=Into the White= 
“There’s not a tool on site could do this to him,” Ragnarsson was telling her across the table. “Nothing like it in the fabber logs, either.”
Inspector Sváfa Nordqvist glanced up from the corpse between them, mismatched violet and gray eyes refocusing visibly. She’d been examining the body at high magnification. She wore a regulation vacsuit, as did everyone in the room, and her hair in a precise, black wedge.
The man who’d spoken, Declan Ragnarsson, stood across from her, tall and bed headed, with anxious eyes—a hazer, but neither as chiseled nor as fey-looking as the stereotypical hazer phenotype. He was one of two Titanian Ministry of Science Police ofﬁcers detailed to on-site security at Murmansk Shaft Research Facility.
“You’re certain the logs haven’t been tampered with?” Sváfa asked.
Ragnarsson’s partner, Monique Antigua, a bouncer with round, east Asian features, stood arms crossed at the edge of the table between Sváfa and Ragnarsson. She shook her head. “I went over the logs with a ﬁne sieve. So did the security AIs. But I’m not an infosec specialist.”
“I’ll rely on your assessment for now,” Sváfa said.
The corpse belonged to Mission Director Kjartan Ólafsson, dead now for just over two days. The research team lacked a medical stasis unit, so they’d laid him on a desk in his quarters and dropped the temperature, creating a temporary morgue. Primitive, but they were two kilometers beneath the surface of Saturn’s moon Iapetus; cold was easy to come by. A security drone hovered in one corner. Leaning one-footed against the wall next to the drone, anonymously handsome and so far silent, was Lt. Januszczak, Commonwealth Fleet Intelligence.
Sváfa returned her attention to Ólafsson. The mission director was white. He’d lost most of his blood through a gaping wound in his chest cavity. The wound had the weird, eaten look characteristic of nanotrauma—as if ﬂesh, bone, and organs had been dissolved by acid, but without the chemical burns or paths of puckered tissue runnels of acid would leave. The gradue of loose particulate and undifferentiated bodily ﬂuids typical of nanotrauma had largely been scraped away by the doctor bot during its autopsy, but images from the crime scene before they’d moved the body showed it clearly.
“No attempt at resuscitation, I take it?” she said. It wasn’t exactly a question.
“We didn’t ﬁnd him nearly soon enough,” Antigua said.
“The stack?” she asked. She started to turn Ólafsson over.
“Disassembled,” said Ragnarsson, helping her.
Indeed. The nanobots, wherever they’d come from, had eaten through the chest cavity, up into the neck, and come out the nape. Where Ólafsson’s cortical stack ought to be was a ten centimeter-wide hole. Something was unusual, though. It was nanotrauma, but not what she’d have expected from, say, a subverted disassembler swarm. She peered closely at the wound, magnifying her vision again.
“Do you have any bush robots on the gear manifest?” she asked.
“Plans only,” Antigua said, “None instanced. Most of what the researchers use out there is imaging equipment—minimally invasive.”
Minimally provocative, she might as well have said. The research station occupied a junction in the network of precisely cylindrical, uniformly white ice tunnels that formed a sprawling, three-dimensional lattice beneath Iapetus’s thirteen kilometer-high equatorial ridge. The tunnels connected what remained of the most massive TITAN project yet discovered—an apparent attempt to convert much of the mass of Iapetus into a planet-scale computer. Exploring the nervous system of a TITAN artifact required a host of precautions. The research station was designed to emit as little electromagnetic energy as possible. The researchers kept radio silence outside of it, and they avoided physically disturbing the tunnels beyond laying down lighting strips.
Sváfa straightened, zoomed out to normal vision. “The pattern of nanotrauma isn’t consistent with a swarm or a hand tool. The doctor bot didn’t note this?”
Januszczak ﬁnally spoke up. “It’s a bot. That’s why we have you. Anyway, what do you think it means?”
Sváfa scowled, studied the ceiling. “Something put a ﬁst full of fractal branching digits through his chest and took apart enough of his vital organs to kill him.”
Ragnarsson grunted. “So what’s our murder weapon?”
She considered. “I don’t know. You don’t have a bush robot, and I’ve never heard of fractal digits as an implant on a biomorph. For now, it’s an open question. When was his last backup?”
“Three months ago,” Antigua said, “There aren’t any ego bridges on site.”
“Never know what we might dig up, down here,” Ragnarsson said.
“Of course,” Sváfa said, “Containment protocol.” Good in a TITAN attack, but bad during a murder investigation.
Januszczak said, “Are we sure the stack isn’t hidden somewhere?”
