Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Baltiel waited for the alienness to strike him, stepping from the shuttle’s airlock onto the surface of Nod. They could have jockeyed down close enough for the automatics to line up a tunnel between ship and habitat, and Baltiel had nixed the idea because of the slim chance that a slip might have damaged one or the other. In truth, though, he had wanted this: the first foot put down onto another living world, the feel of the atmosphere clenching about him, the gravity, the colour of the sunlight…

  And he stood there at the foot of the ramp and there was nothing, almost nothing. So, it wasn’t Earth; neither had the artificial gravity of the Aegean been, or the orbiting module (which had never quite matched its parent ship, for no reason they could ever find). The orange-red of the sun was compensated for by the visor display of his helmet. He could look across the flat expanse of the great salt marsh, all its rivulets and pools and rocky ridges, out to the great darkness of the sea, and he might just be at a somewhat unattractive beach back home. The suit was insulating him from everything; not just a potentially hazardous atmosphere and the radiation of an alien star, but the smells, the sounds, the unalloyed sights that would make it all real. It might just be an underwhelming simulation.

  But we’re here. And perhaps it will come yet, waking to a new rhythm, seeing the life first hand.

  The others were backing up behind him so he set off, a proud stride no matter how he was feeling about it. Or as proud a stride as the cumbersome suit would allow. Even with its servos smoothing his movements he felt he was lumbering like some antique movie monster. Lante, Lortisse and Rani followed him, a little shambling convoy over the rocks. The going was slippery and uneven; their boots were constantly locking in place, soles moulding to fit the terrain. It was an undignified first parade for humanity, but at least the onlooking aliens were unlikely to take much notice. Baltiel stopped short of the habitat, waving Lante to enter and check that internal conditions matched up to the installation’s readouts. He would be last in, he decided. He would stand out here and take in the landscape, and hope for that feeling to hit him.

  Nothing between him and the sea rose past his waist. There were slimy, muddy humps and there were rocks worn down by the constant patience of the tides. Between them was a vast network of hollows and channels, a single body of water at high tide, a thousand, thousand separate ponds at low. It was a complex environment, transformed from moment to moment, the ambassador between the ecologies of the depths and those of the dry interior. If there was anywhere Nodan life might have become complex, then surely it was here.

  There were fliers overhead, like gulls. Perhaps they would be the seeds of intelligence. They were active predators; he’d seen footage of them swooping down on luckless marsh-dwellers. They had a hydrostatic skeleton like most life on Nod and flew by rapid inflation and deflation of their broad vanes, a process that looked like stop-motion photography, and like they shouldn’t have any business in the air. They were the most aggressively active things on the planet, the airborne lords of Nod.

  On the ground there were plenty of things for them to eat, which would likely be the main subject of Baltiel’s studies for the years to come. Hundreds of different lineages of radially-organized creeping and swimming things called the marsh home, from the microscopic to the tortoises that could reach three feet high. Not actual tortoises, of course, or even much like them, but they secreted stony shells and lumbered about on tubular feet, placidly grazing, and the name had stuck. The fliers obviously liked the taste of them, when they could winkle parts of them from their mobile fortresses. Baltiel watched one now, mindlessly plodding over the path he’d taken from the shuttle. It had six legs, exuded and retracted in turn, and six tentacle limbs it used to scrape and gather its harvest of sessile plant-like creatures. As he watched, the thing slowly let out an arm to touch the very ground Baltiel had trodden. Was some part of its limited sensorium encountering an alien chemical, the residue of his boot soles perhaps? The tortoise seemed to spend a lot of time considering the possibility, but then it set off again, sloping down into the next pool in search of sustenance it could understand.

  He turned and followed the others into the habitat.

