“Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.”
“I wasn’t teasing him, I was just chat—”
“Don’t chat with them, either.”
Brüks opened his eyes. Moore was running his eyes down some invisible midair diagnostic. “Remember who they answer to,” he added.
“I can’t imagine that Valerie forgot to swear her minions to secrecy.”
“And I can’t imagine her minions will forget to tell her any secrets you might have asked about. Whether they answered or not.”
Brüks considered that. “You think she might take offense at the melanin-fetish remark?”
“I have no idea,” Moore said quietly. “I sure as hell did.”
Brüks blinked. “I—”
“You look at them.” There was liquid nitrogen in the man’s voice. “You see—zombies. Fast on the draw, good in the field, less than human. Less than animals, maybe; not even conscious. Maybe you don’t even think it’s possible to disrespect something like that. Like disrespecting a lawn mower, right?”
“No, I—”
“Let me tell you what I see. The man you were chatting with was called Azagba. Aza to his buddies. But he gave that up—either for something he believed in, or because it was the best of a bad lot of options, or because it was the only option he had. You look at Valerie’s entourage and you see a cheap joke. I see the seventy-odd percent of military bioauts recruited from places where armed violence runs so rampant that nonexistence as a conscious being is actually something you aspire to. I see people who got mowed down on the battlefield and then rebooted, just long enough to make a choice between going back to the grave or paying off the jump-start with a decade of blackouts and indentured servitude. And that’s pretty close to the best-case scenario.”
“What would be worst case?”
“Some jurisdictions still hold that life ends at death,” Moore told him. “Anything else is an animated corpse. In which case Azagba has exactly as many rights as a cadaver in an anatomy class.” He stabbed the air and nodded: “I was right: it’s precancerous.”
Malawi, Brüks remembered.
“That’s why you took her on,” he realized. “Not for me, not for Sengupta. Not even for the mission. Because she killed one of your own.”
Moore looked right through him. “I would have thought that by now you’d have learned to keep your attempts at psychoanalysis to yourself.” He extracted a tumor pencil from the first-aid kit. “Any nausea? Headaches, dizziness? Loose stools?”
Brüks brought his hand to his face. “Not yet.”
“Probably nothing to worry about, but we’ll run a complete body scan just to be safe. Could be internal lesions as well.” He leaned in, pressed the pencil against Brüks’s face. Something electrical snapped in Brüks’s ear; a sudden tingling warmth spread out across his cheek.
“I’d recommend daily scans from here on in,” Moore said. “Our shielding on approach wasn’t all it could have been.” He gestured for Brüks to move to the right, unfolded the medbed from the wall. “I have to admit I’m a bit surprised this started so soon, though. Maybe you had a preexisting condition.” He stood aside. “Lie back.”
Brüks maneuvered himself over the pallet; Moore strapped him into place against the free fall. A biomedical collage bloomed across the bulkhead.
“Uh, Jim…”
The soldier kept his eyes on the scan.
“Sorry.”
Moore grunted. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to be so fast on the uptake.” He paused. “It’s not as though you’re some kind of zombie.”
“Roaches, you know—we fuck up,” Brüks admitted.
“Yes. I forget that sometimes.” The Colonel took a breath, let it out softly through clenched teeth. “Before you showed up, I—well…”
Brüks waited in silence, fearful of tipping some scale.
“It’s been a while,” Moore said, “since I’ve had much call to deal with my own kind.”
GOD CREATED THE NATURAL NUMBERS. ALL ELSE IS THE WORK OF MAN.
“GOT SOMETHING FOR you.”
It was a white plastic clamshell, about the size and shape to hold a set of antique eyeglasses. Lianna had fabbed a bright green bow and stuck it to the top.
Brüks eyed it suspiciously. “What is it?”
“The Face of God,” she declared, and then—deflated by the look he shot at her, “That’s kind of what the hive’s calling it, anyway. Piece of your slime mold.” She held it out with a flourish. “If Muhammad can’t come to the sample…”
“Thanks.” He took the offering (try as he might, he couldn’t keep from smiling), and set it on the table next to dessert.
“They thought you’d like to take a shot at, you know. Seeing what makes it tick.”
Brüks glanced at a bulkhead window where three Bicamerals floated at the compiler, their gazes divergent as was their wont. (Not any Senguptoid aversion to eye contact, he’d come to realize; just the default preference for a 360-degree visual field, adopted by a collective with eyes to share.) “Are they throwing me a bone, or do they just want someone expendable doing the dissections?”
“A bone, maybe. But you know, this thing does have certain biological properties. And you are the only biologist on board.”
“Roach biologist. And that slime mold’s got to be postbiological if it’s anything at all. And you know as well as I do that I’ve got better odds of getting a blow job from Valerie than—”
He caught himself, too late. Idiot. Stupid, insensitive—
“Maybe not,” Leona said after a pause so brief it might have been imaginary. “But you’re the only one in the neighborhood with a biologist’s perspective.”
“You—you think that makes a difference?”
“Sure. More to the point, I think they do, too.”
Brüks thought about that. “I’ll try not to let them down, then.” And then: “Lee—”
“So what you doing here, anyway?” She leaned in for a closer look at his display. “You’re running mo-cap.”
He nodded, wary of speech.
“What for? Slimey hasn’t moved since we got here.”
“I’m, uh…” He shrugged and confessed. “I’m watching the Bicams.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve been trying to figure out their methodology,” he confessed. “Everyone’s got to have one, right? Scientific or superstitious or just some weird gut instinct, there’s at least got to be some kind of pattern…”
“You’re not finding one?”
“Sure I am. They’re rituals. Eulali and Ofoegbu raise their hands just so, Chodorowska howls at the moon for precisely three-point-five seconds, the whole lot of them throw their heads back and gargle, for fucksake. The behaviors are so stereotyped you’d call them neurotic if you saw them in one of those old labs with the real animals in cages. But I can’t correlate them to anything else that happens. You’d think there’d be some kind of sequence, right? Try something, if that doesn’t work try something else. Or just follow some prescribed set of steps to chase away the evil spirits.”
Lianna nodded and said nothing.
“I don’t even know why they bother to make sounds,” he grumbled. “That quantum callosum or whatever they have has got to be faster than any kind of acoustic—”