“The doc bot found a quantity of near-molecular diamond dust consistent with a cortical stack in the gradue collected from under the corpse,” Antigua said.
Sváfa pulled the sheet back over Ólafsson’s vacant-eyed morph. “Let’s assume for now the victim wasn’t carrying a stack-sized lump of diamond for some other reason,” she said.
Januszczak frowned. “I want to review the doc bot logs in any case.”
“Fine,” Sváfa said. She’d been here half an hour and she already resented Fleet looking over her shoulder. They had a clear interest, though. The research station belonged to the Science Ministry, but security of the moon as a whole fell to Fleet. That Sváfa quietly freelanced for Firewall potentially complicated relations even further. “I think we’re otherwise done here. Let’s have a look at the crime scene.”
“It’s out in the tunnels,” Ragnarsson said.
----
A featureless tunnel, white and even as porcelain, led from the airlock of the research station. Bluish-white strip lighting installed by the research team glared from the tunnel ﬂoor, casting their shadows on the ceiling. The researchers had chosen a major tunnel junction to site the station. Januszczak, bringing up the rear behind Sváfa and Antigua, played out a thin comm tether behind them. Through it they could contact Ragnarsson, who’d remained in the hab module. Among themselves they kept radio silence, communicating instead via suit-mounted laser links. They’d gone armed, but neither this nor knowing that Fleet’s marines had patrolled these tunnels for months and found nothing but frozen corpses reassured Sváfa.
When they’d gone about six hundred meters, the airlock receded to a tiny, gray dot, then to nothing. Sváfa, looking ahead and then behind, felt as if she were looking into a pair of mirrors set opposite one another. There was no sound in the vacuum of the corridor. Only their tacnet maps indicated distance from the station. Sváfa was accustomed to the yawning openness of space, the dizzying sensory disconnect that came with motion in orbit, the closeness of asteroid warrens, but nothing had prepared her for the combination of claustrophobia and spatial disorientation brought on by a long walk in Iapetus’s tunnels.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[It opens into a circuit junction in half a klick,]</span> Antigua said,<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [We’ll have to climb up two levels.]</span>
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Why did Ólafsson go out alone?]</span> Januszczak asked.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Wait ‘til you see what he found,] </span>Antigua said, <span style="color: #00ffff;">[The video in our report isn’t as impressive as the reality.]</span>
They were headed toward an unusual junction in the circuitry. Even as Antigua sent the message, Sváfa caught the shimmer of light reﬂected off what must have been the largest mass of exposed TITAN circuitry she’d yet seen.
Januszczak said, <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Careless. Ólafsson’s backup will have to go through psych before he’s re-certiﬁed.]</span>
One doesn’t speak ill of the dead, Sváfa thought. But their backups are another matter.
They reached the junction. The bottom quarter of the tunnel was still nearly opaque, white ice, but the other three quarters were circuitry. Until now they’d bounded along, using their hands as well as their feet to push themselves forward and avoid hitting their heads on the ceiling. Antigua’s lithe bouncer morph had an easy time of this. For Sváfa and Januszczak in their hazer bodies, the movements came less readily. Now they slowed their pace, shuffling cautiously.
The TITAN circuitry substrate formed dense whorls all around, the clear-as-glass ice etched in seemingly infinite layers that accumulated into patterns hurtful to the eye and brain, even as their crystalline beauty caught the light, entrancing Sváfa. Looking at the substrate made her slightly nauseous, and yet it also bore a weird and deeply uncomfortable familiarity. Sváfa realized the effect had an unsettling similarity to using her async talents.
They entered a vaulted chamber, walled on all sides with glittering substrate. Only a few columns of the rougher, opaque ice climbed to the ceiling, and curving paths of it crisscrossed the ﬂoor. The chamber was perhaps ﬁfteen meters wide and three times that in height, although it was difficult to tell, difficult to look upward at all without feeling nauseous, and Sváfa kept her eyes to the even white of the pathway as much as possible. They had to shuffle even more cautiously to avoid overshooting a step on the path and landing on the fragile circuitry—or in the ﬁve meter-wide shaft at the center of the room.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[It is rather magniﬁcent,]</span> Januszczak said,<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [What do they think it is?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[You know the going theory on how the whole thing worked, yes?]</span> Antigua replied.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Yes.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[They think the shaft is the terminus of one of the heat exchanges,]</span> Antigua said.
