Echopraxia

HE WOKE UP weightless. Unseen hands guided him like a floating log through the Hub, through a southern hemisphere that didn’t move any more than he could. Rakshi Sengupta called in from somewhere far away, and she did not bray or bark but spoke in tones as soft as any cockroach: “This is taking too long we’re gonna start falling back if we don’t restart the burn in five minutes tops.”

“Three minutes.” Moore’s voice, much closer. “Start your clock.”

And that’s all of us, Brüks thought distantly. Just Jim, and Rakshi, and me. No vampires left, no undead bodyguards. Bicamerals all gone. Lianna dead. Oh God, Lianna. You poor kid, you poor beautiful innocent corpse. You didn’t deserve this; your only crime was faith…

One of the axial hatches passed around him. In the next instant he was swinging around an unaccustomed right angle: the Crown’s spokes, rigged for thrust, still laid back along her spine. Rungs scrolled past his face as Moore pushed him headfirst to stern.

All our children, gone. Smarter, stronger, leaner. All those souped-up synapses, all those Pleistocene legacy issues stripped away. Where did it get them? Where are they now? Dead. Gone. Turned to plasma.

Where we’ll be, probably, before long…

Maintenance and Repair. Moore folded out the medbed and strapped him in just as the Crown began clearing her throat. By the time he turned to leave, weight was seeping back into the world. Brüks tried to turn his head, and almost succeeded. He tried to clear his throat, and did.

“Uh… Jim…” It was barely above a whisper. The Colonel paused at the ladder, a vague silhouette in the corner of Brüks’s eye. The ongoing burn seemed to sink him into the deck.

“…Th—thanks,” Brüks managed.

The silhouette stood silently in the burgeoning gravity.

“That wasn’t me,” he said finally, and climbed away.

Moore was not the only one to visit. Lianna returned to him from the grave, a dark flickering plasma who smiled down on his frozen features and shook her head and whispered You poor man, so lost, so arrogant before the sun called her back home. Chinedum Ofoegbu stood for hours at his side and spoke with fingers and eyes and sounds that stuttered from the back of his throat, and somehow Brüks understood him at last: not the ululating cipher, not the intelligent hive cancer, but a kind old man whose fondest childhood memory was the family of raccoons he’d surreptitiously befriended with a few handfuls of kibble and subtle sabotage inflicted on the latch of the household organics bin. Wait—you had a childhood? Brüks tried to ask, but Ofoegbu’s face and hands had disappeared under eruptions of buboes and great ropy tumors, and he could no longer get out the words.

Rhona even came back from Heaven, though she’d sworn she never would. She stood with her back to him, and fumed; he tried to turn her around and make her smile, but when she did the expression was bitter and furious and her eyes were full of sparks. Oh, do you miss her? she raged. You miss your mindless puppet, your sweet adoring ego-slave? Or is it just the fact that you’ve lost the one small fake part of your whole small fake life where you had some kind of control? Well the chains are off, Dan, they’re off for good. You can rot out here for all I care.

But that’s not what I meant, he tried, and I never thought of you that way, and—when he finally ran out of denials and had nothing else to say: Please. I need you. I can’t do it on my own…

Of course you can’t, she sneered. You can’t do anything on your own, can you? I’ll give you that much: you’ve actually turned incompetence into a survival strategy. Whatever would you do if you actually lost your excuses, if you augged up like everyone else? How would you ever survive without your disability to invoke when you can’t keep up?

He wondered what Heaven could possibly be like, to make her so vindictive. He would have asked but Rhona had turned into Rakshi Sengupta right in front of his fossiled eyes, and her train of thought seemed to have jumped to a whole different track. You gotta stay away from the bow, she whispered urgently, glancing nervously over her shoulder. You gotta stay out of the attic, he’s in there now and maybe something else. I wish you’d come back this could be bad and I’m only good with numbers, you know? I’m not so hot in meatspace.

You’re doing fine, Brüks tried to say. You’re even starting to talk like one of us roaches. But all he could manage was a croak and a cough and whatever Rakshi heard seemed to scare her more than his silence had.

Sometimes he opened his eyes to see Moore looming over him, moving shiny blinking chopsticks in front of his face. Once or twice an invisible roaring giant stood on his chest, pressing him deep into the soft earth at his back (the sparse bands of new-grown grass on the bulkhead bowed low against the wall, every blade in uniform alignment); other times he was as weightless as a dandelion seed. Sometimes he could almost move, and the creatures gathered at his side would startle and pull back. Other times he could barely roll his eyes in their sockets.

Sometimes he woke up.

Something sat at his side, a vaguely humanoid blur at the edge of eyesight. Brüks tried to turn his head, unfix his gaze from the ceiling. All he could see was pipes and paint.

“It’s only me.” Moore’s voice.

Is it. Is it really.

“I guess you weren’t expecting it,” said the blur. “I’m actually surprised that Sengupta didn’t tell you. It’s the kind of thing she’d enjoy spreading around.”

He tried again. Failed again. His cervical vertebrae seemed—fused, somehow. Corroded together.

“Maybe she doesn’t know.”

Brüks swallowed. That much he could do, although his throat remained dry.

The blur shifted and rustled. “It’s a mandatory procedure where I come from. Too many scenarios when conscious involvement—compromises performance. Whatever the military is these days, you don’t get into it unless you…”

A cough. A reset.

“The truth is, I volunteered. Back when everything was still in beta, before it was policy.”

Do you get to decide, Brüks wondered, when it comes and goes? Is it a choice, or is it a reflex?

“You may have heard we just go to sleep. Lose all awareness, let the body run on autopilot. So we won’t feel badly about pulling the trigger, afterward.” Brüks heard a note of bitterness in the old man’s voice. “It’s true enough, these days. But we first-gen types, we—stayed awake. They said it was the best they could do at the time. They could cut us out of the motor loop but they couldn’t shut down the hypothalamic circuitry without compromising autonomic performance. There were rumors floating around that they could do that just fine, that they wanted us awake—for debriefing afterward, experienced observer in the field and all—but we were such hot shit we didn’t really care. The sexy bleeding edge, you know. First explorers on the post-Human frontier.” Moore snorted softly. “Anyway. After a few missions that didn’t quite go according to plan, they rolled out the Nirvana Iteration. Even offered me an upgrade, but it—I don’t know. Somehow it just seemed important to keep the lights on.”

Why are you telling me this? What does it matter, now that you’ve thrown the world’s lifeline into the sun?

“What I’m saying is, I was there. The whole time. Only as a passenger—I wasn’t running anything—but I didn’t go away. I’m not like Valerie’s mercenaries, I was—watching, at least. If that makes you feel any better. Just wanted you to know that.”

It wasn’t you. That’s what you’re saying. It’s not your fault.

“Get some rest.” The blur stretched at his side; the Colonel’s face resolved briefly in Brüks’s field of focus, faded again to the sound of receding footsteps.

Which paused.

“Don’t worry,” Moore said. “You won’t be seeing it again.”

The next time he woke up Sengupta was leaning over him.

“How long?” Brüks tried, and was relieved to hear the words come out.

She said: “Can you move yet try to move.”

He sent commands down his legs, felt his toes respond. Tried wiggling his fingers: his knuckles were rusted solid.

“Not eashily,” he said.

“It’ll come back it’s just temporary.”

“Wha’ she do to me?”

“I’m working on that listen—”

“It’s like some kind of ass-fac—ass-backwards Crucifix Glitch.” His tongue fought its way around the words. “How the hell did she—baysh—baselines don’t glitch, we don’t have the shircuits—”

“I said I’m working on it. Look we got other things to worry about right now.”

You’ve got other things, maybe—“Whersh Jim?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you he’s up there in the attic he’s up there with Portia I think—”

“Whah!”

“Well how do we know how far that shit spread huh it coulda coated the whole inside of the array and we never woulda known. Coulda grown all the way up to our front door and got inside.”

His sympathetic motor nerves were still working at least: Brüks could feel the hairs rising along his forearms.

“Anybody take sh—take samples?”

“That’s not what I do I’m a math maid not a bucket boy I don’t even know the protocols.”

“You couldn’t look them up?”

“It’s not what I do.”

Brüks sighed. “What about Jim?”

