Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Anything intelligent here?” Idris asked faintly.

  “Official answer?” Robellin queried. “Fuck knows, mate.”

  There were six others in the car besides Solace, Idris and Kris—their guide Yon Robellin, four new dig staff and an academic. They’d started out around midday and had driven through the night, then all the following day, before they set up a camp. The day after that, back on the trail, a thing like a tree had hoisted a junior archaeologist out of the car. Kris and a couple of others hung on to the victim’s legs in a grim tug of war, while Robellin went for the attacker with a chainsaw. Eventually, Solace scythed down seven entire trees with Mr. Punch. Presumably one of these had been the perpetrator. It felt like an identity parade gone horribly wrong, but at least their archaeologist was recovered intact.

  “That,” Robellin reflected later, “is just bloody typical of this place. Whole new way of fucking you over since I was last out here.”

  “They learn?” Solace asked. “The creatures here? From the human presence on the planet?”

  “Sure wish they didn’t but yes—learn and evolve,” was his response. “Give ’em another ten years, they’ll be turning up wearing clothes and speaking Colvul. And then eating people because they’ll still be the same nasty fuckers.”

  The next time they stopped to sleep, Solace got to see a groppler—not a specific species, Robellin said, but a predatory shape the locals took on. It came right into camp and, though it wasn’t dressed or making conversation, its apparent arrogance seemed to fit with the biologist’s gloomy predictions. One moment they were bedding down and setting out the proximity alarms. The next moment, this thing, half the size of the vehicle itself, had just sauntered into their midst. It was three metres tall and walked on two columnar legs, ending in thorned pads with jagged clutches of talons. Most of the front of it was mouth, easily big enough to slurp up any one of them, and it had a dozen tentacles like a beard reaching to the ground, all of them lined with vicious hooks. Its hide was a mottled blue-white that interacted weirdly with the yellow and azure foliage around it, making it leap out one moment, blend in the next. On either side of the mouth there were big circular organs, probably not actually eyes.

  “Fuck,” said Robellin. He had his beanbag gun to hand, but the thing was right there in the middle of them, an invitation for friendly-fire accidents.

  A gurgling rumble came from the creature’s innards. Its body language now spoke of someone who’d stepped into a neighbour’s hotel room by mistake, almost abashed. Then Idris shifted and something about his furtive, prey-like movement caught the groppler’s attention.

  “Idris,” Solace cautioned. “You stay very still now.”

  Idris was staring into that cavernous mouth. The tentacles swayed on a non-existent breeze, tasting the air.

  “Any hot takes from the biology department?” Kris hissed.

  Robellin’s eyes were narrowed. “Fuckers’ve never done this before, far as I know.” He had his weapon levelled but seemed reluctant to shoot. “If I sting it and it goes on a rampage, that’ll go bloody badly for us, I can tell you.”

  Solace brought her accelerator to her shoulder. “I am going to cut this creature in half now.”

  “Hold,” said Idris hoarsely. He was staring at the groppler, and although it didn’t seem to have anything to stare back at him with, its attention was increasingly fixed on him.

  “Mate, I’d move back now if I were you,” Robellin advised Idris lightly.

  “Hold,” he said again. His narrow face had lost all expression and Solace had a sudden chilling flashback. Seen this before. She almost pulled the trigger then and there, out of sheer reflex. Berlenhof, the Ints trying to reach the Architects with their minds. Idris with his face utterly slack, nobody home because his mind was out there flying across the face of a moon-sized alien intelligence.

  Everyone was very silent now, watching the Intermediary face the monster. The groppler stamped again, and its tentacles knotted and twitched as though it was wringing its hands in embarrassment. Solace half expected Idris to reach out a hand and touch the monster’s sagging skin, tame the thing, arrive at the dig riding a groppler in fulfilment of some bizarre local prophecy.

  “Mate, seriously,” Robellin whispered. “I don’t know what you’re about but that bastard will fucking eat you and crap out the bits it can’t digest.”

