Behind him a hauling remote was following at a set distance, waiting for his signal. It had three tortoises in its bed already, aimlessly crawling over the plastic. More specimens for Lante to dissect. He stooped over another of the creatures. There were plenty of them; scientific depredation wouldn’t make a dent. Of course, people had probably said that about mammoths and bison and actual tortoises, once upon a time, but right now Lortisse reckoned even the plodding nature of Nod was more than enough to overcome the efforts of four poor humans.
“We’re all going spare, but so gently,” he continued his narrative. “It’s like seeing something break up in zero gravity, the pieces gradually falling away from each other. But why not? The world ended. There’s no force pulling us together any more. I see Kalveen and she’s constantly improving on systems, designing… palaces, mansions, habitats the size of cities, planning them out with fail-safes and redundancies and… on a scale we could never build, not the four of us, not forty of us. She says it’s the future, but she can’t believe it. She can give us a virtual tour of floating cities on Damascus, of airborne dome-complexes on Nod that have a zero footprint, where the alien life just goes on unmolested beneath your feet. And it’s mad, it’s all mad.”
The remote came at his signal and he loaded up his latest victim. Is this what I’ve come to? Driving the execution wagon for brainless alien shellfish? But it got him out under the sky. It exercised the muscles. Better than staying cooped up with Baltiel and Rani and…
“And Erma,” he finished the thought aloud. “She’s always talking about breeding a new generation in the vats, only we don’t even have the vats yet, and she never seems to get started. There’s always some other thing that needs planning out. She can’t get her head past the stage where it becomes real and there are… what, some sickly, feeble children someone has to take care of. She knows the automatics can’t just do it for us, but it’s not as though any of us want the responsibility. Give us a next generation, sure, but don’t make us care for it. Senkovi cares more for his octopodes than any of us would for those poor goddamn children.”
The hauling remote always made the tortoises limpet down on the rock. Something about it said “predator” in a way Lortisse’s human form didn’t. It was a wide, flat thing on six narrow legs, and probably its shadow resembled one of the fliers, or at least to the weird eyes of a tortoise. Anyway, the other animals nearby had all fled or were hunkered down enough to make it impossible to pry them free without killing them. Lortisse continued his ramblings, stepping carefully around the pools, the remote following at its polite undertaker’s distance. “And so Erma just goes on doing piecework dissections for Yusuf, because Yusuf’s the craziest of us all. Because he just wants to carry on as though nothing happened. It’s like he doesn’t even understand it’s all gone. He wants to study the aliens, as though they care, as though anybody ever will. He thinks as long as he’s doing his job—or, not even his job, but the job he gave himself before it all went to hell—that things are still okay. That it’s all business as usual.”
He found another pool clustered with tortoises, some in the water, some at the edge, scissoring and rasping at the blackish clusters of fronds and spirals that were something like plants, something more like sessile, semi-autotrophic animals. Nod lacked hard divisions between kingdoms. Those “plants” would release swimming or airborne larvae to colonize other regions. Some of them would supplement their diet with just such microscopic flotsam; others went through mobile phases in which they metamorphosed into something entirely more active. Perhaps the tortoises had a plant stage, too. Perhaps the fliers did, putting down roots in high mountain crevices and turning their wings to the sun. Lortisse stood still, feeling the environment encroach on his mind with its very strangeness, staring out across the lumpen, low landscape towards the sea, watching rain sheeting in across the coast.
“Really, Senkovi’s the sanest of us all. I should go back to the Aegean, go swimming with his pets again. That was good. That made sense. None of this does.”
A searing pain lanced into his calf. Dumbfounded, he looked down. One of the tortoises had honed a tentacle arm into something resembling a needle and jammed it into his leg. At first he didn’t yell or call for help. He just stared at the thing as it removed the prong, his suit sealing the puncture automatically. The tortoise seemed to lose whatever interest it had in him instantly, bumbling away and scraping shells with its neighbour.
