Left unchecked, it would transform the entire mass of the ship into something weirder and stranger than any Ultra had ever dreamed of. We knew, because we had picked up reports of it happening to other lighthuggers. And it wouldn’t stop at the ship. The plague made no distinction between machines and people. It viewed them with perfect equanimity, equal grist to its transformative mill. From me, with my blood running thick with medichines, to Captain Luarca, with her plastic mask and alloy fingers, we’d be none of us immune.
Fortunately for us, though, Branco had found the impact spot. I knew this because I could see where he had drilled and inserted the sensors around the crater’s perimeter. He couldn’t fight it, not there and then. But he could draw a margin around it, measure the speed with which it was eating his ship. And then return inside for the high-energy weapons and tools which could do something.
He must have been coming back inside when the spike took him.
Formantera Lady survived, of course. Once the suit had shown me the danger, it relinquished its fight. I resumed my climb, and was halfway to the door when communications were restored. I told Captain Luarca about the discovery. I chose my words very carefully.
Later, when the infection had been fusion-sterilised, and the rest of the tail swept for other spore sites (there turned out to be none), she took me aside and asked a question.
“You said ‘we’, Raoul.”
“I did?”
“When you called in. You said ‘we’ found something. As if there were two of you out there.”
“Branco led me to the infection site,” I said.
I waited for her to query this, to ask me to explain myself, but instead her plastic mask gave a nod of quiet understanding, as if I had told her all that was necessary. “The volition box,” was all she said.
I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now. The box was supposed to hold a model of Branco, a predictive simulation capable of anticipating his next move. Something like a beta-level, but only in the crudest sense. It couldn’t possibly have emulated him with enough thoroughness to know that he had unfinished business, a vital job that still needed to be done.
Could it?
“It was resisting me,” I said, still trying to think my way through what had happened. “Now it isn’t. I’ve taken the suit out again and it’s gradually becoming easier to use. It won’t take long, now. It’s learning quickly.”
It was not necessary to add the corollary, which was that my gain meant the guttering out of whatever part of Branco had still been trapped inside the volition box.
“He served us well,” Captain Luarca said. “Right until the end. We won’t forget him.”
“And the suit?”
“Just a vessel,” she said softly, as if speaking to herself. “That’s all.”
She was right, I suppose. But later, when I had enough confidence with a brush, I added a cameo that showed the last good deed he did for Formantera Lady: Branco standing on the hull, looking into the crater where the spore had lodged. The work wasn’t up to his standards, but I liked to think he’d have forgiven me for that.