  “There’s something… Oh. Hell.” Idris sat down suddenly. It seemed to surprise the groppler as much as anyone, because it took a skittish step away from him. “You… ever get Ints here, Menheer Robellin?”

  “In this armpit place? Not bloody likely.”

  Then the groppler shook itself like a man remembering a prior appointment, lurched sideways, to general alarm, and stamped off into the jungle.

  “Idris, what was that?” Kris demanded, sounding furious with him, though Solace could tell it was mostly adrenaline.

  The Intermediary held his head in his hands, as though to physically hold it together. “Yon said the life here adapted.”

  “All the bloody time,” Robellin confirmed. “Listen, mate, like the lady says, what was that?”

  “Originators,” Idris said weakly. “The ruins here. I bet the local wildlife keeps clear of the sites, right?”

  “The big fuckers, sure.” The biologist nodded warily.

  “They don’t like them.” Idris was abruptly running with sweat, despite the cool air. He looked absolutely wrung-out with fatigue and nerves. “Don’t know why. But they know how to detect them sure enough. They’re… on the same channel.”

  “As what?” Robellin asked, but Idris had clammed up and wouldn’t say more. Solace knew what he’d left unsaid. The “Originator channel” carried some indefinable signal—one that telegraphed the location of anything from that ancient civilization, even a handful of leftover junk. It broadcast so that even a moon-sized planet destroyer, up in high orbit, could detect its presence and would rather flee than risk a confrontation. It was the same channel that Ints like Idris could access, that had let them touch the inhuman sentience of the Architects and send them away. This planet hosted the most extensive set of Originator ruins any human had ever seen. And here, the entire ecosphere was plugged right into that same channel and was listening.

  Two of Jericho’s brief day-and-nights later, the trail finally led their grinding, complaining car to the dig site. They lurched abruptly over a rise and into a bowl-like crater, at least a kilometre across. As they did so, the dense foliage thinned out a little. The group was silent as they descended the incline. Laid out below, like the bones of time itself, was all that the Originators had left behind.

  18.

  Idris

  In an eerie echo of the nearby human settlement, the Originators had certainly liked their concentric circles when it came to architecture. Or maybe it was something to do with their technology—or something else entirely. Whatever their purpose, those circles were the last remnants of what might have been a city. Maybe. They were visible as striations in the grey, ashy soil of Jericho where the plantlife had been cut back. Or they could be spotted beneath odd swathes of off-colour vegetation. Each circle enclosed a weird mazework of buried foundations. It was as though the whole site was composed of a series of nested labyrinths—each only large enough for a five-year-old to comfortably navigate. Idris could see where the archaeology team had been working, because a whole slice of the ruins had been exposed. The excavation currently extended down two metres, and Idris considered how much further down it might go. The thought of a half-mile of cramped, subterranean labyrinth lurking beneath them made his insides twist. And yet somehow he felt it was there.

  The ruins seemed to be formed of eroded stone. Perhaps the chewing of the elements over countless centuries had given those structures their toothy, irregular texture. Yet the stonework of the exposed lower levels was no smoother. Maybe it’s just what the stuff is supposed to look like? By this time the ground car was winding around the oute
r circle, careful not to crush any priceless archaeological rubbish. Idris spotted some large dome tents nearby—big ones, with individual chambers podding out from the centre on spokes. They were lit up from within, now the sun was on its way down. The sunken basin, surrounded by tall forest, must mean night came suddenly to the dig site.

  “What,” Kris asked Robellin, “keeps the damn gropplers and the rest from just… chowing down on you all?”

  “Half our generator power goes into creating big-ass EM static,” the biologist told them. “Fucks with our comms all right, but it’s like shouting into the ears of any bastard that wants to come at us.” His grin slipped. “Still, it’s like your mate was saying. Nothing much big does come down there. They don’t like it.”

  “Do the ruins put out their own EM frequencies?”

  “That’d be a tidy bloody piece of explanation, wouldn’t it? No such luck. We’ve tested everything, and they’re dead. They’ve been dead for hundreds of thousands of years—conservative estimate. You wouldn’t expect them to have left the fucking oven on or something.”

