Nothing but breathing on comm.
Maybe I’m asleep already, he thought, twisting in the web. Maybe I’m lucid.
Valerie stared back at him. No trace of fatigue or anesthesia in that face.
No metabolic hacks for her, Brüks thought as his eyes began to close. No rotten stench in the back of her throat, no CO or H2S clogging up her blood cells, no half-assed technology to keep her under. She doesn’t need our help. She was doing this twenty thousand years ago, she’d mastered the undead arts before we’d even started scratching stick figures on cave walls. She gorged on us and then she just went away while we bred back to sustainable levels, while we forgot she was real, while we turned her from predator to myth, myth to bedtime story…
A bullet hole appeared in the center of her breastplate. A line, growing vertically: a crack splitting her suit down the middle.
All those years we took to convince ourselves she didn’t really exist after all, and all that time she was sleeping right under our feet. Right up until the time she got hungry again, and dug herself out of the dirt like some monstrous godforsaken cicada, and went hunting while we put ourselves to sleep in our own graves and called it Heaven…
Valerie twisted and squirmed and emerged naked from her silvery cocoon: white as a grub, lean as a mantis. She grinned needles and clambered across the web toward him.
Like we’re sleeping now, Brüks thought, fading. While she smiles at me.
I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.
HE DESCENDED INTO Heaven’s dungeon, but the shackles were empty and his wife was nowhere to be seen.
He lay on his back in the desert, looked down and saw that he’d been gutted, crotch to throat. Spectral snakes surged eagerly from the gash, fled the confines of his body for the endless baked mud of a fossil seabed, free at last, free at last…
He soared through an ocean of stars, dimensionless pinpoints: abstract, unchanging, unreal. One of them broke the rules as he watched, a pixel unfolding into higher dimensions like some quantum flower blooming in time-lapse. Angles emerged from outlines; shadows stretched across surfaces turning on some axis Brüks couldn’t quite make out. Bones spun majestically at its midsection.
Monsters in there, waiting for him.
He tried to veer off, to brake. He pulled all those temporoparietal strings that turned dreams lucid. The Crown of Thorns continued to swell in his sights, serenely untroubled by his pitiful attempts to rewrite the script. A hab swept toward him like the head of a mace; he flailed and thrashed and closed his eyes but felt no impact. When he looked again he was inside, and Valerie was staring back.
Welcome to Heaven, Cold Cut.
Her monster eyes were fully dilated; like headlights, like balls of bright bloody glass lit from within. The mouth beneath split open like a fresh grinning wound.
Go back to sleep, she told him. Forget all your worries. Sleep forever.
Her voice was suddenly, strangely androgynous.
It’s your call.
He cried out—
—and opened his eyes.
Lianna leaned over him. Brüks raised his head, glanced frantically in all directions.
Nothing. No one but Lianna. They were back in Repair and Maintenance.
Better than Storage.
He settled back on the pallet. “I guess we made it?”
“Probably.”
“Probably?” His throat was parched.
She handed him a squeezebulb. “We’re where we’re supposed to be,” she said as he sucked like a starving newborn. “No obvious signs of pursuit. It’ll take a while before we can be sure but it’s looking good. The drive blew up a few hours after we separated, so as far as we know they know, they got us.”
“Whoever they are.”
“Whoever they were.”
“So. Next stop, Icarus?”
“Depends on you.”
Brüks raised his eyebrows.
“I mean yes, we’re going to Icarus. But you don’t have to be up for it if you’re not, you know, up for it. We could put you back under, next thing you know you’re back on Earth safe and sound. Since you’re not officially part of the expedition.”
One mission-critical. One ballast.
“Or you put me back under and I die in my sleep when your expedition goes pear-shaped,” he said after a moment.
She didn’t deny it. “You can die in your sleep anywhere. Besides, the Bicams would know better than any of us, and they’re pretty sure you’ll make it back.”
“They told you that, did they?”
“Not explicitly, but—yeah. I got that sense from them.”
“If they really knew what they were going to find down there,” Brüks mused, “they wouldn’t have to go in the first place.”
“There is that,” she said. And then, more cheerfully: “But if the mission does go pear-shaped, wouldn’t you rather die in your sleep than be wide awake and screaming when you get sucked into space?”
“You are the Queen of the Silver Lining,” Brüks told her.
She bowed, and waited.
A trip to the sun. A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market. The face of the unknown. What scientist would choose to sleep through that?
As if they’d ever let you get close to their precious Angel of the Asteroids, his inner companion sneered. As if you’d be able to make any sense of it if they did. Better to sit it out, better to let them carry you back home so you can pick up your life where you dropped it. You don’t belong out here anyway. You’re a roach on a battlefield.
Who could easily get squashed in his sleep. What soldier in combat, no matter how benign, ever gave a thought to the vermin underfoot?
Awake, at least, he might be able to scuttle clear of descending boots.
“You think I’d pass up the chance to do this kind of field work?” he said at last.
Lianna grinned. “Okay then. You know the drill, I’ll let you get yourself together.” She took a bouncing step toward the ladder.
“Valerie,” Brüks blurted out behind her.
She didn’t turn. “In her hab. With her entourage.”
“When the ship was breaking—I saw—”
She tilted her head, lowered her gaze to some point on the far bulkhead. “You see weird things when you go under, sometimes. Near-death experiences, you know?”
Too near. “This was no Tunnel of Light.”
“Hardly ever is.” Lianna reached for the railing. “Brain plays tricks when you turn it on and off. Can’t trust your own perceptions.”