed, a shadowy background figure that refused to come into focus except for one passing reference in TimeSpace:

…owes his single-minded pursuit of personal goals as much to his childhood battle with epilepsy as to his upbringing as a soldier’s son…

Brüks turned the words over in his head, searching for coincidence.

“Yah Colonel Carnage had to go out and get his baby almost killed don’tcha know. Before he was even born.”

The low gravity was no friend; Brüks jumped so high he cracked his head on the ceiling.

“Je-sus!” He pulled back the hood. Sengupta appeared between the interface dissolving in his head and the backup resurrecting on the bulkhead behind her. I have got to figure out the privacy settings on this thing, Brüks told himself. Not that they’d keep her from looking over his shoulder if she really wanted to, he supposed.

“Where did you come from?”

“I’ve been here all along five minutes at least.”

“Well say something next time. Announce yourself.” He rubbed the sore spot on his head. “What are you doing here anyway?”

Sengupta smacked her lips and cast sidelong eyes at her tent. “Hunting a dead man.”

I am the only meat sack on this whole damn ship who isn’t some kind of predator. “Hunting what?” One of the zombies?

“Not on board I mean like you—” Snapping her fingers at the ConSensus display—“hunting him.”

Brüks looked back at the wall: a factoid collage, a palimpsest of puff pieces. It didn’t come anywhere close to biography.

“Jim nearly got him killed?”

“Yah I said that.” Snap snap.

“Says here he had some kind of viral epilepsy.”

Sengupta snorted. “They had to cut out half his brain for viral epilepsy right. Like anyone on Carnage’s salary has to settle for leeches and laudanum when his brat gets sick.”

“So what was it then?”

“Viral something,” Sengupta crowed. “Viral zombieism.”

Ventilator sounds filled the sudden silence.

“Bullshit,” Brüks said softly.

“Oh he didn’t do it deliberately the larva was just collateral. Some evildoer cooked up a basement bug but he got the fine-tuning wrong. Virus likes fetus brains way better than grown-up brains right? All that growth metabolism all that neural pruning everything moves faster so they give it to Mommy and she gives it to Daddy but it really takes off when it gets past that old-time placenta in the third tri. Goes through baby’s brain faster’n flesh-eating. Wake up next morning the little fucker’s already seizing in the womb and it’s lucky for them it’s their canary in the coal mine, they go down to Emerg and shoot up on antizombals, get cleaned out just in time. But too late for little Siri Keeton. He comes into the world and he’s already damaged goods and they deal with it best they can they try all the best drugs and all the best lattices but it’s downhill all the way and after a few years the seizures start up and that’s all they wrote on Siri Keeton’s left hemisphere right? Had to scrape it out like a rotten coconut.”

“Jesus,” Brüks whispered, and glanced around despite himself.

“Oh you don’t have to worry about him he’s way down deep in his precious Theseus signals.” An odd, single-shouldered shrug. “Anyway it all turned out okay though better’n before like I say. Storm troopers have really good medical plans. Replacement hemisphere’s a big improvement. Made him the man for the mission.”

“What a horrible thing to do to a kid.”

“If you can’t grow the code stay out of the incubator. Fucker probably did it himself to God knows how many others, that’s what they do.”

Brüks had seen the footage, of course: civilian hordes reduced to walking brainstems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought. It wasn’t the precise surgical excision of cognitive inefficiency, not the military’s reversible supersoldiers or Valerie’s programmed bodyguards. It was consciousness and intellect just chewed away from cortex to hypothalamus, Humanity reduced to fight/flight/fuck. It was people turned back into reptiles.

It was also a hell of an effective strategy for anyone on a budget: cheap, contagious, terrifyingly effective. If you were caught in some panicking crowd you could never be sure whether the person pushing from behind was trying to rape you, or bash in your skull, or just get the fuck out of the zone. If you were above the crowd all your state-of-the-art telemetry would never tell the undead from the merely undone; not even Tran tech could pick out the fractional chill of a zombie brain inside its skull, not from a distance, not through a wall or a roof, not in the middle of a riot. All you could do was seal off the area and try to keep upwind until the flamethrowers showed up.

They had special squads for that in India, Brüks had heard. People with off switches in their heads, fighting fire with fire. They were really good at their jobs.

“Had it coming you ask me,” Sengupta hissed.

“Jesus, Rakshi.” Brüks shook his head. “What do you have against that guy?”

“Nothing I don’t have against any jackboot who fucks people over and then’s all just following orders.” She poked at some unseen irritant with the toe of her boot. “Look I know you two are dating or whatever okay? Fine with me tell him whatever you want just don’t be surprised when he fucks you over. He’ll feed you into the meat grinder the moment he thinks it serves his greater good. Feed himself in, too, for that matter. I swear sometimes I don’t know which is worse.”

Neither spoke for a few moments.

“Why are you telling me this?” Brüks asked at last.

“Why not?”

“You’re not afraid I’ll pass it on?”

Sengupta barked. “Like you would. Besides he can’t blame me if he stomps his muddy footprints all over the ’base for anyone to see. You coulda seen ’em even.”

Why do I put up with her? Brüks asked himself for the tenth time. And then, for the first: Why does she put up with me?

But he thought he knew that answer already. He’d suspected it at least since she’d moved in next door: Sengupta liked him, in a weird twisted way. Not sexually. Not as a colleague or a peer, not even as a friend. Sengupta liked Daniel Brüks because he was easy to impress. She didn’t think of him as a person at all; she thought of him as a kind of pet.

Shitty social skills. Rakshi Sengupta was too contemptuous of etiquette to be bothered. But the fact that she didn’t abide by social cues didn’t mean she couldn’t read them. She’d read him well enough, at least; there was no way he’d ever tell Jim Moore what Sengupta had learned about his son. Not Dan Brüks.