  Idris stopped listening because he was looking at the ruins—no, feeling the ruins. He could sense them in the same way that he could sense the Throughways and the nodes of unspace. Something was active there. It was a tugging at the edge of his mind, like someone plucking at his sleeve. There was a metaphysical weight to the whole area. It was baked in to the structure, the shape, the weird maze-like arrangements and the materials that nobody had ever been able to satisfactorily analyse or duplicate.

  “Has the site ever had an Intermediary here, working on the Originator ruins?” he asked.

  “An Int? Don’t think so, mate. Not that I heard, anyway.” Robellin spread his hands. “I mean, you fellers are pretty few and thin, right? Not as if there’s a bundle of you at the careers bureau, wondering what you can do with your time.”

  Idris fell silent, wondering if he had a duty to tell someone about this—the Liaison Board, maybe. It would be a cushy job for some of their forced-conscript Ints to work in archaeology, rather than brave the trauma of unspace travel. But when the leashes were signed, even Originator archaeology lost out to interstellar trade, espionage and military transport. There was probably no point.

  A handful of people were coming out from the tents to welcome the land car, and they eyed Solace warily. Probably no Nativist hostility out here, but you wouldn’t expect to find a battle-ready Partheni soldier on Jericho. Then the staff began unloading the car and hauling crates away—and Idris saw what must be Trine limping out to greet them.

  The Trine of his memory had been shiny and new, instanced into a frame that was broadly humanoid, faceless and just about identical to their Hive-built siblings. Back in the war, this had been standard for Hivers who interacted with humans. Once they were free to quit Hugh and humanity, Hivers had started diversifying. This Trine’s frame had two legs, thin and jointed like a bird’s, and their torso was a barrel shape above a box pelvis, opening onto a whole cutlery drawer of folding limbs. Trine’s head was a silvery bowl containing a projected face. It was human, androgynous, middle-aged and cheery-looking, and a trick of the projection made it appear to be looking straight at you, no matter what angle you were at.

  The other thing Idris noticed about Trine’s frame was how old and battered it was. Any polish was most definitely gone, and the metal body was covered in dents and spot repairs, off-colour panels cannibalized from other machinery. One leg was slightly shorter than the other. Only that array of arms had been kept polished and perfect.

  “Subtlety was never the Parthenon’s strong point.” The precise, amused-sounding voice issued from somewhere within Trine’s torso. “Myrmidon Executor Solace, as I live and fail to breathe. No Partheni task force behind you, about to take possession of the Gold City dig site?” Everyone could hear his comments, and Trine received a number of awkward looks from their colleagues.

  “This is purely for self-defence, Delegate.” Solace also raised her voice, to confirm to the camp that she wasn’t a one-woman invasion. Mr. Punch currently rested on one shoulder, muzzle only threatening the first faint stars. “And that seems a necessity on this planet of yours.”

  “Oh yes.” Idris had never heard a Hiver snicker before, but Trine had apparently felt it necessary to install the facility. “Our neighbours.”

  “About our new friends,” Yon Robellin broke in, coming back for another crate. “Your feller here, the skinny one, he’s a surprising fucker. Groppler wrangler. May just have opened up a whole bloody can of research on us. Tell y’about it when we’ve got stuff put away.”

  The Hiver’s attention now focused on Idris. “Menheer Idris Telemmier…?” The statement trailed off questioningly. They might not think like humans, but as a product of human technology, Hivers were good at putting on a nuanced show.

  “None other,” Idris confirmed weakly, knowing that Trine would be performing a compare-and-contrast with the young Intermediary they’d known during the war, and finding far too few differences. “Long story.”

  “Evidently,” Trine agreed. “But, now, let us step over here and speak of matters utterly innocent and unconnected with subterfuge.” They took several canted steps towards the perimeter, beckoning with some of their arms.

  “You mentioned subtlety,” Solace pointed out, when they’d put ten metres or so between them and the ground car.

