Brüks shrugged. “Watch. Explore.” Farther up the hall, the blob shuddered afresh as the node called Jaingchu washed away her sins. Why do all the bodies do that, he wondered, if there’s only one mind behind them all?
“You’ll get better real-time intel back here.”
“I guess.” He shook his head. “You’re right, of course. They’re right. I’m just—going a bit stir-crazy in here.”
“I’d have thought you’d want less excitement in your life. The way things have been going lately, boredom’s something we should be aspiring to.” She managed a smile, laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll be good as there. Looking right over my shoulder.”
Sengupta grunted from her couch as he drifted back into the Hub. “So they won’t let you out to play.”
“They will not,” he admitted, and settled in beside her.
“Better view from here.” One foot tapped absently against the deck. “Wouldn’t wanna be over there anyway, not with that lot can’t even talk to them they got shitty manners in case you hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t go over there if you paid me.”
“Thanks,” Brüks said.
“For what?”
For trying. For the comforting scritch between the ears.
Sengupta waved her hand as if spreading a deck of cards: a row of camera windows bloomed left to right across the dome. Gloved hands, visors, the backs of helmets; tactical overlays describing insides and outsides in luminous time-series.
The lamprey opened its mouth. The Bicameral entourage swam innocently down its throat.
Brüks pulled on his hood and booted up the motion sensors.
He wasn’t entirely useless. They set him to work reseeding the astroturf panels; scraping away the dead brittle stuff that had been sacrificed to cold and vacuum on the way down; spraying fresh nutrigel into the bulkhead planters; spraying, in turn, a mist of microscopic seeds into the gel. The treated surfaces began to green up within the hour, but rather than watch the grass grow he looked on from a distance while Bicams and zombies swarmed across Icarus like army ants, carving great cookie-cutter chunks of polytungsten from its flanks and hauling them back to that jagged gaping stump where the Crown had been torn in two. Eventually they let him outside; the array itself was still off-limits but they let him help out closer to home, tutored him in the use of heavy machinery and set him loose on the Crown’s hull. He torched pins and struts on command, helped shear the parasol free from its mooring at the bow and haul it aft; helped cut precise holes in its center for improvised thrusters that could stare down the heat of ten suns.
Other times he sat restlessly in the Hub while Sengupta ran numbers across the wall, this many tonnes and that many kiloNewtons and so much Isp thrust. He’d tap into AUX/RECOMP and watch Valerie and Ofoegbu and Amina at work, scientific and religious paraphernalia floating about their heads as they attempted communion with an impossible slime mold from the stars. He’d capture their movements and their incantations, feed them to a private database he’d been building since before the Crown had docked. Sometimes Jim Moore would be there; other times Brüks would catch him sequestered in some far-off corner of the Crown, adrift on a sea of old telemetry that had nothing to do with his son, nothing at all, just facts on the ground.
The Colonel was always civil, these days. Never more.
When the sight of people in more productive roles failed to satisfy, Brüks abandoned Icarus’s bustling tourist district and went off by himself, cam by cam: stepped through views of empty crawlspaces and frozen habs, an endless dark maze of tunnels connecting the uninhabited and the unexplored. Sometimes there was atmosphere, and frost sparkling on bulkheads. Sometimes there was only vacuum and girders and rails along which prehensile machinery scuttled like platelets in a mechanical bloodstream.
Once there were stars where no stars should have been: a great hole bitten out of Icarus’s carapace where it would do the least damage. Brüks could see incendiary Bicameral teeth through the gap, brilliant blue pinpoints taking another bite farther down the hull. Even filtered by the camera, they made him squint.
Next stop.
Ah. AUX/RECOMP again, more crowded than before: Moore had joined Valerie and the Bicamerals at play.
Just another roach, Brüks thought. Just like me.
But you get a seat at the table just the same.
He watched in silence for a few moments.
Fuck this.
Pale blue light spilled into the attic from the open airlock, limned the edges of pipes and lockers and empty alcoves. Brüks sailed through the hatch, grabbed a strut in passing, swung to port and into the glowing mouth of the lamprey itself.
Eyes hypersaccading in an ebony face, snapping instantly into focus. A body rooted to the airlock wall by one arm, fingers clenched around a convenient handhold. Spring-loaded prosthetics below the knees; they extended absurdly and braced against a bulkhead, blocking Brüks’s way.
He braked just in time.
“Restricted access, sir,” the zombie said, eyes dancing once more.
“Holy shit. You talk.”
The zombie said nothing.
“I didn’t think there’d be—anyone in there,” Brüks tried. Nothing. “Are you awake?”
“No, sir.”
“So you’re talking in your sleep.”
Silence. Eyes, jiggling in their sockets.
I wonder if it knows what happened to the other one. I wonder if it was there…
“I want to—”
“You can’t, sir.”
“Will you—”
“Yes, sir.”
—stop me?
“Yes but it won’t be necessary,” the zombie added.
Brüks had been wondering about lethal force. Maybe best not to push that angle.
On the other hand, the thing didn’t seem to mind answering questions…
“Why do your ey—”
“To maximize acquisition of high-res input across the visual field sir.”
“Huh.” Not a trick the conscious mind could use, with its limited bandwidth. A good chunk of so-called vision actually consisted of preconscious filters deciding what not to see, to spare the homunculus upstream from information overload.
“You’re black,” Brüks observed. “Most of you zombies are black.”
No response.
“Does Valerie have a melanin feti—”
“I’ve got this,” Moore said, rising into view through the docking tube. The zombie moved smoothly aside to let him pass.
“They talk,” Brüks said. “I didn’t—”
Moore spared a glance at Brüks’s face as he moved past. Then he was back on board, and heading aft. “Come with me, please.”
“Uh, where?”
“R&M. Freckle on your face I don’t like the look of.” Moore disappeared into the Hub.
Brüks looked back at the airlock. Valerie’s sentry had moved back into place, blocking the way to more exotic locales.
“Thanks for the chat,” Brüks said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“Close your eyes.”
Brüks obeyed; the insides of his lids glowed brief bloody red as Moore’s diagnostic laser scanned down his face.