If “heat” were a fair word. But it was. Sváfa checked her suit’s readout. The chamber was a few degrees warmer than the surrounding tunnels. Not enough to melt ice, but enough to yield a trickle of power to the trillions of thermoelectric couples theorized to have powered the matrioshka brain. Theorized, only, though: the actual circuitry devoured itself when the matrioshka shut down, leaving only a ﬁne grit in the circuit pathways and the icy substrate itself, tantalizing as a fossil trilobite.
The fossil is not the mechanism, she reminded herself. She’d messaged her Firewall contact, Tara Yu, when she found out she’d be going to Iapetus. So far this looked to Sváfa like a murder—and not of an unfamiliar type. The claustrophobic white uniformity of Iapetus’s tunnels and the cramped quarters in which the research team lived were a recipe for depression, withdrawal, and sudden violence. But Yu had let her in on more of what Firewall knew about Iapetus: the human inhabitants converted to exsurgent drones, then abandoned to starve when their goal here, whatever it had been, was completed. Every centimeter of these tunnels had been cut by once-human colonists. She’d never been so close to the enormity of the Fall.
Januszczak edged closer to the shaft, close enough to set Sváfa’s incisors on edge. <span style="color: #8470ff;">[Wouldn’t there be some type of cabling to exploit the temperature difference between here and the mantle?]</span> he asked.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[If transhumans designed it,]</span> Antigua said, <span style="color: #00ffff;">[And there might be cabling. Deeper. The theory is that closer to the surface, the entire system ran on waste heat.]</span>
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Without thermocouple arrays?]</span>
Antigua shrugged. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Any of the science team will be happy to go on about their pet theories. Really, they know nothing.]</span>
Sváfa was still looking at the ground. <span style="color: #b02f5f;">[Let’s keep moving?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[This way,]</span> Antigua said. The researchers had installed a set of rungs on a section of white ice wall. The rungs climbed two thirds of the way up the wall before stopping at another horizontal corridor. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[Careful,]</span> Antigua said as she began hoisting herself, grasping the rungs with both feet and hands. <span style="color: #00ffff;">[You don’t want to fall, even in this gravity.]</span>
Sváfa kept her eyes on the wall as she climbed. She had a weird urge to reach out and touch the TITAN circuitry substrate. It was in arm’s reach. She wondered what it would tell her.
Nothing good, she suspected, coming back to herself. Sváfa had only met one other async while working for Firewall—a xenoarcheologist named Ngembe. He, too, possessed a talent for reading objects; he called it “grokking.”
“Things call to you before you ever apply your mind to them, don’t they?” Ngembe had asked her.
“That’s not a rational idea,” she’d answered him; she’d thought him mad. Now, though, her talent—her infection—nagged at her to probe the TITAN circuitry. It was easy to resist, but the gnawing sense of something other pushing her toward the burnt-out workings couldn’t be put aside.
At the top of the ladder, they again found themselves in a white corridor. Where previously the white hallways had been disorienting, Sváfa now found them positively comforting.
<span style="color: #8b5a00;">[You’re almost there,]</span> Ragnarsson messaged.
They came to a T junction. To the left, more identical corridor. To the right, the lighting strips ran for about ﬁfty meters before ending. The smooth white of the corridor dimly reﬂected their lights for some distance before receding into blackness.
In the center, the crime scene. Malformed ice, melted by an agonizer on roast mode and then refrozen again just as quickly, ran in one long trail for about ten meters down the ﬂoor of the corridor to the left. In one spot, it had crossed a lighting strip, burning it out. A shorter trail of malformed ice ran just a few meters along the ﬂoor.
Sváfa knelt and released a nanoswarm directly onto the ﬂoor. Unable to ﬂy in the vacuum, they’d spread slowly, but they were her only option for nanoscale detection. Her nanodetector, relying as it did on intake of air, would be useless here.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Not a very good shot,] </span>Januszczak observed,<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [if he had to track it along the ground that far.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[He was a civilian,]</span> Antigua said.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[He didn’t do militia service?]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5f;">[No,]</span> Sváfa messaged, memory augmentations bringing Ólafsson’s ﬁle swiftly to mind. She had a dossier for everyone in the station, the product of two days’ stim-fueled research during her ﬂight to Iapetus.<span style="color: #b02f5f;"> [He opted for civil instead.]</span>
She pointed down the dark corridor.<span style="color: #b02f5f;"> [Where does that go?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Unexplored,]</span> Antigua said.
They were three, all armed and combat trained, yet the darkness beyond terrified her. She suppressed a shudder, activated her emotional dampers. It wouldn’t do for a detective of the Commonwealth Science Police to be shaking in her vacsuit. Iapetus was dead, was it not?
She imaged the nearby ice using t-rays and lidar but found nothing other than ice and more circuit substrate beyond the walls.
