Kaden had named the dwarf Fáfnir. I had to look it up.
Nothing was insurmountable. Put your gates in an oblique orbit to minimize contact with the accretion disk. Send machines into the vortex to scrape the energy you need, while Eriophora stays safely distant from gravity’s rocky shore. There are solutions and workarounds for everything.
Still.
Thousands of exagrams in a dust mote? Twenty-four suns within the diameter of an asteroid? The dynamics are scary enough even before you add a dwarf bleeding out across the void, the lethal radioactive vortex of Nemesis’ accretion disk, a fleet of factories and refineries with a retinue of harvesters and construction drones half a million strong. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I’d watch them move. Sometimes, just to torture myself, I’d false the spectrum and take in that tableaux against a backdrop of X and gamma and superheated plasma. I’d watch our pitiful machines swirl and scurry like dust-mites while close behind—far too close behind—Fáfnir’s lifeblood drained through a trap door in the bottom of the universe, screaming blue murder as it disappeared.
I couldn’t tear myself away. It was the first feed I accessed whenever the Chimp thawed me out, the last before I froze again: a view so overwhelming I didn’t dare let it spill into wraparound for fear that total immersion would crush me down to some insignificant speck gibbering in the maelstrom. I kept the view shrunken and contained in a cortical window, or trapped out in the tac tank like a beast in an aquarium.
The tank had a perverse hold over us in those days. We’d drift onto a bridge in ones or twos, gather around our tiny toy Nemesis and watch transfixed. That lethal disk of incandescent gas. That tiny black maw at its heart, distant stars smeared around its edge like bright stains. The tenuous hyperdiamond necklace slung between here and there, a gravitic conveyor endlessly scraping the ergosphere and lifting precious aliquots of harvested energy back to our capacitors. Half a million pieces waltzing with annihilation: the whole dispersed factory floor in constant motion, every processor and refinery and fab assembly schooling in murmurations intricate enough to make your head hurt. We’d watch without a word, for hours sometimes, cave men huddling around a campfire that somehow left us chilled.
It wasn’t just the soul-crushing scale of it, though. There was something strangely familiar about the way all those pieces moved, something I could never quite put my finger on. Only now, here, do I remember where I saw something like it before: alone with the Chimp, back in an empty cavern in a half-constructed Eriophora, before we ever left home.
So who knows. Maybe it wasn’t dancing after all.
The Chimp came to me, in the waning of a Sunset Moment, and tried to make everything better.
I’d thought I’d been holding up my end: chatting about tribal politics as I docked my roach and approached the crypt on foot, confirming that everyone signed up for the Teredo tournament would be on deck for the first big boot, using my special influence to suggest that Ghora might be a better fit on deck than Dhanyata. (“Yeah, Dhanyata and Kaden don’t really get along—they had some kind of serious feud back before we shipped out and you gotta remember it’s barely been a couple of decades far as us cavemen are concerned.”) The crypt gaped at my arrival; I stepped inside, and walked down that dim high vault to the bright altar glowing at its heart, and—
And something moved there, in and out of the light, waiting for me.
More than one thing, I saw as I approached. A flotilla: half a dozen roaches, turning and spinning quietly on electric wheels. At least as many ground-effect drones weaving sine waves through the air around my coffin. The teleop cluster reaching down from the darkness, carbon tentacles and delicate jointed fingers—instruments of intervention, reserved for medical emergencies during resuscitation (and, sometimes, the disposal of bodies afterward)—possessed now by some spirit that made them dip and flex and undulate in ways I’d never seen before.
Everything moved with complex precision, each device a moving part of some elaborate whole: as if the components of an intricate clockwork had come apart in zero gee, yet continued to move in correct and proper relation to one another. It was precise and deterministic and I suppose there was a kind of grace to it. But it was—sterile. It was exactly what you’d expect from an algorithm parsing
—used to watch you dance—
without any real understanding of what dancing is, what it means, without any recollection of the time when it breathed life and wonder into a thousand glittering facets of self. A time when, just maybe, it had some kind of soul.
This was not that. This was a collection of lifeless objects jiggling on threads, and it almost broke my heart to realize what else it was:
A peace offering.
“Do you like it?” the Chimp asked from the darkness.
“I—” And trailed off. “I appreciate the sentiment.”
“I would like to repair our relationship,” it said.
“Repair.”
“We don’t talk as much as we used to. When we do talk, there is less intimacy.”
“Uh huh.” I couldn’t help myself. “Any wild guesses as to why that might be?”
He didn’t seem to notice. “Our relationship changed when you rediscovered the hardware archive.”
“When I found out you’d killed three thousand people, you mean.”
“If you say so.” He wasn’t even being snippy; he honestly didn’t remember. “I accept that you hold me responsible for that. But I also have faith in you, Sunday. I know that you’re vitally invested in the mission, and that you are vital to its success. We still work together, despite everything. And our relationship has improved since then.”
I trod carefully. “It—takes time.”
“Until now I’ve let our relationship heal naturally. You’ve been quicker to engage in conversation. I welcome that. I’m accelerating that process now because I need your help.”
“With?”
“I’ve noted activities over the past hundred gigasecs that may indicate attempts at sabotage. I would like them to stop.”
I bit my lip. Hoped that my sudden increase in heart rate wasn’t enough to send up any flags, that the Chimp would write it off as an understandable reaction to news of Enemies in Our Midst. Bots and roaches and teleops continued to waltz and orbit before me, surrealistic and absurd.
“What sort of activities?” My voice carefully steady.
“Inventory disappears temporarily. Fabricators run but I can’t find records of anything being produced.”
“Describe the missing inventory.”
“I can’t. The mass-balance checksums indicate that something’s missing, but all stockpiles are at expected levels.”
“This isn’t just another order from Mission Control you were told to forget about afterward?”
“If I ever carried out such commands in the past, they didn’t leave detectable inconsistencies in the record. I think someone’s actively hiding their activities from the mission logs. The most likely reason is that those activities aren’t in the best interests of the mission.”
I took a breath, and a chance: “How do you know it isn’t me?”
“I don’t. But it’s unlikely. You’ve never lied to me.”
“What do you need me for? You don’t have enough eyes and ears already?”