Sengupta stared past him. “No help he just keeps reading those letters from home over and over. I told him but I don’t think he even cares.” She shook her head (she did it so effortlessly), added: “He comes down here sometimes checks up on you. He’s been shooting you up with all sorts of GABA and spasmolytics he says you should be good to go by now.”

He flexed his fingers; not too bad, this time. “It’s coming back, I guess. Body’s just out of practice.”

“Yah it’s been a while. Anyway I gotta get back.” She stepped across the hab, turned back at the base of the ladder. “You gotta get back in the game Dan things are getting weird.”

They were, too.

She’d never called him by name before.

He’d stopped slurring his words by the time Sengupta had departed; five minutes later he could roll from side to side without too much discomfort. He bent knees and arms in small hard-won increments, ratcheting each joint against the brittle resistance of his own flesh. At some critical angle his right elbow cracked and pain splintered down his arm like an electrical shock: but the limb worked afterward, bent and straightened at his command with nothing but a dull arthritic aching in the joint. Encouraged, he forced his other limbs past their breaking points and reclaimed them for his own.

Reclaimed from what? he wondered.

The medical archives reenacted the corruption of his flesh in fast-forward: a body flooded with acetylcholine, Renshaw cells compromised, ATP drawn down to the fumes by fibrils that just wouldn’t stop clenching. No ATP to cut in and ask myosin for this dance; nothing to break the actin-myosin bond. Gridlock. Tetany. A charley horse that froze the whole damn body.

The mechanism was simple enough: once the action potentials started hammering that fast it could only end one way. But this didn’t seem to be drug induced. Valerie hadn’t spiked his coffee or slipped anything into his food. His medical telemetry hadn’t picked up the trail until long minutes after Brüks had been hit, but as far as he could tell those signals had come from his own brain: CNS to alpha-motor to synaptic cleft, boom boom boom.

Whatever this was, he’d inflicted it on himself.

He took his time in checking out. Time to extract the catheters and stretch his limbs; time to boot his defossilized corpus back into some semblance of an active state. Time to refuel: his convalescence had left him ravenous. Almost an hour had passed by the time he climbed out of M&R in search of whatever the galley might serve up.

He was halfway across the Hub before he noticed the light bleeding from the spoke.

A snapshot of the past: a corpse, laid out on the lawn. Brüks didn’t know which element was the more incongruous.

The lawn, he supposed. At least that was unexpected: not so much a lawn as a patchy threadbare rug of blue-green grass—rusty in the dim longwave vampires preferred—ripped from the walls of the hab and strewn haphazardly across the deck. Vampires had OCD, Brüks remembered vaguely. The mythical ones at least, not the ancient flesh-and-blood predators that had inspired them. Seventeenth-century folk legends had it that you could drive a vampire to distraction by the simple act of throwing salt in its path; some supernatural brain circuit would compel it to drop everything and count the grains. Brüks thought he’d read that somewhere. Probably not peer reviewed.

For all he knew, that ridiculous superstition might have at least a rootlet in neurological reality. It certainly wasn’t any more absurd than the Crucifix Glitch; maybe some pattern-matching hiccup in those omnisavant brains, some feedback loop gone over the top. Maybe Valerie had fallen victim to the same subroutine, seen all those thousands of epiphytic blades and torn them from their bulkhead beds with her bare fingernails, counting each leaf as it fluttered to the deck in a halfhearted chlorophyllous blizzard.

Of course, the catch was that vampires didn’t have to count: they would simply see the precise number of salt grains or grass leaves in an instant, know that grand seven-digit total without ever going through the conscious process of adding it up. Any village peasant who sacrificed two seconds scattering salt in his path would buy himself a tenth-of-a-second’s grace, tops. Not a great rate of exchange.

Maybe the zombie hadn’t known that, though. Maybe the homunculus behind the eyes had rebooted just in time to see what was coming, maybe it somehow wrested control back from all those shortcuts and back alleys and tried one last-ditch Hail Mary with nothing left to lose. Maybe Valerie had let it, watching, amused; maybe even played along, pretended to count each falling blade while her dinner turned the deck into a haphazard shag rug.

Maybe the zombie hadn’t even cared. Maybe it had just lain down on command and waited to be eaten. Maybe Valerie had just wanted a tablecloth.

The zombie’s throat had been slashed. It lay spread-eagled on its stomach, naked, face turned to the side. The right buttock had been carved away; the quads; one long strip of calf muscle. There was flesh above and flesh below: in between, a flensed femur connected the lower leg to the torso, socketed into the broad scraped spatula of the pelvic girdle.

There was very little blood. Everything had been cauterized.

“You never checked it out,” Brüks said.

Sengupta zoomed the view: the gory table setting expanded across the window. Blades of grass grew to the size of bamboo shoots; tooth marks resolved like jagged furrows on bared bloody bone.

Some kind of wire snaked through the grass—barely visible even at this magnification—and disappeared beneath the half-eaten corpse.

“Found eight wires don’t know what for exactly but that thing wasn’t exactly Secret Santa you know? Carnage said probably booby traps and Carnage is probably right for once. She wanted us to see this.”

“How do you know?”

“This is the only feed she didn’t break.” Sengupta waved the recording off the bulkhead.

“So you jettisoned the habs.”

She nodded. “Too risky to go in too risky to leave ’em there.”

Another feed abutted the first, a view down the truncated spoke that had once led to Valerie’s lair. It ended after only twenty meters now, in a pulsing orange disk flashing UNPRESSURIZED back up the tunnel at two-second intervals. Just like the Commons spoke opposite, cut loose in turn to keep the vectors balanced.

He remembered downhill conversations, the sound of glasses clinking together. “Shit,” he said.

“It’s not like they’re not all the same you know they all got the same plumbing and life support.”

“I know.”

“And it’s not like we’re gonna run out of food or air what with everybody being dead and—”

“I fucking know,” Brüks snapped, and was surprised when Sengupta fell immediately silent.

He sighed. “It’s just, the only half-decent moments I’ve had on this whole bloody trip were in Commons, you know?”

She didn’t speak for a moment; and when she did, Brüks couldn’t make out the words.

“What did you say?”

“You talked to him down there,” she mumbled. “I know that but it doesn’t matter even if it was still here he’s not. He just sits up in the attic and runs those signals over and over like he never even left Icarus…”

“He lost his son,” Brüks said. “It changed him. Of course it changed him.”

“Oh yah.” She barely spoke above a whisper. Something in that voice made Brüks long for the trademark hyena laugh. “It changed him all right.”

No excuses left. Nothing else to do.

He ascended into the Hub, breached its sky into the guts beyond: hissing bronchioles, cross-hatched vertebrae, straight-edged intestines. He moved like an old man, free fall and residual paralysis and the spacesuit he’d scavenged from the cargo-bay airlock all conspiring to take him to new depths of clumsiness. Up ahead, the paint around the docking hatch splashed the surrounding topography with the usual diffuse glow.

This is where the shadows come, Brüks realized. Every other corner of the Crown is bright as a swimming pool now that the Hold’s off-limits, now that Valerie’s cave has been cut loose. Shadows don’t have a chance back there.

They’ve got nowhere else to go…

“Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Jim Moore turned slowly in the rafters, just past the airlock. The lines of his face, the edges of limbs moved in and out of eclipse.

“This is living?” Brüks tried.

“This is the waiting list.”

He thought he might have seen a smile. Brüks pushed himself across the attic and pulled a welding torch from the tool rack: checked the charge, hefted the mass. Jim Moore watched from a distance, his face full of shadow.

“Uh, Jim. About—”

“Enemy territory,” Moore said. “Couldn’t be helped.”

“Yeah.” A fifth of the world’s energy supply, in the hands of an intelligent slime mold from outer space. Not a cost-benefit decision Brüks envied. “The collateral, though…”

Moore looked away. “They’ll make do.”

Maybe he was right. Firefall had slowed Earth’s headlong rush to offworld antimatter; a power cord stretched across a hundred fifty million kilometers was far too vulnerable for a universe in which godlike extraterrestrials appeared and vanished at will. There were backups in place, fusion and forced photosynthesis, geothermal spikes driven deep into the earth’s crust to tap the leftover heat of creation. Belts would be tightened, lives might be lost, but the world would make do. It always had: the beggars and the choosers and the spoiled insatiable generations with their toys and their power-hungry virtual worlds. They would not run out of air, at least. They would not freeze to death in the endless arid wastes between the stars.

