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Rapisardi cleared his throat. “The, um... All I needed to change was the sign of one input parameter, and of course the activation timer. Two numbers. It's fortunate the code was configured as it was, or the idea mightn't have occurred to me.”

  “Very convenient.”

  “Yes? And are you distressed at finding yourself still alive?”

  “Almost time to fire the other tube,” Wallich observed, his eyes on some invisible chronometer. “Let's knock it off and get back to work.”

  I tensed, knowing what came next. We'd rehearsed this procedure over and over, and while there had never been an attack in the middle of it, this point was nonetheless the most critical in terms of timing and task loading. I kept a close eye on the allocation monitors, making sure no one had too much or too little of the data system's attention.

  “Coming around to north cap deployment attitude,” Wallich said. “Attitude achieved. Attitude lock. Rapisardi, open tube number two please.”

  “Aye, sir. Tube two open.”

  “Prepare to fire.”

  “Aye, sir. Ready to fire.”

  “Fire.”

  The ship clanked and popped and vibrated again.

  “Payload is away,” Rapisardi said.

  “Maneuvering to south burn attitude,” Wallich called out without pause. And that was it; the payload was away, ten detector packages that would slam down upon the Martian polar cap, and alert the Immunity the moment they found mycoric activity there, activity that signaled a new tolerance for cold, a clear threat to those above. But there was no comment from any of us, no sense of triumph or accomplishment. Not yet, anyway. My arms floated free as the ship rotated around us.

  Davenroy's voice: “Engine covers are open. Ready main thrust.”

  Wallich grunted acknowledgment. “Achieved. Attitude lock. Engage main engines.”

  From there it was burn and turn, burn and turn, three five-minute periods of thrust that would put us in line with the south pole at a velocity that wouldn't pulverize the probes as they hit. And then the covers were blown off payload tubes three and four, two more open wounds in our hull, and the probes were fired out of them. Pop! Pop!

  Throughout all of this I kept stealing looks at Baucum, who appeared to be taking all the activity rather poorly, her face gone gray and shiny. Now was not the time for chatter, and I couldn't reach her with my hands, so there was no consolation I could offer. But then, it didn't look like a consolement sort of mood anyway; more like she was motion-sick or in fear for her life, either of which could easily be true. Presently, she took notice of her instruments, and her frown lines deepened.

  “Captain, we're being pinged again. I'm reading multiple solid echoes, a lot of variation in cross-section.”

  “Flash us the data,” Wallich said.

  Baucum and Lehne had geeked together a radar sim that would refine their earlier solutions based on any new data, and it was a frame from this that appeared on my zee: the planet Mars a transparent globe of red wire, surrounded by colored lines representing the targets.

  “Damn,” Wallich said. And then, after a hesitation of moments, he began to laugh. Not chuckle or giggle or snigger, but laugh, a stiff braying spaced out at fixed intervals, as if something were pressing rhythmically on his stomach, forcing the air out in measured bursts. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “Sir?” Baucum said, turning, looking at him uncertainly.

  Wallich's grinning face was red, the pace of his laughter picking up. “Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!”

  This was not good. On a scale of good to not good, this was definitely on the “not” side of the spectrum. Even I couldn't afford to go to pieces in the middle of a— But then, as suddenly as it had begun, the laughter cut off, and Wallich was blinking, looking at his bridge crew looking back at him. His eyes narrowed for a moment, suspicious at our stares, and then he was all business again.

  “Hiding behind the planet,” he said, eyeing (no doubt) the display Baucum had flashed over.

  “What are they?” I asked. Demanded, really, because this was another one of those things nobody was talking about, and at this point I damn well wanted to know.

  Wallich shrugged, made a face of exaggerated innocence at me. “A few of these radar cross-sections are big enough to be manned ships. Probably that's exactly what they are; this doesn't feel like pure machine activity, does it? And teleoperation is out; the light lag from even the Gladholds is too severe. So there need to be human beings down here running the show. Got to be. The rest of the objects are much smaller, though: probes, small weapons platforms, who knows? Probably teleoperated from the ships via laser beam, although I suppose some of them could be autonomous.

