Echopraxia by Peter Watts

into the air.
    Moore caught him on the rebound: “Well, that’s one way of making the trip…”
    Brüks thrashed in his arms, pushed him away: “ Get the fuck off me! ”
    â€œCalm down, sol—”
    â€œ I’m not your fucking soldier! ” Brüks tried to stand in the crowded space; his wounded ankle twisted under him as though attached by rubber bands. “I’m a parasitologist, I was down in the goddamn desert minding my own business. I didn’t ask to get caught up in your gang war, I didn’t ask to get my ass shot into fucking orbit, and I sure as shit didn’t ask to get stored down in your basement like a box of Christmas ornaments!”
    Moore waited until he’d run out of words. “Are you finished?”
    Brüks fumed and glared. Moore took his silence for a yes. “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said drily. “Once things have calmed down a bit, maybe we can check in with your wife. Tell her you’re working late.”
    Brüks closed his eyes. “I haven’t checked in with my wife, ” he said through gritted teeth, “in years.” My real wife, anyway .
    â€œReally.” Moore refused to take the hint. “Why not?”
    â€œShe’s in Heaven.”
    â€œHuh.” Moore grunted. Then, more softly: “So’s mine.”
    Brüks rolled his eyes. “Small world.” His ears popped again. “Are we going to get out of here before our blood starts boiling?”
    â€œLet’s go, then,” Moore said.
    Up past a leaning cityscape of cargo cubes, man-size alcoves flanked an ovoid airlock, two to each side. Spacesuits hung there like flensed silver skins, held in place by cargo straps. They billowed gently at the knees and elbows. Moore helped Brüks across the slanted deck, passed him a loose cargo strap to cling to while unbuckling the suit in the leftmost alcove; it sagged sideways into the soldier’s arms.
    A breeze hissed softly against Brüks’s cheek. Moore held out the suit: gutted from crotch to neck, a split exoskeleton shed by some previous owner. Brüks stood angled and bouncing slightly on his good foot, let Moore guide his bad one into the suit. The low gravity helped; by now Brüks couldn’t have weighed more than ten kilos. He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.
    An itch crawled across the back of his free hand; he held it up, eyed the blood-brown tracery of elastic filaments webbed across the skin. “Why—”
    â€œSo what’s she in for?” Moore asked, jerking Brüks’s leg hard to seat his injured foot in its boot. Bits of bone ground against each other down there—his tibia carried the vibration past whatever nerve block Moore had installed. It didn’t hurt. Brüks grimaced anyway.
    â€œUh, what?”
    â€œYour wife.” The right leg was trickier, without the left to stand on; Moore offered himself as a crutch again. “What’s she in Heaven for?”
    â€œThat’s a strange way of putting it,” Brüks remarked.
    I’m sick of it, she’d said softly, looking out the window. They’re alive, Dan. They’re sapient.
    Moore shrugged. “Everyone’s running from something.”
    They’re just systems, he’d reminded her. Engineered.
    So are we, she’d said. He hadn’t argued with her; she’d known better. Neither of them had been engineered, not unless you counted natural selection as some kind of designer and neither of them was woolly-minded enough to entertain such sloppy thinking. She hadn’t wanted an argument anyway; she’d been long past the verbal jousts that had kept them sparking all those years. Now she’d only wanted to be left alone.
    â€œShe—retired,” he told Moore as his right foot slid smoothly into its boot.
    â€œFrom what?”
    He’d