Echopraxia (25 page)

“Juppyu imaké.”

Moore rose from a defensive crouch, studied hands half-raised against blows that hadn't materialized. Brought them down again.

Chinedum Ofoegbu rose from the throat of the
Crown
.

You can't do that,
Brüks thought, astonished.
You're stuck in the Hold for another three days.

“
Prothat blemsto bethe?
” Ofoegbu's hands fluttered like a pianist's against an invisible keyboard. The light in his eyes slithered like the aurora borealis.

I don't care how smart you are. You're still made out of meat. You can't just
step out
of a decompression chamber.

The Bicameral's blood must be fizzing in its flesh. All those bubbles out on early parole, all those gases freed from the weight of too many atmospheres: all set loose to party it up in the joints and capillaries …

One's all it'll take, one tiny bubble in the brain. A pinpoint embolism in the right spot and you're
dead
, just like that.

“Your
vampire
—” Sengupta began, before Moore preempted her with: “We have some
mission-critical
issues to deal with…”

But there is no
you
anymore, is there? You're just a body part, just a node in a network. Expendable. When the hive cuts you loose, will you get it all back? Will Chinedum Ofoegbu wake up in time to die a roach's death? Will he change his mind too late, will he have a chance to feel betrayed before he stops feeling anything at all?

Ofoegbu coughed a fine red mist into the room. Blood and stars bubbled in his eyes. He began to fold at the middle.

Lianna Lutterodt climbed up in his wake, bent in on herself, one arm clenched tight to her side. With the other she reached out, wincing; but her master was too far away. She pushed off the lip of the south pole, floated free, caught him. Every movement took a visible toll.

“If you people are through trying to kill each other”—she coughed, tried again—“maybe someone could help me get him back to the Hold before he fucking
dies
.”

*   *   *

“Holy
shit,
” Brüks said, dropping back into Commons. The node was back with its network. Lianna was meshed and casted and had retreated to her rack while her broken parts stitched themselves back together.

Moore had already cracked open the scotch. He held out a glass.

Brüks almost giggled. “Are you kidding?
Now?
”

The Colonel glanced at the other man's hands: they trembled. “Now.”

Brüks took the tumbler, emptied it. Moore refilled it without asking.

“This can't go on,” Brüks said.

“It won't. It didn't.”

“So Chinedum stopped her. This time. And it just about killed him.”

“Chinedum was only the interface, and she knows that. She would have gained nothing and risked everything by attacking him.”

“What if she'd pulled that shit a few days ago? What if she pulls it again?” He shook his head. “Lee could have been
killed
. It was just dumb luck that—”

“We got off lightly,” Moore reminded him. “Compared to some.”

Brüks fell silent.
She killed one of her zombies.

“Why did she do it?” he asked after a moment. “Food? Fun?”

“It's a problem,” the Colonel admitted. “Of course it's a problem.”

“Can't we do anything?”

“Not at the moment.” He took a breath. “Technically, Sengupta
did
attack first.”

“Because Valerie
killed
someone!”

“We don't know that. And even if she did, there are—jurisdictional issues. She may have been within her rights, legally. Anyway, it doesn't matter.”

Brüks stared, speechless.

“We're a hundred million klicks from the nearest legitimate authority,” Moore reminded him. “Any that might happen by wouldn't look more kindly on us than on Valerie. Legalities are irrelevant out here; we just have to play the hand we're dealt. Fortunately we're not entirely on our own. The Bicamerals are at least as smart and capable as she is. Smarter.”

“I'm not worried about their
capabilities
. I don't trust them.”

“Do you trust me?” Moore asked unexpectedly.

Brüks considered a moment. “Yes.”

The Colonel inclined his head. “Then trust them.”

“I trust your
intentions,
” Brüks amended softly.

“Ah. I see.”

“You're too close to them, Jim.”

“No closer than you've been, lately.”