After several minutes, Thora, Sváfa’s muse, reported that the nanoswarm had sampled the whole area. <span style="color: #cd8400;">[Particulate matches on vacsuits and gear worn/carried by Agent Januszczak, Ofﬁcers Antigua and Ragnarsson, Director Ólafsson, and yourself.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[No one else?]</span> she asked. Ragnarsson and Antigua had gone looking for Ólafsson and found the body. They’d done so at a suggestion from Nilsen, Ólafsson’s assistant, who’d found the thermal exchange and expected Ólafsson would be working there alone, documenting it. And Januszczak had arrived with her, dropped by a Fleet shuttle at the head of the Murmansk Shaft ice elevator atop the equatorial ridge.
<span style="color: #cd8200;">[No one,]</span> Thora said.
Sváfa said, <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Someone’s run a cleaner swarm over this area.]</span> No exsurgent bogeymen from the depths of Iapetus were involved, unless they were unusually fastidious.
Januszczak said, <span style="color: #8470ff;">[You’re sure?]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[It’s difficult to say when a given particle was deposited here, but if anyone was here other than Ólafsson himself prior to Antigua and Ragnarsson ﬁnding him, they’d have left a trace.]</span>
She turned to Antigua.<span style="color: #b02f5d;"> [Can you and Ragnarsson account for your vacsuits at the time the crime was committed?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Yes,] </span>she said.<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [We had them on. Regs on an SPD-protected site in a vacuum environment: suits on when you’re not in your bunk.]</span>
Sváfa knew that regulation. It wasn’t always enforced, but here they ran a tight ship. She took a sample of the gradue, just to be thorough. <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[We should get back,]</span> she said.
As they walked, Januszczak asked,<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [Who has access to cleaner swarms?]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Almost everyone,] </span>Antigua said.<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [The hab module crawls with them.]</span>
----

Sváfa set about interviewing the research team. She’d eliminated Antigua and Ragnarsson as suspects. They and ﬁve of the science team had all been in the hab module’s common area at the time of the murder. The module’s radio emissions prooﬁng meant none of them could have committed the crime using a teleoperated robot. And for the scientists, professional rivalry was an unlikely motive. Their purpose was to investigate Iapetus’s gross physical properties, and though they’d been led by Ólafsson, a materials scientist, they all came from distinct ﬁelds.
This left three suspects.
Magda Nikkanen, programmer-archeologist and Titan Tech academic, had been absent from the common area and lacked a convincing alibi. She claimed to have been in her bunk, but spime records neither proved nor disproved this.
Oleg Nilsen, Ólafsson’s assistant (and like Ólafsson a materials scientist), had also been absent—and he had a motive. Nilsen had led the tunnel crawl that initially discovered and documented the heat exchange shaft near the crime scene. Several days after the discovery, Nilsen and Ólafsson argued bitterly and, within a few days, word arrived that Nilsen would be transferred off the team.
Finally, there was Mick Keegan, ice mining engineer, charged with analyzing stresses in the ice, preventing damage to the circuitry, and digging out if any cave-ins occurred. The TITANs apparently never intended for the matrioshka to last. They knew that faults in the ice would eventually degrade the machine’s performance beyond what even their inhuman technology could achieve. Iapetus’s interior had been reshaped for limited use, and now it was falling apart. Every team sent down had a mining engineer. Scientists dying to get their ﬁngers into Iapetus were a dime a dozen, but ice mining engineers on Titan had no shortage of less hazardous work. The Science Ministry had scouted Keegan from off world.
But Keegan had done more than engineering. When they found the body, Antigua and Ragnarsson immediately searched the station for weapons. They found none, but they did discover that Keegan had hidden away several slabs of TITAN circuitry substrate, crated and prepped to smuggle off the moon.
----

Sváfa started with Keegan. The engineer was ruggedly handsome, with unkempt black hair and a decidedly un-Titanian rakishness to his gear.
Since her infection had manifested, Sváfa could see colors and textures rise and fall in a person’s face during conversation—even more so if the person were experiencing stress or strong emotion. She’d already been a highly trained kinesicist, but the infection afforded a higher level of certainty. She often suppressed this talent. The interplay of expression, muscle movement, blood circulation and … call it “probability” … in a speaking human face could be almost physically painful, as if the thing in her hated what it sensed. Nor was this occasional antipathy limited to transhumans; she often felt the same toward uplifts, even neo-octopi and neo-avians, whom most humans found closed and alien. It made it difficult at times to play the hard-nosed investigator.
“They call you the Anarchist. You’re from Kronos Cluster?”