For Moore so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Twice.

“Anyway,” Moore added, “we’ll know soon enough.”

Brüks chewed his lip. “How long, exactly?”

“Could be home in a couple of weeks,” Moore said indifferently. “You’d have to ask Sengupta.”

“A couple—but the trip down took—”

“Using an I-CAN running on half a tank, and keeping our burns to an absolute minimum. We’re on purebred beamed-core antimatter now. We could make it to Earth in a few days if we opened the throttle. We’d just be going too fast to stop when we got there. End up braking halfway to Centauri.”

Or somewhere in between, Brüks thought.

He looked across the compartment. Moore pinwheeled slowly through light and shadow and looked back. This time the smile was as unmistakable as it was cryptic.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“About…?”

“We’re not headed for the Oort. I’m not taking you away on some misguided desperate search for my dead son.”

“I—Jim, I didn’t—”

“There’s no need. My son is alive.”

Maybe six months ago. Maybe even now. I supposed it’s possible. Not in six months, though. Not after the telematter stream winks out and leaves Theseus to freeze in the dark.

Not after you cut him adrift…

“Jim…”

“My son is alive,” Moore said again. “And he’s coming home.”

Brüks didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “How do you know?”

“I know.”

Brüks pushed the torch with one hand into the other, felt the solid reality of mass and inertia without: the fragility of aching body parts within. “Okay. I, um, I should take some samples—”

“Of course. Sengupta and her invading slime mold.”

“Doesn’t cost anything to check it out.”

“’Course not.” Moore reached out a casual hand, anchored himself to an off-duty ladder. “I take it the suit’s a condom.”

“No point in taking chances.” Watching Moore in his yellow paper jumpsuit, the Colonel’s naked hand clenched on untested territory.

“No helmet,” Moore observed.

“No point in going overboard, either.” If Portia ran on ambient thermal, it wouldn’t be getting enough joules from the bulkhead to sprout any pseudopods on short notice. Besides, Brüks felt stupid enough as it was.

Under Moore’s bemused gaze he positioned himself to one side of the hatch and dialed the beam down to short focus. Smart paint sparked and blistered along the lip of the hatch. Nothing screamed or recoiled. No tentacles extruded from the metal in frantic acts of self-defense. Brüks scraped a sample from the scored periphery of the burn. Another from the untouched surface a few centimeters further out. He moved systematically around the edge of the hatch, taking a sample every forty centimeters or so.

“Will you be using that on me?” Moore wondered behind him.

I should. “I don’t think that’s necessary just yet.”

Moore nodded, his face impassive. “Well. Change your mind, you know where I am.”

Brüks smiled.

I wish I did, my friend. I really wish I did.

But I don’t have a fucking clue.

Out of the attic into the Hub.

Looks like the Hub, anyway. Could be a lining. Could be a skin.

Through the equator, from frozen north to pirouetting south. Try not the touch the grate on your way through.

Could be watching me right now. I could be swimming through an eyeball.

Don’t be an idiot, Brüks. Portia had years in Icarus; you were there for three weeks. Not nearly enough time to grow enough new skin to—

Unless it didn’t grow new lining, unless it just redistributed the old. Unless it spent all those years building up extra postbiomass as an investment against future expansion.

It couldn’t just ooze through the front door and down the throat without anyone noticing. (Coasting between an eyeball and an iris, now: one open, one shut, both silver. Both blind.) No kinetic waste heat, no mass alarms—

Unless it moved slowly enough to blend in with the noise. Unless it happens to know a little more about the laws of thermodynamics than we do…

Down the spoke, putting on weight, staring hard at the gloved fingers clenched around their handhold. Alert for subtle mycelia threading between suit and stirrup. Eyes open for any bead of moisture there, some meniscus of surface tension that might belie a film in motion.

You’re being paranoid. You’re being an idiot. This is just a precaution against a remote possibility. That’s all this is.

Don’t go off the deep end. You’re Dan Brüks.

You’re not Rakshi Sengupta.

You only made her.

He heard her moving in the basement as he fed samples into the holding tray. He tried to ignore her foot taps and mutterings as the scrapings cycled through quarantine, as he gave in to reawakened hunger and wolfed down whatever the lab hab’s bare-bones galley disgorged, swallowing not quite fast enough to stay ahead of the Spirulina aftertaste.

Finally, though, he gave in: pushed from above by Moore’s matter-of-fact dissonance, pulled from below by Sengupta’s compulsive scuttling. He climbed down out of the lab, maneuvered around the giant seedpod obstruction of Sengupta’s tent beside his own. The pilot was running ConSensus on the naked bulkhead between two impoverished bands of astroturf. The Crown of Thorns rotated there in animatic real time, two of her limbs amputated at the elbow. We keep going at this rate and we’re going to be three spacesuits and a tank of O2 by the time we get home, Brüks mused.

A dot on the map: MOORE, J. floated safely distant in the attic. Other readouts formed a sparse mosaic across the bulkhead; Brüks couldn’t understand them all but he was pretty sure that one or two involved the blocking of intercom feeds.

She turned as his feet hit the deck, stared expectantly at his lapel.

“Jim,” he said.

“Yah.”

“You said he’d—changed…”

“Don’t have to take my word for it you saw it yourself he’s been changing ever since we left LEO.”

Brüks shook his head. “He was only—distracted before. Preoccupied. Never delusional.”

Sengupta ran her fingers down the wall; file listings flew by too fast for Brüks to make out. “He was transmitting into the Oort did you know that? Even before we left Earth he broke the law hell he helped make that law after Firefall nobody else could get away with it but man, he’s the great Jim Moore and he was—sending messages…”

“What kind of messages?”

“To Theseus.”

“Well, of course. He was with Mission Control.”

“And it talked back.”

“Rakshi. So what?”

“It’s talking to him now,” Sengupta said.

“Uh—what? Through all the interference?”

“We’re out of the solar static already most of it anyhow. But he’s been collecting those signals for way longer some of the timestamps go back seven years and they change. All the early stuff that’s all just telemetry you know? Lot of voice logs too but mainly just data, all the sensor records contingency analyses and about a million different scenarios that vampire that Sarasti was running when they were closing on target. It was dense there was noise all over the signal but the streams were redundant so you can make it out if you run it through the right filters right? And then Theseus goes dark you don’t hear anything for a while and then there’s this—”

She fell silent.

“There’s what, Rak?” Brüks prompted gently.

She took a breath. “There’s this other signal. Not tightbeam. Omnidirectional. Washing over the whole innersys.”

“He said Theseus went dark,” Brüks remembered. “They went in and lost contact and that was all anybody knew.”

“Oh he knew. It’s really thin and it’s so degraded you can barely make it out even with every filter and noise-correction algorithm in the arsenal I don’t think you’d even see it if you didn’t already know it was there but Colonel Carnage, man, he knew. He picked it out, and it’s… it’s…”

Her fingers danced and jittered in the air between them. The faintest breeze of static wafted through the hab: the moan of a distant ghost.

“That it?” Brüks asked.

“Almost but then you add the last couple of Fouriers and—”

—And a voice: thin, faint, sexless. There was no timbre to it, no cadence, no sense of any feeling behind the words. Any humanity it ever might have contained had been eroded away by dust and distance and the dull microwave rumble of a whole universe roaring in the background. There was nothing left but the words themselves, not reclaimed from static so much as built from the stuff. A whisper on the void:

Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection… record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty… feel your blood, syrupy… forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dil… flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack… udden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen… rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.

The hab fell silent.

“What the fuck was that?” Brüks whispered after a very long time.

“I dunno,” Sengupta drummed her fingers on her thigh. “The start of a story. It’s been coming through in bits and pieces, every few years according to the timestamps. I don’t think it’s finished, either, I think it’s still—in progress.”

“But what is—”

“I don’t know okay? It says it’s Siri Keeton. And there’s something underneath it too not words exactly I don’t know.”

“Can’t be.”

“Doesn’t matter what you or I think he thinks it’s Siri Keeton. And you know what he’s talking back to it I think he’s talking back.”

My son is alive.

“He’s got a while to wait. If that’s really coming from the Oort it’ll be a solid year before he can even think about getting an answer.”

Sengupta shrugged and looked at the wall.

He’s coming home.

NEGATIVE.

Negative.

Negative.

Torn lattices and broken nanowires and mangled microdiodes. Eviscerated smart paint. Nothing else.