He was a good boy.

The next time he saw Lianna, he didn’t.

He heard her voice—“Whoa, watch that—” just a second before the hab tilted crazily askance and pain shot up from—in from…

Actually, he didn’t know where the pain was coming from. It just hurt.

“Holy Heyzeus Dan, you didn’t see that?” Lianna popped magically into existence beside the Commons coffee table as he blinked up from the deck.

The table, he realized. I ran into the table…

He shook his head to clear it. Lianna vanished again—

“Hey—”

—and reappeared.

Brüks hauled himself to his feet, pulled the gimp mask off his face as the pain settled in his left shin. “There’s something wrong with this thing. It’s screwing with my eyes.”

She reached out and took it. “Looks okay. What were you doing?”

“Just trawling the cache. Thought I’d bookmarked an article but I can’t find the damn thing.”

“You encrypt the search?”

Brüks shook his head. Lianna far-focused into ConSensus. “Szpindel et al? ‘Gamma-protocadherin and the role of the PCDH11Y ortholog’”?

“That’s the one.”

“It’s right here.” She frowned, handed back the gimp hood. “Try again.”

He pulled it back on over his head. Search results reappeared in the air before him, but Szpindel wasn’t among them. “Still nothing.”

“Hmm,” Lianna said, and vanished.

“Where are you? You just dis—”

She leaned back into view from nowhere in particular.

“—appeared.”

“There’s the problem,” she said, and peeled the gimp hood back off his scalp. “Induced hemineglect. Probably a bad superconductor.”

“Hemineglect?”

“See why you should get augged? You could just pull up a subtitle, know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“See why I don’t?” Brüks conjured up a definition out of smart paint. “Nobody has to cut my head open to replace a bad superconductor.”

Broken brains that split the body down the middle and threw half of it away: an inability to perceive anything to the left of the body’s midline, to even conceive of anything there. People who only combed their hair on the right side with their right hands, who only saw food on the right side of their plates. People who just forgot about half the universe.

“That is fucked,” Brüks said, quietly awed.

Lianna shrugged. “Like I said, a bad superconductor. We got spares, though; faster’n fabbing a replacement.”

He followed her through the ceiling. “So you never told me why you were so old school,” she said over her shoulder.

“Fear of vivisection. When superconductors go bad. We covered this.”

“The reason that stuff goes bad is because it’s crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.”

“So they’ll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year’s supply of bubble bath for cats.”

“Hey, at least the augs are firewalled. It’s way easier to hack a raw brain, if that’s what you’re worried about.

“Then again,” she added, “I don’t think it is.”

He sighed. “No. I guess it isn’t.”

“What, then?”

They emerged into the southern hemisphere. Their reflections, thin as eels, slid across the mirrorball as they passed.

“Know what a funnel-web spider is?” Brüks asked at last.

After the barest hesitation: “I do now.” And a moment later, “Oh. The neurotoxins.”

“Not just any neurotoxins. This one was special. Pharm refugee maybe, or just some open-source hobby that got loose. Might have even been beneficial under other circumstances, for all I know. The little fucker got away. But I felt a nip, right about here”—he spread the fingers of one hand, tapped the webbing between thumb and forefinger with the other—“and I was flat on my back ten seconds later.” He snorted softly. “Taught me not to go sampling without gloves, anyway.”

They crossed the equator, single file. No one in the northern hemisphere.

“Didn’t kill you though,” Lianna observed shrewdly.

“Nah. Just induced the mother of all allergic responses to nanopore antiglials. Any kind of direct neural interface finishes what that little bugger started.”

“They could fix that, you know.” Lianna bounced off the deck and glided along the forward ladder, Brüks clambering in her wake.

“Sure they could. I could take some proprietary drug for the rest of my life and let FizerPharm squeeze my balls every time they change their terms and conditions. Or I could get my whole immune system ripped out and replaced. Or I can take a couple of pills every day.”

The attic.

A warren of pipes and conduits, an engineering subbasement at the top of the ship. Plumbing, docking hatches, great wraparound bands full of tools and spacesuits and EVA accessories. Stone Age control panels in the catastrophic event that anyone might need to take manual control. A stale breeze caressed Brüks’s face from some overhead ventilator; he tasted oil and electricity. Up ahead the docking airlock bulged to starboard like a tinfoil hubcap three meters across; a smaller lock, merely man-size, played sidekick across the compartment. Spacesuits drifted in their alcoves like dormant silver larvae. Portals and panels crowded the spaces between struts and LOX tanks and CO2 scrubbers: lockers, bus boards, a head gimbaled for variable gee.

Lianna cracked one of the lockers and began rummaging about inside.

Yet another ladder climbed farther forward, out of the attic and up along a spire of dimly lit scaffolding. Afferent sensor array up there, according to the map. Maneuvering thrusters. And the parasol: that great wide conic of programmable metamaterial the Crown would hide behind when the sun got too close. Photosynthetic, according to the specs. Brüks didn’t know whether it would shuttle enough electrons to run whatever backup drive the Bicamerals were putting together, but at least hot showers were always an option.

“Got it.” Lianna held up a greasy-looking gray washer, smiling.

For a moment. The look of triumph drained from her face while Brüks watched; the expression left behind was bloodless and terrified.

“Lee…?”

She sucked in breath, and didn’t let it out. She stared past his right shoulder as if he were invisible.

He spun, expecting monsters. Nothing to see but the airlock. Nothing to hear but the clicks and sighs of the Crown of Thorns, talking to itself.

