“Uh, this is my—”
“What?” she said, facing away.
“Nothing.” He settled back down, maneuvered his back against the wall of the tent. It left maybe thirty centimeters between them. He might even be able to sleep, if neither of them rolled over.
If he felt the least bit tired.
Rakshi wasn’t sleeping either, though. She was scratching at her own commandeered side of the tent, bringing up tiny light shows on the walclass="underline" a little animatic of the Crown, centered on the rafters where MOORE, J. clung to a ghost, or danced on the strings of some unknowable alien agenda, or both; the metal landscape the drone traversed in search of countermeasures; the merest smudge of infrared where a sleeping monster hid in the shadows. There really weren’t any safe places, Brüks reflected. Might as well feign what safety you could in numbers. The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.
Sengupta turned her face a little: a cheekbone, the tip of a nose in partial eclipse. “Roach?”
“I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”
“What you said before, about losing people. Different people deal in different ways that’s what you said right?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How do you deal?”
“I—” He didn’t quite know how to answer. “Maybe the person you lose comes back, someday. Maybe someday someone else fits into the same space.”
Sengupta snorted softly, and there was an echo of the old derision there: “You just sit around and wait?”
“No, I—get on with my life. Do other things.” Brüks shook his head, vaguely irritated. “I suppose you’d just whip up some customized ConSensus playmate—”
“Don’t you fucking tell me what I’d do.”
Brüks bit his lip. “Sorry.”
Stupid old man. You know where the hot buttons are and still you can’t help pushing the damn things.
There was a bright side, though, to Colonel Carnage’s deepening insanity, to Valerie’s lethal waiting games, to ghosts haunting the ether and uncertain fates waiting to pounce: at least Rakshi wasn’t hunting him anymore. He wondered at that thought, a little surprised at Sengupta’s place atop his own personal hierarchy of fear. She was just a human being, after all. Unarmed flesh and blood. She wasn’t some prehistoric nightmare or alien shapeshifter, no god or devil. She was just a kid—a friend even, insofar as she could even think in those terms. An innocent who didn’t even know his secret. Who was Rakshi Sengupta, next to monsters and cancers and a whole world on the brink? What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides?
It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors.
She was the only one he’d brought upon himself.
His own hunt wasn’t going so well.
Of course, Portia wasn’t quite so visible a target as Daniel Brüks. Brüks couldn’t subsist on the ambient thermal energy of bulkhead atoms vibrating at room temperature, couldn’t flatten himself down to paper and wrap himself around a water pipe to mask even that meager heatprint. He’d wondered about albedo or spectro, wondered if a probe built of very short wavelengths might be able to pick up the diffraction gratings that Portia used to talk—perhaps it used them as camouflage as well—but the improvised detectors he fabbed turned up nothing. Which didn’t mean they didn’t work, necessarily. Maybe it only meant that Portia kept to the Crown’s infinite fractal landscape of holes and crannies too small for bots and men.
He was almost certain it couldn’t launch an open attack without letting some tell slip beforehand: the heat signature of muscle analogs building a charge, the reallocation of mass sufficient to construct an appendage at some given set of coordinates. It could run, though, in some sort of postbiological baseline state, powered by the subtle energy resonating from the crude mass of the real substrate into the superconducting intelligence of the false one. It could think and plan forever in that mode, if Bicameral calculations had been right. It could hide.
The less he found, the more he feared. Something nearby was watching him; he felt it in his gut.
“Ship’s too damn noisy,” he confided to Sengupta. “Thermally, allometrically. Portia could be anywhere, everywhere. How would we know?”
“It’s not,” she told him.
“Why so sure? You were the one who warned me, back when—”
“I thought it might have got in yeah. Maybe it did. But not enough to get everywhere it didn’t coat everything. It didn’t swallow us.”
“How do you know?”
“It wanted to keep us in Icarus. It wouldn’t have tried to stop us from leaving if we were still inside it. It’s not everywhere.”
He thought. “It could still be anywhere.”
“Yah. But not enough to take over, just a—a little bit. Lost and alone.”
There was something in her voice. Almost like sympathy.
“Yah well why not?” she asked, although he had said nothing. “We know how that feels.”
Sailing up the center of the spine, navigating through the grand rotating bowl of the southern hemisphere, up through the starboard rabbit hole with the mirrorball gleaming to his left: Daniel Brüks, consummate parasite, finally at home in the weightless intestines of the Crown of Thorns. “I checked the numbers three times. I don’t think Portia—”
He stopped. His own face looked down at him across half the sky.
Oh fuck—
Rakshi Sengupta was a presence near the edge of vision, a vague blur of motion and color more felt than seen. He had only to turn his head and she would come into focus.
She knows she knows she knows—
“I found the fucker,” she said, and there was blood and triumph and terrible promise in her voice. He could not bring himself to face her. He could only stare at that incriminating portrait in front of him, at his personal and professional lives scrolling across the heavens big as the zodiac: transcripts, publications, home addresses; Rhona, ascendant; his goddamn swimming certificate from the third grade.
“This is him. This is the asshole who killed my—who killed seven thousand four hundred eighty two people. Daniel. Brüks.”
She was no longer talking like Rakshi Sengupta, he realized at some horrible remove. She was talking like someone else entirely.
“I said I would find him. And I found him. And here. He. Is.”
She’s talking like Shiva the fucking Destroyer.
He floated there, dead to rights, waiting for some killing blow.
“And now that I know who he is,” Shiva continued, “I am going to survive that thing on the hull and I am going to survive that thing in Colonel Carnage’s head and I am going to make it back to Earth. And I will hunt this fucker down and make him wish he had never been born.”
Wait, what—?
He forced back his own paralysis. He turned his head. His pilot, his confidante, his sworn nemesis came into focus. Her face, raised to the heavens, crawled with luminous reflections of his own damnation.
She spared him a sidelong glance; her lips were parted in a smile that would have done Valerie proud. “Want to come along for the ride?”