For hours now he’d let worst-case scenarios play out in his imagination. Portia had expanded into the Crown. Portia had spread past the attic. Portia had oozed invisibly across every bulkhead and every surface, coated the skins of tents and of crewmembers, wrapped itself around every particle of food each of them had taken into their mouths from the moment they’d docked. Portia enveloped him like a second skin; Portia was inside him, measuring and analyzing and corroding him from the outside in and the inside out. Portia was everywhere. Portia was everything.

Bullshit.

His neocortex knew as much, even as his brain stem stole its insights and twisted them to its most paranoid ends. Whatever Portia’s ultimate origin, it was the telematter system that had built it: lasers etching blank condensates into thinking microfilms that planned and plotted and spread across each new frontier like a plague of cognition. However far it had spread, however much or little had infiltrated the Crown, it couldn’t keep growing once severed from the engine of its creation. They hadn’t been docked that long: surely the enemy couldn’t have achieved anything but the most superficial penetration of the front line.

The samples were clean.

Which proved, of course, absolutely nothing.

Aboard Icarus it had sprung shut like a leg-hold trap—but it had had unlimited power to play with, and eight years to learn how to use it. One passive filter on the solar panels, damped by a thousandth of a percent. One short-circuited electrical line, sparking and heating the surrounding metal. That’s all it would have taken—just time, and a little Brownian energy to keep it fed.

What had Sengupta said so offhandedly, just before Portia had attacked? Little warm in there…

It can’t sprint without stockpiling energy, he mused. Maybe it builds up a detectable heatprint before it pounces…

Sengupta poked her head up through the floor. “Find anything?”

Brüks shook his head as she climbed onto the deck.

“Yah well I did. I found how that fucking vampire turned you to stone and better you than me, sorry but it coulda been me or Carnage either for all I know. I think she did it to all of us.”

“Did what, exactly?”

“You ever been scared roach?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not scaring me now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He couldn’t help laughing.

“What?” Sengupta said. “What?”

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

“Roach you gotta—”

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

Sengupta smacked her lips and looked out the window.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“You see the problem,” Sengupta said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In between:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah but look where it is.”

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

“No atmo there no tanks or lines either.”

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

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

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

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

“Just LIDAR it.”

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

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

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

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

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

She was: the ’bot’s eye saw struts and plating more often than shadows within shadows. Sengupta was keeping her head down on approach. At the moment they could see nothing but the looming face of some small grated butte dead ahead.

“Right around the corner now this should do it.”

The drone farted hydrogen and drifted gently out of eclipse. Still nothing but faint amorphous yellow on infrared.

On StarlAmp, though: a silver body, legs straight arms spread, wired against the side of the ship. Boosted photons rendered the body in fragments: ridges of mirrored fabric glinting in thousand-year-old starlight, creases that swallowed any hint of mass or structure. The spacesuit was a patchwork of bright strips and dark absences, the shell of some tattered mummy with half its bandages ripped away and nothing at all underneath. But the right shoulder shone pale and clear: the double-E crest boasting the unsurpassed quality of Extreme Environments, Inc., protective gear; a name tag, programmable for the easy identification of multiple users.

LUTTERODT.

It can’t be, Brüks thought. I saw her, she was dead, her faceplate was in pieces. She was not unconscious. She was not stunned. That was not her I saw pounding on the hatch, awake again, running for her life, too frantic to notice that she’d awakened in someone else’s suit. It was not Lianna we left to burn, it was Valerie. It was Valerie. We abandoned no others who were not already dead.

We did not do this.

Sengupta was making noises somewhere between laughter and hysteria: “I told you I told you I told you.

“Not stupid at all. She knows what she’s doing.”

Out there all this time, Brüks thought. Hiding. I would never have found her. I would never have even looked.

Maybe Portia’s hiding, too. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.

“We have to tell Jim,” he said.

“Will you look at that,” Moore remarked.

Lianna’s spacesuit flickered on the dome, a snapshot taken before Sengupta had pulled the drone back for fear of setting off alarms. Not that a live feed would have been any more dynamic.

“It’s Valerie it’s fucking Valerie—”

“Apparently.”

It can’t be, Brüks thought for the thousandth time, the voice in his head weaker with each iteration. By now it was barely whispering.

“I told you we can’t trust—”

“She seems harmless enough for now,” the Colonel remarked.

“Harmless are you felching crazy don’t you remember what she—”

Moore cut her off: “There’s no way that suit could support an active metabolism all the way back to Earth and there’s no sign of any kind of octopus rig. She’s gone undead for the trip home. Probably expects to revive and jump ship when we dock in LEO. Waking up earlier wouldn’t accomplish anything except using up her O2.”

“Good then I say we give the bot some teeth and go scrape her off the hull like a goddamn barnacle while we got the chance.”

“By all means, if you think she hasn’t set up any defenses against just that scenario. If you’re certain the hull isn’t booby-trapped with a nanogram of antimatter set to blow a hole in the ship if anything disturbs her. I assumed you realized that she’s smart. You certainly pulled your drone back fast enough.”

That gave her pause. “Whadda we do then?”

“She’s waiting for us to dock. So we don’t dock.” Moore shrugged. “We jump ship and let the Crown burn up on reentry.”

“And then what surf back through the atmosphere on top of a passing comsat? If I was supposed to pack a shuttle nobody told me.”

“One thing at a time. For now, just continue your hull crawl in case she’s left anything else out there for us to find. If you’ll excuse me”—he drifted around his own axis and pushed himself off the deck—“I have my own work to do.”

He disappeared into the attic. Brüks and Sengupta stayed at the mirrorball. Buried in the shadows of some obscure province on the hull, Valerie lay still as death in her stolen skin.

“What does she want?” Brüks wondered.

“What all of them want I guess to touch the Face of God.”

The common enemy, he remembered. “That whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing went down the toilet the moment she slaughtered the Bicams. Whatever it was, she wanted sole access.”

“She’s got plans for God oh yah they all did. Too bad God had plans for them, too.”

Maybe she wasn’t happy just touching the Face of God, he mused. Maybe she wants to bring God home as a pet. Maybe, while we’ve been going crazy looking for Portia in here, it’s been out there all along sealed up in a ziplock bag.

Another good reason to burn this fucking ship. As if we needed one.

“Whatever those plans were,” he said, “they’re all dead in the water now.”

“Oh you think so huh?”

“Jim’s—”

“Oh Jim that’s a good one. Because vampires are no match for roach plans are they? So how did she get out then in the first place huh? How come she isn’t still strapped to a chair solving puzzles at SFU?”

Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn’t even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.

Valerie, walking blithely out of her cage one night and scaring the piss out of prey in a local bar for chrissakes and then walking back in again, just to show that she could.

“I don’t know,” Brüks admitted.

“I do.” A single, jerky nod. “It wasn’t just her there were others there were three other vampires in that lab and they worked together.”

He shook his head. “They’d never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they did meet they’d be more likely to tear out each other’s throats than draw up escape plans.”

“Oh they drew up their plans all right they all just did it alone.”

Brüks felt a contradiction rising on his tongue. Then it sunk in.

“Shit,” he said.

“Yah.”

“You’re saying they just knew what the others were going to do. They just—”

“Elevated respiration from the short redhead prey consistent with conspecific encounter within the past two hundred breaths,” Sengupta chanted. “East south corridors public so exclude them; conspecific must have been moved twenty meters along the north tunnel no more than one hundred twenty five breaths ago. Like that.”

Each observing the most insignificant behavioral cues, the subtlest architectural details as their masters herded them from lab to cell to conference room. Each able to infer the presence and location of the others, to independently derive the optimal specs for a rebellion launched by X individuals in Y different locations at Z time. And then they’d acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they’d never met would have worked out the same scenario.

“How do you know?” he whispered.

“It’s the only way I tried to make it work from every other angle but it’s the only model that fits. You roaches never stood a chance.”

Jesus, Brüks thought.

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

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

“Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”

“Nobody’s that territorial. Someone must’ve amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Brüks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only—deliberate.”

“How do you know that I haven’t seen that anywhere.”

“Like you said, Rak: it’s the only the model that fits. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.”

“They’re better,” Sengupta said. “Look I don’t care how helpless Carnage thinks that thing is I’m not taking my fucking eyes off it. And I’m firewalling every onboard app and every subroutine I can find until I check every last one for logic bombs.”

