The Colonel by Peter Watts Page B

focus.
    The Colonel tries to think. They’re not just aiming to cut the aerostat loose; you don’t need a hive for that, you don’t even need to breach the perimeter. Whatever this is, it’s microsurgical. Something that requires massive on-site computation—maybe something to do with microclimate, something that can be influenced by wind or humidity or any of a dozen other chaotic variables. If they’re not trying to cut the umbilical outright they might be trying to maneuver it somehow: a biocorroded hole exactly X millimeters in diameter here, a stretching patch of candle-wax monomers over there, and way up in the stratosphere the aerostat sways some precise number of meters on some precise bearing—
    To what end? Play bumper-cars with the maintenance drones? Block some orbital line-of-sight, nudge a distant act of ground-based terrorism into surveillance eclipse at a critical moment? Maybe they’re not going for the umbilical after all, maybe they’re—
    â€œSir?” The first of the insurgents has made it to the donut hole. “Sir, if we have to light ‘em up before they coalesce—”
    â€œ Not yet, Lieutenant .”
    He’s a blind man in a bright room. He’s a rhesus monkey playing chess with a grand master. He has no idea of his opponent’s strategy. He has no concept even of the rules of the game. He only knows he’s bound to lose.
    The last of the insurgents lurches out of weapons range. The Lieutenant’s finger hovers over that icon as though desperate to scratch a maddening itch.
    Coalescence.
    That far-focus moment, that thousand-soul stare. You can see it in their eyes if you know what to look for, if you’re close enough and fast enough. The Colonel is neither. All he has is a top-down view through a telescope thirty-six thousand kilometers away, ricocheted through the atmosphere and spread across this table. But he can see what follows: the fusion of interlocking pieces, the simultaneous change in physical posture, the instant evolutionary leap from spastic quadruped to sapient superweapon.
    Out of many, one.
    â€œ Now. ”
    It knows. Of course it knows. It’s inconceivable that this vast emergent mind hasn’t—in the very instant of its awakening—detected some vital clue, made some inference to lay the whole trap bare. The station’s defenses whine belatedly into gear, startled awake in the sudden glare of a million thoughts; multimind networks may be invisible to human eyes but they’re bright blinding tapestries down in RF. The hive, safely behind the firing line, has no need to care about that .
    No, what’s got its attention now is the wave of hydrogen sulfide billowing from the southern storage tanks: silent, invisible, heavy as a blanket and certain death to any standalone soul. No baseline would suspect a thing until the faint smell of rotten eggs told him he was already dead.
    But this soul does not stand alone. Eleven of its bodies simultaneously turn and flee back toward the fence, each following a unique trajectory with a little Brownian randomness layered in to throw off the tracking algos. The other two stand fast in the donut hole, draw sidearms from belts—
    The Colonel frowns. Why didn’t the sensors pick those up?
    â€œHey, are those guns—that looks like bone ,” the Lieutenant says.
    The nodes open fire.
    It is bone. Something like it anyway; metal or plastic would have triggered the sensors before they’d even reached the fence. The slugs are probably ceramic, though; no osteo derivative would be able to punch through the least of those conduits…
    Except that’s not what the hive is going for. They’re shooting at any old pipe or panel, anything metal, anything that might—
    Strike a spark…
    Because hydrogen sulfide isn’t just poisonous, you idiot. It’s flammable .
    â€œHoly shit,” the Lieutenant whispers as the