“Do you hear that?” she whispered. Her eyes moved in terrified little saccades. “That—ticking…”

He heard the sigh of recycled air breathed into cramped spaces, the soft rustle of empty spacesuits stirring in the breeze. He heard faint muffled sounds of movement from below: a scrape, a hard brief footfall. Brüks looked around the compartment, swept his eyes past alcoves and airlocks—

Now he heard something: sharp, soft, arrhythmic. Not a ticking so much as a clicking, a sound like, like a clicking tongue perhaps. A hungry sound, from overhead.

His stomach dropped away.

He didn’t have to look. He didn’t dare to. Somehow he could feel her up there in the rafters: a dark predatory shadow, watching from places where the light couldn’t quite reach.

The sound of teeth tapping together.

“Shit,” Lianna whispered.

She can’t be up there, Brüks thought. He’d checked the board before leaving the Commons. He always checked. Valerie’s icon had been down in her hab where it always was, a green dot among gray ones. She must have really moved.

Of course, they could do that.

Now those clicking teeth were so loud he didn’t know how he could have missed them. There was no pattern to that sound, no regular predictable rhythm. The silences between clicks stretched forever, drove him insane with trivial suspense; or snapped unexpectedly closed after a split second.

“Let’s—” Brüks swallowed, tried again. “Let’s get…”

But Lianna was already headed aft.

The Hub was bright light and sterile reflections: the soft glow of the walls chased Brüks’s fears back to the basement where they belonged. He looked at Lianna a bit sheepishly as they rounded the mirrorball.

Lianna did not look sheepish at all. If anything, she looked more worried than she had in the attic. “She must have hacked the sensors.”

“What do you mean?”

She wiggled her fingers in midair; INTERCOM appeared on the bulkhead. Sengupta was astern near the Hold; Moore was back in the Dorm.

Valerie’s icon glowed reassuring green, down in her own private hab with the grays.

“Ship doesn’t know where she is anymore,” Lianna said. “She could be anywhere. Other side of any door you open.”

“Why would she do that?” Brüks glanced up at the hole in the ceiling as Lianna grabbed the ladder. “What was she even doing up there?”

“Did you see her?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t look.”

“Me neither.”

“So for all we know, she wasn’t even up there.”

She managed a nervous laugh. “You wanna go back and check?”

Here among the bright lights and the gleaming machinery, it was hard not to feel utterly ridiculous. Brüks shook his head. “Even if she is up there, so what? It’s not like she’s confined to quarters. It’s not like she did anything other than—grind her teeth.”

“She’s a predator,” Lianna pointed out.

“She’s a sadist. She’s been pushing my buttons since day one; I think she just gets off on it. Jim’s right: if she wanted to kill us we’d be dead already.”

“Maybe this is how she kills us,” Lianna said. “Maybe she mambos.”

“Mambos.”

“Vodou works, Oldschool. Fear messes up your cardiac rhythms. Adrenaline kills heart cells. You can literally scare someone to death if you hack the sympathetic nervous system the right way.”

So voodoo’s real, Brüks mused.

Chalk one up for organized religion.

Moore was heading down when Brüks was heading out.

“Hey Jim.”

“Daniel.”

It didn’t happen often anymore. Whether at meals or after, during the Crown’s bright blue day or the warmer shadows of its night cycle, the Colonel always seemed to be deep in ConSensus these days. He never talked about what he did there. Cramming for Icarus, of course. Reviewing the telemetry Theseus had sent before disappearing into the fog. But he kept those details to himself, even when he came out to breathe.

Brüks stopped at the foot of the Commons ladder. “Hey, you want to see a movie?”

“A what?”

“The Silences of Pone. Like a game you can only watch. Lee says it’s one of—you know, back when they couldn’t just induce desired states directly. They had to manipulate you into feeling things. With plot and characters and so on.”

“Art,” Moore said. “I remember.”

“Pretty crude by current standards but apparently it won a whole bunch of awards for neuroinduction back in the day. Lee found it in the cache, set up a feed. Says it’s worth watching.”

“That woman is getting to you,” the Colonel remarked.

“This whole fucking voyage is getting to me. You in?”

He shook his head. “Still reviewing the telemetry.”

“You’ve been doing that for a week now. You hardly come up for air.”

“There’s a lot of telemetry.”

“I thought they went in and went dark.”

“They did.”

“Almost immediately, you said.”

“Almost is a relative term. Theseus had more eyes than a small corporation. Take a lifetime to sift through even a few minutes of that feed.”

“For a baseline, maybe. Surely the Bicams have everything in hand.”

Moore looked at him. “I thought you didn’t approve of blind faith in higher powers.”

“I don’t approve of breaking your back pushing boulders uphill when you’re eyeprinted for the heavy lifter across the street, either. You said it yourself. They’re a hundred steps ahead of us. We’re just here to enjoy the ride.”

“Not necessarily.”

“How so?”

“We’re here. They’re stuck in decompression for the next six days.”

“Right,” Brüks remembered. “Field-tested.”

“Why they brought us along.”

Brüks grimaced. “They brought me along because I happened to stumble onto the highway and they didn’t have the heart to see me turn into roadkill.”

The Colonel shrugged. “Doesn’t mean they can’t make the most of an opportunity when it presents itself.”

Brüks’ fingertips tingled in remembrance. Opportunities, he realized with sudden dull surprise.

I’m missing one.

It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead. You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface. You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield. It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.

Six of the monks were resting, suspended in medical cocoons like dormant grubs waiting out the winter. The others moved purposeful as ants across a background of shadows and half-built machinery: a jumbled cityscape of tanks and stacked ceramic superconductors and segments of pipe big enough to walk through without ducking. Brüks was pretty sure that the patchwork sphere coming together near the center of the hold was shaping up to be the fusion chamber.