  They didn’t seem to feel the same sense of anticlimax. The air was full of their chatter as they checked in with Skai. Baltiel called up the latest on the Aegean and Senkovi’s idiot games. The ship was still dark, Senkovi’s crew were exchanging anxious communiques with Skai’s people about what happened if it didn’t light back up on schedule. We go in and salvage what’s left, was the obvious answer to that. We find Disra’s body. Nobody was saying it; everyone was thinking it.

  Lante gave him a grin. She was a heavyset woman, her hair cropped almost to her skull, her skin ashen in the artificial light. Rani was shorter and darker, always slightly dishevelled; even standing there in her suit it showed in the cant of her helmet. Lortisse was a tall man, half a head over his commander, with a dark beard held back by a net to stop it fritzing with his HUD controls. These were Baltiel’s people, his disciples. Their names would appear in the history books, under his own.

  Then Rani was frowning. The expression made it look as though she’d just remembered something she meant to pack. Too late to go back for it now.

  He sent her a query over their local net and she linked him in to a transmission from Skai.

  “Repeat,” he instructed, rather than having to replay and catch up.

  “I said we’ve been getting the strangest signal from Earth. It was only on the news channels first, but now it’s on all of them, every frequency.” Skai’s voice was glitchy with static. “One moment it was the usual war stuff, then it’s just this—”

  Her image in their HUD froze, the expression of mild puzzlement on her face drawn out and out until it became unsettling.

  “Skai?” Baltiel pinged her, sending a request to connect, and received a scatter of contradictory responses from the network. The others were casting sidelong glances, trying their own diagnostics and getting nowhere.

  For a moment Skai’s image was alive again, skipping straight from mild puzzlement to mid-panic. “—od, the system, it…”—stutter, freeze—“contact with the shuttle. Han, Han, do you…” A staccato pattern of flashes that hurt the eye, as though some message was being beamed through their pupils to scratch madly at their retinas. “—coming down… ife support, someone… ease.” They had no visuals now, just that one woman’s voice, torn up by static, far away and getting further. In the background was interference and feedback and, if Baltiel stretched his imagination, terrified screaming. “Anyone?” Skai shouted. “Anyone?” But there was no-one, and a moment later not even her.

  Baltiel and his crew stared at each other, not quite processing what had happened. Each of them kept trying to connect to the module, receiving nothing but static, white noise they couldn’t parse.

  “The hell…?” Lante’s was the first human voice to break the quiet. Everything they had heard, they heard via their comms implants, which should have kept them all one happy family even at this distance.

  “Is this one of Senkovi’s jokes or something?” Lortisse added. He didn’t like Senkovi much.

  Rani was tweaking the parameters of their instruments to try and get past whatever was blocking transmissions. Right then, nobody really thought anything had gone wrong, not with anything save communications.

  Baltiel took a deep breath, knowing he had to make a command decision but too short of information to know what it should be.

  The lights died, first the lambent illumination around them, then the dull red emergency lamps, and then, last of all, the purple glow of the screen Rani was looking into. They were left with a residual amber radiance from everywhere and nowhere; the sunlight from outside leaking a little through the fabric of the habitat.

  Baltiel pinged Rani or tried to. He had no sense of signal sent, certainly no confirmation it had been received. He queried his suit. Nothing. He moved, feeling the full weight of all that cumberso
me protection. The servos ground at the joints, refusing to assist him.

  A white beam flicked on: Rani had an emergency torch and was flashing it around. Baltiel saw her mouth moving and lurched closer.

  “Suit’s dead!” He read her lips as much as anything, in the shaking light.

  “How much air?” Lortisse must be half deafening himself. His voice sounded like someone in another room with the door closed.

  “Can’t tell!” Rani yelled distantly back. “All dead.”

  Baltiel went to signal that they should have at least eight hours each, but of course there were no comms. In-suit exposure to the outside had only been planned for the few steps between shuttle and habitat, but he was diligent, as were they all. The suits had been topped up, that much he remembered. Except he was feeling dreadfully short of breath already, which was impossible. The pumps should have their own power, should be independent of any failure of the suit’s systems.

