"There's something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can't you see it?"
"N-no. My HUD's down—"
Sascha broke in: "How can he not see it it's right th—"
Bates barked over her: "It's man-sized, radially symmetrical, eight, nine arms. Like tentacles, but—segmented. Spiky."
"I don't see anything," I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship's spine, watching as we laid our best plans.
I saw Michelle the synesthesiac, curled into a fetal balclass="underline" You can't see it…it's in—visible…
"What's it doing?" I called. Why can't I see it? Why can't I seeit?
"Just—floating there. Kind of waving. Oh, sh—Keet—"
The grunt skidded sideways, as if slapped by a giant hand. It bounced off the wall and suddenly the laser link was back, filling the HUD with intelligence: first-person perspectives of Bates and Sascha racing along alien tunnels, a grunt's-eye view of a space suit with Keeton stenciled across its breastplate and there, right beside it, some thing like a rippling starfish with too many arms—
The Gang barreled around the curve and now I almost could see something with my own eyes, flickering like heat-lightning off to one side. It was large, and it was moving, but somehow my eyes just slid off every time they tried to get a fix. It's not real, I thought, giddy with hysterical relief, it's just another hallucination but then Bates sailed into view and it was right there, no flickering, no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid, undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and scrambled over our heads, segmented arms flailing like whips. A sudden crackling buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting free again, charred and smoking.
A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down. Three grunts hovered in formation in the middle of the passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal proboscis sliding back into its sheath. Bates shut the grunt down before it had finished closing its mouth.
Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar of heavy breathing.
The offlined grunt drifted in the murky air. The alien carcass bumped gently off the wall, twitching: a hydra of human backbones, scorched and fleshless. It didn't look much like my on-board visions after all.
For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I found that almost reassuring.
The two active grunts panned the fog until Bates gave them new orders; then one turned to secure the carcass, the other to steady its fallen comrade. Bates grabbed the dead grunt and unplugged its tether. "Fall back. Slowly. I'm right behind you."
I tweaked my jets. Sascha hesitated. Coils of shielded cable floated about us like umbilical cords.
"Now," Bates said, plugging a feed from her own suit directly into the offlined grunt.
Sascha started after me. Bates took up the rear. I watched my HUD; a swarm of multiarmed monsters would appear there any moment.
They didn't. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates' machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited. Its inhabitants were invisible.
Sometimes. Sort of.
And, oh yeah. We'd just killed one.
Bates threw the deactivated grunt into the sky as soon as we'd made vacuum. Its comrades used it for target practice while we strapped in, firing and firing until there was nothing left but cooling vapor. Rorschach spun even that faint plasma into filigree before it faded.
Halfway back to Theseus, Sascha turned to the Major: "You—"
"No."
"But— they do shit on their own, right? Autonomous."
"Not when they're slaved."
"Malfunction? Spike?"
Bates didn't answer.
She called ahead. By the time we made it back Cunningham had grown another little tumor on Theseus spine, a remote surgery packed with teleops and sensors. One of the surviving grunts grabbed the carcass and jumped ship as soon as we passed beneath the carapace, completing the delivery as we docked.
We were born again to the fruits of a preliminary necropsy. The holographic ghost of the dissected alien rose from ConSensus like some flayed and horrific feast. Its splayed arms looked like human spinal columns. We sat around the table and waited for someone else to take the first bite.
"Did you have to shoot it with microwaves?" Cunningham sniped, tapping the table. "You completely cooked the animal. Every cell was blown out from the inside."
Bates shook her head. "There was a malfunction."
He gave her a sour look. "A malfunction that just happens to involve precise targeting of a moving object. It doesn't sound random to me."
Bates looked back evenly. "Something flipped autonomous targeting from off to on. A coin toss. Random."
"Random is—"
"Give it a rest, Cunningham. I don't need this shit from you right now."
His eyes rolled in that smooth dead face, focused suddenly on something overhead. I followed his gaze: Sarasti stared down at us like an owl panning for meadow voles, drifting slowly in the Coriolis breeze.
No visor this time, either. I knew he hadn't lost it.
He fixed Cunningham. "Your findings."
Cunningham swallowed. Bits and pieces of alien anatomy flickered with color-coded highlights as he tapped his fingers. "Right, then. I'm afraid I can't give you much at the cellular level. There's not much left inside the membranes. Not many membranes left, for that matter. In terms of gross morphology, the specimen's dorsoventrally compressed and radially symmetrical, as you can see. Calcareous exoskeleton, keratinised plastic cuticle. Nothing special."
Bates looked skeptical. "Plastic skin is 'nothing special'?"
"Given the environment I was half-expecting a Sanduloviciu plasma. Plastic's simply refined petroleum. Organocarbon. This thing is carbon-based. It's even protein based, although its proteins are a great deal tougher than ours. Numerous sulphur cross-bonds for lateral bracing, as far as I could tell from what your grunts didn't denature." Cunningham's eyes looked past us all; his consciousness was obviously far aft, haunting remote sensors. "The thing's tissues are saturated with magnetite. On earth you find that material in dolphin brains, migratory birds, even some bacteria—anything that navigates or orients using magnetic fields. Moving up to macrostructures we've got a pneumatic internal skeleton, which as far as I can tell doubles as musculature. Contractile tissue squeezes gas through a system of bladders that stiffen or relax each segment in the arms."
The light came back into Cunningham's eyes long enough to focus on his cigarette. He brought it to his mouth, dragged deeply, set it down again. "Note the invaginations around the base of each arm." Flaccid balloons glowed orange on the virtual carcass. "Cloacae, you could call them. Everything opens into them: they eat, breathe, and defecate through the same little compartment. No other major orifices."
The Gang made a face that said Sascha, grossed out. "Don't things get—clogged up? Seems inefficient."
"If one gets plugged, there's eight other doors into the same system. You'll wish you were so inefficient the next time you choke on a chicken bone."
"What does it eat?" Bates asked.
"I couldn't say. I found gizzard-like contractiles around the cloacae, which implies they chew on something, or did at some point in their history. Other than that…" He spread his hands; the cigarette left faint streamers in its wake. "Inflate those contractiles enough and you create an airtight seal, by the way. In conjunction with the cuticle, that would allow this organism to survive briefly in vacuum. And we already know it can handle the ambient radiation, although don't ask me how. Whatever it uses for genes must be a great deal tougher than ours."