For a moment he is gripped by a fierce yearning, a longing and excitement utterly alien to him, bigger than him, impossible to stave off or channel. He can only crouch down and press his palms to the sides of his head as though the feelings might erupt explosively out of his skull.
Then the sensation has passed; either that or his window on it has closed, the entire event just a momentary bleed from some vast well of howling sensation he brushed too close to. He stands unsteadily. Zaine isn’t looking his way. Possibly the two spiders are; with their lesser eyes, it’s hard to tell.
The human parts of the module have been built on, and the technology involved is plainly the same that contributed to the octopus vessels they encountered. Globes and bubbles are tacked on in ungainly profusion, with little regard for the structure and centre of gravity of the original. The module would have employed rotational gravity for the benefit of its human occupants; the new mishmash has none of that, but Meshner guesses aquatic creatures don’t have the same need to know which way is up; even Portiids are far more laissez-faire about such things than humanity, old or new. A detailed look reveals more method than the original madness might suggest. On the basis that it was adapted for aquatic use and filled with water, the ungainly structure’s rotation should result in a stable orbital tumble, no indication of decay for at least the next few centuries. Some speculative modelling from Zaine raises the possibility that the end-over-end spin would serve to generate water currents to circulate a clean and breathable medium inside.
Except that medium has very plainly left the building, because the entire structure is catastrophically damaged, torn open at one end, riddled with holes. Kern has a drone making a cautious fly-by, and its images show what Meshner can only characterize as “battle-scarring”. Kern’s analysis, and her own personal experience from the point of view of Kern-as-ship, matches this with the sort of armaments the octopus vessels deployed, and moreover places the damage as recent, as far as she can tell, perhaps even within a decade. There is sufficient ice still locked in the same orbit to testify as to the fate of the station’s innards, plus organic material that might once have been its inhabitants. And yet the signal persists, and it is not an octopus signal but something eminently human in format and content. Human, but antiquated.
“So they went in and they woke up some systems. And then they had one of their sudden bouts of violence,” Zaine proposes. “Or some other bunch tried to take it from the first lot, as they seem more than happy to fight each other.” Her tone suggests an understandable lack of fondness for the locals.
“They have awoken some manner of journal, from a scientist of the Old Empire,” Viola puts in, via Kern. “I would very much like to believe so, although there are some discrepancies. The content is… not uniformly consistent with Old Empire academic style. Also, I have reservations about the validity of the dating system given the period that entries appear to cover. One interpretation suggests constant composition for far longer than your species would normally live.”
“There was plenty of variance in dating conventions,” Zaine starts, but Viola raps sharply on the console to cut her off.
“There are sections in which meaning breaks down entirely,” the Portiid notes primly. “There are repetitions. Some parts of the signal consist of random characters or words placed in a framework that resembles cogent language but is not, unless this is some Old Empire cypher we are not familiar with. However, it is plain that there is a trove of information of some sort available on this facility, and the facility itself will not last forever. The longevity of its orbit is in doubt now that the internal water has been removed.”
“Hold on.” Meshner raises a hand, hearing his own voice come out as a croak. “Sorry, not sure what you’re saying now, or where you’re going with it.”
Viola’s front legs twitch in irritation. “We are obviously going to go in and retrieve such information as remains accessible.”
Did we agree that? He would be entirely willing to accept that he’d simply glazed through the relevant crew meeting, except that Zaine and Fabian seem equally surprised by the contention. Zaine was against the whole business, wasn’t she?
Viola climbs a metre higher on the wall so she can look down on all of them, tilting her body left and right so that her major eyes can pin them all. Her palps lift with a self-important little flourish, obviously choosing this time to announce her ascension to the captain’s pre-eminence.
“Let me be the bearer of bad tidings,” comes Kern’s translation, and Meshner feels a stab of amusement at the slightly pompous tone the computer chooses. “The viability of our entire mission in this solar system is in doubt. The native civilization is both aggressive and potent enough to destroy us should it make a concerted effort. Only its inherent disorganization has prevented this from happening. Bianca is dead and Helena and Portia are lost, and the Voyager is preserved only because it is assiduously concealing its presence. We had hoped to find a counter-force to combat the octopus civilization but thus far nothing is apparent. However, we have found here an opportunity to salvage something of value. There are records here dating to the earliest era we know, that of the humans whose strange culture underlies us all. Moreover, there are records of an entirely other world, which plainly engaged the interests of those humans, and which contains within it biological systems and Understandings of potential use and relevance to our entire species.” A pause, and then a hurried skitter of legs. “And Humans.”
Meshner mostly watches Zaine to work out how novel any of this is supposed to be to him, and she still seems just as clueless as he is. In the end it is Fabian who responds, a meek little question from the floor, his posture as crouching and inoffensive as a male can be.
“Help me along the path to your conclusions, please. Understanding is a matter of Portiids. To what do you refer?” The word Kern uses is given that specific spin, meaning Portiid inherited memories rather than simple grasping of concepts, and Meshner has the same difficulty in seeing the relevance.
