The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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  For Alex

  Prologue

  The Sister Colony: Part One

  SEVENTY-TWO HOURS AWAKE and Bain wanted to crash. Lena Dal came in just as the drugs were wearing off, complaining about the sampling drones. “Gone! Another one gone!”

  He lay there in his pod. Just another five minutes. Except it wouldn’t be five minutes. Five hours, five days. It felt as though he could sleep five weeks and still not iron the kinks out. But there weren’t enough shoulders to share the load of the new colony. Everyone was pharma’d to the eyeballs to keep them going. It started because the days here were two hours too short, to go with the years being eighty of those days too long. Two hours short; you’d think it would be easy enough to adapt to, but nobody had. Give me a thirty-six-hour cycle and I reckon I could have lived with it, Bain told himself, but just two hours too few in the day . . . He’d never settled. And now Lena came stomping in, banging on his lid, just as he was about to have himself put under. “I know you’re not gone yet. Bain, we have to talk.”

  Half an hour later and he was back on the fizzy cocktail that kept them going there, all twenty-eight of them doing the work of fifty people, trying to keep the sister expedition going with practically zero support from the ship. He was back in the ready room of the main dome, out on the shore of an alien sea. Seven of the others were sleeping, lucky them. The rest were in the various lab modules fighting the toxic biochemistry of the planet, trying to find a way to square the circle with poor, abused Earth biology. And then there was Lena, and him.

  “We can’t get anywhere without samples.” Because when Lena said, We need to talk, she meant she needed to talk, to tell Bain what they all knew. “I can’t get samples if the damn things keep eating my drones. I need escorts. Armed escorts. Drive off the locals.”

  “Don’t call them locals.” Bain’s voice sounded like it had died, just a raspy croak. “Just one particularly aggressive species. Which is why I don’t want to risk—”

  “They’re just molluscs, Bain.”

  “They’re not molluscs, they just look like—”

  “A few of us in environment suits, with guns.”

  “You’re volunteering, are you?” Too tired to be politic.

  “Yes, I am,” Lena confirmed. “I will personally go out there with a hammer and crack open the next shellfish to try anything. Bain, we are . . . besieged.”

  “You’re being—”

  “There are dozens of the things within our immediate area!”

  He felt sick. Not at the thought of marauding not-molluscs, because even though they had a taste for drones, for some inexplicable reason, it wasn’t as though the lumbering things had proved a threat, really. Sick because of the decisions hanging over him that he’d been resolutely refusing to make.

  “I think we need to move site,” he said weakly, knowing what her response would be.

  “No! Bain, the coast is the only place where we’ve found any give in the biology! You’ve seen the reports from the ship. It’s all poison out there, utterly incompatible with Earth life. But the saltwater biomes, they’re flexible. There’s a convergence there.”

  “There are giant molluscs that eat our samplers.” He waited for her to parrot his own not molluscs back at him, but she didn’t. Abruptly half the fight had gone from her and she was looking away, to where the curved side of the dome met the hard plastic of the floor.

  “They don’t eat them,” she said. Innocent enough except there was a big indigestible lump of words she wasn’t quite vomiting up. Under the circumstances, and because he was so strung he couldn’t think, he just let the silence hang.

  “They . . .” And she was just as worn down by the long shifts and the drugs. We can’t keep going. We should abandon this doomed venture and go back to the ship. Except Bain had heard what sort of measures the lead science team over there were considering and . . . unthinkable. Just unthinkable. There must be another way, a path that preserves us as human.

  He realised he was crying. He couldn’t stop it, and it didn’t even engage with him consciously. It was just something his body was doing. Lena looked on dully. We did all the groundwork, some scientist part of him was wailing, outraged at an unfair universe. They had known there was a biosphere here they could work with, all the right elements. Oxygen, carbon, plenty of water. Life, recognisably the building blocks of life. It was supposed to be paradise, ripe for colonising. Except apparently you could have every familiar Earth element and put them together in a way utterly inimical to anything from Earth. The world rejected them from their arrival, and continued to do so, moment by moment. They couldn’t eat it without being poisoned. They couldn’t touch it without potentially fatal allergic reactions to everything. And they were here, now. It wasn’t a return trip. Hundreds of would-be colonists, come light years from home, just to plant a flag in a planet that murdered them by its very nature.

  “Fine,” he spat out, because right then agreeing was less effort. “Guns. Print out guns, ammunition. Something heavy enough to get through those shells.” They were the size of a two-person transport, those not-molluscs. Small-arms fire or light energy weapons wouldn’t stand a chance. “Or a hammer, if you really want.” And what can they do, poor dumb beasts that they are? They were the Galapagos tortoises of an alien world, and they wouldn’t even have the wit to rue the day they met humanity.

  Only after she’d gone, after he was back in his pod with strict instructions to shoot him full of downers and let him sleep for a week, did he realise he never asked her what they did with the sampler drones. What they did, instead of eating, that so discomfited her. But it was too late then, and by the time they woke him, it was a moot point.

