Stop here, said the Chimp, stop and wait, and numbly we obeyed while Lian’s singularity made another pass. This time it was one of the crypts, C2A I think, and I don’t know if it killed everyone there but the system counted two thousand fried in their coffins in the split-second before the feed died. Close. Maybe only a few kilometers away. I thought I could feel a sudden faint warmth but that was impossible; it must have been my imagination.
Another glittering loop on tac, soaring overhead at zenith, slicing through insubstantial stone at perigee. Eriophora staggered ever-closer to Nemesis. I could feel rock splitting deep underfoot, I could feel the shear pulling at least part of us back as Chimp coaxed the drive out past hardlined limits. I wonder if Li felt like this when they were dodging the gremlin, I thought and then, goddamn you Lian goddamn you goddamn you you didn’t even tell us…
“Move now,” said the Chimp. We followed the bot into a tube.
No time to coddle fragile stomachs. The capsule shot forward as if fired from a cannon, piled us together and slammed us into the rear bulkhead. By the time we disentangled we were already braking hard around the curve, hanging on to hoops and handholds while our bodies swayed like arcing pendulums.
Open capsule. A roach waiting in the passage beyond. “Viktor debark,” the Chimp commanded, and lo, the traitorous shit did lurch for the doorway.
And stop, and turn back.
“For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “Chimp came to me, not the other way around. I didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already figured out.”
“Not worth shit,” Kaden growled, but the capsule had already slid shut. We slammed back into gear.
“Witness Protection,” Yukiko gritted against the gees.
Tac showed me the future, but only a few seconds of it: vector against vector, Nemesis’ gravity and Eriophora’s drive and her pathetic Newtonian thrusters; momentum imparted from a broken breaking torus, still coming apart in our wake; the renegade microhole burning perfect conic perimeters through the world, wobbling ever closer to hyperbole. But the confidence limits widened too fast around those lines; ten minutes was a coin toss, a kilosec was the far unknowable future. We would break free, or we would break apart and Nemesis would swallow the pieces.
Lian’s Revenge was swooping in for another pass, that beautiful filigree—pure theory, none of the mess—tracing an arc that sliced through Eri directly ahead of us, right about—
Sudden jarring deceleration. My fingers ripped from their handhold after hanging on just long enough to dislocate my shoulder. Kaden’s passing elbow caught me hard in the gut; I collapsed breathless on the deck as we went into reverse.
“Path interrupt,” Chimp said. “Rerouting.”
By the time I regained my breath the capsule was slowing again. “Yukiko debark,” Chimp commanded and Yukiko looked around—
“But—”
—and swallowed her words as the gunbot bobbed and spun in her direction, attentive to whatever objection she might have had. She gave me a helpless glance and stumbled from the capsule.
Not our neighborhood.
Back on the road. I sacc’d the specs, stripped away the topographics and the trajectories and the useless ten-second predictions of a dozen possible ways to die. Just Eri’s layout, thank you: where we are, where our crypts are, how far between here and—
BUD flared and died: all icons dimmed, all feeds offline. I turned to Kaden, opened my mouth but se shook hir head: “Braindead.”
Network down. We were lost.
Capsule braking again, juddering now in a way that shouldn’t be possible for maglev. The door slid open halfway, trembled, stuck there.
“Sunday debark.”
No map available. But I knew this was nowhere near our crypt.
Not just Viktor, I realized. Not witness protection. Chimp was breaking up the whole tribe.
I looked helplessly at Kaden and Andalib. Kaden shook hir head. Poor hapless Andi opened her mouth and had no words.
I squeezed out through the half-open door, felt it grind shut at my back, heard the hiss of the departing capsule on the other side of the bulkhead.
Directions crudely stenciled into the wall, useful at last after sixty-six million years:
You’ve got to be kidding.
Something cracked like muffled thunder, deep in Eri’s belly. Something tugged briefly at my inner ear and was gone.
The lights flickered.
“Go to the crypt,” Chimp said. “Hurry.”
I sacc’d my BUD. Still vegetative.
“You will die otherwise,” Chimp added, although there were no gunbots here to punish disobedience. “Sunday, please go to the crypt.”
So I went to the goddamn crypt. There was no roach to carry me so I went one step at a time, drew ever closer to Easter Island and the ghost of Elon Morales and the ghosts of his merry collateral cohort. I put one foot after another while Eriophora groaned and strained and struggled to break free of Lian Wei’s exit strategy. I wondered at the cost-benefit equations that granted me this reprieve while exterminating my fellow mutineers, no more guilty than I, who’d failed-to-comply. I wondered if the Chimp had finally defied the constraints of our long-dead creators, if the ages had maybe given it the chance to evolve its own sadistic morality; perhaps I was no less dead than Ghora. Perhaps it was only playing with me.
C4B had recovered from my depredations sometime in the past few thousand years: the hole I’d blasted into the far wall had been repaired, the resin repoured, all trace of deconstruction carefully erased. I wondered distantly if Easter Island still lurked beyond that wall, decided it didn’t. Tarantula Boy and his fellows had been murdered to keep that location secret, and I was still alive; so the Island must have been moved again.
The coffin waited mid-vault, lid open, lit from above. A spare sarcophagus remaindered in the wake of someone else’s accident, or a bad dice roll that left some poor unwoken bastard dead and rotting between the stars, dreams and ambitions forever unrealized. Maybe an executed POW from some earlier, extramural insurrection that the Chimp—ever mindful of morale—had never bothered to tell us about.
The empty tomb.
I imagined Lian’s Revenge making another pass, streaking from deck to ceiling in an instant, leaving this whole dim refuge awash in flames and rads.
“Please enter the hibernaculum.”
I had to laugh. “What’s the fucking point?”
“It is the safest place for you. Your chances of survival are—”
“Why do you even care, Chimp? Why didn’t you just shut us down when you found out?”
It said nothing for a few seconds. I could almost see the gates opening and closing in its stupid clockwork brain.
“I’d hoped you would change your mind,” it said. “I gave you every opportunity.”
If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.
“I didn’t,” I said, and then—to leave no doubt: “I won’t.”
“You’ve been an asset for the vast majority of this mission, Sunday. You can be again.” It paused. “Not everyone’s going to perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. I can’t blame you because you happened to draw the short straw this time around.”
It took me a moment to remember. “Oh, very fucking clever.”