He chuckled, smiled jaggedly. She hadn’t known they made bouncers with freckles … or crooked teeth. “Let’s not tarry, love,” he said, “I’m from Phelan’s, not Kronos, and I’m not an anarchist—I’m a capitalist.”
By which he meant “criminal,” Sváfa gathered. “You’re glib for a man likely to serve a few decades in simulation.”
“Commonwealth justice is a lamb compared to most.”
“You’re also a talented engineer to be running a conﬁdence scheme over chunks of ice,” she said.
“Plenty of talented engineers sleeved in clankers on Mars, love. Skill’s one thing, but a man does well to have cred in the bank.”
“So much for return on your investment,” Sváfa said, “But for now I’m concerned with Director Ólafsson.”
“Go on, do I look like a jealous scientist? Or a fucking exsurgent?” He’d said the word in English, ﬁrst pausing for a beat, as if his Skandinavíska skillsoft didn’t know it.
Sváfa tensed. Few people knew the term. Keegan had watched her reaction. So had Januszczak. She sat stone-faced, waiting, letting the silence work at Keegan. She was betting he loved his voice too much for his own good.
But too soon, Januszczak stood and leaned over the desk at Keegan—rather ineffectually, Sváfa observed. What was he doing? “Did you kill Kjartan Ólafsson?”
“No,” Keegan said.
Sváfa believed him.
----
“You made that short,” Januszczak said.
“Your question was badly timed, but it did the work,” Sváfa said.
They’d had to put Keegan in the room with Ólafsson’s corpse for lack of space. She’d detailed Ragnarsson to watch him while Antigua printed more security drones. There wasn’t much chance of Keegan escaping; where would he go? But a desperate man might try something.
“You barely questioned him.”
Sváfa could read lies on a human face like ﬂashing red AR graphics, but she didn’t want to get into an argument about policecraft with an intel man. “He’d be a fool to draw attention to himself by killing someone. And it’s clear he’s not a fool.”
She let Januszczak fume and called in Nikkanen.
----
Magda Nikkanen’s dossier said she’d spent twenty-eight months beneath Iapetus on ﬁve different research teams. She’d authored several papers proposing possible architectures for the TITAN hardware—all presently classified.
Nikkanen herself had a round face with high cheekbones. She’d attired herself severely: black bowl cut, unadorned gray vacsuit. Some of the team wore vacsuits with helmets off habitually, but on Nikkanen, it looked buttoned up, clinical—a sterile wall between her and her surroundings.
“You were born on Iapetus,” Sváfa began. This alone made Nikkanen interesting.
“That’s accurate,” Nikkanen said. “It was quite … Titanian, before the Fall.” No wistful look off into the distance; just a statement.
“Your family … early colonists?”
“Yes,” Nikkanen said. “From a city in Finland, on Earth. My older brother was born there.”
“Did you kill Kjartan Ólafsson?” Januszczak put in.
Idiot, Sváfa thought, I should have coached him after the last one. What had been a good closing question with Keegan was a terrible one early in the interview with Nikkanen. Januszczak clearly didn’t know the difference between an interview and an interrogation.
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Thora,] </span>she messaged.<span style="color: #b02f5d;"> [Her reaction on that last question?]</span>
Normally, Sváfa would go with her gut and review results from the kinesics software later, but Januszczak’s question might shorten the interview considerably.
<span style="color: #cd8200;">[Surprise/alarm,]</span> the AI messaged.
“No!” Nikkanen said. “Who would? Kjartan could be brusque, but he was a good sort. I mean, obviously someone did, but … really, they couldn’t have been in their right mind to do it.”
<span style="color: #cd8200;">[Avoidance,]</span> Thora put in. Yes.
Before Nikkanen finished, Sváfa messaged Januszczak, <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[This isn’t a Fleet interrogation room. She’ll demand counsel if we treat her like more than a witness.]</span>
Sváfa backed her chair up, giving Nikkanen more space, and said, “I’ll be straight with you. Our primary subject of interest is Mick Keegan.” Nikkanen’s posture relaxed almost imperceptibly.
Januszczak said, “Keegan planned to smuggle TITAN artifacts off Iapetus. Did Ólafsson mention any suspicions he might have had, about Keegan or anyone else?”
Nikkanen tensed again. Sváfa suppressed a grimace. Januszczak was making a hash of this.
“I wasn’t in his conﬁdence,” Nikkanen said. “Why? You know, I don’t think I should say anything else to you without an attorney.”
Januszczak bristled. “This is a military jurisdiction!”
