But those shredded pieces kept falling, and suddenly the ground beneath was alive with motion. I zoomed the view: scramblers surged across Rorschach's hull like an orgy of snakes, naked to space. Some linked arms, one to another to another, built squirming vertebral daisy-chains anchored at one end. They lifted from the hull, waved through the radioactive vacuum like fronds of articulated kelp, reaching—grasping—
Neither Bates nor her machines were stupid. They targeted the interlinked scramblers as ruthlessly as they'd gone after the escapees, and with a much higher total score. But there were simply too many targets, too many fragments snatched in passing. Twice I saw dismembered bits of Stretch and Clench caught by their brethren.
The ruptured hab loomed across ConSensus like a great torn leukocyte. Another alarm buzzed somewhere nearby: proximity alert. Cunningham shot into the drum from somewhere astern, bounced off a cluster of pipes and conduits, grabbed for support. "Holy shit—we are leaving, aren't we? Amanda?"
"No," Sarasti answered from everywhere.
"What—" does it fucking take? I caught myself. "Amanda, what if it fires on the ship?"
"It won't." She didn't take her eyes from her windows.
"How do you—"
"It can't. If it had spring-loaded any more firepower we'd have seen a change in thermal and microallometry." A false-color landscape rotated between us, its latitudes measured in time, its longitudes in delta-mass. Kilotons rose from that terrain like a range of red mountains. "Huh. Came in just under the noise lim—"
Sarasti cut her off. "Robert. Susan. EVA."
James blanched. "What?" Cunningham cried.
"Lab module's about to impact," the vampire said. "Salvage the samples. Now." He killed the channel before anyone could argue.
But Cunningham wasn't about to argue. He'd just seen our death sentence commuted: why would Sarasti care about retrieving biopsy samples if he didn't think we stood a chance of escaping with them? The biologist steadied himself, braced towards the forward hatch. "I'm there," he said, shooting into the bow.
I had to admit it. Sarasti's psychology was getting better.
It wasn't working on James, though, or Michelle, or—I couldn't quite tell who was on top. "I can't go out there, Siri, it's—I can't go out there…"
Just observe. Don't interfere.
The ruptured inflatable collided impotently to starboard and flattened itself against the carapace. We felt nothing. Far away and far too near, the legions thinned across Rorschach's surface. They disappeared through mouths that puckered and dilated and magically closed again in the artefact's hull. The emplacements fired passionlessly at those who remained.
Observe.
The Gang of Four strobed at my side, scared to death.
Don't interfere.
"It's okay," I said. "I'll go."
The open airlock was like a dimple in the face of an endless cliff. I looked out from that indentation into the abyss.
This side of Theseus faced away from Big Ben, away from the enemy. The view was still unsettling enough: an endless panorama of distant stars, hard and cold and unwinking. A single, marginally brighter one, shining yellow, still so very far away. Any scant comfort I might have taken from that sight was lost when the sun went out for the briefest instant: a tumbling piece of rock, perhaps. Or one of Rorschach's shovelnosed entourage.
One step and I might never stop falling.
But I didn't step, and I didn't fall. I squeezed my pistol, jetted gently through the opening, turned. Theseus carapace curved away from me in all directions. Towards the prow, the sealed observation blister rose above the horizon like a gunmetal sunrise. Further aft a tattered snowdrift peeked across the hulclass="underline" the edge of the broken labhab.
And past it all, close enough to touch, the endless dark cloudscape of Big Ben: a great roiling wall extending to some flat distant horizon I could barely grasp even in theory. When I focused it was dark and endless shades of gray—but dim, sullen redness teased the corner of my eye when I looked away.
"Robert?" I brought Cunningham's suit feed to my HUD: a craggy, motionless ice field thrown into high contrast by the light of his helmet. Interference from Rorschach's magnetosphere washed over the image in waves. "You there?"
Pops and crackles. The sound of breath and mumbling against an electrical hum. "Four point three. Four point oh. Three point eight—"
"Robert?"
"Three point—shit. What—what are you doing out here, Keeton? Where's the Gang?"
"I came instead." Another squeeze of the trigger and I was coasting towards the snowscape. Theseus convex hull rolled past, just within reach. "To give you a hand."
"Let's move it then, shall we?" He was passing through a crevice, a scorched and jagged tear in the fabric that folded back at his touch. Struts, broken panels, dead robot arms tangled through the interior of the ice cave like glacial debris; their outlines writhed with static, their shadows leaped and stretched like living things in the sweep of his headlight. "I'm almost—"
Something that wasn't static moved in his headlight. Something uncoiled, just at the edge of the camera's view.
The feed died.
Suddenly Bates and Sarasti were shouting in my helmet. I tried to brake. My stupid useless legs kicked against vacuum, obeying some ancient brainstem override from a time when all monsters were earthbound, but by the time I remembered to use my trigger finger the labhab was already looming before me. Rorschach reared up behind it in the near distance, vast and malign. Dim green auroras writhed across its twisted surface like sheet lightning. Mouths opened and closed by the hundreds, viscous as bubbling volcanic mud, any one of them large enough to swallow Theseus whole. I barely noticed the flicker of motion just ahead of me, the silent eruption of dark mass from the collapsed inflatable. By the time Cunningham caught my eye he was already on his way, backlit against the ghastly corpselight flickering on Rorschach's skin.
I thought I saw him waving, but I was wrong. It was only the scrambler wrapped around his body like a desperate lover, moving his arm back and forth while it ran the thrust pistol tethered to his wrist. Bye-bye, that arm seemed to say, and fuck you, Keeton.
I watched for what seemed like forever, but no other part of him moved at all.
Voices, shouting, ordering me back inside. I hardly heard them. I was too dumbfounded by the basic math, trying to make sense of the simplest subtraction.
Two scramblers. Stretch and Clench. Both accounted for, shot to pieces before my eyes.
"Keeton, do you read? Get back here! Acknowledge!"
"I—it can't be," I heard myself say. "There were only two—"
"Return to the ship immediately. Acknowledge."
"I—acknowledged…"
Rorschach's mouths snapped shut at once, as though holding a deep breath. The artefact began to turn, ponderously, a continent changing course. It receded, slowly at first, picking up speed, turning tail and running. How odd, I thought. Maybe it's more afraid than weare…
But then Rorschach blew us a kiss. I saw it burst from deep within the forest, ethereal and incandescent. It shot across the heavens and splashed against the small of Theseus back, making a complete and utter fool of Amanda Bates. The skin of our ship flowed there, and opened like a mouth, and congealled in a soundless frozen scream.