Then the pain of the incision was growing and growing until his whole leg was on fire with it. Poison! And yet no creature on Nod could have evolved a poison to attack a man of Earth, surely. But now his helmet display was covered in red lights, medical emergency signals winging to the habitat. Lortisse swayed, vision blurring, his breath abruptly laboured. He could feel a terrible pressure as his calf and thigh swelled within his suit.
Haruspex. The result of his earlier search had been waiting for him at the edge of his attention, waiting politely at the edge of his mind’s eye. To seek the future in entrails.
He lurched forwards, wheezing, gasping, even as the panicked voices of his colleagues twittered faintly in his ear.
PRESENT 2
INSIDE THE WHALE
1.
Doctor Avrana Kern is suspicious by nature. Partly this is a deeply-ingrained trauma resulting from a betrayal by an underling, back when she was human and alive and (relatively) sane. Partly it is simply building on a suspicion that was always part of her nature. This suspicion has survived in her despite the many forms she has taken: from human to human-AI hybrid to pure AI (that believed itself human) through to a complex program running on an organic operating system arising out of the interactions of millions of ants.
Which means that when an alien fleet hoves into view, she starts looking for weapons and analysing technology and constructing elaborate countermeasures and emergency plans that even she had not thought would suddenly become necessary.
Abruptly, they are necessary. She was watching the energy signatures of the alien ships—all built on enough of an Old Empire foundation that she can understand them. Within seconds of the Lightfoot’s first visual transmission she senses a moment of utter chaos—as though the vessels are brains undergoing a seizure. Everything lights up: they are manoeuvring; they are activating their weapons. Kern reacts instantly, her hypotheticals becoming the new reality.
Humans, back when they built spaceships, constructed them with a hard outer shell to protect their vulnerable insides. Portiids build ships with an internal skeleton but a flexible outer sheath that Kern can trim by shifting the ship’s bones. The outer hull comprises multiple layers of a fabric that is to the ancestral spider silk as a thrown stone is to the weapons the aliens are deploying, but it retains many of that substance’s virtues. It has an incredible tensile strength for its weight; it can stretch without rupturing; it can be produced in large quantities in a short period of time.
Kern starts shedding hull in great loose swatches, each one carrying with it a fluctuating electromagnetic signature. The Lightfoot becomes the centre of an expanding haze of urticated silk that writhes and clumps and forms constellations of matter even as the ship itself alters course. That suffices to confuse the targeting systems of the missiles now heading towards it: they veer off, spinning into snarling skeins that drag them off course, chasing electronic ghosts created in their sensor feedback by the arachnid chaff. The first lasers fall foul of the same defences, wasting their energy on a vacuum abruptly cluttered. By then, the Lightfoot is already moving on a different heading, shifting tack so suddenly that its effective length halves, its internal buttressing compressing about the crew quarters, preserving that little bubble of air intact.
The alien vessels are also turning, but they lumber where the Lightfoot darts. Kern has calculated the sort of mass they are hauling and it is, by her reckoning, insane. Yes, the ships are huge, but even for such massive craft they appear to be carrying an absurd momentum, a thousand times more than
she can account for as they utterly fail to match her swift course correction.
Of course, that is why they have launched a scattering of smaller craft, she surmises, which are tiny, each barely larger than a couple of Humans end to end and with engines every which way, apparently, so that they spin about any axis they need to, to come and bother the Lightfoot with their weapons.
She deploys more silk, aware that she is boiling away the mass of the ship, making some of that inertial shortening a permanent fixture as she cannibalizes her own substance. At least one of the incoming fighters ploughs straight into a mass of the stuff, loses half its thrusters and spins off into the void, but the rest are doggedly on her. She briefly considers consulting Bianca about permission to fire, but she is, after all, Avrana Kern. Who better to make such decisions? She has a brief fugue moment of memory: unleashing her tiny satellite’s weaponry against the Gilgamesh’s shuttles and drones, killing humans before they became Humans.