Two of the Bicamerals huddled off to one side in some sort of wordless back-to-back communion. A glistening gelatinous orb floated beside them. Someone else (Evans, that was it) seized a nearby hand tool and lobbed it to starboard. It spun lazily end over end until Chodorowska reached up and snatched it from the air, without ever taking her eyes off the component in her other hand.

She’d never even looked. Which was not to say she hadn’t seen it coming.

But of course there was no her. Not right now, anyway. There was no Evans or Ofoegbu either.

There was only the hive.

How had Moore put it? Cognitive subspecies. But the Colonel didn’t get it. Neither did Lianna; she’d shared her enthusiastic blindness with Brüks over breakfast that very morning, ticked off in hushed and reverent tones the snips and splices that had so improved her masters: No TPN suppression, no Semmelweis reflex. They’re immune to inattentional blindness and hyperbolic discounting, and Oldschool, that synesthesia of theirs—they reset millions of years of sensory biases with that trick. Randomized all the errors, just like that. And it’s not just the mundane sensory stuff, it’s not just feeling color and tasting sounds. They can literally see time…

As if those were good things.

In a way, of course, they were. All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savannah and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth, and replaced it with—something else. They might look human. Their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve. But to merely call them a cognitive subspecies was denial to the point of delusion. The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian anymore. A look into those sparkling eyes would show you nothing but—

“Hey.”

Lianna’s reflection bobbed upside down next to his in the window. He turned as she reached past and unhooked her pressure suit from its alcove. “Hey.”

His eyes wandered back to the window. The back-to-back Bicamerals had ended their joint trance; they turned, simultaneously plunged their hands into the wobbling sphere at their side (Water, Brüks realized: it’s just a blob of water), dried off on a towel leashed to the bulkhead.

“I didn’t know,” he said, too quietly. As if afraid they’d hear him through the bulkhead. “How they work. What they—are.”

“Really.” She checked her suit O₂. “I would’ve thought the eyes’d be a giveaway.”

“I just assumed that was for night vision. Hell, I know people who retro fluorescent proteins as a fashion statement.”

“Yeah, now. Back in the day they were—”

“Diagnostic markers. I figured it out.” After Moore had inspired him to go back and actually look at the thing that had left all those corpses twisted like so much driftwood in the Oregon desert. It still lingered in his own blood, after all—and it had been almost too easy, the way the lab had taken that chimera apart and spread-eagled every piece for his edification. Streptococcal subroutines lifted from necrotizing myelitis; viral encephalitides laterally promoted from their usual supporting role in limbic encephalitis; a polysaccharide in the cell wall with a special affinity for the nasal mucosa. A handful of synthetic subroutines, built entirely from scratch, to glue all those incompatible pieces together and keep them from fighting.

But it had been the heart of that piecemeal bug that had betrayed the hive to Brüks’s investigations: a subroutine targeting a specific mutation of the p53 gene. He hadn’t got any direct hits when he’d run a search on that mutation, but the nearest miss was close enough to spill the secret: a tumor antagonist patented almost thirty years before.

As if someone had weaponized an anticancer agent.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he wondered now.

The suit had swallowed her to the waist. “Why should it?”

“They’re tumors, Lee. Literally. Thinking tumors.”

“That’s a pretty gross oversimplification.”

“Maybe.” He wasn’t clear on the details. Hypomethylation, CpG islands, methylcytosine—black magic, all of it. The precise and deliberate rape of certain methylating groups to turn interneurons cancerous, just so: a synaptic superbloom that multiplied every circuit a thousandfold. It was no joyful baptism, as far as Brüks could tell. There’d be no ecstasy in that rebirth. It was a breakneck overgrowth of weedy electricity that nearly killed its initiates outright, pulled sixty-million-year-old circuits out by the roots.

Lianna was right: the path was subtle and complex beyond human imagining, controlled with molecular precision, tamed by whatever drugs and dark arts the Bicamerals used to keep all that overgrowth from running rampant. But when the rites and incantations had been spoken, when the deed had been done and the patient sewn up, it all came down to one thing:

They’d turned their brains into cancer.

“I was so worked up about Luckett.” Brüks shook his head at his own stupidity. “We just left him back there to die, you know, we left all of them—but he would have died anyway, wouldn’t he? As soon as he graduated. Every pathway that ever made him what he was, the cancer would eat it all and replace it with something…”

“Something better,” Lianna said.

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“You make it sound so horrible.” Wrist seals. Click click. “But you know, you went through pretty much the same thing yourself and you don’t seem any the worse for it.”

He imagined coming apart. He imagined every thread of conscious experience fraying and dissolving and being eaten away. He imagined dying, while the body lived on.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Sure. When you were a baby.” She laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. “We all start out with heads full of random mush; it’s the neural pruning afterward that shapes who we are. It’s like, like sculpture. You start with a block of granite, chip away the bits that don’t belong, end up with a work of art. The Bicams just start over with a bigger block.”

“But it’s not you.”

“Enough of it is.” She plucked her helmet out of the air.

“Sure, the memories stick.” Some elements were spared: in the thalamus and cerebellum, hippocampus and brain stem all left carefully unscathed by a holocaust with the most discriminating taste. “But something else is remembering them.”

“Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.” She lowered the helmet over her head, yanked it counterclockwise until it clicked into place. His fish-eye reflection slid bulging across her faceplate as she turned.

“What about you, Lianna?” he asked softly.

“What about me?” Her voice muffled and breathy across the glass.

“You aspiring to the same fate?”

She eyed him sadly from the bowl of her helmet. “It’s not like you think. Really.” And passed on to some farther shore.

LOOK, BRÜKS WANTED to say: fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said, Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring grain and gold and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful Place. And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.

And you’re a smart kid, Lianna. You’re a bright kid and I like you but some day you’ve got to grow up and realize that it’s all a trick. It’s all just eyes scribbled on the wall, to make you think there’s something looking back.