  “Earth's navies used to use a similar approach: manned vessels surrounded by swarms of attendant machinery. Less vulnerability that way, more fluid response. How long would they last if the radar beacons were right on the ships? About two seconds. So they put the radar out on drones, and listened passively to the echoes. Weapons, same thing; the humans were there to guide the attack, not to participate directly. That's what I think is going on, here. The real question is, who are they? The Temples of Transcendent Evolution aren't up to a prank like this.”

  “Not without help,” Lehne said.

  I protested: “This is not a prank. This is a murder.”

  “Not much of a murder,” the disembodied voice of Jenna Davenroy observed. “On their present course it'll take them half an hour to intercept us.”

  “Well,” Wallich said, “clearly we aren't where they expected us to be. They probably thought we'd break off to avoid their... spritzing machine. Whatever it was.”

  “Maybe lucky for us,” Lehne said.

  Yeah. Probably very lucky.

  “I'm reading plasma clouds near several of the echoes,” Baucum warned, her eyes on invisible instruments.

  “Propulsive?” Wallich asked.

  “Hydrogen-iron spectrum,” she confirmed. A ladderdown signature.

  This time, his chuckle sounded natural and humorless. “Coming after us, are they? Well, let's see if they'll follow us all the way down. I'm bringing us around to trans-Earth injection attitude. Davenroy, uncover the main engines again, please.”

  Below, the planet was an enormous symbol of yin and yang—bisected by sunlight, huge enough to appear flat rather than spherical. How high above it were we? A few thousand kilometers? Even at normal magnification, it was like holding a dinner plate right in front of your nose.

  A moldy dinner plate, I should say, or, more precisely... imagine looking down, from a height of three or four meters, on a lawn of unkempt grass, patchy, shot through with strangling weeds. Now imagine that the grass and weeds are transparent, faint rainbows twinkling here and there, and that a low, unmoving ground fog enshrouds them all. The fog, on closer inspection, is in fact a mad crisscross of translucent threads, and the soil beneath it all has the ruddy, airy look of wet clay pressed through mesh. Visually, this is what Mars looked like as we raced by.

  Emotionally, with what artists used to call the “eye of the heart,” I saw instead an open wound, polluted flesh wriggling with maggots and bacterial slime. The corpse of a planet, all beauty transmuted to horror and rot. Looking at it, I felt a rush of absolute terror: what in God's name were we doing? Even Tug Jinacio had died at the hands of this stuff. How had we gotten down here? How had we dared?

  But already I could see the features receeding, the edges of the planet itself growing visibly smaller. Closest approach had come and gone, then; we were leaving this world, not approaching it. Already! God, we were moving fast.

  “Trans-Earth Injection attitude achieved,” Wallich said crisply. “Davenroy, fire the engines, please.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The sense of acceleration was light but immediate. We were putting on speed, putting distance between ourselves and this bloom of a world at an ever-increasing rate. Good riddance, was all I could think.

  “Objects are moving to intercept,” Wallich observed. Then, m
aybe ten seconds later: “I don't think they can catch us. But they can sure as hell follow.”

  “Replication events on the hull are stepping up,” Baucum said, gray-faced, just to let us know our troubles weren't over. Fear danced like bubbles of ice water through my veins.

  Wallich simply pressed his lips together in an expression of distaste. “HF sweat not cutting it, eh? Lehne, what are the indications for increased flowrate?”

  “Contraindicated, definitely.”

  “Are we damaging the hull?”

  “Probably. No time for a serious inspection right now, but if something starts eating through you'll know for sure. Main thing is, the hydrogen ions are food. Maybe even fluorine, depending. Neutralize one pathogen, great, but you leave behind a useful residue of TGL debris. Complementin is mostly gone by now; I say stop the sweat.”

