A dot on the map: MOORE, J. floated safely distant in the attic. Other readouts formed a sparse mosaic across the bulkhead; Brüks couldn’t understand them all but he was pretty sure that one or two involved the blocking of intercom feeds.
She turned as his feet hit the deck, stared expectantly at his lapel.
“Jim,” he said.
“Yah.”
“You said he’d—changed…”
“Don’t have to take my word for it you saw it yourself he’s been changing ever since we left LEO.”
Brüks shook his head. “He was only—distracted before. Preoccupied. Never delusional.”
Sengupta ran her fingers down the wall; file listings flew by too fast for Brüks to make out. “He was transmitting into the Oort did you know that? Even before we left Earth he broke the law hell he helped make that law after Firefall nobody else could get away with it but man, he’s the great Jim Moore and he was—sending messages…”
“What kind of messages?”
“To Theseus.”
“Well, of course. He was with Mission Control.”
“And it talked back.”
“Rakshi. So what?”
“It’s talking to him now,” Sengupta said.
“Uh—what? Through all the interference?”
“We’re out of the solar static already most of it anyhow. But he’s been collecting those signals for way longer some of the timestamps go back seven years and they change. All the early stuff that’s all just telemetry you know? Lot of voice logs too but mainly just data, all the sensor records contingency analyses and about a million different scenarios that vampire that Sarasti was running when they were closing on target. It was dense there was noise all over the signal but the streams were redundant so you can make it out if you run it through the right filters right? And then Theseus goes dark you don’t hear anything for a while and then there’s this—”
She fell silent.
“There’s what, Rak?” Brüks prompted gently.
She took a breath. “There’s this other signal. Not tightbeam. Omnidirectional. Washing over the whole innersys.”
“He said Theseus went dark,” Brüks remembered. “They went in and lost contact and that was all anybody knew.”
“Oh he knew. It’s really thin and it’s so degraded you can barely make it out even with every filter and noise-correction algorithm in the arsenal I don’t think you’d even see it if you didn’t already know it was there but Colonel Carnage, man, he knew. He picked it out, and it’s… it’s…”
Her fingers danced and jittered in the air between them. The faintest breeze of static wafted through the hab: the moan of a distant ghost.
“That it?” Brüks asked.
“Almost but then you add the last couple of Fouriers and—”
—And a voice: thin, faint, sexless. There was no timbre to it, no cadence, no sense of any feeling behind the words. Any humanity it ever might have contained had been eroded away by dust and distance and the dull microwave rumble of a whole universe roaring in the background. There was nothing left but the words themselves, not reclaimed from static so much as built from the stuff. A whisper on the void:
Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection… record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty… feel your blood, syrupy… forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dil… flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack… udden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen… rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.
The hab fell silent.
“What the fuck was that?” Brüks whispered after a very long time.
“I dunno,” Sengupta drummed her fingers on her thigh. “The start of a story. It’s been coming through in bits and pieces, every few years according to the timestamps. I don’t think it’s finished, either, I think it’s still—in progress.”
“But what is—”
“I don’t know okay? It says it’s Siri Keeton. And there’s something underneath it too not words exactly I don’t know.”
“Can’t be.”
“Doesn’t matter what you or I think he thinks it’s Siri Keeton. And you know what he’s talking back to it I think he’s talking back.”
My son is alive.
“He’s got a while to wait. If that’s really coming from the Oort it’ll be a solid year before he can even think about getting an answer.”
Sengupta shrugged and looked at the wall.
He’s coming home.
ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM NATURE.
NEGATIVE.
Negative.
Negative.
Torn lattices and broken nanowires and mangled microdiodes. Eviscerated smart paint. Nothing else.
For hours now he’d let worst-case scenarios play out in his imagination. Portia had expanded into the Crown. Portia had spread past the attic. Portia had oozed invisibly across every bulkhead and every surface, coated the skins of tents and of crewmembers, wrapped itself around every particle of food each of them had taken into their mouths from the moment they’d docked. Portia enveloped him like a second skin; Portia was inside him, measuring and analyzing and corroding him from the outside in and the inside out. Portia was everywhere. Portia was everything.
Bullshit.
His neocortex knew as much, even as his brain stem stole its insights and twisted them to its most paranoid ends. Whatever Portia’s ultimate origin, it was the telematter system that had built it: lasers etching blank condensates into thinking microfilms that planned and plotted and spread across each new frontier like a plague of cognition. However far it had spread, however much or little had infiltrated the Crown, it couldn’t keep growing once severed from the engine of its creation. They hadn’t been docked that long: surely the enemy couldn’t have achieved anything but the most superficial penetration of the front line.
The samples were clean.
Which proved, of course, absolutely nothing.
Aboard Icarus it had sprung shut like a leg-hold trap—but it had had unlimited power to play with, and eight years to learn how to use it. One passive filter on the solar panels, damped by a thousandth of a percent. One short-circuited electrical line, sparking and heating the surrounding metal. That’s all it would have taken—just time, and a little Brownian energy to keep it fed.
What had Sengupta said so offhandedly, just before Portia had attacked? Little warm in there…
It can’t sprint without stockpiling energy, he mused. Maybe it builds up a detectable heatprint before it pounces…
Sengupta poked her head up through the floor. “Find anything?”
Brüks shook his head as she climbed onto the deck.