I looked at Bates and Sascha. "Control panel?"
Bates shrugged. Her drones panned the throats around us, spraying sonar down each. My HUD sketched a patchy three-d model from the echoes: swathes of paint thrown against invisible walls. We were dots near the center of a ganglion, a tiny swarm of parasites infesting some great hollowed host. Each tunnel curved away in a gradual spiral, each along a different orientation. Sonar could peep around those bends a few meters further than we could. Neither eyes nor ultrasonics saw anything to distinguish one choice from another.
Bates pointed down one of the passageways—"Keeton—" and another— "Sascha," before turning to coast off down her own unbeaten path.
I looked uneasily down mine. "Any particular—"
"Twenty-five minutes," she said.
I turned and jetted slowly down my assigned passageway. The passage curved clockwise, a long unremarkable spiral; after twenty meters that curvature would have blocked any view of its entrance even if the foggy atmosphere hadn't. My drone kept point across the tunnel, its sonar clicking like the chattering of a thousand tiny teeth, its tether unspooling back to the distant drum in the nexus.
It was a comfort, that leash. It was short. The grunts could stray ninety meters and no further, and we were under strict orders to stay under their wings at all times. This dim infested burrow might lead all the way to hell, but I would not be expected to follow it nearly so far. My cowardice had official sanction.
Fifty meters to go. Fifty meters and I could turn and run with my tail between my legs. In the meantime all I had to do was grit my teeth, and focus, and record: everything you see, Sarasti had said. As much as possible of what you can't. And hope that this new reduced time limit would expire before Rorschach spiked us into gibbering dementia.
The walls around me twitched and shivered like the flesh of something just-killed. Something darted in and out of sight with a faint cackle of laughter.
Focus. Record. If the grunt doesn't see it, it's not real.
Sixty-five meters in, one of the ghosts got inside my helmet.
I tried to ignore it. I tried to look away. But this phantom wasn't flickering at the edge of vision; it hovered near the center of my faceplate, floating like a spot of swirling dizziness between me and the HUD. I gritted my teeth and tried to look past, stared into the dim bloody haze of the middle distance, watched the jerky unfolding travelogues in the little windows labeled Bates and James. Nothing out there. But in here, floating before my eyes, Rorschach's latest headfuck smeared a fuzzy thumbprint right in front of the sonar feed.
"New symptom," I called in. "Nonperipheral hallucination, stable, pretty formless though. No spiking that I can—"
The inset marked Bates skidded hard about. "Keet—"
Window and voice cut out together.
Not just Bates' window, either. Sascha's inset and the drone's-eye sonarscape flickered and died at the same moment, stripped my HUD bare except for in-suit feeds and a little red readout flashing Link Down. I spun but the grunt was still there, three meters off my right shoulder. Its optical port was clearly visible, a ruby thumbnail set into the plastron.
Its gun ports were visible too. Pointing at me.
I froze. The drone shivered in some local electromagnetic knot as if terrified. Of me, or—
Of something behind me…
I started to turn. My helmet filled with sudden static, and with what sounded—faintly—like a voice:
"—ucking move, Kee—not—"
"Bates? Bates?" Another icon had bloomed in place of Link Down. The grunt was using radio for some reason—and though almost close enough to touch, I could barely make out the signal.
A hash of Batespeak: "—to your—right in front of—" and Sascha as well, a bit more clearly: "—an't he see it?..."
"See what? Sascha! Someone tell me what—see what?"
"—read? Keeton, do you read?"
Somehow Bates had boosted the signal; static roared like an ocean, but I could hear the words behind it. "Yes! What—"
"Keep absolutely still, do you understand? Absolutely still. Acknowledge."
"Acknowledged." The drone kept me in its shaky sights, dark stereocam irises spasming wide, stuttering to pinpoints. "Wha—"
"There's something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can't you see it?"
"N-no. My HUD's down—"
Sascha broke in: "How can he not see it it's right th—"
Bates barked over her: "It's man-sized, radially symmetrical, eight, nine arms. Like tentacles, but—segmented. Spiky."
"I don't see anything," I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship's spine, watching as we laid our best plans.
I saw Michelle the synesthesiac, curled into a fetal ball: You can't see it...it's in—visible...
"What's it doing?" I called. Why can't I see it? Why can't I see it?
"Just—floating there. Kind of waving. Oh, sh—Keet—"
The grunt skidded sideways, as if slapped by a giant hand. It bounced off the wall and suddenly the laser link was back, filling the HUD with intelligence: first-person perspectives of Bates and Sascha racing along alien tunnels, a grunt's-eye view of a space suit with Keeton stenciled across its breastplate and there, right beside it, some thing like a rippling starfish with too many arms—
The Gang barreled around the curve and now I almost could see something with my own eyes, flickering like heat-lightning off to one side. It was large, and it was moving, but somehow my eyes just slid off every time they tried to get a fix. It's not real, I thought, giddy with hysterical relief, it's just another hallucination but then Bates sailed into view and it was right there, no flickering, no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid, undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and scrambled over our heads, segmented arms flailing like whips. A sudden crackling buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting free again, charred and smoking.