  Unless they had been explicitly told to shut down. It was theoretically possible, as part of a maintenance cycle. Everything’s shut down. An attack. Nothing’s working except us.

  “Shuttle!” Lortisse shouted, lurching for the habitat airlock, which stayed resolutely closed. He fumbled for the manual release, winching the near door open, shuddering and gasping until he fell to his knees. Grimly, Baltiel took a leaden step over and found the emergency release on the man’s helmet, cracking it open so that Lortisse exchanged the dying air in his helmet for the slowly dying air of the habitat. He followed by removing his own, gasping at the rubber-smelling pocket of atmosphere he suddenly had access to, and soon enough they’d all done the same.

  “The hell?” Lante repeated, clearly audible now they’d all decided to do the dumb thing together. The other two looked as though they’d already got it, Baltiel decided—Rani definitely, Lortisse just piecing it together now.

  “We were shut down.” Because it needed to be said and he was in charge. “An attack, from home. An attack from thirty years ago. The war…”

  “We need to get comms back,” Rani said. “The module…”

  “We need to survive.” Baltiel was already taking inventory. They had food here. They had water, though they couldn’t reprocess waste until they were able to restart that part of the system. They had limited air. Could they get the scrubbers and the pumps online? Could they get access to the suit tanks? Again, he tried to link to the others, to throw the problem to them and have their minds work on it in that virtual space between them. Denied, again denied.

  “Air first, comms second,” he decided. “Perhaps the shuttle comms survived, if they weren’t being used.” Except the sanest, grimmest part of his mind was pointing out that the comms on the shuttle were open all the time; of course they were, why wouldn’t they be? What’s the worst that could happen?

  “Why us?” Lante moaned.

  Maybe it wasn’t just us. But there was time for that kind of speculation later.

  In the end they were able to jury rig the suits to get the tanks pumping again, which was fine except they could barely communicate unless they touched faceplates. The habitat’s pumps remained stubbornly silent. Rani reckoned she could get them working, circumvent all the parts of the system that had clenched and died at Earth’s faraway command, but perhaps not in a time frame that would be useful.

  Baltiel had volunteered to go out and try the shuttle. They lost a roomful of atmosphere letting him out and he was wondering whether he would ask to be let back in. The shuttle was as dead as everything else, he discovered with no surprise. The airlock was locked down, even the manual release wouldn’t shift it. He hammered on the metal of the door, indulging his fury on the inanimate so he could go back and be reasonable for his fellow human beings. When he was done ranting for the sole audience of his own ears, he looked round to see several of the tortoises watching this spectacle, this doomed alien invader come to their world to die. They had simple eyes at the lower edge of their shells, his memory reminded him, but complex stalked eyes that emerged from the blowhole in the apex of their shell, because they needed to watch out for the fliers. Now those eyes were goggling at him, making him feel that he was letting the side down. Just moved in and what would the neighbours say?

  So, he marched laboriously back to the habitat and banged on the airlock until they let him in. By then, Rani had performed miracles with her suit battery and an antenna array and had what she claimed was a working transmitter/receiver. Except nobody out there was transmitting or acknowledging receipt of anything they were sending. The module was silent; the Aegean was silent; the shuttle Senkovi had sent his colleagues off in was silent.

  The non-functional habitat was a ticking clock on their lives, but they were on a planet, within atmospheric pressure. If the module’s systems had shut down, how long would Skai have? Baltiel was acutely aware that every single part of their life in space was mediated by computers.

  “Keep trying,” he told Rani. “The rest of us, let’s get the habitat air up.”