Now there’s a quick weekend project. Aloud: “Anything else?”

“I don’t know I’m working on it but how do I know she hasn’t already figured everything I could think of? No matter what I do I could be playing right into her hands.”

“Well, for starters,” Brüks suggested, “what about welding the airlocks shut? You can’t hack sheet metal.”

Sengupta took her eyes off the horizon, turned her head. For a moment Brüks even thought she might look at him.

“When it’s time to leave, we cut a hole,” he continued. “Or blow one. I assume this isn’t a rental. If it is, I’m pretty sure the damage deposit’s already a write-off.”

He waited for the inevitable put-down.

“That’s a great idea,” Sengupta said at last. “Brute-force baseline thinking shoulda thought of it myself. Fuck safety protocols. I’ll do the hold and the spokes you do the attic.”

The docking hatch wouldn’t take a weld: it was too reactive, its reflexes almost the stuff of living systems. Clenched tight it could withstand the point-blank heat of lasers and still dilate on command like a dark-adjusting eye. Brüks had to make do with bulkhead panels from the attic, strip them from their frames and weld them into place across the airlock’s inner wall.

Jim Moore appeared at his side, wordlessly helped him maneuver the panels into place. “Thanks,” Brüks grunted.

Moore nodded. “Good idea. Although you could probably fab a better—”

“We’re keeping it low-tech. In case Valerie hacked the fabbers.”

“Ah.” The Colonel nodded. “Rakshi’s idea, I’m guessing.”

“Uh-huh.”

Moore held the panel steady at one end while Brüks set the focus. “Serious trust issues, that one. Doesn’t like me at all.”

“You can’t really blame her, given the way you folks—manipulated her.” Brüks lined up the keyhole, fired. Down at the tip of the welder, metal flared bright as a sun with an electrical snap; but the lensing field damped that searing light down to a candle flame. The tang of metal vapor stung Brüks’s sinuses.

“I don’t think she knows about that,” Moore said mildly. “And that wasn’t me in any case.”

“Someone like you, anyway.” Aim. Fire. Snap.

“Not necessarily.”

Brüks looked up from the weld. Jim Moore stared back impassively.

“Jim, you told me how it works. Herded into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, remember? Somebody thought that up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Moore’s eyes focused on some spot just past Brüks’s left shoulder.

You’re barely even here, Brüks thought. Even now, half of you is caught up in some kind of—séance…

“There’s a whole other network out there,” Moore was saying. “Orthogonal to all the clouds, interacting with them like—I don’t know, the way dark matter interacts with baryonic matter maybe. Weak effects, and subtle. Very tough to trace, but omnipresent. Ideally suited for the kind of tweaks we use to marshal our forces, as we like to say. And do you know what’s really remarkable about it, Daniel?”

“Tell me.”

“As far as we know, nobody built the damn thing. We just discovered it. Turned it to our own ends. The theorists say it could just be an emergent property of networked social systems. Like your wife’s supraconscious networks.”

“Uh-huh,” Brüks said after a moment.

“You don’t buy it.”

He shook his head. “A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just emerged?”

Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve. Something must have created it.”

Ouch, Brüks thought.

“I’ll admit I’ve heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I’d hear it from a biologist.”

Evidently half of him was enough.

HE AWOKE TO the sound of jagged breathing. Shadows moved across the skin of his tent.

“Rak?”

The flap split down the middle. She crawled inside like some heartbroken infant returning to the womb. Even in here, cheek to jowl, she would not look at his face; she squirmed around and lay down with her back to him, curled up, fists clenched.

“Uh…,” Brüks began.

“I told you I didn’t like him I never did and now look,” Sengupta said softly. “We can’t trust him roach, I never really liked him but you could count on him at least you knew where he stood. Now he’s just—gone all the time. Don’t know what he is anymore.”

“He lost his son. He blames himself. People deal with it in different ways.”

“It’s more than that he lost his kid years ago.”

“But then he got him back. In a small way, for a little while. Can you imagine what that must be like—to, to deal with the loss of someone you loved only to find out that they’re still out there somewhere, and they’re talking and it doesn’t matter if they’re talking to you or not it’s still them, it’s new, you’re not just playing a sim or wallowing in the same old video she’s actually out there and—”

He caught himself, and wondered if she’d noticed.

I could have her back, he told himself. Not in the flesh maybe, not here in the real world but real time at least, better than this thin graveside monologue Jim clings to. All I have to do is knock on Heaven’s door…

Which was, of course, the one thing he’d sworn to never do.

“He says Siri’s alive,” Sengupta whispered. “Says he’s coming home.”

“Maybe he is. That clip from the transmission, right near the beginning, you know? The coffin.”

She ran her finger across the inside of the tent. Words wrote themselves in her wake: Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.

Brüks nodded. “That’s the one. If you take that at face value, he’s not on board Theseus anymore.”

“Lifeboat,” Sengupta said. “Shuttle.”

“Sounds like he’s coasting in. It’ll take him forever, but there’ll be a hibernaculum on board.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Jim’s not wrong: maybe his son’s coming home.”

He lay there, breathing in the scent of oil and mold and plastic and sweat, watching his breath ruffle her hair.

“Something’s coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of model…”

Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you’re a machine.

“It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character’s head, that kind of thing.”

“Why do you have to put yourself in your own head though eh why do you have to imagine what it’s like to be you?” She shook her head, a sharp little jerk of denial. “All those splines and filters and NCAs they take out so much you know, you can’t hear the words without them but you can’t hear the voice unless you strip them away. So I went back through all the steps I looked for some sweet spot where you might be able to hear and I don’t know if I did the signal’s so weak and there’s so much fucking noise but there’s this one little spot forty-seven minutes in where you can’t make out the words but you can sort of make out the voice, I can’t be sure you can never be sure but I think the harmonics are off.”

“Off how?”

“Siri Keeton’s male I don’t think this is male.”

“A woman’s voice?”

“Maybe a woman. If we’re lucky.”

“What are you saying, Rakshi? You’re saying it might not be human?”

“I don’t know I don’t know but it just feels wrong and what if it’s not a—a literary affectation what if it’s some kind of simulation? What if something out there is literally trying to imagine what it’s like to be Siri Keeton?”

“The voice of God,” Brüks murmured.

“I don’t know I really don’t. But whatever it is it’s got its hooks into a professional killer with a zombie switch in his brain. And I don’t know why but I know a hack a when I see one.”

“How could it know enough to hack him? How would it even know he exists?”

“It must’ve known Siri and Siri knew him. Maybe that’s enough.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted after a bit. “Hacking a human mind over a six-month time lag, it seems—”

“That’s enough touching,” she said.

“What?”

She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know you gerries like to touch and have meat sex and everything but the rest of us don’t need people to get us off if you don’t mind. I’ll stay here but it doesn’t mean anything okay?”

“Uh, this is my—”

“What?” she said, facing away.

“Nothing.” He settled back down, maneuvered his back against the wall of the tent. It left maybe thirty centimeters between them. He might even be able to sleep, if neither of them rolled over.

If he felt the least bit tired.

Rakshi wasn’t sleeping either, though. She was scratching at her own commandeered side of the tent, bringing up tiny light shows on the wall: a little animatic of the Crown, centered on the rafters where MOORE, J. clung to a ghost, or danced on the strings of some unknowable alien agenda, or both; the metal landscape the drone traversed in search of countermeasures; the merest smudge of infrared where a sleeping monster hid in the shadows. There really weren’t any safe places, Brüks reflected. Might as well feign what safety you could in numbers. The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.

Sengupta turned her face a little: a cheekbone, the tip of a nose in partial eclipse. “Roach?”

“I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”

“What you said before, about losing people. Different people deal in different ways that’s what you said right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“How do you deal?”

“I—” He didn’t quite know how to answer. “Maybe the person you lose comes back, someday. Maybe someday someone else fits into the same space.”

Sengupta snorted softly, and there was an echo of the old derision there: “You just sit around and wait?”

“No, I—get on with my life. Do other things.” Brüks shook his head, vaguely irritated. “I suppose you’d just whip up some customized ConSensus playmate—”

“Don’t you fucking tell me what I’d do.”

Brüks bit his lip. “Sorry.”

Stupid old man. You know where the hot buttons are and still you can’t help pushing the damn things.