Magda was shaking a bit, her voice unsteady. “If you had me up on charges of smuggling TITAN artifacts or compromising security. But you’re questioning me in relation to a civil crime. And I’m not being detained.” She looked at Sváfa. “Am I, Inspector?”
“No,” Sváfa said, not looking at Januszczak. “You’re free to go.”
----

“I apologize,” Januszczak said after Magda Nikkanen left the room, straightening and trying to make eye contact, which Sváfa avoided. “I imagine she was receiving legal advice from her muse. That was stupid of me.”
Sváfa said, “You didn’t help matters, but I don’t think she’s our killer. Though from her reaction to your question, she might know who is.”
“I’ll keep quiet on the next one,” Januszczak said.
“Forget about it,” Sváfa said. Being angry at a Fleet intel man for being forceful in an interview was like being angry at a wasp for stinging you on the thumb. “Let’s talk to Nilsen.” But just before she summoned him, Antigua called.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[I found something,] Antigua messaged. [Oleg Nilsen tampered with the surveillance logs. Not just during the crime, but on multiple prior occasions.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[How do you know?]</span> Sváfa asked.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Fleet Intel has an agent loose in the local mesh that tries to double-log every contact between a spime and a mesh ID. Nilsen didn’t know about it.]</span>
Sváfa glanced at Januszczak; did he even know? Fleet security was an onion; it was entirely possible he didn’t have access to all of the layers. <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[How do you know?] </span>Sváfa asked.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Hacked it and tossed its logs. Our warrant to search the premises is still active. Fleet’s not immune. It caught Nilsen several times.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Please keep that to yourself for now. It could be a headache later; better if we can make a case without you revealing that.]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Fine. But it’s useful, isn’t it?]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Maybe.]</span>
----
Sváfa disliked Nilsen immediately. He had a nervous, seeking face. She felt as if he were searching Januszczak and her for both approval and weakness at each question. She tried to swallow her unease with him in order to make an honest assessment of the man, but it was difficult.
Her interviews with the other researchers suggested things had been rocky between him and the director for some time. His work on the TITANs’ use of native Iapetan materials in constructing the matrioshka was brilliant but controversial.
“How was your relationship with Director Ólafsson?” Sváfa asked.
He scowled at her from across the desk. “Strained. Obviously.”
“Be that as it may, you worked closely with him,” she said. “We’ve arrested Mick Keegan for attempting to smuggle sections of circuitry substrate off Iapetus. Do you think Ólafsson suspected?”
Nilsen sneered. “He wouldn’t have cared.”
Januszczak raised an eyebrow but remained quiet.
“What makes you say that?” Sváfa asked.
Nilsen straightened. Here was something new, uglier in his bearing: pride. “I’m a loyal Titanian. Ólafsson didn’t care about our security. He was a damned argonaut—would’ve passed everything he learned down here to them.”
As Nilsen spoke, Sváfa messaged Januszczak, <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Nilsen is a radical technosocialist, probably a member of the Interplanetary.]</span>
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[I can conﬁrm that for certain, actually,]</span> Januszczak messaged. He cleared his throat. “Even Fleet Intelligence doesn’t consider the argonauts a hostile group, Doctor Nilsen.”
Nilsen stared at Januszczak as if he’d said something indelibly stupid. “Fleet isn’t concerned about dissemination of data on TITAN technology?”
Sváfa said, “Of course they are, Doctor. Was Director Ólafsson in collusion with Keegan, then? Or releasing data on his own?”
Sváfa could tell Nilsen was about to lie even as he opened his mouth. “I’ve been gathering evidence, yes. Building a case.”
She gazed off into a corner. “Is that why you tampered with hab module surveillance logs?”
“What? What? I did no such thing.” Nilsen was on his feet, drawing Sváfa’s eyes back to him. His face was red, a vein bulging out, and he’d balled up his ﬁsts.
Januszczak’s hand went to his stunner. His voice was intimidatingly calm. “Easy, Nilsen. This is still just an interview.”
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[He’s telling the truth,] </span>Sváfa messaged.<span style="color: #b02f5d;"> [It wasn’t him.]</span>
Nilsen slowly sat back down.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[How do you know?]</span> Januszczak asked.
Sváfa said, “Mr. Nilsen, let’s put aside your suspicions about the Director for now. I’d like to review the statement you gave regarding the events of two days ago one more time.
----
They continued with Nilsen for another thirty minutes, during which time Sváfa became convinced that although Oleg Nilsen was a disagreeable ideologue, he’d had nothing to do with Ólafsson’s murder. Her suspicions began to veer back toward Magda Nikkanen.
