Wait a second, Brüks thought. Shouldn’t there be—
That shadow, hinting at an unseen presence by the hatch. Gone now.
Moore: “It’s using the same protocols we are.”
Valerie had been there, just a few minutes ago. Now she was gone.
“It’s reflecting our own protocols back at us. It’s completely rote.”
Amina and Eulali. They weren’t going to meet Jim at all, Brüks realized. I bet they’re tracking Valerie…
He foregrounded their feeds. They still faced in opposite directions, each presumably sharing in the wraparound vista of a conjoined visual field. Icarus drifted about them like a sharp-edged dream.
“We’re not talking to an alien intelligence,” Moore continued. “We’re talking to a mirror.”
Something caught Brüks’s eye, a tiny bright sparkle in the upper-left corner of Amina’s feed. A faint star drifting on the recycled breeze. He skimmed the stereocam menu, selected 27E—VAPOR CORE REACTOR—EXT. CORRIDOR. Same corridor, dorsal view. Now he stared down at the tops of two open helmets; that floating star twinkled in the foreground. He zoomed the feed onto a sliver of glass—something like that, anyway—barely the size of a hangnail. A shard of something broken.
A big place, Icarus. It went on forever, breathed through more than a thousand kilometers of ductwork. This glass speck could have come from anywhere.
“You want to make any progress at all—” Moore said.
No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around.
…’Course you gotta go in there and check to be sure…
“—you’ve got to break it.”
In the sanctum, Jim Moore extended his arm. Too late, Ofoegbu rushed to intervene. A bright little figurine sprang into existence on the palm of Moore’s hand, a hologram, an offering in the shape of a man.
“This is my son.” Moore’s voice carried soft and clear along the channel. “Do you know him?”
Portia’s interface imploded and disappeared.
Holy shit holy shit— “Holy shit holy shit holy—” That was Sengupta beside him, locked in a loop, synced with another voice in Brüks’s own head. “Shut up,” Brüks said; amazingly, both obeyed.
Moore’s hand didn’t move. The offering on its palm glowed steadily. Portia lay silent on its shrine while every sapient being within a hundred million kilometers held its breath.
After an endless moment, a single bright eye opened in the middle of that surface. Light spilled from its pupil, fountained swirling across some canvas of melanin and magnetite, settled finally into an image with arms and legs. Siri Keeton looked back at himself, arms spread just slightly at his sides, palms out.
Brüks leaned forward. “Another mirror image.”
Sengupta clicked and ticked and shook her head. “Not a mirror look at the hand the right hand.” She zoomed the feed to make it easy: a ragged line there, from the heel of the palm right up to the webbing between the index and ring fingers. As if something had torn Keeton’s hand apart, right down to the wrist, and glued it back together.
Brüks glanced at Sengupta, trying to remember: “That’s not on Jim’s—”
“Of course not that’s the whole fucking point isn’t—”
A sudden strangled sound from somewhere in the network: Bicameral sounds, a host of complex harmonics that probably held volumes. All Brüks could decipher there was surprise: over at 27E—EXT. CORRIDOR. Eulali was charging up the passageway at full speed. Amina floated transfixed, staring straight at the camera—no, not at the camera. At that telltale shard floating in front of it.
Everywhere, suddenly: pandemonium.
The helmet feeds at the shrine were all in frantic motion, swinging like drunken pendulums and sweeping the scenery too fast to make out whatever had scared them. Off down 27E Eulali bounced off a bulkhead (Wait a second; had there even been a bulkhead there a moment ago?) and retreated back toward Amina; another instant and both were gone from third-person view, lost but for the frantic blurry sweep of their suit cams. Sengupta grabbed AUX/RECOMP and spread it front and center across the dome, a top-down view of the shrine and its resident deity and its misbegotten acolytes caroming off solid metal where an open hatchway had gaped only a few moments before. Portia lay quiet as clay along condenser, its subtle mutilation of Siri Keeton glowing soft and steady as a child’s nightlight: the oily gray tentacle that lashed out toward Chinedum Ofoegbu sprouted from the far bulkhead, and Moore barely had time to push the monk out of the way.
All in those final furious moments before the feeds went dark.
Sengupta gibbered faintly to port. Brüks barely heard her. I know what that is, he thought as those last seconds played over in his head. I’ve seen these before, I’ve used these before, I know exactly what this is…
Magnetite and chromatophores and crypsis. Cages broken and painstakingly rebuilt. Footprints wiped clean, disturbing alien smells erased, sensors and samplers carefully planted and natural habitat reconstructed along all axes.
This is a sampling transect.
He yanked the quick-release buckle on his harness, floated free. “We’ve got to get them out.”
Sengupta shook her head so hard Brüks thought it might come off. “No fucking way no fucking way we gotta get outta here—”
He spun above the mirrorball, grabbed her by the shoulders—
—“Don’t fucking touch me!”—
—let her go but kept close, face-to-face, mere centimeters between them though she squirmed and turned her face away: “It doesn’t know we’re here do you understand? You said it yourself, too dumb to track the camera too dumb to know we’re here, they never let us onto Icarus so it’s never seen us. We can take it by surprise—”
“Roach logic that’s stupid that doesn’t mean anything man we gotta leave—”
“Don’t leave. Do you hear me? Stay here if you want but don’t you fucking leave until I get back. Boot up the engines if the damn things even work yet, but stay put.”
She shook her head. An arc of spittle spread from her lips and fanned through the air. “What are you gonna do huh they’re ten times smarter than you and they never even saw it coming—”
Good question. “In some ways, Rakshi. They’re ten times dumber in others. They know all about quarks and amplituhedrons but they didn’t get nailed by a piece of quantum foam, do you understand? They got nailed by a goddamned field biologist. And that’s a game I know inside out.”
He cupped her head in his hands and kissed her on the crown—
—“Don’t leave.”—
—and leapt into the attic.
He shot through the rafters like a pinball, bouncing from strut to handhold, knocking aside straps and buckles and glistening blobs of oily water that splattered on contact. Brüks the baseline. Brüks the roach. Give it up, Danny-boy: don’t even try to think, you’ll only embarrass yourself in front of the grown-ups. Just nod and swallow what they feed you. Keep your mouth shut when Sengupta brushes off a discrepancy of a few millimeters as insignificant thermal expansion. Play it safe when Moore points out that Portia, wonder of wonders, grows; point to a puddle of candle wax on the machinery and dismiss it with a shrug. Don’t bother wondering whether the infiltration really stopped at such an obvious border. Forget that Portia computes and pattern-matches, forget its capacity to build mosaics of such intricate resolution that no meatball eye could tell the difference between a naked bulkhead and one sheathed in the thinnest layer of thinking plastic. Don’t let the results of your own half-assed research point you to the obvious: that Portia might coat everything like an invisible intelligent skin, that it’s there between whenever anyone boots up an interface or turns on the goddamn lights: watching everything we do, feeling every sequence our fingers tap against the panels. Just sit back and smile as the adults blunder innocently into an alien cage painted inside the man-made one.