There was a bright side, though, to Colonel Carnage’s deepening insanity, to Valerie’s lethal waiting games, to ghosts haunting the ether and uncertain fates waiting to pounce: at least Rakshi wasn’t hunting him anymore. He wondered at that thought, a little surprised at Sengupta’s place atop his own personal hierarchy of fear. She was just a human being, after all. Unarmed flesh and blood. She wasn’t some prehistoric nightmare or alien shapeshifter, no god or devil. She was just a kid—a friend even, insofar as she could even think in those terms. An innocent who didn’t even know his secret. Who was Rakshi Sengupta, next to monsters and cancers and a whole world on the brink? What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides?

It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors.

She was the only one he’d brought upon himself.

His own hunt wasn’t going so well.

Of course, Portia wasn’t quite so visible a target as Daniel Brüks. Brüks couldn’t subsist on the ambient thermal energy of bulkhead atoms vibrating at room temperature, couldn’t flatten himself down to paper and wrap himself around a water pipe to mask even that meager heatprint. He’d wondered about albedo or spectro, wondered if a probe built of very short wavelengths might be able to pick up the diffraction gratings that Portia used to talk—perhaps it used them as camouflage as well—but the improvised detectors he fabbed turned up nothing. Which didn’t mean they didn’t work, necessarily. Maybe it only meant that Portia kept to the Crown’s infinite fractal landscape of holes and crannies too small for bots and men.

He was almost certain it couldn’t launch an open attack without letting some tell slip beforehand: the heat signature of muscle analogs building a charge, the reallocation of mass sufficient to construct an appendage at some given set of coordinates. It could run, though, in some sort of postbiological baseline state, powered by the subtle energy resonating from the crude mass of the real substrate into the superconducting intelligence of the false one. It could think and plan forever in that mode, if Bicameral calculations had been right. It could hide.

The less he found, the more he feared. Something nearby was watching him; he felt it in his gut.

“Ship’s too damn noisy,” he confided to Sengupta. “Thermally, allometrically. Portia could be anywhere, everywhere. How would we know?”

“It’s not,” she told him.

“Why so sure? You were the one who warned me, back when—”

“I thought it might have got in yeah. Maybe it did. But not enough to get everywhere it didn’t coat everything. It didn’t swallow us.”

“How do you know?”

“It wanted to keep us in Icarus. It wouldn’t have tried to stop us from leaving if we were still inside it. It’s not everywhere.”

He thought. “It could still be anywhere.”

“Yah. But not enough to take over, just a—a little bit. Lost and alone.”

There was something in her voice. Almost like sympathy.

“Yah well why not?” she asked, although he had said nothing. “We know how that feels.”

Sailing up the center of the spine, navigating through the grand rotating bowl of the southern hemisphere, up through the starboard rabbit hole with the mirrorball gleaming to his left: Daniel Brüks, consummate parasite, finally at home in the weightless intestines of the Crown of Thorns. “I checked the numbers three times. I don’t think Portia—”

He stopped. His own face looked down at him across half the sky.

Oh fuck—

Rakshi Sengupta was a presence near the edge of vision, a vague blur of motion and color more felt than seen. He had only to turn his head and she would come into focus.

She knows she knows she knows—

“I found the fucker,” she said, and there was blood and triumph and terrible promise in her voice. He could not bring himself to face her. He could only stare at that incriminating portrait in front of him, at his personal and professional lives scrolling across the heavens big as the zodiac: transcripts, publications, home addresses; Rhona, ascendant; his goddamn swimming certificate from the third grade.

“This is him. This is the asshole who killed my—who killed seven thousand four hundred eighty two people. Daniel. Brüks.”

She was no longer talking like Rakshi Sengupta, he realized at some horrible remove. She was talking like someone else entirely.

“I said I would find him. And I found him. And here. He. Is.”

She’s talking like Shiva the fucking Destroyer.

He floated there, dead to rights, waiting for some killing blow.

“And now that I know who he is,” Shiva continued, “I am going to survive that thing on the hull and I am going to survive that thing in Colonel Carnage’s head and I am going to make it back to Earth. And I will hunt this fucker down and make him wish he had never been born.”

Wait, what—?

He forced back his own paralysis. He turned his head. His pilot, his confidante, his sworn nemesis came into focus. Her face, raised to the heavens, crawled with luminous reflections of his own damnation.

She spared him a sidelong glance; her lips were parted in a smile that would have done Valerie proud. “Want to come along for the ride?”

She’s toying with me? This is some kind of twisted—

“Uh, Rakshi—” He coughed, cleared a throat gone drier than Prineville, tried again. “I don’t know—”

She raised one preemptive hand. “I know, I know. Priorities. Counting chickens. We have other things to do. But I’ve had friends wiped by the storm troopers for hacking some senator’s diary, and then this asshole racks up a four-digit death toll and those same storm troopers protect him, you know what I mean? So yah, there are vampires and alien slime molds and a whole damn planet coming apart at the seams but I can’t do anything about that.” Her gaze on the ground, she pointed to the sky. “This I can do something about.”

You don’t know who I am. I’m right here in front of you and you’ve dredged up my whole sorry life and you’re not putting it together how can you not be putting it together?

“Bring back a little balance into the social equation.”

Maybe it’s the eye contact thing. He suppressed a hysterical little giggle. Maybe she just never looked at me in meatspace…

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

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

Why don’t you have mine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A filter.”

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

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

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

Brüks hit him in the face.

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

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

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

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

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

“Not good enough.”

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

“Tell that to Lianna.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moore shrugged. “God knows.”

“Oh, very clever.”

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

“My own people?”

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

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

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

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

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

Moore inclined his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The wrong kind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOW FAST ORBIT over a world in flames.

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

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

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

Enemy territory. Couldn’t be helped.

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

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

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

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

“We don’t dock,” Moore reminded her.

“How long?” Brüks asked.

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

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

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

Its remaining time. Measured in minutes, now.

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

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

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

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

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

It was such a long way down.

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

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

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

“Sorry—”

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

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

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

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

“—oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck—”

You little chickenshit. You turned off your comm…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone had carved a landing strip out of thin air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not clandestine enough, apparently.

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

The Colonel shrugged. “Something convenient.”

“How so?”

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

“Is it still plugged in? What if it—”

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

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

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

You got that right.

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

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

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

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

The bodies were human. Their movements were anything but.

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

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

They were dancing.

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

And faintly familiar, somehow.

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

“Echopraxia echofuckingpraxia,” Sengupta hissed at his shoulder.

Moore was back. “This way.”

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

Brüks glanced over his shoulder. “What about—”

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

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

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

“Oh.” After a moment: “Worst-case?”

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

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

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

Brüks sat in the leaning darkness and did not move.

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

Hey, you know how Icarus went away and world fell apart? Funny story…

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

Hi, honey. I’m home.

He took a deep breath.

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

Let it out again.

Someone has to tell her. She needs to know.

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

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

He sacc’ed the interface.

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

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

Please pick up.

Please be busy.

“Dan.”

Oh God. Here she is.

I must be dreaming…

“Hi, Rho.”

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

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

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch…”

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

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

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

He didn’t say anything.

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

“I can’t see you,” he said softly.

“Dan. What would be the point?”

He shook his head.

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

“Rho, you can’t stay in there.”

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Icarus.”

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

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

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

“How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?”

“I—what?”

“An elephant never forgets.”

He said nothing.

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

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

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

More than ever.

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

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

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

She paused some precise number of milliseconds.

“I don’t have to kill intelligent beings to pay the rent.”

“Nobody’s saying you’d have to—”

“Now let’s look out there, shall we? Infectious zombieism running rampant in at least twenty countries I know of. Realists and Rearguard Catholics taking shots at any heretics they can lay their crosshairs on. Food poisoning on the rise for anyone who can’t afford a consumables-class printer. They haven’t even bothered tracking species extinction rates for a decade now, and—oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.”

“The difference,” he said grimly, “is that when the power fails out here, you can curl up under a blanket. If it fails in Heaven you’re brain dead in five minutes. You’re helpless in there, Rhona, and it’s all just a house of cards waiting for…”

She didn’t answer. He couldn’t finish.

