“One thing at a time. For now, just continue your hull crawl in case she’s left anything else out there for us to find. If you’ll excuse me”—he drifted around his own axis and pushed himself off the deck—“I have my own work to do.”
He disappeared into the attic. Brüks and Sengupta stayed at the mirrorball. Buried in the shadows of some obscure province on the hull, Valerie lay still as death in her stolen skin.
“What does she want?” Brüks wondered.
“What all of them want I guess to touch the Face of God.”
The common enemy, he remembered. “That whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing went down the toilet the moment she slaughtered the Bicams. Whatever it was, she wanted sole access.”
“She’s got plans for God oh yah they all did. Too bad God had plans for them, too.”
Maybe she wasn’t happy just touching the Face of God, he mused. Maybe she wants to bring God home as a pet. Maybe, while we’ve been going crazy looking for Portia in here, it’s been out there all along sealed up in a ziplock bag.
Another good reason to burn this fucking ship. As if we needed one.
“Whatever those plans were,” he said, “they’re all dead in the water now.”
“Oh you think so huh?”
“Jim’s—”
“Oh Jim that’s a good one. Because vampires are no match for roach plans are they? So how did she get out then in the first place huh? How come she isn’t still strapped to a chair solving puzzles at SFU?”
Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn’t even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.
Valerie, walking blithely out of her cage one night and scaring the piss out of prey in a local bar for chrissakes and then walking back in again, just to show that she could.
“I don’t know,” Brüks admitted.
“I do.” A single, jerky nod. “It wasn’t just her there were others there were three other vampires in that lab and they worked together.”
He shook his head. “They’d never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they did meet they’d be more likely to tear out each other’s throats than draw up escape plans.”
“Oh they drew up their plans all right they all just did it alone.”
Brüks felt a contradiction rising on his tongue. Then it sunk in.
“Shit,” he said.
“Yah.”
“You’re saying they just knew what the others were going to do. They just—”
“Elevated respiration from the short redhead prey consistent with conspecific encounter within the past two hundred breaths,” Sengupta chanted. “East south corridors public so exclude them; conspecific must have been moved twenty meters along the north tunnel no more than one hundred twenty five breaths ago. Like that.”
Each observing the most insignificant behavioral cues, the subtlest architectural details as their masters herded them from lab to cell to conference room. Each able to infer the presence and location of the others, to independently derive the optimal specs for a rebellion launched by X individuals in Y different locations at Z time. And then they’d acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they’d never met would have worked out the same scenario.
“How do you know?” he whispered.
“It’s the only way I tried to make it work from every other angle but it’s the only model that fits. You roaches never stood a chance.”
Jesus, Brüks thought.
“Pretty good hack right?” Admiration mingled with the fear in Sengupta’s voice. “Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually could stand to be in the same room together?”
He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. “That’s why we made sure they couldn’t.”
“Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”
“Nobody’s that territorial. Someone must’ve amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Brüks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only—deliberate.”
“How do you know that I haven’t seen that anywhere.”
“Like you said, Rak: it’s the only the model that fits. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.”
“They’re better,” Sengupta said. “Look I don’t care how helpless Carnage thinks that thing is I’m not taking my fucking eyes off it. And I’m firewalling every onboard app and every subroutine I can find until I check every last one for logic bombs.”
Now there’s a quick weekend project. Aloud: “Anything else?”
“I don’t know I’m working on it but how do I know she hasn’t already figured everything I could think of? No matter what I do I could be playing right into her hands.”
“Well, for starters,” Brüks suggested, “what about welding the airlocks shut? You can’t hack sheet metal.”
Sengupta took her eyes off the horizon, turned her head. For a moment Brüks even thought she might look at him.
“When it’s time to leave, we cut a hole,” he continued. “Or blow one. I assume this isn’t a rental. If it is, I’m pretty sure the damage deposit’s already a write-off.”
He waited for the inevitable put-down.
“That’s a great idea,” Sengupta said at last. “Brute-force baseline thinking shoulda thought of it myself. Fuck safety protocols. I’ll do the hold and the spokes you do the attic.”
The docking hatch wouldn’t take a weld: it was too reactive, its reflexes almost the stuff of living systems. Clenched tight it could withstand the point-blank heat of lasers and still dilate on command like a dark-adjusting eye. Brüks had to make do with bulkhead panels from the attic, strip them from their frames and weld them into place across the airlock’s inner wall.
Jim Moore appeared at his side, wordlessly helped him maneuver the panels into place. “Thanks,” Brüks grunted.
Moore nodded. “Good idea. Although you could probably fab a better—”
“We’re keeping it low-tech. In case Valerie hacked the fabbers.”
“Ah.” The Colonel nodded. “Rakshi’s idea, I’m guessing.”
“Uh-huh.”
Moore held the panel steady at one end while Brüks set the focus. “Serious trust issues, that one. Doesn’t like me at all.”
“You can’t really blame her, given the way you folks—manipulated her.” Brüks lined up the keyhole, fired. Down at the tip of the welder, metal flared bright as a sun with an electrical snap; but the lensing field damped that searing light down to a candle flame. The tang of metal vapor stung Brüks’s sinuses.
“I don’t think she knows about that,” Moore said mildly. “And that wasn’t me in any case.”