Viola jerks with annoyance but starts sending data to the screens, a teacher with slow pupils. “Here is what our signaller has to say about the genetics of the native life of this planet. Here is the structure of their encoding molecules.” Something other than DNA, alien proteins folding in uncomfortable ways, encrypting information in combinations of shape and chemistry. “Here is a genome-equivalent in situ.” Something like a random scrawling revealed as a three-dimensional structure on the interior of a membrane. “Here is another. Another.” Meshner’s eyes are starting to swim because Viola is letting her diagrams overlap, as Portiids tend to, until picking the new from the old is like disentangling old string. “Here is another.”
This one is huge. Viola keeps pulling out and pulling out, and if the others had been a few ditches and earthworks stuck to a cell’s inside wall, this is a city, a metropolis of compact protein-a-likes, molecules for which Old Empire science doesn’t even have convenient handles. Viola flags up various sections, comparing and contrasting to other examples. Meshner loses the ability to make anything of her diagrams at this point and must simply take it all as read.
“According to the signaller the inheritable information is being encoded at an atomic level, meaning that the transmission of information can be accomplished at far greater energy-efficiency than our own genetic code. What, then, can this great assemblage of information be, if not an Understanding? It is plain to me that this alien biota has undergone a parallel evolution allowing it to encode its experiences just as we have, and in a manner that we could learn from and adapt to our own purposes. We need to download this station’s archives entirely and then get them, and ourselves, out of this solar system as fast as possible.”
And hope the bloody octopuses don’t follow us, thinks Meshner, keeping the words unspoken. At the same time he is aware that Fabian is literally bristling with unexpressed emotion, and he guesses it’s probably anger because Viola’s new pet project casts a long sha
dow on their own.
And he is also very aware of her “It is plain to me” comment, because Portiid science has no problems with making bold claims and only later dismantling them. It is how their academics jostle for dominance amongst themselves. Viola cannot know a tenth of what she claims, but she has decided to make this the cornerstone of her gameplan, and perhaps she is right: getting out of the system with whatever they can grab is probably not the worst idea in the universe right now.
Nobody has mentioned Helena and Portia and the outside possibility that they are still alive and captives somewhere. The overwhelming technological superiority of the locals consigns any thoughts of rescue into the “doomed heroics” category and neither Human nor Portiid nature is quite so in love with its own myth.
Meshner looks about him: Fabian, unhappy; Viola plainly not caring what Fabian thinks—or Meshner himself—but cocking an eye at Zaine; Zaine nodding. Motion carried.
There is an interesting pause before Kern responds, as though she too was hovering near the “nay” camp. At last she concedes, though, her potential veto unused.
“Connect to the active system and download whatever it has,” the spider instructs. “And then we can work out how to get past the natives.”
“Who may take a lot more interest in us if they work out we’re stealing from this place,” Meshner puts in. “Their first attack came when we said we were human—their second, when they caught us responding to this signal. Whatever they’re so touchy about, this is the heart of it.”
Viola’s response, a couple of dismissive taps, is rendered by Artifabian as: “Even so.”
Meshner wrestles with the nearest console, finding his hands still tremble a little. Kern seems to second-guess him, in the end, showing him a record of her contact attempts using a variety of Old Empire protocols.
It’s not recognizing us. He read some of the old Gilgamesh records once, something most Humans do when they are young, trying to reconnect with their receding origins. The situation here is weirdly parallel to when the ark ship had first encountered a dormant Kern, save that in this case Kern is on the outside.
“Play something of its own back to it?” he murmurs, because that had worked for his ancestors. Instead, Kern drops into a deeper level of communication, system-to-system handshakes and deep-access protocols.
A volley of emotions ambushes him: surprise, disappointment, opportunism. Meshner grips the console, dizzy, trying to catch up with his own cognitive processes to discover why he feels like this. Even as he tries to master himself, the sensations bleed into Kern’s thoughtful noise. “Hmm.” A human utterance from a computer system full of insects. “I had contact. It acknowledged me. Then the signal stopped.”
“Infiltrate them,” Viola directs.
“There is nothing to infiltrate.” Kern’s human voice sounds puzzled, which rings a perfect twin to the puzzlement Meshner hosts, as though he and the system are in sympathetic lockstep. “I can find no trace of any system there. The transmission has stopped, but there is no open port, no live network. It’s as though an operator was manually sending the material and has now ceased. But if there is anything within the station to be aware, it is now aware of us.”
“Have the drone find some manner of live conduit on the surface,” Viola says, her movements skittish.
“The power use readings are curious,” Kern notes, illustrating that curiosity with examples on the screens. Some solar collectors are still in operation, a mix of the Old Empire’s ancient, robust technology and some kind of photosynthetic coating used by the octopuses, which in itself seems efficient enough to be worth taking a sample of. They are jury-rigged, cobbled together with lots of loose ends and blind alleys, but routing power to some source inside. Now the signal is gone, nothing on the hull seems to be turned outwards. There is no electronic back door Kern can exploit.