He wondered how much she’d changed already, how much of her remained behind that gentle, utterly unyielding and unreal voice. Was he even talking to an intact brain, or to some hybrid emulation of neurons and arsenide? How much of his wife had been replaced over the past two years? That incremental cannibalism, that ongoing fossilization of flesh by minerals—it had always scared the living shit out of him.

And she embraced it.

“I’ve seen things,” he told her. “World-shaking things.”

“We all have. It’s a shaky world.”

“Will you just shut up and listen to me? I’m not talking about the goddamned news feeds, I’m talking about things that—I’ve seen things that—I know why you went away, now, you know? I finally get it. I never did before, but right now I swear I’d join you in a second if I could. But I can’t. It doesn’t feel like transcendence to me, it doesn’t feel like rising into some better world, it feels like being—replaced. I mean, I can’t even stand to have a ConSensus augment in my head. It’s like anything that changes what I am kills what I am. Do you understand?”

“Of course. You’re scared.”

He nodded miserably.

“You’ve always been scared, Dan. As long as I’ve known you. You’ve spent your whole life being an asshole just to keep people from finding out. Lucky for you I could see through it, mmm?”

He said nothing.

“Know what else I see?”

He didn’t. He didn’t have a clue.

“That’s what makes you brave.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?”

“You think I don’t know? Why you keep mouthing off to the wrong people? Why you sabotaged your own career every step of the way? Why you can’t help but face off against anybody who has any power over you?”

Climbing an endless ladder toward a hungry monster. Charging into a leghold labyrinth with living walls. Biting the head off a girl half his size when she told him he couldn’t go home.

Maybe not such a proud moment, that last one…

“You’re saying I overcame my fear,” he began.

“I’m saying you gave in to it! Every time! You’re so scared of being seen as a coward you’d jump off a cliff just to prove you weren’t! You think I never saw it? I was your wife, for God’s sake. I saw your knees knocking every time you ever stood up to the schoolyard bully and got your teeth kicked in for your troubles. Your whole damn life has been one unending act of overcompensation, and you know something, love? It’s just as well. Because people need to stand up now and then, and who else is going to?”

It didn’t sink in at first. All he could do was frown and replay and try to figure out when the conversation had switched tracks like that.

“That has to be the most heart-warming definition of asshole I’ve ever heard,” he said at last.

“I liked it.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, though. I still can’t—follow you…”

“Follow me.” Her voice was flat with sudden insight. “You think…”

She won’t come out, and I can’t go in—

“Dan.” A window opened on the wall. “Look at me.”

He looked away.

He looked back.

He saw something that resembled a pickled fetus more than it did a grown woman. He saw arms and legs drawn close against the body in defiance of the cuffs at wrists and ankles, of the contractile microtubes that pulled them straight three times a day in a rearguard battle against atrophy and the shortening of tendons. He saw a shriveled face and a hairless scalp and a million carbon fibers sprouting from the base of the skull, floating like a nimbus around her head.

“This is not what I’m talking about,” something said with her voice, and her lips did not move.

“Rhona, why are you—”

“You call this change, but it isn’t,” the voice said. “Heaven isn’t the future. It’s a refuge for gutless wonders who want to hide from the future, a nature preserve for people who can’t adapt. It’s, it’s wish fulfillment for passenger pigeons. You think I was lording this over you? This is nothing but a dumping ground for useless also-rans. You don’t belong here.”

“Useless?” Brüks blinked, stunned. “Rho, don’t ever—”

“I ran away. I threw in the towel years ago. But you—you may be doing everything for the wrong reasons and you may be pissing yourself when you do it, but at least you haven’t given up. You could be hiding with the rest of us but you’re out there in a world with no reset button, a place you have no control over, a place where other people can take your whole life’s work and twist it to such horrible ends and there’s no way to ever take back what they did.”

“Rhona—what—”

“I know, Dan. Of course I know. You didn’t have to hide it from me. You couldn’t hide it from me, I’m more plugged in than you are.” The voice was gentle, and kind, and still the face of that thing did not move. “The moment they quarantined Bridgeport I knew. I almost called you then, I thought maybe you’d finally give up and come inside but—”

A mountain smashed into the back of his skull. His forehead smacked the wall of the cubby, rebounded; he toppled backward in his chair and sprawled across the deck. A red-shifted galaxy ignited, pulsing, in his head: light-years away, an upside-down giant stood silhouetted in the doorway.

He blinked, moaned, tried to focus. The starfield dimmed; the roaring in his head faded a little; the giant shrank down to merely life-size. Its depths were so black they almost glowed.

Rakshi Sengupta, meet Backdoor Brüks.

Somewhere far away, a computer called out in the voice of his dead wife. Brüks tried to bring his hand to his head; Sengupta stomped on it and leaned over him. Fresh pain erupted off the midline and shot up his arm.

“I want you to imagine something, you fucking roach.” Sengupta’s fingers danced and dipped overhead.

Oh God no, Brüks thought dully. Not you, too… He let his head loll to the side, let his eyes stray somewhere anywhere else; Sengupta kicked him in the head and made him pay attention. Her fingers clenched and interlaced and bent backwards so far he thought they’d break.

“Want you to imagine Christ on the Cross—”

He was barely even surprised when the spasms started.

Sengupta leaned in to admire her handiwork. Even now she could not look at his face. “Oh yes I have been waiting for this I have been working for this I have—”

A sound: sharp, short, loud. Sengupta fell instantly silent. Stood up.

A dark stain bloomed on her left breast.

She collapsed onto Brüks like a rag doll. They lay there a moment, cheek to cheek, like slow-dancing lovers. She coughed, tried to rise; sprawled downhill to Brüks’s side. Her dimming eyes focused, unfocused, settled finally on some point near the hatch. Jim Moore stood there like a statue, his eyes so full of grief they might as well have been dead already.

Something crossed Sengupta’s face in that moment. Not happiness, not quite. Not surprise. Enlightenment, maybe. After a moment, for the very first time, she looked Dan Brüks straight in the eye.

“Oh fuck,” she whispered as her eyes went out. “Are you ever screwed.”

“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Moore was saying, turning the gun over in his hands. “We were never close. That may have been my fault, I suppose. Although, you know, he wasn’t what you’d call an easy child…”

He’d pulled up a chair, sat hunched and leaning against the slant with his knees on his elbows, the light from the corridor catching him in quarter-profile. Brüks lay on the floor while Sengupta’s blood pooled against his side. It soaked through his clothing, stuck his jumpsuit to his ribs. His head throbbed. His throat was parched. He tried to swallow, was relieved and a bit surprised to find that he could.

“Now, though… he’s a half a light-year away, and for the first time in his life I feel that we’re actually able to talk…”

Pale nebulae clouded Sengupta’s open eyes. Brüks could see them clearly even in this dim light; could even turn his head a little to bring them into proper focus. Not Valerie’s best-laid glitch, not the total paralysis the vampire had layered down with weeks of graffiti and subtle gesticulation—or at least, not the same precision in the trigger stimulus. It probably was the same program, the same chain of photons to mirror neurons to motor nerves, still dozing in the back of his head should anyone sound the call to arms; Sengupta must have just improvised after the fact, gone back over old footage, figured out the basic moves and acted them out as best she could.

“It’s as though he knew I’d be listening all those months ago, as though he knew what I’d be thinking when his words arrived…”

She probably hadn’t even been planning for vendetta. It had probably been just another pattern-matching puzzle to keep that hyperactive brain occupied, fortuitously available when it turned out that her wife’s murderer and her adopted roach were one and the same. This rigor was half-assed and short-lived; he could feel it in his tendons. The tightness was already beginning to subside.

Still pretty impressive, though.

“I feel closer to Siri than I ever did when we were on the same planet,” Moore said. He leaned forward, assessed the living and the dead. “Does that make any sense to you?”

Brüks tried to move his tongue: it barely trembled against the palate. He focused on moving his lips. A sound emerged. A groan. It contained nothing but frustration and distress.

“I know,” Moore agreed. “And at first it felt more like just—reports, you know? Letters home, but full of facts. About the mission. I listened to that signal, oh, I would have listened forever, even if all he’d ever done was tell the tale. I learned so much about the boy, so much I never suspected.”

Take two…: “Jim…”

“And then it—changed. As though he ran out of facts and had nothing left but feelings. He stopped the reportage and started talking to me…”

“Jim—Rak—Rakshi thought—”

“I can even hear him now, Daniel. That’s the remarkable thing. The signal’s so weak it shouldn’t even be able to penetrate the atmosphere, especially with all the broadband chatter going on. And yet I can hear him, right here in the room.”