  Wallich mulled this over, nodding unhappily. I understood his dilemma—to fight off external pathogens he really had only two useful weapons: variations in pH, and variations in temperature. And the release of active immunocytes, sure, but that was tantamount to a declaration of war against an effectively omnipotent foe. Not smart, except maybe as a last resort.

  But meanwhile, any variation in hull conditions rendered the t-balance that much less effective, that much less likely to fool the mycospores attached to it. The result was a tightrope walk: the more numerous and active the spores, the stronger the countermeasures required to foil them, ergo the more activity on our part and more suspicion on theirs... But doing nothing wasn't much of an option, either, not if they were already starting to replicate.

  “Recommendations?” Wallich asked finally.

  “LN2 purge, level one,” Lehne replied, with a reluctant grunt of approval soon following from Baucum.

  “This close to the planet?”

  Lehne nodded. “Quench and warm. Five minutes, tops. Vapor should boil off most of them, along with contaminants, and the rest... We don't crack them up with the thermal shock, well, at least they wake up cold on a clean, hypoantigenic surface.”

  “Why not just leave it cold?” I asked. I realized this had been bothering me for some time; why didn't we always run cold? Coat the hull with liquid nitrogen and blast through the Mycosystem like a miniature comet, frigid as the surface of Ganymede itself? I was recording, and it occurred to me that I'd used my Reporter voice to ask the question. Some habits simply don't die.

  Wallich looked briefly surprised, as if he'd forgotten I was aboard, or forgotten I was anything more than an allocations console operator. But then his patient-captain-warming-to-the-cameras look switched on, along with a faint smile. “Sensible question, Strasheim, but life is unfortunately not that simple. Temperature doesn't mean quite the same thing on the nanoscale, especially in hard vacuum and bright sunlight. Cold surfaces just attract a different sort of trouble down here.”

  “I see,” I said. “May I pester you for details later?”

  He laughed. “If there's a later, you certainly may.”

  NINETEEN:

  Cracking Pressure

  Every time Louis Pasteur strikes a foreign object, whether spore or dust mote or living mycostructure, atoms are knocked free from its t-balance surface in proportion to the square of our relative velocity, which has been consistently higher than original plan. Individually these events are trivial almost to the point of nonexistence, but the cumulative erosion from thousands of such events every day will eventually begin to impair this most important of our defenses.

  “Eventually” might have meant as much as four or five years, if not for the corrosive effects of a chemical taggant, nineteen abortive microblooms, and the acids and solvents used to remove the remains of same. Estimates of our survival time are now measured in months, and will remain in the double digits only so long as no further misfortune befalls us.

  Given that the five unidentified spaceships currently pursuing us—and their attendant swarm of apparently unmanned instrument and weapons platforms—are only three light-seconds behind, and that we must certainly slow down to deploy our detector packages when we get to Earth, and then very nearly reverse our course for the return home, such fortune appears unlikely.

  And no, we can't abort the mission—I've asked. First of all, deployment of these detectors may of course prove frightfully important to the wellbeing of the Immunity. Second and more immediately, our fuel supply will not carry us home without the gravity assist of at least one more planetary flyby. Oh well, I did promise Momma I'd say hallo to the Earth.

  —from LET'S GET THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF HERE

  (c) 2106 by John Strasheim

  (Author's Preferred Text)

  ~~~

  Attack 5+ unknw enmy ship @ Mars, msn ongoing but Erth = big probm

  —from LET'S GET THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF HERE

  (c) 2106 by John Strasheim

  (Text As Transmitted)

  ~~~

  Things sounded pretty hot on the bridge—we'd been encountering a more aggressive breed of mycorum since leaving Mars behind—but Baucum was just finishing her sleep rotation and I was just starting mine, and unless specifically called up to help, I was determined to take the opportunity to talk with her. Not so much for personal reasons, although that was a factor, as for professional ones. Spacer professional, I mean, not as a berichter. She'd been so strange since the attack, not so much frightened as diminished, defeated, somehow both brittle and limp, and considering I now probably knew her better than any of the others did, it seemed natural that I should be the one to find out just exactly what the problem was.