A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down. Three grunts hovered in formation in the middle of the passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal proboscis sliding back into its sheath. Bates shut the grunt down before it had finished closing its mouth.
Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar of heavy breathing.
The offlined grunt drifted in the murky air. The alien carcass bumped gently off the wall, twitching: a hydra of human backbones, scorched and fleshless. It didn't look much like my on-board visions after all.
For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I found that almost reassuring.
The two active grunts panned the fog until Bates gave them new orders; then one turned to secure the carcass, the other to steady its fallen comrade. Bates grabbed the dead grunt and unplugged its tether. "Fall back. Slowly. I'm right behind you."
I tweaked my jets. Sascha hesitated. Coils of shielded cable floated about us like umbilical cords.
"Now," Bates said, plugging a feed from her own suit directly into the offlined grunt.
Sascha started after me. Bates took up the rear. I watched my HUD; a swarm of multiarmed monsters would appear there any moment.
They didn't. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates' machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited. Its inhabitants were invisible.
Sometimes. Sort of.
And, oh yeah. We'd just killed one.
*
Bates threw the deactivated grunt into the sky as soon as we'd made vacuum. Its comrades used it for target practice while we strapped in, firing and firing until there was nothing left but cooling vapor. Rorschach spun even that faint plasma into filigree before it faded.
Halfway back to Theseus, Sascha turned to the Major: "You—"
"No."
"But— they do shit on their own, right? Autonomous
."
"Not when they're slaved."
"Malfunction? Spike?"
Bates didn't answer.
She called ahead. By the time we made it back Cunningham had grown another little tumor on Theseus' spine, a remote surgery packed with teleops and sensors. One of the surviving grunts grabbed the carcass and jumped ship as soon as we passed beneath the carapace, completing the delivery as we docked.
We were born again to the fruits of a preliminary necropsy. The holographic ghost of the dissected alien rose from ConSensus like some flayed and horrific feast. Its splayed arms looked like human spinal columns. We sat around the table and waited for someone else to take the first bite.
"Did you have to shoot it with microwaves?" Cunningham sniped, tapping the table. "You completely cooked the animal. Every cell was blown out from the inside."
Bates shook her head. "There was a malfunction."
He gave her a sour look. "A malfunction that just happens to involve precise targeting of a moving object. It doesn't sound random to me."
Bates looked back evenly. "Something flipped autonomous targeting from off to on. A coin toss. Random."
"Random is—"
"Give it a rest, Cunningham. I don't need this shit from you right now."
His eyes rolled in that smooth dead face, focused suddenly on something overhead. I followed his gaze: Sarasti stared down at us like an owl panning for meadow voles, drifting slowly in the Coriolis breeze.
No visor this time, either. I knew he hadn't lost it.
He fixed Cunningham. "Your findings."
Cunningham swallowed. Bits and pieces of alien anatomy flickered with color-coded highlights as he tapped his fingers. "Right, then. I'm afraid I can't give you much at the cellular level. There's not much left inside the membranes. Not many membranes left, for that matter. In terms of gross morphology, the specimen's dorsoventrally compressed and radially symmetrical, as you can see. Calcareous exoskeleton, keratinised plastic cuticle. Nothing special."
Bates looked skeptical. "Plastic skin is 'nothing special'?"
"Given the environment I was half-expecting a Sanduloviciu plasma. Plastic's simply refined petroleum. Organocarbon. This thing is carbon-based. It's even protein based, although its proteins are a great deal tougher than ours. Numerous sulphur cross-bonds for lateral bracing, as far as I could tell from what your grunts didn't denature." Cunningham's eyes looked past us all; his consciousness was obviously far aft, haunting remote sensors. "The thing's tissues are saturated with magnetite. On earth you find that material in dolphin brains, migratory birds, even some bacteria—anything that navigates or orients using magnetic fields. Moving up to macrostructures we've got a pneumatic internal skeleton, which as far as I can tell doubles as musculature. Contractile tissue squeezes gas through a system of bladders that stiffen or relax each segment in the arms."
The light came back into Cunningham's eyes long enough to focus on his cigarette. He brought it to his mouth, dragged deeply, set it down again. "Note the invaginations around the base of each arm." Flaccid balloons glowed orange on the virtual carcass. "Cloacae, you could call them. Everything opens into them: they eat, breathe, and defecate through the same little compartment. No other major orifices."
The Gang made a face that said Sascha, grossed out. "Don't things get—clogged up? Seems inefficient."
"If one gets plugged, there's eight other doors into the same system. You'll wish you were so inefficient the next time you choke on a chicken bone."
"What does it eat?" Bates asked.
"I couldn't say. I found gizzard-like contractiles around the cloacae, which implies they chew on something, or did at some point in their history. Other than that..." He spread his hands; the cigarette left faint streamers in its wake. "Inflate those contractiles enough and you create an airtight seal, by the way. In conjunction with the cuticle, that would allow this organism to survive briefly in vacuum. And we already know it can handle the ambient radiation, although don't ask me how. Whatever it uses for genes must be a great deal tougher than ours."
