> MISSION_CLOCK: HOSTILE_DWELLERS

Fifteen minutes to apogee: maximum safe distance, in case [Rorschach] decided to hit back. Far below, the artefact's magnetic field pressed into Ben's atmosphere like God's little finger. Great dark thunderheads converged behind it; turbulent moon-sized curlicues collided in its wake.

Fifteen minutes to apogee, and [Bates] was still hoping Sarasti would change his mind.

In a way, this was her fault. If she had just treated this new travail as one more cross to bear, perhaps things would have gone on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope that [Sarasti] would have let us grit our teeth and keep on going, besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors as well as the usual gauntlet of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn't just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe.

We're on the brink as it is, just surviving the [baseline] environment of this thing. If it's started taking deliberate countermeasures…I don't see how we can risk it.

Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still regretting those words.

On previous expeditions we'd charted twenty-six septa in various stages of development. We'd x-rayed them. We'd done ultrasound. We'd watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind [the Gang of Four] had been a whole different animal.

And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just happened to also come with antilaser prismatics? That was no routine growth event. That thing was set for us.

Set by…

That was the other thing. Thirteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was worried about the tenants.

It had always been breaking and entering, of course. That much hadn't changed. But when we'd jimmied the lock we'd thought we were vandalizing an empty summer cottage, still under construction. We'd thought the owners would be out of the picture for a while. We hadn't been expecting one of them to catch us on his way to take a late-night piss. And now that one had, and vanished into the labyrinth, it was natural to wonder what weapons it might keep stashed under the pillow…

Those septa could spring on us any time. How many are there? Are they fixed, or portable? We can't proceed without knowing these things..

At first, Bates had been surprised and delighted when Sarasti agreed with her.

Twelve minutes to apogee. From this high ground, well above the static, [Theseus] peered down through Rorschach's wrenched and twisted anatomy to keep rock-steady eyes on the tiny wound we'd burned in its side. Our limpet tent covered it like a blister; inside, Jack fed us a second, first-person view of the unfolding experiment.

Sir. We know Rorschach is inhabited. Do we want to risk further provoking the inhabitants? Do we want to risk killing them?

Sarasti hadn't quite looked at her, and hadn't quite spoken. If he had, he might have said I do not understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

Eleven minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was lamenting the fact—not for the first time— that this mission was not under military jurisdiction.

We were waiting for maximum distance before performing the experiment. Rorschach might interpret this as a hostile act, Sarasti had conceded in a voice that contained no trace of irony whatsoever. Now he stood before us, watching [ConSensus] play on the table. Reflections writhed across his naked eyes, not quite masking the deeper reflections behind them.

Ten minutes to apogee. Susan James was wishing that [Cunningham] would put out that goddamned cigarrette. The smoke stank on its way to the ventilators, and anyway, it wasn't necessary. It was just an anachronistic affectation, an attention-getting device; if he needed the nicotine a patch could have soothed his tremors just as easily, without the smoke and the stink.

That wasn't all she was thinking, though. She was wondering why Cunningham had been summoned to Sarasti's quarters earlier in the shift, why he'd looked at her so strangely afterward. I wondered about that myself. A quick check on ConSensus timestamps showed that her medical file had been accessed during that period. I checked those stats, let the shapes bounce between hemispheres: part of my brain locked on elevated oxytocin as the probable reason for that conference. There was an eighty-two percent chance that James had become too trusting for Sarasti's liking.

I had no idea how I knew that. I never did.

Nine minutes to apogee

Barely a molecule of Rorschach's atmosphere had been lost on our account. That was all about to change. Our view of base camp split like a dividing bacterium: one window now focused on the limpet tent, the other on a wide-angle tactical enhance of the space around it.

Eight minutes to apogee. Sarasti pulled the plug.

Down on Rorschach, our tent burst like a bug beneath a boot. A geyser erupted from the wound; a snowstorm swirled at its edges, its charged curlicues intricate as lace. Atmosphere gushed into vacuum, spread thin, crystallized. Briefly, the space around base camp sparkled. It was almost beautiful.

Bates didn't think it was beautiful at all. She watched that bleeding wound with a face as expressionless as Cunningham's, but her jaw was clenched unto tetanus. Her eyes darted between views: watching for things gasping in the shadows.

Rorschach convulsed.

Vast trunks and arteries shuddered, a seismic tremor radiating out along the structure. The epicenter began to twist, a vast segment rotating on its axis, the breach midway along its length. Stress lines appeared where the length that rotated sheared against the lengths to either side that didn't; the structure seemed to soften and stretch there, constricting like a great elongate balloon torqueing itself into sausage links.

Sarasti clicked. Cats made something like that sound when they spied a bird on the far side of a windowpane.

ConSensus groaned with the sound of worlds scraping against each other: telemetry from the onsite sensors, their ears to the ground. Jack's camera controls had frozen again. The image it sent was canted and grainy. The pickup stared blankly at the edge of the hole we'd bored into the underworld.

The groaning subsided. A final faint cloud of crystalline stardust dissipated into space, barely visible even on max enhance.

No bodies. None visible, anyway.

Sudden motion at base camp. At first I thought it was static on Jack's feed, playing along lines of high contrast—but no, something was definitely moving along the edges of the hole we'd burned. Something almost wriggled there, a thousand gray mycelia extruding from the cut surface and writhing slowly into the darkness. "It's—huh," Bates said. "Triggered by the pressure drop, I guess. That's one way to seal a breach."

Two weeks after we'd wounded it, Rorschach had begun to heal itself.

Apogee behind us now. All downhill from here. Theseus began the long drop back into enemy territory.

"Doesn't use septa," Sarasti said.