“Which I’m guessing it did,” Brüks said.
Moore eyed the empty glass at his side, as if weighing the wisdom of having set it down. After a moment he reached for the bottle.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, refilling his glass. “Theseus got—decoyed en route, did you know that? Did they ever make that public?”
Brüks shook his head. “There was something about course corrections out past Jupiter, new and better data coming down the pike.”
“I can never keep it straight anymore,” Moore growled. “What we’ve admitted, what we’ve massaged, what we’ve covered up completely. But yes. After Firefall we were all staring at the sky so hard our eyeballs bled. Found something beeping out in the Kuiper Belt—that much you know—sent a squad of high-gee probes to check it out. Sent Theseus afterward, soon as we could slap her together. But she never made it that far. The probes got there first, caught a glimpse of something buried in a comet just before it blew up. All that way to get suckered by a—a decoy, as far as anyone could tell. Glorified land mine with a squawk box bolted on top. So we went back to our radio maps and our star charts and we found an X-ray spike buried in the archives, years before Firefall and never repeated. IAU called it an instrument glitch at the time but now it’s all we’ve got to go on. Theseus is already fifteen AUs out and headed the wrong way but you know, that’s the great thing about an unlimited fuel supply. We feed her a new course and she spins around and heads into the Oort and she finds something out there, tiny brown dwarf it looks like. She goes in for a look, finds something in orbit, starts to send back details and pfsst—”
He splayed the fingers of his free hand, brought them together at the tips, spread them again as if blowing out a candle.
“—gone.”
“I didn’t know that,” Brüks said after a while.
“I’d be worried if you did.”
“I thought the mission was still en route. Nothing on any of the feeds about finding anything.” Brüks eyed his own glass. “So, what was it?”
“We don’t know.”
“But if they’d started sending—”
“Multiple contacts. Thousands. There was some evidence they might have been seeding the dwarf’s atmosphere with prebiotic organics—some kind of superjovian terraforming project, perhaps—but if they ever followed that up we never heard about it.”
“Jesus,” Brüks whispered.
“Maybe something else in there, too,” Moore added, staring at the deck. Staring through it. Staring all the way out to the Oort itself. “Something—hidden. Nothing definitive.”
He didn’t seem to be entirely in the room. Brüks softly cleared his throat.
Moore blinked and came back. “That’s all we know, really. The telemetry was noisy at best—that dwarf has one mother of a magnetic field, shouts over anything you try to send out. The Bicamerals have some amazing extraction algorithms, they were squeezing data out of clips I swore were nothing but static. But there are limits. Theseus went in and it was like, like watching a ship vanish into a fog bank. For all we know she could still be sending—they left a relay sat behind at least. It’s still active. As long as there’s hope, we’ll keep the feed going. But we’re not getting anything back from the ship itself. Can’t even get a signal through that soup.”
“Except you’re getting a signal right now, you said. Coming in along—”
“No.” Moore held up his hand. “If the system was operating normally we’d have seen it operating, and we didn’t. No handshaking protocols, no explicit transmissions, nobody from up there telling us they were sending something down here. None of the usual bells that are supposed to go off when a package arrives. At most we got a little hiccup that suggests that something might have started coming down, but the checksums didn’t pass muster so move along folks, nothing to see here. Mission Control didn’t even notice it. I didn’t notice it. Wasn’t until the Bicamerals helped me squeeze the archives through their born-again algorithms that I clued in, years after the fact.”
“But if the stream isn’t even running its own protocols, how can it be—”
“Ask them.” Moore jerked his chin toward a vague point beyond the bulkhead, some nexus of Bicameral insight. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“So, something’s using our telematter stream,” Brüks said.
“Or was, at least.”
“And it’s not us.”
“And whatever it is, it’s gone to great lengths to stay off the ’scope.”
“What would it be sending?”
“The Angels of the Asteroids.” Moore shrugged. “That’s what the Bicamerals are calling it, or at least that’s our closest approximation. Probably just their idea of an op code. But I don’t know if they really think anything’s down there. Maybe it’s just a glitch after all. Or some kind of long-distance hack that didn’t work out, and we can learn something about the hackers by studying their footprints.”
“Suppose there is something down there, though,” Brüks said. “Something—physical.”
Moore spread his hands. “Like what? A clandestine mist of dissociated atoms?”
“I don’t know. Something that breaks the rules.”
“Well,” Moore said, “in that case, I suppose…”
He took a breath.
“It’s had a few years to settle in.”
THINGS FALL APART.
THEY’D COME UP with this really great plan to keep their mysterious pursuers from blowing up the Crown: they were going to blow it up themselves first.
They hadn’t asked Brüks for his input.
Now he was back in Maintenance and Repair, taping himself up with another rubbery exoskeleton. It was easy enough to lay down the bands; all he had to do was follow the denuded template he’d stripped into existence less than two days before.
Of course, by now there were no days left to while away. Judging by the chime that had just sounded, he only had about two minutes to burn.
Two minutes to burn.
Lianna dropped out of the ceiling. “Hey. Just so you know, Rak’s about ready to fold down the spokes. Didn’t want you falling over when the gravity shifted.”
Yeah, always concerned about the roaches, Brüks reflected wryly. That sounds just like Rakshi Sengupta.
On cue, the bulkheads shivered. The hab trembled with the sudden faint roar of a distant ocean. A squeezebulb rolled a few centimeters along the cube where someone had left it.
Brüks swallowed. His knitting ankle itched maddeningly. He resisted the urge to scratch; it wouldn’t help anyway, not through the cast.
“Nothing to worry about,” Lianna assured him. “Right-side up goes out of whack by a couple of degrees for a couple of minutes. Not even enough to spill your drink. If you were drinking.”
He wished he was.
Down edged out from between his feet like a lazy pendulum, came to rest half a meter off his centerline: the Crown’s hollow bones folding back along the spine like the ribs of a closing umbrella, the spin that threw them out slowing in a precise and delicate handoff to acceleration building from behind. All those thousands of tonnes in slow motion, all those vectors playing one against another, and Brüks could feel nothing but a brief polite disagreement between his inner ears. Even now, down was edging back to where it belonged.