  * * *

  They were an unlovely thing, Lena Dal thought. But if they’d stuck to simply crawling about in the mud like the snails they resembled, she would have been content to share a world with them. At least until a solution was found to long-term human habitation here. If that solution involved snail genocide she wouldn’t weep. She might be a bioengineer but that didn’t mean she was soft on every creature in the cosmos.

  She’d come out with Shay Park and Orindo Snapper, geologist and technician respectively. They’d used too many expedition resources fabricating large-bore percussion weapons and now they were escorting a sampler drone out along the beach. They’d already seen a dozen of the monstrous mollusc-alikes, even on the short walk from the dome complex to the sea. The sister colony expedition had set up in the wind-shadow of a great rise, a slanted boulder, fifteen metres high, that had been rolled up to the high-water mark by some ancient storm. Or perhaps left by retreating glaciation, though they’d seen little other sign of that. It remained the landscape’s lone muck-and-vegetation-encrusted shelter. A bastion against the fierce winds that came off the great greenish expanse of the sea, the water murky as a weed-choked pond with a scum of plankton. Filthy. She wouldn’t want to put a foot in it. Yet this ecosystem was the most amenable to conversion for human uses. Com
ing about the boulder-hill’s broad, rounded base, she felt her heart sink at the sight. The beach was utterly desolate, windswept, with a strand line of decaying purple detritus speckled with the odd corpse of some oceanic denizen. Not fish. Not even not-fish as the snails were not-snails. Macrofauna on this world had a kind of a skeleton but no spine. The hydrodynamic shape that evolved over and over on Earth never found a foothold here. Everything that swam was all webbed legs, like spider-crabs crossed with bats. And dead, if it had washed up here. If she weren’t suited up, she’d have a noseful of alien decay, a weirdly floral, cloying scent, but a stink, nonetheless. She reckoned they’d stink alive, too. She hated them, but not as much as the snails.

  They dominated the beach. She could see thirty of them, the smallest as large as she was, the largest four times that. They made their desultory way along the strand, picking over the detritus. Too big, too slow, too wrong. And they didn’t care about her. She meant nothing to their creeping existence. Except they didn’t even slide about like real snails. Beneath that crumpled, swept-back cone of a shell there were greyish legs, like fingers. As though the snail was a hand nestled into that great stony shell like an obscene hermit crab. Mostly they stayed low, and only the stumps of their fingertips were visible, broad about as Lena’s thigh. But she’d seen them move. She’d seen the bastards hustle, from a standing start and without any obvious cause. They lifted their huge shells like ponderous matrons with their skirts, and those grotesque flesh limbs scuttled them along, far too fast for so huge a bulk. The sight had made her ill, when they showed her the footage. She’d hated them ever since.

  But she didn’t indulge herself. She just escorted the wheeled drone as it motored over to the strand line and began selecting another round of samples from the recently beached. Back at the dome, the expedition scientists, Lena included, would do their level best to find levers amongst this alien biochemistry, to find a way to yoke it to their service. Or clear it, said the quiet voice in the back of her mind. Exterminate it, just locally. Just to give them a foothold. We came so far.

  Like Bain, she’d spoken to their counterparts at the ship. People were dying. The planet was killing them. All attempts at agriculture were stillborn. People were desperate. But Lena Dal told herself that she thrived under pressure. It made her stronger. She fought back.

  The sampler drones: she didn’t know what it was about the things, but the snails loved them. The expedition team had tried painting them different colours, modulating the engine frequency, signals, emissions. The monsters couldn’t resist, no matter what. They came and dismantled them, devoured parts. Not all, but only some components. Mechanisms, the computer brain, certain instruments. As though they were gourmets. She’d seen footage of that, too. The snails were hands within hands, unfolding rubbery mouthparts that were just rings of fingers over smaller fingers until the bile almost choked her.

  “Incoming,” Shay said and, true to form, the closest snails had started ambling over. When they stayed low, she could almost kid herself that they were just molluscs.

  “Do we, what? Give them a warning?” Orindo asked.

  “Sure, go tack an eviction notice on ’em,” Lena snapped. Loud noises had been tried. No point in a warning shot. She looked around to see where the rest of the things were, because she didn’t want to get mobbed, pawed at by those horrible, unformed hands. The rest of the beachcomber population were scattered all the way down the strand line. Safe enough.

  She levelled the gun and shot. Recoil compensation meant little of the kinetic kickback got to her shoulder. The snail rocked, and she saw cracks craze the whorled, stony curve of its shell. For a moment it was still, but then it just continued its dogged progress towards the sampler, intent on vandalism.

  “I hope the others are capable of learning from this,” she said, and gave it another round. The superdense plastic projectile struck close on the crack and a great shard of shell was abruptly hanging away, still attached by sticky membranes and grey flesh to the thing beneath. Now the bastard stopped. Now it shuddered and its unspeakable finger-legs drummed and clawed the gritty beach. Without being told, Shay and Orindo did the same to the second, three shots sufficing to shatter its defences and leave it split open and quivering.