The Lightfoot is closing on the station now, easing into a matching orbit. The large drone Kern currently has out there is joined by some diminutive siblings which quickly find rents in the hull sufficient to allow them inside. Their limited light and range of vision give the crew a vertiginous look at the interior: ancient walls, metal overlain with shrivelled biotech, a chaos of two technologies, or rather two far-distant branches of the same technological tree. Fragments and particles drift everywhere, so that the pair of little drones cause a chaotic whirl of collisions everywhere they go, radiating outwards through the vacuum and out of sight of their lamps. Worry clutches inside Meshner, as though the ripples of the drones’ approach might warn some predator lurking inside.
“I am following the power traces,” Kern remarks flatly. The drones find an ancient doorway, an iris seized half-open, and bob through it. The next area was recently buttressed, shimmering with tatters of membrane, cluttered with a profusion of machinery that just seems to have been piled up and stuck together. All of it looks both new and not designed for human use. One wall is stippled with holes through which the system’s sun glitters on the bristling ice that lines half the chamber.
There is a closed door in one wall, seemingly intact. The drones jockey about in front of it, trying to find how it might open. “Design suggests an airlock—or potentially a water-lock, given the preferences of the most recent occupants. There’s no active terminal I can detect,” Kern reports. “Whatever is beyond this, though, that’s where the power is being routed.”
“Go outside and find another way in?” Meshner suggests, but his words are lost in an announcement from Zaine:
“The pings we’re getting from the locals are more intense now. We’re detecting ship movement towards this orbit. Maybe not an attack fleet but I wonder if they’re working themselves up to it.”
“They didn’t seem to need much working up the last few times.” Fabian’s translated words successfully come over as bitter. “They just did.”
“Then they’re getting themselves into a position where if they just do, they’ll be able to make it stick,” Zaine tells him exasperatedly. “So, if we’re doing something here, Viola, we should consider we have a limited time.”
“Door controls are manual only,” Kern states, and Artifabian twitches and rattles off across the crew quarters towards its own airlock. It is configured as a Portiid, after all, which entails certain physical competencies. At Viola’s insistence Fabian scuttles up to a console, standing by as backup pilot should one be necessary. Meshner just sits back and watches the view from Artifabian’s cameras, feeling oddly proprietory. The arachnoid remote is one of his and Fabian’s team, after all. It’s almost as if he’s contributing.
Kern carefully adjusts the ship’s velocity and proximity to the station, feeding the data to Artifabian. The airlock door is open and their destination is still distant, the size of a thumbnail in the robot’s view. Fabian reports sullenly on trajectory, performing backup maths. Artifabian has limited manoeuvring jets, but most of the legwork, so to speak, will be done the old-fashioned way. Meshner watches stress tolerance readouts push limits as the robot ratchets in its third pair of limbs.
“Relative velocities are stable,” Kern offers, and Artifabian springs, legs spread, kicking off into space.
The approach to the station threads a needle through a sparse cloud of debris that is matching the orbital’s orbit, the echo of a much larger collection of clutter that time and physics has dispersed. Artifabian’s approach is graceful, ghost-like, a single perfect leap over kilometres, a subtle murmur of jets to slow its approach when the wall of the station is already its whole world. Meshner sees the positives as its feet find their anchors, touching down like a feather, no bounce-back at all. Then it goes pattering swiftly towards the nearest torn ingress, following the trail already blazed by the drones, creeping under and over with considerably more ease than the remotes through the cluttered, swirling spaces to the closed door.
Opening the room up is another complex operation. The manual release is nothing made for a Portiid, real or artificial, and Meshner reckon
s a human would have difficulty, too. In the end Artifabian cannibalizes the camera drones for parts, botching together a kind of flexible glove puppet that the robot can manipulate to get purchase on the control. The process takes longer than anyone is comfortable with.
Meshner half-expects a torrent of water and possibly some annoyed molluscs to come tumbling out of the chamber beyond. What Artifabian detects is air, though, the ghost of a stale breath from the past. The chamber itself would be cramped for a human, sandwiched between two doors, no window on what lies beyond. An airlock for real, though, buried in the heart of the derelict station.
“Doesn’t guarantee air on the other side,” Zaine points out. “Not if a shot compromised the hull through there.” Her voice sounds muffled and Meshner is alarmed to see her suiting up. Is she worried we’ll get shot too? But then the realization: she thinks we’re going over there. She must be mad. And his eyes flick to the long-range readings, because the locals are definitely coming closer. He imagines those monstrously heavy dreadnoughts building up an unstoppable momentum, finally united in their desire to turn these intruding aliens into a fog of atoms.
Artifabian has another convoluted wrestling match to seal the first door and open the second, while Zaine and Viola track the attention they are getting from the distant local vessels. Meshner is already ahead of them in considering that “far away” doesn’t necessarily mean anything given the level of weaponry the octopuses deployed. There might already be projectiles or missiles streaking through the void towards the Lightfoot. “We need to speed this up,” he whispers. “We have to get out of here.”
Children of Ruin Page 26