around the cabin, as the branching me looked quickly around, searching for the source of the powering engines. At first, I missed it. Everything suddenly lurched back, and I could tell the magnetic boots had uncoupled. The world spun as the branching me tried to reorient and get his boots back on the deck. And when he did, I saw the corpse—it had to be a corpse; there was no air, or heat, or pressure in that cabin—rise from one of the acceleration couches at the back of the ship and launch itself right toward me.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.
“Pause,” Chan snapped.
Sarah complied, pausing with the coil laid out parallel to the ship’s deck, arms outstretched before it, eyes blank and staring.
“What in God’s name is that?” Chan asked.
“Sarah?”
“Analysis indicates that it is what it appears to be—a reanimated coil impervious to the effects of vacuum.”
“Which tells us nothing,” I muttered. “Is that what kills… me?” As much as I didn’t want to hear the answer, I didn’t want to witness my own death at the hands of some space-zombie a whole hell of a lot more.
“No. Transmission ends before your previous coil is terminated.”
“Right. Should have known that, or the message wouldn’t have gotten out.” The whole thing had me rattled. Video or not, it all felt too real and at the same time preposterous on a level that made it hard to believe. “Go ahead and resume playback.”
It was strange, watching the branching me in a struggle for his life. Watching from his eyes as he avoided the lunging coil, drew his sidearm, and kept shooting until the lifeless corpse was, once again, a lifeless corpse. The fact that the entire ballet of violence took place in total silence only enhanced the ethereal unreality of the scene.
“Jesus,” Chan whispered, and I couldn’t tell if it was an exclamation or a prayer. “What just happened?”
The video stopped, and we were hanging once more above the nebula, drifting through an endless starscape. The blue star that was Sarah’s avatar pulsed with light as she said, “The remainder of the video consists of you making your way to the bridge against increasing acceleration and sending a message to your home console. There are no further anomalies that occur during that time frame, and analysis has found no information as to the registry of the vessel or explanation of the various events that took place.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Drop VR, then, Sarah.”
The session ended, and we were once more seated in Chan’s bolt-hole, the real world seeming somehow dull and washed out after the VR experience. I sighed heavily. “I think we have more questions than when we started.”
“Maybe,” Chan said, and after seeing and hearing her in VR, I had to fight back the eeriness that came with that smooth baritone. “But at least we know what happened out there. Probably as much as we would if we had all survived, somehow. And we know that whatever is going on, it’s got to have government or corporate ties.”
That threw me. “How do you figure?”
“They got to Miller. Not just his personal records, but his backups. That’s…” She paused. “That’s hard, Carter. Really, really hard. The backup vaults have the best security we’ve ever been able to devise, and they’re constantly monitored, not just by AIs, but by some of the best pros in the business. No individual, or even affiliation or hacktivist group, could break that security on their own, not without triggering something that would set the Net on fire. And they managed to do it to Miller, and probably took a shot at you, too. And there’s Harper. We still don’t know where they are.”
It made sense. And that wasn’t even taking into consideration the Persephone. Something had taken her out, and there weren’t a lot of civilians out there who had armed space ships. That meant money, and that in turn meant polities or the megacorps. “Okay. So we’re up against the big boys. Big enough that they took out the Persephone, and then tried to wipe us out. And when that didn’t work, they decided to send people to kill us.”
“Or kidnap,” Chan said. “Kidnap makes more sense. Lock us up somewhere. Force us to check in with the insurance companies to keep our backups current. It wouldn’t be hard to either drum up fake communications for our families or just make us do it at gunpoint. They could keep us that way for decades, and no one would