  “Well you did rather push that ship out and burn it,” Trine remarked tartly. “When is your ship due, may I ask?”

  Solace exchanged a glance with Idris. “It… isn’t. The EM interference, they said we couldn’t fly because of it…”

  “You said you had a ship,” Trine pressed, their ghostly face tight-lipped and disapproving. “I specifically enquired as to whether you had a ship. You equally specifically confirmed that, yes, a ship was what you had.”

  “We do have a ship. In orbit,” Idris put in.

  “I am not sure why you imagine that would be of any immediate use, Menheer Telemmier,” Trine told him sharply. “Solace, my dear, my love, friend of my youth, et cetera. Did you not consider that, when I was asking about your ship, I meant that I might have need of one?”

  “Trine,” Solace said, with obvious patience, “what’s going on?” Idris could almost read her mind: Have they gone crazy? After all, nobody knew how long a Hiver could stay separate and instanced, without rejoining the whole.

  “I have had two attempts on my life, these being the specific circumstances to which I am alluding,” Trine said shortly. The holographic face made a big show of looking suspiciously left and right. “I don’t know what you saw in Anchortown, but the politics there have taken a very marked downturn in the last year.”

  “Nativist recruiting drive,” Solace agreed. “We saw some of it.”

  Trine made a dismissive sound. “Oh, it has always been thus, my good, dear friend of my heart. But Nativists are an empty hand, all they can do is a little light slapping. I refer to those hands that carry a knife. You know the ones, dear heart?”

  “The Betrayed?” Idris asked. “I mean, they’ve got enough people to hate without bringing archaeology into it, haven’t they?”

  “You’d think, but no,” Trine insisted. “According to them, of course regular humans could have won the war. But then Ints came along and made contact with the Architects—and made some nefarious deal with them, plus a bunch of aliens and the Partheni… the usual suspects.” Trine’s chest-arms waved about in mockery. “But even the Betrayed can’t get round the fact that alien artefacts saved millions, because Architects won’t touch Originator sites with a long pole from orbit. As a result, the Betrayed are starting to claim that Originators were the ur-humans—mankind’s mystical space-parents or some such ridiculous supposition. They also claim that various ‘traitor factions’ are even now pillaging Originator sites, and selling everything to the aliens, the Hegemony or whoever. There’s no Originator site bigger than this one, so the Betrayed have been tri
ckling into Jericho for a year at least. They hold the sincere belief that we at the dig are all traitors in need of a good knifing. And I, my dear, am both the sole non-human academic here and the highest-profile Originator expert. Or, as we call it here, I’m ‘a target.’ We found a bomb in a crate of instruments I’d ordered. Someone spotted the tampering, thankfully. And a few months ago, someone came to our camp and shot my leg off. Which was inconvenient.”

  “Why are you still here then?” Solace demanded.

  “Because my good old former boon companion Myrmidon Executor Solace didn’t bring her ship with her,” Trine hissed. “Look you, my dear. I can’t just leave. I’m not going to walk through the streets of Anchortown alone or jump into an elevator car with who knows what company. Which was why, my old comrade-in-arms, I rather hoped you were bringing your ship.”

  “They said you couldn’t fly out here!” Solace almost shouted at them.

  “Well you almost can’t!” Trine snapped right back. “But if you time it right, you just about can—if you have a very good pilot.”

  “We have a very good pilot,” Solace insisted, then grimaced. “Who’s here with me and not on our ship.”

  “Well,” Trine said, “with all apologies to your doubtless excellent piloting skills, Menheer Telemmier, that’s not a great deal of use, is it?”

  “Can we raise Olli?” Idris put in. “What are your comms here?”

  “As of now, zero. They’ve put the night screen up to keep out the gropplers,” Trine explained. “Once the sun’s up, we can negotiate for a gap in the EM noise to try and get a signal out. We’ll have to route it to the transmitter station at Anchortown. They can send it up the cable to your vessel. It’s an inexact science.”