I’d checked the logs, of course. The gremlin had charged through the gate like some monstrous mutant phage. It had wobbled—perfectly reflective, like shuddering mercury—extruding and resorbing a thousand needle-like projections as if trying them on for size: twenty-centimeter stilettos to pin your hand to the bulkhead, thousand-meter javelins that could puncture a moon.
It had sent two of them after us.
We’d been almost thirty lightsecs away by then. We should have been untouchable. One missile went wide and fell astern; but the other flew straight for our tailpipe, closing at a crawl but closing. Chimp crunched numbers and bent our wormhole a smidge to the left—just a fraction of a fraction of a degree but enough to push those stress contours out past the hardlined channels. Rock had cracked, split under the torque. Once you’ve gone relativistic the most infinitesimal change in bearing can break you apart; Eri was bleeding from self-inflicted wounds before that javelin even caught up with us. Even then it wasn’t quite enough; it grazed us in passing, boiled away and left a five-kilometer scar along our starboard flank.
I’d been blissfully undead for centuries to either side. Lian Wei had been right there, watching it all happen.
“So, that thing that took a shot at us—you know it doesn’t really change anything, right?”
She looked at me. “How’s that?”
“I mean we’ve still got the edge. Even Angryblob couldn’t get to us until we booted the gate from this end. By the time they charge up and charge through we’re ten million kliks away.”
The suitcase followed her into the corridor. I followed them both. Behind us, the hatch sealed with a soft hiss; behind that, Lian’s abandoned quarters began shutting down for the long sleep.
“And yeah, that thing really put the fear of God into us, and something could come through with beamed weapons or faster missiles. Anything’s possible. But think about this: over a hundred thousand builds and we’ve only been hit once, and even then we got away pretty much unscathed. You gotta admit those are pretty good odds.”
“How do you know it was just once?”
“The logs, of course.”
“And you trust them.”
“Li. They’re the logs.”
“And they can’t be corroborated because Chimp handles most builds on his own.”
“You’re saying he—why would he doctor the record?”
“Because he’s programmed for the good of the mission, and the mission might suffer if we spent every waking hour wondering if something was going to kill us. Maybe we’ve almost died in our sleep a thousand times and he’s rewriting history to protect morale.”
“Li, he saved our lives. You know that better than anyone. And even if you’re right—even if we’ve been under the gun more than the logs show—that’s just that many more times he saved us.”
A bank of lockers rounded into view, a gunmetal honeycomb stretching deck-to-ceiling along the curve of the corridor.
“So you trust him,” Lian said. “Now there’s a surprise.”
“Of course I do.”
“Even though he could be lying to us.” She hefted her luggage from the floor with a soft grunt and slotted it into an empty locker at waist height. Sealed it, locked it with her thumb.
“You said it yourself. He’s programmed for the good of the mission.” From behind the locker door, the faintest hiss of air being sucked away. “You know he’d die for us.”
“Probably.” She turned back down the corridor.
“Hey, we’re still alive.” I fell in beside her again. “He’s obviously doing something right.”
We walked in silence for a bit, passed strange graffiti splashed across the bulkhead.
“Painters are at it again, I see,” Lian said.
I nodded. “Still don’t know who those fuckers are.” Other than some tribe who’d taken to tagging the walls with weird-ass hieroglyphs. Chimp wouldn’t tell us who. Maybe they’d told him to keep their identity hush-hush. No Painter had ever passed through the tribe during any of Chimp’s cultural exchanges—or at least, no one who admitted to being one—which I’d always found a bit suspicious.
“I’m probably overthinking it,” Lian said, and it took me a second to remember: Chimp. Gremlins. Prey.
I took the concession, gave a little back: “I’d say you’ve got cause. I’d have been crapping my pants if I’d been on
deck when all that went down.”
“Sunday…” She stopped.
“Yeah?”
“Just—thanks.”
“For?”
“For checking in. No one else would’ve even thought about it.”
“’Spores. You know.” I shrugged. “We’re designed for solitude.”
“Yeah.” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “That’s kind of my point.”
MELTDOWN
THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW that something has gone seriously wrong aboard Eriophora: you wake up, and you don’t know why.
“What…”
Mouth dry, eyelids like sandpaper, whole body twitching with the tiny convulsions of a nervous system dragged back online after all its synapses have rusted shut.
“My interface…”
“I’m sorry, Sunday. This is an emergency resurrection; there wasn’t time to prebrief you.”
“How… fast…?”
“A little over two hours.”
Your cells could rupture, coming back that fast. Your brain could get frostbite.
I opened my mouth, closed it again. A wracking cough hovered at the back of my throat, threatened to blow my chest open if I let it out.
“Relax,” Chimp said. “You’re in no danger. “
I kept my eyes closed and swallowed on a throat lined with broken glass. Something nudged my cheek. I took the nipple in my mouth, sucked reflexively, reveled in a flood of sweet salty warmth.
“I need help with a personnel issue.” A pause; a small staticky pop behind my eyes. Sparse icons, blooming in my head.
“You’re online,” Chimp confirmed.
I’d only been down for six terasecs. Not even a thousand years. If this was a build, surely someone else was on rotation…
Right: there it was. Ozmont Gurnier, Burkhart Schidkowski, Andalib Laporta. Not our Tribe. Children of Eri, they called themselves. Rock worshippers.
Lian Wei.
Chimp was cross-fertilizing again.
But the build had gone off without a hitch, according to the logs. Dirt-common red dwarf, a whole lot of comets and asteroids (which was why Chimp had decrypted a crew; mass distribution had exceeded some programmed complexity threshold). A standard pass-through hoop that booted without incident; nothing charging out the gate after us, for good or ill. The shift was already over. Everyone had already packed up and headed for bed.
So why…
I opened my eyes, stared up from my coffin into blurry darkness and a circle of bright overlapping halos.
“Lian Wei is upset,” Chimp told me. “I’m hoping you can calm her.”
My throat had soaked up those electrolytes like a meaty sponge. I cleared it experimentally. Much better.
“Upset how?”
“She’s arguing with the other ’spores. She’s increasingly hostile.”
“Ab—” A residual cough. “About what?”
“I think about me.”
The halos resolved into a circular constellation of ceiling lights. One of Chimp’s eyes stared down from its center, a tiny dark heart in a bright ring.