“They had their hooks into you
way
before I joined the party. You and Lianna, the way you just—
accept
everything…”

Moore said nothing.

Brüks tried again. “Look, don't get me wrong. You went up against a vampire for us, and you could've been killed, and I know that. I'm grateful. But we got lucky, Jim: you're usually wrapped up in that little ConSensus shell you've built for yourself, and if Valerie had chosen any other time to torque out—”

“I'm
wrapped up in that shell,
” Moore said levelly, “dealing with a potential threat to the whole—”

“Uh-huh. And how many new insights have you gained, squeezing the same signals over and over again since we broke orbit?”

“I'm sorry if that leaves you feeling vulnerable. But your fears are unfounded. And in any case”—Moore swallowed his own dram—“planetary security has to take priority.”

“This isn't about planetary security,” Brüks said.

“Of course it is.”

“Bullshit. It's about your son.”

Moore blinked.

“Siri Keeton, synthesist on the
Theseus
mission,” Brüks continued, more gently. “It's not as though the crew roster was any kind of secret.”

“So.” Moore's voice was glassy and expressionless. “You're not as completely self-absorbed as you appear.”

“I'll take that as a compliment,” Brüks tried.

“Don't. The presence of my son on that mission doesn't change the facts on the ground. We're dealing with agents of unknown origin and vastly superior technology. It is my
job
—”

“And you're doing that job with a brain that still runs on love and kin selection and all those other Stone Age things we seem hell-bent on cutting out of the equation. That would be enough to tear anyone apart, but it's even harder for you, isn't it? Because one of those facts on the ground is that you're the reason he was out there in the first place.”

“He's out there because he's the most qualified for the mission. Full stop. Anyone in my place would have made the same decision.”

“Sure. But we both know
why
he was the most qualified.”

Moore's face turned to granite.

“He was most qualified,” Brüks continued, “because he got certain augments during childhood. And he got those augments because you chose a certain line of work with certain risks, and one day some asshole with a grudge and a splicer kit took a shot at you and hit him instead. You think it's your fault that some Realist fuckwit missed the target. You blame yourself for what happened to your son. It's what parents
do
.”

“And you know all about being a parent.”

“I know about being
Human,
Jim. I know what people tell themselves. You made Siri the man for the job before he was even born, and when the Fireflies dropped in you had to put him at the top of the list and ship him out and now all you've got is those goddamned signals, that's your last link, and I
understand,
man. It's natural, it's Human, it's, it's
inevitable
because you and I, we haven't gotten around to cutting those parts out of us yet. But just about everyone else around here has, and we can't afford to ignore that. We can't afford to be—distracted. Not here, not
now
.”

He held out his glass, and felt a vague and distant kind of relief at how steady his hand was around the crystal. Colonel Jim Moore regarded it for a moment. Looked back at the half-empty bottle.

“Bar's closed,” he said.

 

PREY

Of greater concern are the smaller networks pioneered by the so-called Bicameral Order, which—while having shown no interest in any sort of military or political activism—remain susceptible to weaponization. Although this faction shares tenuous historical kinship with the Dharmic religions behind the Moksha Mind, they do not appear to be pursuing that group's explicit goal of self-annihilation; each Bicameral hive is small enough (hence, of sufficiently low latency) to sustain a coherent sense of conscious self-awareness. This would tend to restrict their combat effectiveness both in terms of response-latency and effective size. However, the organic nature of Bicameral MHIs leaves them less susceptible to the signal-jamming countermeasures that bedevil hard-tech networks. From the standpoint of brute military force, therefore, the Bicamerals probably represent the greatest weaponization potential amongst the world's extant mind hives. This is especially troubling in light of the number of technological and scientific advances attributable to the Order in recent years, many of which have already proven destabilizing.

—J. Moore, “Hive Minds, Mind Hives, and Biological Military Automata: The Role of Collective Intelligence in Offline Combat,”
Journal of Military Technology
68 no. 14 (December 3, 2095)

 

 

BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK.