Then Ragnarsson entered the room, his face grave. “Magda Nikkanen just stunned one of her colleagues and ﬂed out the airlock.”
“Up the elevator?” Januszczak asked, rising. “Where would she go?” Waiting for the elevator on the broken spine of the equatorial ridge when they’d arrived, Sváfa and Januszczak had seen nothing but heavily cratered ice, ghost white under the stars’ faint illumination, stretching out to both horizons.
“No,” Ragnarsson said, “She’s gone into the tunnels.”
----

“PASKA KAUPUNNI,” read the huge inscription on the tunnel wall. The words were blasted into the wall with carbon grit that resembled black spray paint.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[What is that?]</span> Januszczak signaled. They were communicating by laser, but Januszczak, in the rear, trailed a comm tether. Antigua was on the other end, holding down the fort.
Ragnarsson, taking point with his assault rifle, kept his eyes trained on the hallway as they stopped to examine it.
Above the inscription, the white ice had been carved into an intricate bas relief of a small city—clearly on Earth, as the foreground of the carving depicted a harbor. The manic precision of the bas relief was in marked contrast to the grit-blasted words.
<span style="color: #cd8200;">[Translation from Finnish: “Shit Town/City,”]</span> Thora messaged.
Sváfa ran a hand over the carving and reached into it with her talent, seeking to understand. A sunny day on the harbor—the last one, ever. They were leaving the old city, half drowned, half frozen. He looked one last time at the painted scrawl on the old feedstock tank. “Oulu: Paska Kaupunni.”
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[It’s … grafﬁti. Art,]</span> Sváfa replied. Sváfa activated her emotional dampers and had her suit inject her with a half dose of phlo.<span style="color: #b02f5d;"> [Let’s keep moving.]</span>
The coiling presence of the exovirus was whispering danger to her, but her dampers and the drugs kept her murderously calm.
Things were about to get awful.
Nikkanen had left a heat trail easily followed in the infrared. She’d made straight for the thermal exchange chamber near the site of Ólafsson’s murder but had left it in a different direction from the crime scene. They’d followed her into unexplored tunnels. Januszczak, bringing up the rear, had been marking the ice to leave a breadcrumb trail.
They left the inexplicable ice sculpture behind and soon glimpsed light around a corner.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Dim your suit lights to near-infrared,]</span> Januszczak messaged. They would attempt stealth.
They rounded the corner, and ten meters away, limned in white light from a torch she’d set on the ﬂoor, was Magda Nikkanen. She’d rounded on them, apparently having noticed even the dim sub-visible light from their suits.
Looming behind Nikkanen was a hunched thing, two meters tall at the shoulders. It looked like a giant troll vacuum packed into a spacesuit. It leaned crutch-wise on wiry, elongated forearms that reached to the tunnel ﬂoor and ended in huge, padded ﬁsts. A second, smaller pair of arms extended wing-like from the shoulders, bracing it against the tunnel ceiling, while a third, even smaller pair extended from the chest.
A dendritic froth of fractal branching digits wreathed the two smaller pairs of hands. Its bloated face mashed up against the inside of the vacsuit’s visor, venous and hideously pallid. It clearly did not breathe through the crushed slit of a nose, but the eyes, set deeper, darted about with agonized intelligence.
A cable trailed from Nikkanen’s suit to the exsurgent.
All three trained their guns on the pair. The exsurgent drone made no move.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Dr. Nikkanen,] </span>Januszczak signaled.<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [Unlink from that thing at once.]</span>
Nikkanen raised her hands, open. <span style="color: #ff4400;">[Inspector, Lieutenant … this is my brother.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[That is not your brother, Nikkanen,] </span>Sváfa messaged. <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Pull your data jack now. I won’t warn you again.]</span>
She’d seen footage of exsurgents like this before on Firewall’s VPNs, but they’d all been frozen, starved after the TITANs abandoned Iapetus. How had this one survived? There must be autonomous machinery somewhere in this maze capable of sustaining it—which meant there might be more of them.
<span style="color: #8470ff;">[Nordqvist?] </span>Ragnarsson messaged.<span style="color: #8470ff;"> [What if it really is?]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[It may have been, Ofﬁcer,] </span>she messaged,<span style="color: #b02f5d;"> [but it isn’t anymore. You have my word on that.]</span>
Sváfa drew a bead on the exsurgent’s head; it still had a brain in there, somewhere.