  Aside from the obvious, I mean—we were all pretty much at a loss, like sleepy mice whose nest has suddenly turned out to be the inside of some terrible machine. Worse than that, really, because unlike the Mycosystem itself, these solid enemies were trying to kill us, hoping to kill us, actively thinking about the process of killing us. That's a very personal, very immediate sensation. But it didn't have the rest of us slumping around like our spines had been broken.

  I cornered Baucum coming out of the head, and when she saw me there she tried to close the door again, right in my face. I stuck a foot in it, which she obligingly slammed between fanfold and frame. The door wasn't heavy, and my wide shoes were of course filled with lead, but the gesture was hurtful just the same.

  “Ouch,” I told her gravely.

  “I don't want to talk to you, Strasheim.”

  “This isn't a personal call.”

  “I don't care what it is, I don't feel like talking, and I believe I have that right. Now if you'll excuse me—”

  “You don't have the right,” I said, “where the safety of the ship is concerned.”

  “Fuck the safety of the ship,” she replied calmly, and Jenna Davenroy, who was also just coming off shift, chose that precise moment to pop through the hatchway from the engine room.

  “Hallo,” she said uncertainly, “am I interrupting?”

  “No,” Baucum and I said in unison. “I was just leaving,” Baucum added.

  Davenroy was a good fifteen years older than Baucum, and it showed, suddenly, in the easy condescension she was able to project through what was otherwise a look of polite concern. “Dear, it's no use trying to keep things to yourself around here. What concerns any of us concerns us all. I appreciate your quite natural desire for privacy, but in this context it's really rather rude. I've been spying on you, did you know that? Keeping a little window on you since I noticed what a wreck you'd become. What happened back there to shake you up so badly?”

  Baucum pulled the washroom door fully open, sullen. “It's complicated.”

  “Really.”

  “Why don't you—” I began, but Baucum's glare turned on me and the words dried up. She was really upset, like maybe poised on the brink of violence.

  “We dropped our detectors,” Baucum said, “and son of a gun, they really were bombs after all.”

  “They were used as bombs,” Davenroy corrected. “In defense against an unp
rovoked attack.”

  “Was it unprovoked?”

  Davenroy clucked. “Any danger we might possibly represent is to the Mycosystem, to the blind voracity of mindless, microscopic machines. That hardly constitutes a threat.”

  “And if our activities disturb the Mycosystem in some way? If I lived in the Gladholds, and I found out someone was going to blast a hole in Infected Mars, you'd better believe I'd feel threatened about it.”

  I thought about that, and realized she was probably onto something. The Temples of Transcendent Evolution, or rather the fanatics from whom they'd tried to dissasociate themselves, were no more capable of launching a t-balance battle fleet than Julf Ernst and the gang back at the shoe factory. But as propagandists the Temples had no peer in the solar system; starting from nothing, in a decade and a half they'd recruited tens of thousands of people, not all of whom were stupid or gullible. Not by a long shot. So how hard would it be for them to drop a few discreet hints, mail down a collage or two to selected Gladholder net channels? Find a few well-placed kindred spirits, open up a dialogue...

  In fact, this was one of those obvious-in-retrospect revelations that leave you feeling stupid afterward. Right, yes, it must have happened that way, else how could this situation have come about? What other plausible scenario was there?

  “So that's who we're fighting,” I said, and already my mind was off crafting reports that would imply all of this, leaving the connections plain for any reader to see without specifically implicating any one person or organization. Sincere but misguided, certain elements may have sought the mad industrial might of reckless foreigners...

  Davenroy, though, was not impressed. “Defending our lives is hardly a crime, but endangering us with hazardous chemical sprays certainly is. Whoever is behind all this should have stepped out months ago and aired their grievances publicly.”