  How much later was it, then? No clocks, an alien world (the day-night cycle ran to just short of thirty-four hours and seventeen minutes, Baltiel recalled). No suit gauges, either, and so he made the command decision that they’d run out of air soon, as though it was a choice, a thing he could mandate. They hadn’t managed to unfreeze the air system. One emergency tank had been hauled inside, tapped, used up. Lortisse’s frustrated brute-force efforts had resulted in another tank venting its contents into the heedless alien atmosphere beyond. Without the scrubbers and recyclers online, none of it would matter. It wasn’t as though the habitat just had huge reserves of air; it was supposed to keep churning through it, turning CO2 into O2 with a side of C. As they hadn’t managed to—Lante’s desperate pun—breathe life into that system, none of the rest of it really mattered.

  And so Baltiel had made his command decision. He would take the plunge, be the guinea pig. Partly he was responsible: his ship, he’d go down with it. Partly, though, he would be first. His penance but also his privilege.

  Here he was then, another airlock-full of stale, used-up air vented by the crude manual levers. His suit, smelling of sour Baltiel even to him now, smelling of sweat and even more of the urine it no longer recycled. The interior of the habitat smelled a whole lot worse. They’d all used the facilities but whatever psychotic electronic weapon had been unleashed hadn’t spared the plumbing. His suit was hot and cumbersome, the servos fighting his every movement, designed to protect him but now just a tomb in waiting.

  He looked towards the orange sun as it sank towards the mountains in what had just been another direction once but, now humans were here, would forever be west.

  Or maybe not forever. Just as long as we’re here. So not that long, most likely.

  The others were watching him, not through screens and cameras with complex readouts of his health, but through the darkened glass of a porthole they’d wrestled the cover from.

  He took a deep breath, regretted it, reached up and unlatched his helmet. The lack of warning alarms was a curious relief. One dead system he wouldn’t miss.

  He lifted the helmet off and placed it, with groaning effort, on the ground. That done, he stared up at the dimming orange sky and took a deep breath.

  Salt; ammonia; ozone; but beyond all of these a melange of smells he had no names for. Things decaying by unfamiliar biological pathways, sharp living perfumes, hot smells, red and black smells. He wished more than anything in the world to be synaesthetic right then, so he would have some extra way to process the information his senses were giving him. He had expected the alien air to be pungent, ghastly. Instead it was heady with odours his body could do nothing with. They smelled like something, like nothing. They were cocktails of molecules his nose had never needed to identify before.

  He heard peeping like miniscule baby birds from around his feet. A flier flailed overhead, clacking angrily at him. Something keened shrilly from far off. The tortoises gurgled as they moved, as though
their innards were churning wet rocks together. He had not known. The drones and remotes had never heard these songs, smelled these weird odours. The atmosphere was heavy, dense and humid and hot like the tropics, save when the wind gusted from seawards and the acrid salt reek enveloped him and cooled him and stung his eyes.

  His breathing was speeding up; he felt the panic point of hyperventilation at his shoulder and forced himself to slow. There was less oxygen, but there should be enough, according to the numbers on the dead computers. A human from Earth could breathe unaided. Long exposure would result in a build-up of various chemicals the human body couldn’t process, but better than suffocating, eh? And he could detox later when he got back to the… back to the… Well, there was nowhere to get back to, was there?

  He fought his lungs again, as they grasped for more sustenance than the Nodan atmosphere had to offer. His muscles were aching, too, working with that just-too-strong gravity. But he lived. He breathed in alien air, the same air that all these myriad little monsters depended on for their own incompatible metabolisms.

  He turned back to the others, or to the porthole behind which he must trust they still were. It was hard even to make a thumbs up signal in the suit but he did it. They must have been able to see his grin. He was going to die, but he’d done it now. He was Nod’s first citizen castaway. He felt a crazy streak of hilarity rush through him, and then panic because what if that was the atmosphere getting to him? Yusuf Baltiel was not a man given to sudden attacks of irrational joy! And yet he owned it, claimed it as his own. He had found the aliens; he had saved them from the depredations of his own mission, and now he would die amongst them, now or later or in a hundred years, a mad hermit at the end of the human universe, talking to the tortoises and the little peeping things that lived in the black sand.