<span style="color: #ff4400;">[He isn’t hostile!] </span>Nikkanen messaged.<span style="color: #ff4400;"> [He’s sick. Look! Ólafsson was an accident!]</span>
The part of Sváfa that was still feeling was happy she couldn’t feel anything more.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Inspector!] </span>Antigua messaged,<span style="color: #00ffff;"> [Wide-spectrum radio emissions from your position!]</span>
At the same time, Thora ﬂashed up an intrusion warning on Sváfa’s mesh inserts. Sváfa switched her riﬂe to full auto and opened ﬁre on the exsurgent drone. An instant later, so did Januszczak and Ragnarsson.
The thing closed the distance between them in one leap, knocking Nikkanen to the ground as the access jacks tore free. It trailed a spray of frozen blue gore along the wall where slugs had torn through it.
They’d wounded it badly, but now it was on top of them. It swung at Sváfa with a huge fore-ﬁst. She ducked easily, but a lunge with one of its upper arms caught Januszczak in the chest. The thick, visible ﬁngers of the arm wrapped around his shoulder and upper chest, and then the branching mist of fractal digits ﬂowed onto his vacsuit, pulling it apart.
Ragnarsson and Sváfa backed up, looking for a clear shot. Nikkanen tried to ﬁre her stunner, perhaps not realizing that it wouldn’t function in a vacuum. Sváfa saw her curse inside her helmet and go for another weapon.
Januszczak convulsed as his suit vented, misting the blood and gradue that ﬂowed from the breach, freezing instantly as it drifted toward the ﬂoor. The drone advanced, holding him like a shield. Nikkanen had another weapon in hand, probably an agonizer, but Sváfa shot her ﬁrst.
Ragnarsson held his ground and tried to aim a shot at the drone, but when Sváfa dropped Nikkanen, its crushed face twisted up inside the helmet and it hurled the inert Januszczak at Ragnarsson, knocking the ofﬁcer to the ﬂoor. Then it rushed Sváfa.
Without pausing to think, Sváfa dropped prone and ﬁred her vacsuit’s thruster pack. She avoided the exsurgent but found herself shooting down the corridor, out of control. Sváfa caromed once off the ceiling and then found herself in open space. This was another big chamber, with a wall of TITAN circuitry substrate looming before her.
She couldn’t avoid crashing into it. Well, why not, then? She put her hands out to touch the circuitry, reached out with her infection. The glassy substrate shattered around her, and she fell into a quantum foam of numbers expressing a space cold, dispersed, and virtually endless in scope. Was she seeing the end of the universe in simulation—or was that eschaton only one variable in something larger?
----
“Inspector? Nordqvist? Hey!”
Ragnarsson crouched over her, looking about warily. His vacsuit was slightly charred and showed signs of very recent self-repair. Shrapnel, maybe.
“Ofﬁcer.” They were speaking over a voice channel, breaking radio silence. Probably not the best idea, but the comm tether was nowhere to be seen. “The exsurgent?”
“What?” His voice was ragged.
“The monster. Where?”
“Finished it off with a grenade. Fucking crazy thing to do down here, but I had no other way.”
She sat up. She’d come to rest at the bottom of yet another perfect white shaft, featureless except for the litter of shattered substrate all around them.
She had tasted aleph numbers, cardinalities beyond the transﬁnite. What had they been calculating, to encompass such expanses of data just in the few meters of substrate through which she’d crashed?
“Nikkanen?” she asked.
“Done for,” he said. “Can you walk? We need to get back to the station.”
She stood, dizzy but otherwise ﬁne. Her vacsuit had taken the impact. It was contact with the circuitry that had caused her to black out brieﬂy.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Keegan hacked the security drones and escaped up the elevator,” he said as he led her back toward the explored corridors.
“Least of our worries.” <span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Antigua?]</span> she messaged.
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Inspector.]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Tell the entire research team to prep for evac. All of this activity might have woken something up .]</span>
<span style="color: #00ffff;">[Happily, Inspector.]</span>
----
Once the shuttle left the Iapetan radio silence zone, Sváfa Nordqvist opened a Firewall VPN connection and messaged Tara Yu.
<span style="color: #f4a460;">[Nordqvist,] </span>Yu messaged,<span style="color: #f4a460;"> [did the Science Police get their man?]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Never mind about that, Doctor Yu. I’ve more important matters to report upon.]</span>
<span style="color: #f4a460;">[Really?]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[The purpose of the Iapetan matrioshka, Doctor! Answers from beyond the realms of the calculable. Such wonderful things, Yu. Such wonderful things. Wait until you view the ﬁles I’m sending.]</span>
<span style="color: #f4a460;">[Hold on, Nordqvist. Don’t—]</span>
<span style="color: #b02f5d;">[Uploading now.]</span>

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