That’s what Brüks wanted to say. And Lianna would listen, and ponder this new information, and she would come to see the wisdom of his argument. She would change her mind.

The only problem with this scenario was that it rapidly became obvious that she already knew all that stuff, and believed in invisible tigers anyway. It drove him up the fucking wall.

“That’s not God,” she said one morning in the Commons, wide eyed with astonishment that he could have made such a stupid mistake. “That’s just a bunch of ritualistic junk that got stuck onto God by people who wanted to hijack the agenda.”

A derisive snort from over by the galley dispenser. “Between you two arguing about ghosts and Carnage stringing out on rotten bits”—Sengupta grabbed her breakfast and headed for the ladder—“I don’t think I can handle five more minutes of this shit.”

Brüks watched her go, turned his attention to a bulkhead window Lianna had opened into the Hold: shadows, machine parts, weightless bodies drawing dismembered components together into tangled floating jigsaws. Binary stars, sparkling in the gloom.

“If it’s junk, why do they keep doing it?” He jerked his thumb at the display. “Why can’t those guys go thirty minutes without doing that hand-washing thing of theirs?”

“Hand-washing reduces doubt and second-guessing in the wake of making a decision,” Lianna told him. “Brains tend to take metaphors literally.”

“Bullshit.”

Her eyes defocused for an instant. “I’ve just sent you the citation. Of course an actual tweak would be more efficient—I bet they do that too, actually—but I think they like to remember where they came from. You’d be surprised how much folklore has survival value when you rip it up and look at the roots.”

“I never said religious beliefs weren’t adaptive. That doesn’t make them true.” Brüks spread his hands, palms up.

“What do you think vision is?” she asked him. “You don’t see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are wrong. Hell, color doesn’t even exist outside your own head. Vision’s just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you’re going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.”

“My eyes never told me to murder anyone who doesn’t share my worldview.”

“My God never told me to do that either.”

“Lots of people’s Gods have.”

“Riiight. And we’re just gonna ignore all those racist assholes who quoted Darwin to justify turning people into slaves? Or wiping them out altogether?” He opened his mouth; she preempted him with a raised hand: “Let’s just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best. And science has had a damn good run, no question. But the sun is setting on the Age of Empiricism.”

He snorted. “The Age of Empiricism is just getting started.”

“Come on, Oldschool. We’re long past the days when all you had to do was clock a falling apple or compare beak length in finches. Science has been running into limits ever since it started trying to get Schrödinger’s cat to play with balls of invisible string. Go down a few orders of mag and everything’s untestable conjecture again. Math and philosophy. You know as well as I do that reality has a substructure. Science can’t go there.”

“Nothing can. Faith may claim—”

“Knot theory,” Lianna said. “Invented it for the sheer beauty of the artifact. We didn’t have particle accelerators back then; we had no evidence at all that it would turn out to describe subatomic physics a century or two down the road. Pre-Socratic Greeks intuited atomic theory in two hundred B.C. Buddhists were saying centuries ago that we can’t trust our senses, that sensation itself is an act of faith. Hinduism’s predicated on the Self as illusion: no NMRs a thousand years ago, no voxel readers. No evidence. And damned if I can see the adaptive advantage of not believing in your own existence; but neurologically it happens to be true.”

She beamed at him with the beatific glow of the true convert. “There’s an intuition, Dan. It’s capricious, it’s unreliable, it’s corruptible—but it’s so powerful when it works, and it’s no coincidence that it ties into the same parts of the brain that give you the rapture. The Bicamerals harnessed it. They amped the temporal and they rewired the parietals—”

“You mean ripped them out completely.”

“—and they had to leave conventional language back in the dust, but they figured it out. Their religion, for want of a better word, goes places science can’t. Science backs it up, as far as science can go; there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t keep right on working after it leaves science behind.”

“You mean you have faith it keeps working,” Brüks observed drily.

“Do you measure Earth’s gravity every time you step outside? Do you reinvent quantum circuits from scratch whenever you boot up, just in case the other guys missed something?” She gave him a moment to answer. “Science depends on faith,” she continued, when he didn’t. “Faith that the rules haven’t changed, faith that the other guys got the measurements right. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way. But the whole exercise falls apart if the universe doesn’t follow consistent laws. How do you test if that’s true?”

“If two experiments yield different results—”

“Happens all the time, my friend. And when it does, every good scientist discounts those results because they failed to replicate. One of the experiments must have been flawed. Or they both were. Or there’s some unknown variable that’ll make everything balance out just as soon as we discover what it is. The idea that physics itself might be inconsistent? Even if you considered the possibility in your wildest dreams, how could you test for it when the scientific method only works in a consistent universe?”

He tried to think of an answer.

“We’ve always thought c and friends ruled supreme, right out to the quasars and beyond,” Lianna mused. “What if they’re just—you know, some kind of local ordinance? What if they’re a bug? Anyway”—she fed her plate into the recycler—“I gotta go. We’re test-firing the chamber today.”

“Look, science—” He marshaled his thoughts, unwilling to let it go. “It’s not just that it works. We know how it works. There’s no secret to it. It makes sense.”

She wasn’t looking at him. Brüks followed her eyes to the bulkhead feed. They all seemed more or less mended by now—Chinedum, Amratu, a handful of other demigods who’d never be more than names and ciphers to him—although the pressure still kept them captive for the moment. Still insufficiently omnipotent to speed the physics of decompression. It was a small comfort.

“Those guys do not make sense,” he continued. “They roll around on the floor and ululate and you write up the patent applications. We don’t know how it works, we don’t know if it’s going to keep working, it could stop working at any moment. Science is more than magic and rituals—”

He stopped.

Ululations. Incantations. Hive harmonics.

Rituals.

