"You might even read it off me directly."
"That's why you—" I shook my head. "I thought that was because we were meat."
"That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.
For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.
I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.
Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it…
"Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked.
"Vampires have folk tales?"
He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"Amanda is not planning a mutiny."
"What? You know about—"
"She doesn't even want to. Ask her if you like."
"No—I—"
"You value objectivity."
It was so obvious I didn't bother answering.
He nodded as if I had. "Synthesists can't have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else's. The crew holds you in contempt. Amanda wants me relieved of command. Half of us is you. I think the word is project. Although," — he cocked his head a bit to one side—"lately you improve. Come."
"Where?"
"Shuttle bay. Time to do your job."
"My—"
"Survive and bear witness."
"A drone—"
"Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before it gets away. It can't convince anyone. It can't counter rationalizations and denials. It can't matter. And vampires—" he paused—"have poor communications skills."
It should have been cause for petty, selfish rejoicing.
"It all comes down to me," I said. "That's what you're saying. I'm a fucking stenographer, and it's all on me."
"Yes. Forgive me for that."
"Forgive you?"
Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared.
"I don't know what I'm doing."
The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight.
And counting.
Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up. Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of revised projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben like a filamentous cocoon; Theseus was a naked speck in the middle distance.
I expected any number of those lines to skewer us like needles through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though, the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths couldn't simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently they still had to ease into the curve.
After Rorschach's dive, I'd been starting to think the laws of physics didn't apply.
The trajectories were close enough, though. At least three skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their next orbits.
Sarasti reached for his injector, the blood rising in his face. "Time to go. We refit Charybdis while you're sulking."
He held the hypo to his throat and shot up. I stared at ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a streetlight.
"Now, Siri."
He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway, grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped.
The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling the airspace, standing guard over the fab plants and shuttle 'locks, clinging like giant insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently, the spine itself was stretching.
It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations flexed and relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more lab space.
Or more infantry. Theseus was increasing the size of the battlefield.
"Come." The vampire turned aft.
Bates broke in from up front. "Something's happening."
An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates' feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EM-enhanced equatorial quadrant only a few thousand klicks on a side. The clouds boiled down there, a cyclonic knot of turbulence swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great mass, rising.
Sarasti clicked.
"DTI?" Bates said.
"Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage.
Theseus shuddered.
We've been hit, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding expansion cranked into overdrive; the pleated wall lurched and accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed hatch receded up ahead—
— receded overhead.
The walls weren't moving at all. We were falling, to the sudden strident bleating of an alarm.
Something nearly yanked my arm from its socket: Sarasti had reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech of torquing metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet.
I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away: the ship was bending in the middle and down had started to climb the walls. Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisy-chain pendulum.
"Bates! James!" The vampire roared. His grip on my wrist trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it.
"Susan James has barricaded herself in the bridge and shut down autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless. "She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for at least twenty-seven minutes."
The ship, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The Captain itself. On Public Address.
That was unusual.
"Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!"
Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I couldn't make them out.
Without warning, Sarasti let go.
He dropped obliquely in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead waited to swat him like an insect. In half a second both his legs would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright—
But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming at the mouth.
"Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the wall.
He's having a seizure, I realized.