—REVELATION 3:20

A SUN GROWN
huge. A shadow on its face. A fleck, then a freckle: a dot, a disk, a
hole
. Smaller than a sunspot—darker, more symmetrical—and then larger. It grew like a perfect tumor, a black planetary disk where no planet could be, swelling across the photosphere like a ravenous singularity. A sun that covered half the void: a void that covered half the sun. Some critical, razor-thin instant passed and foreground and background had switched places, the sun no longer a disk but a brilliant golden iris receding around a great dilating pupil. Now it was less than that, a fiery hoop around a perfect starless hole; now a circular thread, writhing, incandescent, impossibly fine.

Gone.

A million stars winked back into the firmament, cold dimensionless pinpricks strewn in bands and random handfuls across half the sky. But the other half remained without form and void—and now the tumor that had swallowed the sun was gnawing outward at the stars as well. Brüks looked away from that great maw and saw a black finger lancing through the starfield directly to port: a dark spire, five hundred kilometers long, buried deep in the shade. Brüks downshifted his personal spectrum a few angstroms and it glowed red as an ember, an infrared blackbody rising from the exact center of the disk ahead. Heat radiator. A hairbreadth from the center of the solar system, it never saw the sun.

He tugged nervously at the webbing holding him to the mirrorball. Sengupta was strapped into her usual couch on his left, Lianna to his right, Moore to hers. The old warrior had barely said a word to him since Brüks had broached the subject of his son. Some lines were invisible until crossed, apparently.

Or maybe they were perfectly visible, to anyone who wasn't an insensitive dolt. Empiricists always kept their minds open to alternative hypotheses.

He sought refuge in the view outside, dark to naked eyes but alive on tactical. Icons, momentum vectors, trajectories. A thin hoop of pale emerald shrank across the forward view, drawing tight around the
Crown
's nose: the rim of her reflective parasol—erased from ConSensus in deference to an uninterrupted view—redundant now, spooling tight into stowage. The habs had already been folded back and tied down for docking. Beyond the overlays, the
Crown
fell silently past massive structures visible only in their absence: shadows against the sky, the starless silhouettes of gantries and droplet-conveyors, endless invisible antennae belied by the intermittent winking of pilot lights strung along their lengths.

The
Crown
bucked. Thrusters flared like the sparks of arc welders in the darkness ahead.
Down
returned, dead forward. Brüks fell gently from the couch into the elastic embrace of his harness, hung there while the
Crown
's incandescent brakes gave dim form to the face of a distant cliff: girders, the cold dead cones of dormant thrusters, great stratified slabs of polytungsten. Then the sparks died, and
down
with them. All that distant topography vanished again. The
Crown of Thorns
continued to fall, gently as thistledown.

“Looks normal so far,” Moore remarked to no one in particular.

“Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of standing guard?” Brüks wondered. There'd been an announcement, anyway, in the weeks after Firefall.
While we have seen no evidence of ill will on the part of
blah blah blah
prudent to be cautious
yammer yammer
cannot afford to leave such a vital source of energy undefended in the current climate of uncertainty
yammer blah.

Moore said nothing. After a moment Lianna took up the slack: “The place is almost impossible to see in the glare unless you know where to look. And there's nothing like a bunch of big obvious heatprints going back and forth for telling the other guys where to look.”

It was as much as she'd said—to Brüks, at least—since Valerie had flexed her claws in the Hub. He took it as a good sign.

More sparks, tweaking the night in split-second bursts. Wireframes crawled all over tactical now, highlighting structures the naked eye could barely discern even as shadows. Constellations ignited on the cliff ahead, lights triggered by the presence of approaching mass, dim and elegant as the photophores of deep-sea fish. Candles in the window to guide travelers home. They rippled and flowed and converged on a monstrous gray lamprey uncoiling from the landscape beneath. Its great round mouth pulsed and puckered and closed off the port bow.