These feeds have motion cap, he remembered.

Colonel Jim Moore crouched sideways against the Commons wall like a monstrous grasshopper: legs folded tight at the knees, spring-loaded and ready to pop; thorax folded over them like a protective carapace; one hand dancing with some unseen ConSensus interface while the other, wrapped around a convenient cargo strap, held body to bulkhead. His eyes jiggled and danced beneath closed lids: blind to this impoverished little shell of a world, immersed in some other denied Daniel Brüks.

The grasshopper opened its eyes: glazed at first, clearing by degrees.

“Daniel,” it said dully.

“You look awful.”

“I asked for an onboard cosmetics spa before we launched. They went for a lab instead.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

Moore frowned.

“That does it. I’m buying, you’re eating.” Brüks stepped over to the galley.

“But—”

“Unless you think that anorexia’s the best way to prep for an extended field op.”

Moore hesitated.

“Come on.” Brüks punched in an order for salmon steak (he was still tickled by the fabber’s proficiency with extinct meats). “Lianna’s back in the hold, and Rakshi’s—being Rakshi. You want me eating with Valerie?”

“So this is a rescue mission.” Moore unfolded himself onto the deck, relenting at last.

“That’s the spirit. What do you want?”

“Just coffee.”

Brüks glared at him.

“Okay, fine. Anything.” The Colonel waved a hand in surrender. “Kruggets. With Tandoori sauce.”

Brüks winced and relayed the order, tossed a ’bulb of coffee across the compartment (Coriolis turned it into a curveball but Moore caught it anyway with barely a glance), grabbed one for himself and twisted the heat tab en route. He set the wobbly warming sphere onto the table and wound his way back to collect their meals.

“Still going over the Theseus data?” He pushed Moore’s fluorescent krill across the table and sat down opposite.

“I thought the whole point of this was to get my mind off that.”

“The point was to get you off your damn hunger strike,” Brüks said. “And to get me something to talk to besides the walls.”

Moore chewed, swallowed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Warn me?”

“I distinctly remember raising the possibility—the likelihood, even—that you might be bored out of your skull.”

“Believe me, I’m not complaining.”

“Yes you are.”

“Maybe a little.” (Why did everything from the galley taste like oil?) “But it’s not so bad. I got ConSensus, I got Lee to try and deprogram. Weigh a little cabin fever against getting stashed with the luggage for the next six months—”

“Believe me.” Moore smiled faintly. “There are worse things than extended unconsciousness.”

“For example?”

Moore didn’t answer.

The Crown did, though. In an instant she turned half the bulkhead bloody with Intercom alarms.

SENGUPTA, they screamed.

Moore commed the Hub while Brüks was still peeling himself off the ceiling. “Rakshi. What—”

Her words cascaded back, high pitched and panicky: “She’s coming oh shit she’s coming up she knows—”

A pit opened in Brüks’s stomach.

“I’m on to her I think she knows of course she knows she’s a fucking vampire she knows everything—”

“Rakshi, where—”

“Listen to me you stupid roach she kil—oh fu—”

The channel died before she could finish, but it didn’t really matter. You could have heard the screaming halfway to Mars.

Moore was through the ceiling in an instant. Brüks followed in his wake, a jump up the ladder, a grab for a passing handhold, the endless loop of the conveyor pulling him smoothly along the weight-loss gradient from hab to Hub. Moore had no time for that shit; he shot up the ladder two rungs at a time, then three, then four. He ricocheted free-falling out the top of the spoke before the belt had drawn Brüks even halfway. That was okay. Maybe he’d have everything fixed by the time Brüks made it to the top, maybe Sengupta’s screams of rage would end and calm soothing voices would murmur in their stead, intent on reconciliation…

Sengupta’s screams ended.

He tried to ignore the other voices, the ones in his head saying Go back, you idiot. Let Jim handle it, he’s a soldier for chrissakes, what are you gonna do against a goddamn vampire? You’re collateral. You’re lunch.

That’s right, Backdoor. Just turn around and run away. Again.

The conveyor, insensitive, drew him forward into battle.

He emerged into the southern hemisphere, knees shaking. There were no calm voices. There were no voices at all.

There was no reconciliation.

The vampire clung one-handed to the grille. Her other hand held Sengupta by the throat, right at eye level, as if the pilot were a paper doll. Valerie looked impassively into her victim’s eyes; Sengupta squirmed and choked and didn’t look back.

The south pole was a bright gaping pit to stern. Its reflection smeared across the mirrorball like a round toothless mouth. An image flashed across Brüks’s forebrain, courtesy of his hind: Valerie tossing Sengupta into that maw. The Crown of Thorns closing its mouth and chewing.

Moore edged along the Tropic of Capricorn, feet just above the deck, hands open at his sides.

“Okay, we can take it from here.”

Not Moore. Lianna’s voice, ringing calm and clear from the back of the Crown’s throat. A moment later she sailed forth from its maw, fearless, light as air, heading directly for Valerie & Victim.

What’s wrong with her? “Lianna, don’t—”

“S’okay.” She spared a glance. “I’ve got it under—”

And was cut down with the sudden crack of bones snapping under the impact of Valerie’s foot, an obscene and elegant en pointe fired like a piston into Lutterodt’s rib cage. She spun back toward the south pole, a rag doll with no fixed center of gravity; the Crown caught her spine in passing, bent it the wrong way, tossed her back down its throat from whence she’d come.

Fuck fuck fuck—

“Let her go,” Moore was saying, his eyes still on Sengupta, calm as death. As though Lianna Lutterodt had never even made an appearance, as though she hadn’t just been swatted like a mosquito. As though she couldn’t possibly be bleeding out against the bulkhead a hundred meters to stern.

I have to help her.