She never said, because neither Portiids nor Humans would understand, but she enjoyed herself, doing that. Cathartic, was the word that occurred to her. And once they started putting her into spaceships, she always wondered if there might be some war, somewhere, with a hostile power. She decides that some other Kerns out there might get to be proper warships one day, and wouldn’t that be fine? For now she resolves that she will try to kill a few of these drones or fighters or whatever they are. She has decided that, based on technological similarity, the “aliens” here are some human successor state. Probably Portiid diplomacy will make them Humans eventually, but for now she will blow a few of them up and see how it makes her feel.
Of course the Lightfoot, hastily prepared scout craft, is not exactly a gunboat, but she has lasers—rather more so than her captain or crew are aware of, more even than the Kern instance on the Voyager knew, because she went behind her own back when building this ship-body. Now she lights them up, the Lightfoot’s malleable hull breaking out in ugly warts that each house a lens. She begins painting the dark sky with lights, trying to pin down the enemy even as they overtake her. They are very swift, though, and she begins to realize they are also good at what they do, whether they are organic or automatic. Their all-direction thrusters allow them to make lightning-fast changes in trajectory, bouncing about like monkeys as she tries to track them. She clips a couple, but they adapt to whatever minor damage she deals out. Their own lasers blister at her, crisping silk that her repair spinnerets replace as quickly as possible, frying some hubs of her ant-network. They have overshot her and are now spinning about, fighting their own momentum with a rapid patter of thrust.
Some of them open up with magnetically accelerated projectiles, and Kern laughs quietly to herself because she can mend any external holes as swiftly as they open, and the Lightfoot simply lacks the solid parts for such miniscule missiles to disrupt. They would need a lucky shot, a very lucky shot—
A string of such little beads rip through her hull. One punches a hole in a main strut of her skeleton, but there is plenty of redundancy there. The trailing edge of the salvo punches a dozen holes in the crew compartment, so swiftly that the crew themselves would not even realize, had not Bianca, the captain, been directly in the path of one shot. Her death is instant, explosive. For the projectile itself, her presence does not affect its course—she is incidental to its path, that takes it into and out of the Lightfoot in the flash of an eye.
For Meshner, the moment is experienced only in retrospect. Bianca had been at her post, stamping out orders that the machines translated only sluggishly for the Human crew—Kern was concentrating too much on their defence to spend too much of herself on the niceties of interspecies communication. Then Bianca was… all around them, without any transitional state, the fluid-filled sack of her body burst asunder.
Everyone is engaged in the fight, all the Lightfoot’s small crew. Bianca’s coordination has been taken from them but nobody can spare more than a heartbeat to register it. Kern may make all the decisions, but the crew is providing her with supplementary computing power in the form of their own grey matter. Portia and Viola are suggesting firing solutions, trying to understand the apparently random patterns of the enemy fighters/drones. Zaine and Helena manage energy budgeting: the Lightfoot’s drive is good, but like the Voyager it is optimized for long-term use, not extreme short-term drain, and space combat is nothing if not draining. Kern draws what she needs and the two Humans do their best to juggle other less-critical systems, like life support. Fabian and Meshner work on wider predictions, with particular reference to the big ships out there that are each erupting with weapons fire from a dozen different angles.
Meshner plots arcs and angles, trying to work out the best way to thread that particular needle. Space is a desert with no cover, and the enemy vessels have no “front”, meaning that any angle invites a broadside, and no sure way to know when it might come.
Fabian passes over his best guess, paths to take that might dodge the worst of the incoming fire as they accelerate out of this mess; Meshner counters. Kern shoots them both down, figuratively speaking, modelling worst-case scenarios for them that see the Lightfoot smeared across a kilometre of empty space. The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.