“Rakshi thought—your zombie switch—”

“I think he’s trying to warn me about something…”

“—you might have been—hacked—”

“Something about you.”

“She said you—you might not be in—control—”

Moore stopped turning the gun in his hands. Looked down at it. Brüks fired every command he could, along every motor nerve in his body. His fingers wiggled.

Moore smiled a sad little smile. “Nobody’s in control, Daniel. Do you really think you don’t have one of these zombie switches in your own head, you don’t think everyone does? We’re all just along for the ride, it’s the coming of the Lord is what it is. God’s on Its way. It’s the Angels of the Asteroids, calling the shots…”

Angels again. Divine teleoperators, powerful creatures with neither soul nor will. God’s sock puppets.

Jim Moore was turning into one before his eyes.

“What if it’s not—Siri?” Brüks managed. His tongue seemed to be thawing a bit. “What if, what if it’s something else…”

The Colonel smiled again. “You don’t think I’d know my own son.”

“It knows your son, Jim.” Of course it knows him, it mutilated him, can’t you remember the goddamn slide show? “It knows Siri, and Siri knows you, and—and it’s smart Jim, it’s so fucking smart…”

“So are you.” Moore eyed him curiously. “Smarter than you let on, anyway.”

If only.

He wasn’t smart enough to get out of this. Not smart enough to outthink some interstellar demon who could hack a man’s brain across five trillion kilometers and a six-month time lag, who could trickle its own parasitic subroutines into the host’s head and lead him around in real time. Assuming that Moore hadn’t just gone batshit crazy on his own, of course. That was probably the most parsimonious explanation.

Not that it mattered. Brüks wasn’t smart enough to get out of that either.

Moore lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to do that, you know. She was a good person, she was just—misguided. I suppose I may have overreacted. I only did it to protect you.”

Behind him, up among the crossbeams that ribbed the ceiling, one shadow stirred among others. Brüks blinked and it was gone.

“I wonder if that was such a good idea…”

“It was,” Brüks croaked. “Really. It—”

Faster than he could finish: a shape detached itself from the ceiling, swayed silently against the light and folded down over Moore like a praying mantis. Inhuman fingers, blurred in motion; silhouetted lips in motion.

Without any fuss at all, Moore stopped moving.

Valerie dropped soundlessly to the deck, crossed the room, stared down at Daniel Brüks as he slowly, painfully bent one knee. It was the closest thing to fight/flight left in him. She bent close and whispered—

“The tomb at Aramathea.”

His body unlocked.

He gulped air. The vampire stood, stepped back, gave him a small cryptic smile.

Brüks swallowed. “Saw you burn,” he managed. Twice.

She didn’t even dignify it with an answer.

We expect a trick, and we find one, and we pat ourselves on the back. We find her pinned to the hull—think we do, anyway—and just stop looking. Of course she’s out there: there she is. There goes her hab and all its tripwires. Why look any further?

Why look inside the Crown? Why check the hatches in the shuttle…?

He propped himself up on his elbows; the sodden jumpsuit peeled from the deck as if steeped in half-set epoxy. Valerie watched impassively as he got to his feet.

“So what now? You give me a ten-second head start to make it sporti—”

A blur and a hiss and he was off his feet, strangling and kicking a meter from the deck with her hand around his throat. In the next instant he was back on the floor, collapsed in a heap while Valerie grinned down with far too many teeth.

“All this experience,” she remarked while he gasped for breath, “and you’re still an idiot.”

Catch and release. Cat and mouse. Just having fun, he supposed. In her way.

“Aircraft are all dead,” Valerie said. “I find a ride in the moon pool, though. Get us to the mainland at least.”

“Us,” Brüks said.

“Swim if you’d rather. Or stay.” She dropped her chin in the direction of the statue frozen on its chair. “If you stay you should kill him though. Or he kills you when he unlocks.”

“He’s my friend. He protected me, before—”

“Only part of him. OS conflict. It resolves soon enough, it’s resolving now.” Valerie turned toward the door. “Don’t wait too long. He’s on a mission from God.”

She stepped into the light. Brüks looked back at his friend: Jim Moore sat staring at the floor, face unreadable. He blinked, very slowly, as Brüks watched.

He did not cry out against his abandonment.

Brüks followed the monster along slanting corridors and companionways, down endless flights of emergency-lit stairs into the bowels of the gyland, unto its very anus: an airlock that would have felt too small at five times the size, given present company. The chamber beyond echoed like a cave and looked a little like one, too: pipes and hoses and cylinders of compressed gas jutted like stalactites from the angled ceiling. The room was half underwater; the ocean had breached the banks of the moon pool as the gyland listed, flooded down to some temporary equilibrium halfway up the far bulkhead. Diffuse gray-green light filtered up from outside and wriggled dimly across every surface.

It was only a small port in the storm. There was probably a bay big enough to dock a Kraken or a Swordfish somewhere else on this floating behemoth, but here the berths were for smaller vehicles. A dozen parking racks hung from an overhead conveyer train, most of them empty. A two-person midwater scout rested snuggly in one clenched set of grappling claws, the end of a service crane still embedded in its shattered crystal snout. Another dangled precariously from the ceiling, nose submerged, tail entangled in its broken perch.

A third, apparently intact, floated just off the flooded deck: broad shark body, whale’s flat flukes, the great saucer eyes of some mesopelagic hatchetfish bridging the snout. Aspidontus, according to the letters etched just above the countershade line. It bumped gently against the edge of the moon pool—tail to the bulkhead, nose poking out over the hole in the floor—a waist-deep wade down the flooded incline.

A fucking cold wade, as it turned out. Valerie leapt the distance from a standing start, sailed over Brüks’s head and landed one step from the hatch. The vessel dipped and rolled under the impact; she didn’t even wobble. By the time Brüks had dragged his soaking legs and shriveled testicles onto the hull, she was inside and the little sub was humming awake.

Three seats. Brüks dropped into shotgun, pulled the hatch down overhead, dogged it. Valerie tapped the dashboard; Aspidontus shook herself, thrashed her flukes, humped forward half-stranded over loose canisters and bits of broken podmates. She hung balanced for a moment, belly scraping the submerged edge of the pool; her flukes slapped the water like a dolphin’s and she was free.

Still dark overhead, though, for all the hours that must have passed since sunrise. The derelict gyland loomed above them like the belly of a mountain, all too visible from underneath, ready to drop down and squash them flat without warning. There was nothing beyond the cockpit: no fish, no plankton swarms, no sun-dappled waves sending shafts of light dancing through the water. Not even the indestructible drifts of immortal plastic debris so ubiquitous from pole to pole. Nothing but heavy blackness above and dim green murk everywhere else. And Aspidontis: a speck embedded in glass.

And where to now? he wondered. Why did I even come along, why did she even take me, what am I to this thing other than a walking lunch? How the hell did I ever decide that Jim Moore was less dangerous than a goddamn vampire?

But he knew it was a meaningless question. It was predicated on the assumption that the decision had ever been his to begin with.

Darkness receded above, encroached from below: Aspidontus was diving. A hundred meters. A hundred fifty. They were in the middle of the Pacific. The seabed was four kilometres down. There was nothing in between, unless Valerie had arranged a rendezvous with another submarine.

Two hundred meters. Aspidontus levelled off.

Right. Beneath the thermocline. Stealthed to sonar.

The vessel angled to port. Valerie hadn’t touched the controls since they’d left the surface. She’d probably given the sub its marching orders while Dan Brüks had been pleading with a brain in a tank. The course was laid out right there on the dashboard, a faint golden thread wound along the eastern North Pacific. The viewing angle was bad, though; too small, too many contours. He could not make out the details.

He knew where he’d have chosen to go. This had all started in the desert; the Bicamerals had manipulated him onto their goddamned chessboard for reasons of their own, and if they’d ever planned on letting him in on the joke, Portia and Valerie and taken them out of the game before they’d had the chance. But the Bicamerals were legion, and not all of them had been burned on the altar. If there were answers to be had, the hive would have them.

He leaned sideways until the road map angled into clearer view: grunted to himself, completely unsurprised. Valerie stared into the abyss and said nothing.

She’d laid in a course for the Oregon coast.