Valerie kept eyes on Sengupta, head cocked like a predatory bird sizing up something shiny. “She attacks me.” Her voice was distant, almost distracted: voicemail from a monster with other things on its mind.

Brüks crept forward, belly against bulkhead: a strut here, a cargo strap there, hand over hand toward the south pole.

“She’s no threat.” Moore was behind Valerie now, looking past her shoulder to her prey. The prey croaked softly. “There’s no reason to—”

“Thank you for your tactical advice.” A faint white smile ghosted across her lips.

Was that a faint moan sighing up through the Crown’s throat? Still conscious then, maybe. Still hope.

“Trade,” Valerie said.

“Yes,” Moore replied, moving forward.

“Not you.”

Suddenly Brüks was off the deck and yanked into the air; suddenly Valerie’s hand was around his throat, gripping him just below the jaw with fingers cold and sinuous as tentacles while a distant irrelevant Rakshi Sengupta bounced off the southern hemisphere, hacking, doubled over.

And when Valerie looked at him with that bemused and distant stare, he looked back. He tried not to. Over the slow burning in his lungs, over the casual pain of a larynx compressed just this side of strangulation, he would have given anything to turn away. Somehow he didn’t have the will. He couldn’t even close his eyes against hers.

Her pupils were bright bloody pinpoints, red stars clenched tight against the light of day. Behind them, the bulkhead rolled past in lazy slow motion.

The Hub dwindled to the wrong end of a telescope. Sengupta was shouting somewhere, her voice raw and tinny and barely audible over the white noise of distant pounding surf: She killed one of them she killed one of her zombies one of her people he’s not on the board I can’t find him anywhere—

There was nothing in Valerie’s face but that spectral half smile, that look of dispassionate appraisal. She didn’t seem to notice Moore slipping up from behind, or Sengupta screaming headlong back into the fray with claws bared. She didn’t even seem to notice her own left hand flicking back of its own accord to casually slap the pilot into the soldier, all that momentum spun impossibly on the head of a pin and redirected a hundred eighty degrees. Fucking monster fucking monster fucking monster, Sengupta shouted from across an ocean and Brüks could only think: Cats and dogs cats and dogs…

But none of that mattered. All that mattered were he and Valerie, alone together: the way she let just enough air past her fingers to keep him awake, the way she reached out with her free hand and tapped that light arrhythmic tattoo across his temple; the things she whispered for his ears only, intimate secrets of such vital importance he forgot them even as she breathed them out along his cheek.

Behind her, Jim Moore grabbed a cargo strap and braced his feet against the wall. Valerie didn’t even bother to keep him in view.

“Is it true?” he asked quietly.

“Of course it’s fucking true she’s a vampire she’d kill all of—”

Moore, eyes locked on Valerie, raised a palm in Sengupta’s direction. Sengupta shut up as if guillotined.

“You think this matters.” There was distant amusement in Valerie’s voice, as if she’d just seen a rabbit stand up on its hind legs and demand the right to vote.

“You think so, too,” Moore began. “Or—”

“—you wouldn’t have reacted,” he and Valerie finished in sync.

He tried again: “Were they under formal con…” they chorused. He trailed off, an acknowledgment of futility. The vampire even matched his ellipsis without missing a beat.

Sengupta fumed silently across the compartment, too smart and too damn stupid to be scared. Brüks tried to swallow, gagged as his Adam’s apple caught between the vice of Valerie’s thumb and forefinger.

“Malawi,” Valerie said quietly, and: “Not mission-critical.”

Brüks swallowed again. As if there’s anyone on this goddamn ship who’s less mission-critical than me.

Maybe Moore was thinking it, too. Maybe he decided to act on behalf of Daniel Brüks, the Parasite That Walked Like a Man. Or maybe he just took advantage of his adversary’s distraction, maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Brüks at all. But something—changed subtly, in Moore’s stance. His body seemed looser, somehow, more relaxed, incongruously taller at the same time.

Valerie was still eye to eye with Brüks, but it didn’t matter. It was obvious from the way her smile widened and cracked, from the tiny click of teeth against teeth: she could see everything that mattered about Moore’s face, reflected in his own.

She turned, almost lazily, tossed Brüks aside like a cigarette butt. Brüks flailed across the open spine; he barely missed a figure blurring past in the opposite direction. A cargo cube caught him and slapped him back off the deck. He doubled over, coughing, while Moore and Valerie danced in fast-forward. The monster’s arms moved as though spun by a centrifuge; her body rebounded off the deck and shot through empty space where Jim Moore had existed a split-second before.

“Fhat thouding do’re.”

Not a shout. Not even an exclamation. It didn’t sound like a command. But those sounds reached into the Hub from the south pole and seemed to physically slap Valerie off target, reach right into the monster’s head and grab her by the motor nerves. She twisted in midair, landed like a jumping spider on the curve of the bulkhead and froze there: eyes bright as halogen, mouth full of gleaming little shark teeth.

“Juppyu imaké.”

Moore rose from a defensive crouch, studied hands half raised against blows that hadn’t materialized. Brought them down again.

Chinedum Ofoegbu rose from the throat of the Crown.

You can’t do that, Brüks thought, astonished. You’re stuck in the Hold for another three days.

“Prothat blemsto bethe?” Ofoegbu’s hands fluttered like a pianist’s against an invisible keyboard. The light in his eyes slithered like the Aurora Borealis.

I don’t care how smart you are. You’re still made out of meat. You can’t just step out of a decompression chamber.

The Bicameral’s blood must be fizzing in its flesh. All those bubbles out on early parole, all those gases freed from the weight of too many atmospheres: all set loose to party it up in the joints and capillaries…

One’s all it’ll take, one tiny bubble in the brain. A pinpoint embolism in the right spot and you’re dead, just like that.