Back to the drawing board. Fabian stamps out a little fit of anger against his controls, which are above Meshner’s head.
There’s no way we can get clear unless we break from the fighters, Fabian insists. Even as he does so, Meshner registers that another three railgun projectiles have just clipped through the crew compartment, striking nothing vital and having no effect other than a tiny loss of atmosphere before the infinitesimal wounds in the hull seal themselves. The lasers are potentially worse, but the enemy fighters only use them in brief stabs, rather than trying to slice the Lightfoot open. Most likely the tiny ships have even more limited energy reserves than their victim and lasers are a colossal power sink.
Meshner blinks, frowning, because abruptly his view of the screen is fuzzing, lines breaking apart into spectra of colours, the controls seeming to jump and writhe under his fingers.
Not a good time, not a good time, he knows, watching his hands rattle with sudden palsy.
Also: Artifabian didn’t translate Fabian for me. He understood the Portiid’s words direct, somehow, or imagined he had. He opens his mouth to advise Kern he’s having issues. His tongue waves; words don’t come.
He turns and looks at the ocean sunset, both it and him running mad with colours he doesn’t know, and that his mind baulks at simply calling “purple”. When the waves crash on the shore they are silent, yet they speak to him in a roar, insisting on their own provenance and immortality before reducing to a grumbling nothing.
Meshner freezes, clutching for the controls he knows are there. His fingertips come back to him with a riot of sensory overload, a complexity of tactile data he simply lacks the equipment to decode. The approximate shape of his console is in there somewhere, camouflaged within the tumult.
The ocean waves crash, same as before, exactly the same, cycling: a broken stub of memory recorded in too many colours, missing channels of data he would need before any of it felt real. It looks like corrupted recordings, ancient video data, flickering and phasing, repeating over and over.
Not now!
And, at the same time: Is this it? Has the fight shaken this loose? Have we succeeded at last? And yet this doesn’t feel… first person. He is Meshner, the Human. This isn’t what he was hunting for, in trying to graft Portiid Understandings into his implant and his Human brain. He feels as though he is watching the information from the outside, through some sort of third party mediation.
With that thought he can move his point of perspective—he has no physical body, or rather his body is not here, all its sensory data and proprioception locked in another room. And surely Fabian cannot just go wandering through his own m
emories like this; he would be locked to the perspective he—or his ancestor—had occupied when the Understanding was first encoded. So how can he, Meshner, take apart and analyse the sensory data in this way? I’m modelling it, extrapolating a whole from Fabian’s limited perspective. Which means that probably half of what he experiences is his own invention, but fascinating nonetheless. If he wasn’t about to die in—of all the stupid things—a space battle he would be exhilarated by this development.
He turns around and sees Fabian there, the same Fabian he knows, looking out at that sunset. Why did the spider choose this moment? The Portiid—or some past Portiid whose likeness was lost but whom Meshner has reconstructed as modern-day Fabian—had loved this sunset, this seascape, enough. Perhaps that was all.
You cannot interrogate this, the spider tells him, the usual dance of feet and waving palps, and yet the meaning is crystal clear in Meshner’s mind. This is all your own conjecture, building on reconstructed data in virtual space.
“Then who am I talking to?” he demands, and the spider stamps out, Work it out yourself. I’m busy.
The means of communication is unfamiliar, the sharp tone less so. “Kern?” Or some limited sub-system of hers?
Make yourself useful, it instructs him, and he has a sudden sense of wider space beyond this looping moment.
It occurs to him that this could go very badly if he lets himself get trapped in the same five seconds of Fabian’s recollection forever. And yet how is this even still present in his brain?
It isn’t, idiot. His own sharpness now, his own thoughts, not Kern’s. But it’s still in your implant. Like Kern said, it’s a virtual space. The implant is a potent computing tool built to translate and model memory data, after all. Now, at the worst moment, he has finally accessed that space, except he didn’t ask to and potentially cannot escape from it.
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