"So it can survive in space," Bates mused.
"In the sense that a dolphin survives underwater. Limited time only."
"How long?"
"I'm not certain."
"Central nervous system," Sarasti said.
Bates and the Gang grew suddenly, subtly still. James's affect seeped out over her body, supplanting Sascha's.
Smoke curled from Cunningham's mouth and nose. "There's nothing central about it, as it transpires. No cephalisation, not even clustered sense organs. The body's covered with something like eyespots, or chromatophores, or both. There are setae everywhere. And as far as I can tell—if all those little cooked filaments I've been able to put back together after your malfunction really are nerves and not something completely different—every one of those structures is under independent control."
Bates sat up straight. "Seriously?"
He nodded. "It would be akin to independently controlling the movement of each individual hair on your head, although this creature is covered with little hairs from tip to tip. The same thing applies to the eyes. Hundreds of thousands of eyes, all over the cuticle. Each one is barely more than a pinhole camera, but each is capable of independent focus and I'm guessing all the different inputs integrate somewhere up the line. The entire body acts like a single diffuse retina. In theory that gives it enormous visual acuity."
"A distributed telescope array," Bates murmured.
"A chromatophore underlies each eye—the pigment's some kind of cryptochrome so it's probably involved in vision, but it can also diffuse or contract through the local tissue. That implies dynamic pigment patterns, like a squid or a chameleon."
"Background pattern-matching?" Bates asked. "Would that explain why Siri couldn't see it?"
Cunningham opened a new window and played grainy looped imagery of Siri Keeton and his unseen dance partner. The creature I hadn't noticed was ominously solid to the cameras: a floating discoid twice as wide as my own torso, arms extending from its edges like thick knotted ropes. Patterns rippled across its surface in waves; sunlight and shadow playing on a shallow seabed.
"As you can see, the background doesn't match the pattern," Cunningham said. "It's not even close."
"Can you explain Siri's blindness to it?" Sarasti said.
"I can't," Cunningham admitted. "It's beyond ordinary crypsis. But Rorschach makes you see all sorts of things that aren't there. Not seeing something that is there might come down to essentially the same thing."
"Another hallucination?" I asked.
Another shrug while Cunningham sucked smoke. "There are many ways to fool the human visual system. It's interesting that the illusion failed when multiple witnesses were present, but if you want a definitive mechanism you'll have to give me more to work with than that." He stabbed his cigarette hand at the crisped remains.
"But—" James took a breath, bracing herself— "We're talking about something... sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power."
Cunningham nodded again. "I'd estimate nervous tissue accounts for about thirty percent of body mass."
"So it's intelligent." Her voice was almost a whisper.
"Not remotely."
"But—thirty percent—"
"Thirty percent motor and sensory wiring." Another drag. "Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, but half of them get used up running the suckers."
"My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent," James said.
"By molluscan standards, certainly. But do you have any idea how much extra cabling you'd need if the photoreceptors in your eye were spread across your entire body? You'd need about three hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single static image, with no filtering, no i
nterpretation, no time-series integration at all." Shiver. Drag. "Now multiply that by all the extra wiring needed to focus all those eyespots on an object, or to send all that information back to individual chromatophores, and then add in the processing power you need to drive those chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but I strongly doubt you'd have much left over for philosophy and science." He waved his hand in the general direction of the hold. "That—that—"
"Scrambler," James suggested.
Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. "Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It's also dumb as a stick."
A moment's silence.
"So what is it?" James asked at last. "Somebody's pet?"
"Canary in a coal mine," Bates suggested.
"Perhaps not even that," Cunningham said. "Perhaps no more than a white blood cell with waldoes. Maintenance bot, maybe. Teleoperated, or instinct-driven. But people, we're ignoring far greater questions here. How could an anaerobe even develop complex multicellular anatomy, much less move as fast as this thing did? That level of activity burns a great deal of ATP."
"Maybe they don't use ATP," Bates said as I thumbnailed: adenosine triphosphate. Cellular energy source.
"It was crammed with ATP," Cunningham told her. "You can tell that much even with these remains. The question is, how can it synthesize the stuff fast enough to keep up with demand. Purely anaerobic pathways wouldn't suffice."
Nobody offered any suggestions.
"Anyway," he said, "So endeth the lesson. If you want gory details, check ConSensus." He wiggled the fingers of his free hand: the spectral dissection vanished. "I'll keep working, but if you want any real answers go get me a live one." He butted out his cigarette against the bulkhead and stared defiantly around the drum.
The others hardly reacted; their topologies still sparkled from the revelations of a few minutes before. Perhaps Cunningam's pet peeve was more important to the Big Picture; perhaps, in a reductionist universe, biochemical basics should always take priority over the finer points of ETI and interspecies etiquette. But Bates and the Gang were time-lagged, processing earlier revelations. Not just processing, either: wallowing. They clung to Cunningham's findings like convicted felons who'd just discovered they might be freed on a technicality.