“Is it still coming through?” Lianna’s voice, a little dazed.
“Don’t be stupid you don’t think I’d mention it if it was? Wouldn’t work anyway some idiot left the port open.”
But life support had been shut down until the Crown had docked, Brüks remembered. Vacuum throughout. “Maybe it was running until you pressurized the habs. Maybe we—interrupted it.”
Those little pimply lumps, like—like some kind of early-stage fruiting bodies…
“I told you I’d mention it Jesus the logs say no juice for weeks.”
“Assuming we can trust the logs,” Moore said softly.
“It looks almost like dumb paint of some kind,” Lianna remarked.
Brüks shook his head. “Looks like a slime mold.”
“Whatever it is,” Moore said, “it’s not something any of our people would have sent down. Which raises an obvious question.”
It did. But nobody asked it.
Of course, no slime mold could survive in hard vacuum at absolute zero.
“Name one thing that can,” Moore said.
“Deinococcus comes close. Some of the synthetics come closer.”
“But active?”
“No,” Brüks admitted. “They pretty much shut down until conditions improve.”
“So whatever that is”—Moore gestured at the image—“you’re saying it’s dormant.”
Stranger even than the thing in the window: the experience of being asked for an opinion by anyone on the Crown of Thorns. The mystery lasted long enough for Brüks to glance sideways and see monks and vampire clustered in a multimodal dialogue of clicks and phonemes and dancing fingers. The Bicamerals faced away from each other; they hovered in an impromptu knot, each set of eyes aimed out along a different bearing.
Jim may be Colonel Supersoldier to me, Brüks realized, but we’re all just capuchins next to those things…
“I said—”
“Sorry.” Brüks shook his head. “No, I’m not saying that. I mean, look at it: it’s outside the chamber, part of it anyway. You tell me if there’s some way for that machine to assemble matter off the condenser plate.”
“So it must have—grown.”
“That’s the logical conclusion.”
“In hard vacuum, near absolute zero.”
“Maybe not so logical. I don’t have another answer.” Brüks jerked his chin toward the giants. “Maybe they do.”
“It escaped.”
“If that’s what you want to call it. Not that it got very far.” The stain—or slime mold, or whatever it was—spread less than two meters from the open port before petering out in a bifurcation of rootlets. Of course, it shouldn’t have even been able to do that much.
The damn thing looked alive. As much as Brüks kept telling himself not to jump to conclusions, not to judge alien apparitions by earthly appearance, the biologist was too deeply rooted in him. He looked at that grainy overblown image and he didn’t see any random collection of molecules, didn’t even see an exotic crystal growing along some predestined lattice of alignment. He saw something organic—something that couldn’t have just coalesced from a diffuse cloud of atoms.
He turned to Moore. “You’re sure Icarus’s telematter technology isn’t just a wee bit more advanced than you let on? Maybe closer to actual fabbing? Because that looks a lot like complex macrostructure to me.”
Moore turned away and fixed Sengupta with a stare: “Did it—break out? Force open the port?”
She shook her head and kept her eyes on the ceiling. “No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around. Just looks like someone ran a standard diagnostic took out the sample forgot to close the door.”
“Pretty dumb mistake,” Brüks remarked.
“Cockroaches make dumb mistakes all the time.”
And one of the biggest, Brüks did not say, was building you lot.
“’Course there’s only so much you can see with a camera you gotta go in there and check to be sure.”
Up on the sky, the slime mold beckoned with a million filigreed fingers.
“So that’s the next step, right?” Brüks guessed. “We board?”
A grunted staccato from Eulali, with fingertip accompaniment. From any other primate it might have sounded like a laugh. The node spared him a look and returned her attention to the dome.
It wasn’t English. Brüks supposed it wasn’t even language, not the way he’d define it at least. But somehow he knew exactly what Eulali had meant.
You first.
Two hours later four of the Bicamerals and a couple of Valerie’s zombies were on the hull crawling forward along the Crown’s spine with a retinue of maintenance spiders, hauling torches and lasers and wrenches behind them. Two hours to start making half a ship whole again.
Three days to screw up the courage to go anywhere else.
Oh, they laid the groundwork. Sengupta did cam-by-cams of the whole frozen array, hijacked a couple of maintenance bots and sent them through every accessible corner and cranny. Brüks couldn’t make out any angels on the feeds. No asteroids either, for that matter. He was starting to wonder if that code-name hadn’t been a red herring—a phrase set loose across the ether so pursuers wouldn’t think twice when the Crown relit her engines halfway through the innersys and accelerated away to some farther destination.
Squinting as hard as she could, all Sengupta could see was a small dark suspicion that disappeared when you laid an error bar across it: “Station allometry’s off by a few millimeters but it’d be weirder if you didn’t get shrinkage and expansion with all the heat flux.” The hive huddled together and passed occasional instructions through Lianna: Bring the condenser up to twenty atmospheres. Freeze the chamber. Heat the chamber. Turn out the lights. Turn them on again. Vent the condenser back to vacuum. Here, fab this SEM and bot it over.
The elephant in the room refused to rise to any flavor of bait. After three days, Brüks was itching for action.
“They want you to stay here,” Lianna said apologetically. “For your own safety.”
They floated in the attic, the Crown’s viscera hissing and gurgling about them as a procession of Bicamerals climbed into spacesuits at the main airlock. A globe of water, held together by surface tension, wobbled in midair just off the beaten path. The soft light spilling from the lamprey’s mouth washed everything in robin’s egg.
“Now they’re interested in my safety.”
She sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dan.”
Valerie emerged from the Hub and bared her teeth as she sailed past. Her fingers trailed along a bundle of coolant pipes, lightly tapping an arrhythmic tattoo. Brüks glanced at Lianna; Lianna glanced away. Up the attic, Ofoegbu plunged his hands into the water; pulled them out; rubbed them together before donning his gauntlets.
“You’re going, though,” Brüks observed. To work side by side with the creature who had nearly killed her without so much as a glance in her direction. He’d edged around the subject in casual conversation, what little of that there’d been lately. She hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it.
“It’s my job,” she said now. “But you know, we’re even keeping Jim pretty much in the background.”
That surprised him. “Really?”
“We might bring him over once we’re a little more sure of our footing—he was ground control for the Theseus mission, after all—but even then he’ll mostly be remoting in from the Crown. The Bicams don’t want to expose anyone to unnecessary risk. Besides—” She shrugged. “What would you do over there anyway?”