“Your vampire—” Sengupta began, before Moore preempted her with: “We have some mission-critical issues to deal with…”

But there is no you anymore, is there? You’re just a body part, just a node in a network. Expendable. When the hive cuts you loose, will you get it all back? Will Chinedum Ofoegbu wake up in time to die a roach’s death? Will he change his mind too late, will he have a chance to feel betrayed before he stops feeling anything at all?

Ofoegbu coughed a fine red mist into the room. Blood and stars bubbled in his eyes. He began to fold at the middle.

Lianna Lutterodt climbed up in his wake, bent in on herself, one arm clenched tight to her side. With the other she reached out, wincing; but her master was too far away. She pushed off the lip of the south pole, floated free, caught him. Every movement took a visible toll.

“If you people are through trying to kill each other—” She coughed, tried again—“maybe someone could help me get him back to the Hold before he fucking dies.”

“Holy shit,” Brüks said, dropping back into Commons. The node was back with its network. Lianna was meshed and casted and had retreated to her rack while her broken parts stitched themselves back together.

Moore had already cracked open the scotch. He held out a glass.

Brüks almost giggled. “Are you kidding? Now?”

The Colonel glanced at the other man’s hands: they trembled. “Now.”

Brüks took the tumbler, emptied it. Moore refilled without asking.

“This can’t go on,” Brüks said.

“It won’t. It didn’t.”

“So Chinedum stopped her. This time. And it just about killed him.”

“Chinedum was only the interface, and she knows that. She would have gained nothing and risked everything by attacking him.”

“What if she’d pulled that shit a few days ago? What if she pulls it again?” He shook his head. “Lee could have been killed. It was just dumb luck that—”

“We got off lightly,” Moore reminded him. “Compared to some.”

Brüks fell silent. She killed one of her zombies.

“Why did she do it?” he asked after a moment. “Food? Fun?”

“It’s a problem,” the Colonel admitted. “Of course it’s a problem.”

“Can’t we do anything?”

“Not at the moment.” He took a breath. “Technically, Sengupta did attack first.”

“Because Valerie killed someone!”

“We don’t know that. And even if she did, there are—jurisdictional issues. She may have been within her rights, legally. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

Brüks stared, speechless.

“We’re a hundred million klicks from the nearest legitimate authority,” Moore reminded him. “Any that might happen by wouldn’t look more kindly on us than on Valerie. Legalities are irrelevant out here; we just have to play the hand we’re dealt. Fortunately we’re not entirely on our own. The Bicamerals are at least as smart and capable as she is, if not smarter.”

“I’m not worried about their capabilities. I don’t trust them.”

“Do you trust me?” Moore asked unexpectedly.

Brüks considered a moment. “Yes.”

The Colonel inclined his head. “Then trust them.”

“I trust your intentions,” Brüks amended softly.

“Ah. I see.”

“You’re too close to them, Jim.”

“No closer than you’ve been, lately.”

“They had their hooks into you way before I joined the party. You and Lianna, the way you just—accept everything…”

Moore said nothing.

Brüks tried again. “Look, don’t get me wrong. You went up against a vampire for us, and you could’ve been killed, and I know that. I’m grateful. But we got lucky, Jim: you’re usually wrapped up in that little ConSensus shell you’ve built for yourself, and if Valerie had chosen any other time to torque out—”

“I’m wrapped up in that shell,” Moore said levelly, “dealing with a potential threat to the whole—”

“Uh-huh. And how many new insights have you gained, squeezing the same signals over and over again since we broke orbit?”

“I’m sorry if that leaves you feeling vulnerable. But your fears are unfounded. And in any case”—Moore swallowed his own dram—“planetary security has to take priority.”

“This isn’t about planetary security,” Brüks said.

“Of course it is.”

“Bullshit. It’s about your son.”

Moore blinked.

“Siri Keeton, synthesist on the Theseus mission,” Brüks continued, more gently. “It’s not as though the crew roster was any kind of secret.”

“So.” Moore’s voice was glassy and expressionless. “You’re not as completely self-absorbed as you appear.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Brüks tried.

“Don’t. The presence of my son on that mission doesn’t change the facts on the ground. We’re dealing with agents of unknown origin and vastly superior technology. It is my job—”

“And you’re doing that job with a brain that still runs on love and kin selection and all those other Stone Age things we seem hell-bent on cutting out of the equation. That would be enough to tear anyone apart, but it’s even harder for you, isn’t it? Because one of those facts on the ground is that you’re the reason he was out there in the first place.”

“He’s out there because he’s the most qualified for the mission. Full stop. Anyone in my place would have made the same decision.”

“Sure. But we both know why he was the most qualified.”

Moore’s face turned to granite.

“He was most qualified,” Brüks continued, “because he got certain augments during childhood. And he got those augments because you chose a certain line of work with certain risks, and one day some asshole with a grudge and a splicer kit took a shot at you and hit him instead. You think it’s your fault that some Realist fuckwit missed the target. You blame yourself for what happened to your son. It’s what parents do.”

“And you know all about being a parent.”

“I know about being Human, Jim. I know what people tell themselves. You made Siri the man for the job before he was even born, and when the Fireflies dropped in you had to put him at the top of the list and ship him out and now all you’ve got is those goddamned signals, that’s your last link and I understand, man. It’s natural, it’s Human, it’s, it’s inevitable because you and I, we haven’t got around to cutting those parts out of us yet. But just about everyone else around here has, and we can’t afford to ignore that. We can’t afford to be—distracted. Not here, not now.”

He held out his glass, and felt a vague and distant kind of relief at how steady his hand was around the crystal. Colonel Jim Moore regarded it for a moment. Looked back at the half-empty bottle.

“Bar’s closed,” he said.