Icarus shrank away. The sun burst back into view around it. Five blue sparks still flickered even in the light of that blinding corona: five bright dots in a dwindling black disk in a sea of fire. Stabilizing thrusters, Brüks realized distantly, and wondered why they burned so long and so bright, and wished that the answer hadn’t come to him so quickly.
The newborn gravity kept putting on weight. It pulled Brüks ever harder against his restraints, leaned him out of the alcove and angled over the deck. His knees did not buckle under the strain; his body did not collapse. He was breathing statuary, and some gut sense stronger than logic knew that he would not crumple if those straps gave way: he would topple to the deck and shatter.
The spacesuits beside him had disappeared. Rotting corpses hung in their stead, slivers of gray flesh dangling through the mesh, maggots dripping like rice grains from empty eye sockets. Grinning mandibles clicked and clattered and uttered incomprehensible sounds. REM paralysis, one part of Brüks said to another, although he was not asleep. Hallucination. The corpses laughed like something less dead, coughing through mud.
Floaters swarmed in his eyes. Half visible in the encroaching fog, Jim Moore stood against the deck without benefit of webs or incantations or anything but the crushing awareness of his own actions. Darkness closed in. With the last few synapses sparking in his cache, Brüks wondered what Luckett might have said in the face of such a toll.
Probably that everything was going according to plan.
PREDATOR
You have to understand, Deen, this is the fifth attack on Venezuela’s jet-stream injection program so far this year. Stratospheric sulfates are still down by three percent and even if there aren’t any further attacks, we’ll be lucky if they recover by November. Any agro who can’t afford seriously drought-hardened transgenics is going to have a disastrous summer. Clones and force-grown crops from higher lats should be able to pick up the slack—as long as we don’t suffer a repeat of last year’s monoculture collapse—but local shortages are pretty much inevitable.
We’re well aware that the Venezuelan program is technically illegal (you think none of us have read the GBA?) but I don’t have to tell you about the benefits of stratospheric cooling. And even if geoengineering is a short-term solution, you gotta use what you can or you don’t live long enough to reach the long term. Of course Caracas isn’t doing itself any favors with their idiotic adherence to an outmoded judicial system. Personal culpability? What are these [EPITHET AUTOREDACT] going to come up with next, witch-dunking?
So I can speak for the whole department when I say that we sympathize completely. And if you folks over in Human Rights want to blacklist them again, go right ahead. But the bottom line is, You can’t ask us to withdraw support for Venezuela. The world just can’t afford to see even modest climate-mitigation efforts sabotaged like this.
I know how bad the optics are. I know how tough it is to sell an alliance with a regime whose neuropolitics are rooted in the Middle Ages. But we’re just going to have to take this dick in our mouths and swallow whatever comes out. Stratospheric cooling is one of the few things keeping this planet from falling on its side right now, and as you know that technology takes a lot of power.
If it makes you feel any better, consider the fact that if this had happened twenty, twenty-five years ago we wouldn’t even be having this conversation; we didn’t have enough Joules in hand back then to be able to afford these kinds of options. We’d probably be tipping into another Dark Ages by now.
Thank God for Icarus, eh?
I HAVE NEVER FOR ONE INSTANT SEEN CLEARLY WITHIN MYSELF. HOW THEN WOULD YOU HAVE ME JUDGE THE DEEDS OF OTHERS?
HE WOKE UP weightless. Unseen hands guided him like a floating log through the Hub, through a southern hemisphere that didn’t move any more than he could. Rakshi Sengupta called in from somewhere far away, and she did not bray or bark but spoke in tones as soft as any cockroach: “This is taking too long we’re gonna start falling back if we don’t restart the burn in five minutes tops.”
“Three minutes.” Moore’s voice, much closer. “Start your clock.”
And that’s all of us, Brüks thought distantly. Just Jim, and Rakshi, and me. No vampires left, no undead bodyguards. Bicamerals all gone. Lianna dead. Oh God, Lianna. You poor kid, you poor beautiful innocent corpse. You didn’t deserve this; your only crime was faith…
One of the axial hatches passed around him. In the next instant he was swinging around an unaccustomed right angle: the Crown’s spokes, rigged for thrust, still laid back along her spine. Rungs scrolled past his face as Moore pushed him headfirst to stern.
All our children, gone. Smarter, stronger, leaner. All those souped-up synapses, all those Pleistocene legacy issues stripped away. Where did it get them? Where are they now? Dead. Gone. Turned to plasma.
Where we’ll be, probably, before long…
Maintenance and Repair. Moore folded out the medbed and strapped him in just as the Crown began clearing her throat. By the time he turned to leave, weight was seeping back into the world. Brüks tried to turn his head, and almost succeeded. He tried to clear his throat, and did.
“Uh… Jim…” It was barely above a whisper. The Colonel paused at the ladder, a vague silhouette in the corner of Brüks’s eye. The ongoing burn seemed to sink him into the deck.
“…Th—thanks,” Brüks managed.
The silhouette stood silently in the burgeoning gravity.
“That wasn’t me,” he said finally, and climbed away.
Moore was not the only one to visit. Lianna returned to him from the grave, a dark flickering plasma who smiled down on his frozen features and shook her head and whispered You poor man, so lost, so arrogant before the sun called her back home. Chinedum Ofoegbu stood for hours at his side and spoke with fingers and eyes and sounds that stuttered from the back of his throat, and somehow Brüks understood him at last: not the ululating cipher, not the intelligent hive cancer, but a kind old man whose fondest childhood memory was the family of raccoons he’d surreptitiously befriended with a few handfuls of kibble and subtle sabotage inflicted on the latch of the household organics bin. Wait—you had a childhood? Brüks tried to ask, but Ofoegbu’s face and hands had disappeared under eruptions of buboes and great ropy tumors, and he could no longer get out the words.
Rhona even came back from Heaven, though she’d sworn she never would. She stood with her back to him, and fumed; he tried to turn her around and make her smile, but when she did the expression was bitter and furious and her eyes were full of sparks. Oh, do you miss her? she raged. You miss your mindless puppet, your sweet adoring ego-slave? Or is it just the fact that you’ve lost the one small fake part of your whole small fake life where you had some kind of control? Well the chains are off, Dan, they’re off for good. You can rot out here for all I care.