  They were hollow, she saw. The first one had a mess of organic detritus inside it. The second . . .

  Sampler parts. She stared. They’d been there a while, weirdly patinaed, layered over as though becoming outsize alien pearls. For a moment, until she put another round into the mess, until she convinced herself otherwise and recast the memories a different way, she thought there had been an organisation to the pieces. As though the insensate brute had filed them away according to some plan.

  * * *

  Bain woke to find the world shaking. The lid of his pod had popped open, evacuation protocols in full swing. Uncontrollable spasms racked his limbs under the chemical onslaught of the emergency wake-up procedure.

  He jackknifed up, almost fell face-first out onto the floor. There were klaxons going, panicked voices. He heard gunfire.

  “What . . . ? What . . . ?” Croaking pitifully, alone in the sleep room. Above him, the curved ceiling shuddered.

  Still wearing just a medical smock, he stumbled out into a corridor, almost going under the feet of three of his crew. He clawed at them. “What . . . ? What . . . ?” I’m the director. You have to tell me.

  Two of them just charged off. The third, unable to shake him off, stared wild-eyed. “We have to get out!”

  “What is it?” As though, if he got three sentences of briefing, he could magically make it all go away, quell the earthquake, repel the invasion.

  “Bain!”

  He jerked as his name was called, and the man he had hold of writhed out of his grip and ran. Turning, he saw Lena. She looked . . . She had a gun and there was blood on her, the sleeve of her exosuit torn up.

  “We’re under attack, Bain,” she barked. “Get to the flier.”

  “Attack?” For a moment his mind just went into free fall. Attack from the other colonists? The planet? The sound of tortured metal from nearby shocked him out of it.

  “We need to get you in a suit!” Lena shouted at him. “Come on!”

  Behind her, the wall of the corridor deformed, something blunt shunting determinedly against it. There was a lab on the other side of that, and he had sudden thoughts of something grown there, some experiment gone wild . . .

  Lena had seen it, too. “They’re inside already,” she told him, hauling him away. “So we need to get out. Out and away, back to the ship. This was a mistake. It was all a mistake.” Up to and including coming to colonise this planet in the first place, her tone said.

  “They?” Echoing her was all he could do.

  “The snails!”

  Impossible. But even as he thought it, even as Lena dragged him off, he saw the corridor wall split behind them, the round, ridgy prow of a shell push through it, dragged forwards on those ghoulish grey fingers.

  They got to the airlock, and Lena insisted on him suiting up. Even though her own suit was torn open, her blood exposed to every alien particle that her body would so violently reject. Even though someone had jammed the airlock doors open so people could flee. That brought it home; that made it real. We’re abandoning the expedition. The whole base was contaminated by the planet, now. They’d start to sicken, soon.

  If the snails don’t get us.

  The flier was ahead. He saw people thronging there. One of the servitors, a nine-foot humanoid form of titanium and plastic, was patiently loading it with crates under Orindo Snapper’s direction.

  “I’ve got him!” Lena was yelling. Her voice came dully to Bain through his helmet. “Just get on board! Just—!”

  The snail came at them with maniac speed, surely a ton of shell and mushy body, but it was riding high, its rubbery hand of a body at full extension. People threw themselves aside and the servitor was caught by the edge of the shell, flipped end over end
with a squeal of complaining electronics.

  The sound of the creature ramming the flier was weirdly flat. It didn’t sound like the end of the world at all. If Lena had rapped on his faceplate, the noise would have been sharper, more alarming. And yet the machine folded, all those high-strength, hollow components just crumpling before the snail’s unstoppable momentum. People were running. People were fleeing in all directions. He heard shots. One thundered from close by as Lena sent a round into that shell, marking it with a jagged white scar.

  The creature crouched in the ruin of their flier, their single transport, the only way they could get back to the ship. Its shell cocked and tilted, the rubbery legs beneath lifting it high as though it was exalting. It extruded a mass of prying fingers and began to tear into the ruined machine’s innards. He heard Lena scream at it in fear and frustration.

  The ground shook again. He’d written it off as the structure of the base under assault, but he was out of the dome now. The ground was just the ground.

  Lena was pulling at his arm, but he just turned back to see. No amount of warning could have prevented him.

  The hill, the shielding boulder they’d built against, it was moving. Weed and mud at its base bulged and split as it levered itself up. He saw the vast limbs there, like the hand of a half-formed god.

  I

  AS WE MADE OUR way through the last of the trees towards Meravo, the children saw us. I think the adults sent them out that way, their scouts having had sight of us for a while. The little ones didn’t know what was going on, and we heard their shrieking as they spotted us between the bristling, feathery trunks. An odd sound; part terror, part excitement. Half of them were too young to remember us the last time we came this way, but they heard stories. Children are their own secret Order, with their own initiations, legends and rites. The thought made our business seem innocent by association.

  “The Bandage-Men!” they cried, and fled ahead of us. “Don’t let them get you!” And I knew their parents must tell them: be good, do your share, or the Bandage-Men will claim you.