Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I’ve already got the security team and some auxiliaries woken up and armed,’ Karst said stubbornly. ‘We’ll go down and make a beachhead, establish a base, start pushing out. We’ll burn the fuckers. What else can we do? Nobody said it was going to be easy. Nobody said it would happen overnight.’

  ‘Well, it might come to that,’ Vitas conceded. ‘And if it does, I shall stay up here and coordinate the assault, and good luck to you. However, I hope there will be a more efficient way to dispose of our pest problem. Lain, I’ll need at least one of the workshops up and running at my direction, and access to all the old files – anything we’ve still got regarding Earth.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Lain asked without looking back at her.

  ‘Brew up a present for the s-s- . . . for them, below.’ This time Vitas’s stutter was clear enough that everyone noticed it. ‘I don’t think it should be impossible to put together some sort of toxin that will target arthropods, something to eat away at their exoskeletons or their respiratory system, but that won’t have any ill effect on us. After all, assuming they’re derived from actual Earth spiders, they’re essentially a completely different form of life to us. They’re not like us at all, in any way.’

  Holsten, listening, heard too much emphasis on those words. He thought of broken messages in Imperial C. Had it been Kern herself, or something just parroting Kern’s words?

  In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.

  Nobody was paying attention to him, especially as he wasn’t voicing any of these thoughts that entered his head, so he found a console that looked halfway operational and got into the comms system.

  As he had expected, there was a great deal of broad-frequency radio activity issuing from the planet. The destruction of the Sentry Habitat meant that nothing was coming to them now as clearly – possibly it had been merely a powerful transmitter for the planet, at the end. But the green world itself was alive with urgent, incomprehensible messages.

  He wanted to think of something wonderful, then: some perfect message that would somehow bring comprehension in its wake, open a dialogue, give everyone options. The cruel arithmetic of Vitas’s prisoners locked him down, though. We couldn’t trust them. They couldn’t trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He thought of human dreams – both Old Empire and new – of contacting some extra-terrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We’d never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we’d still be those same two prisoners forced to trust – and risk – or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.

  Then there came a new transmission, from the planet direct to the ship, fainter than before, but then it was not using the satellite as a relay any more. One word in Imperial C, but absolutely clear in its meaning.

  Missed.

  Holsten stared, opened his mouth two or three times, about to draw someone’s attention, then sent a simple message back on the same frequency.

  Doctor Avrana Kern?

  I told you to stay away, came the immediate, baleful response.

  Holsten worked swiftly, aware that he was negotiating now not for the Gilgamesh but as Earth’s last classicist in the face of raw history. We have no option. We need to get off the ship. We need a world.

  I sent you to a world, ungrateful apes. The transmission came from the planet, pulsing strongly out of the general riot of signals.

  Uninhabitable, he sent. Doctor Kern, you are human. We are human. We are all the humans there are left. Please let us land. We have no other choice. We cannot turn back.

  Humanity is overrated, came Kern’s dark reply. And, besides, do you think that I am making the decisions? I’m only an advisor, and they didn’t like my preferred solution to the problem that is you. They have their own ways of dealing with trouble. Go away.

  Doctor Kern, we are not bluffing, we really have no option. But it was just like before: he was not getting through. Can I talk to Eliza please?

  If there was anything left that was Eliza and not me you’ve just destroyed it, Kern responded. Goodbye, monkeys.

  Holsten sent further transmissions, several times over, but Kern was apparently done with talking. He could hear the woman’s contemptuous voice as he read through the impeccable Imperial C, but he was far more shaken with the ancient entity’s suggestion that the creatures on the planet would not be held back even by her. Where has her experiment taken her?

  He glanced about him. Vitas had gone now, heading off for her workshop and her chemicals, ready to sterilize as much of the planet as was necessary so that her species could find a home there. Holsten wasn’t sure how much would be left of what made the place attractive for habitation, after she was finished. But what other choice have we? Die in space and leave the place to the bugs and to Kern?

  ‘We’re still losing hull sensors,’ Alpash noticed. ‘The impacts may have caused more damage than we thought.’ He sounded genuinely worried, and that was a disease that others caught off him almost immediately.

  ‘How can we still be losing them?’ Lain demanded, still concentrating on her own work.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m sending out a drone, then. Let’s take a look,’ Karst stated. ‘Here.’ After some fumbling, he got the drone’s-eye-view up on one of the screens as it manoeuvred somewhat shakily out of its bay and coasted off down the great curving landscape of the ship’s hull. ‘Fuck me, this is patched to buggery,’ he commented.

  ‘Mostly from what we installed after the terraform station,’ Lain confirmed. ‘Lots of opening her up and closing her back down to get new stuff in, or to effect repairs . . .’ Her voice trailed off. ‘What was that?’

  ‘What now? I didn’t see—’ Karst started.

  ‘Something moved,’ Alpash confirmed.

  ‘Don’t be stupid . . .’

  Holsten stared, seeing the lumpy, antennae-spiked landscape pass. Then, at the corner of the screen, there was a flurry of furtive, scuttling movement.

  ‘They’re here,’ he tried to say, but his throat was dry, his voice just a whisper.

  ‘There’s nothing out there,’ Karst was saying. But Holsten was thinking, Was that some kind of thread drifting from that antenna? Why are the hull sensors going down, one by one? What is that I see moving . . . ?

  ‘Oh, fuck.’ Karst suddenly sounded older than Lain. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

  In the drone’s sight, a half-dozen grey, scrabbling forms passed swiftly over the hull, running with slightly exaggerated sureness out in the freezing, airless void, even leaping forwards, catching themselves with lines, leaving a tracery of discarded threads latticing the Gilgamesh’s exterior.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Alpash asked hollowly.

  Lain’s voice, at least, was steady. ‘Trying to get in.’

  7.6 BREAKING THE SHELL

  One of Portia’s peers operates a bulky device of silk-bound glass that acts as an eye, containing a colony of tiny ants whose sole function is to create a compound view of the sights before them and relay it back to the orbital web and to the planet. Bianca can then give moment-to-moment orders to best exploit their new position up on the exterior of this vast alien intruder. This is just as well, for Portia would not have the first idea what to make of anything she sees. Every detail is bizarre and disturbing, an aesthetic arising from the dreams of another phylum, a technology of hard metal and elemental forces.

  Bianca herself has little better idea what to do with it, but the images are being routed down to the vast colony-complex that is Doctor Avrana Kern, or what is left of her. Kern can make an educated guess at what Portia is seeing, and offers her recommendations, some of which are taken, some of which are discarded. Kern has fallen far from her status as God.
She and the leaders of her erstwhile flock have undergone some bitter disagreements about the fate of the human race currently aboard the Gilgamesh. She argued and threatened, and in the end she begged and pleaded, but by then the spiders had their assault planned, and were not to be swayed. In the end Kern was forced to accept the hard decisions of those that had once been her faithful, and were now her hosts.

  Now she has identified the hull sensors for Portia and the other bands of orbital defenders. They have been busy crossing the hull to put out the Gilgamesh’s eyes.

  Portia has little concept of the living contents of the ark ship at this point. Intellectually, she knows they are there, but her mind is focused on this stage of her duty, and the concept of a vast ship of giants goes further than her imagination will stretch. Nonetheless, her mental picture of the processes going on within is surprisingly accurate. They will detect us, and they will know that we will try and break in. In her mind, the Gilgamesh is like an ant colony, one of the bad old kind, and any moment the defenders must boil out, or else some weapons will be deployed.

  There will be a small number of hatches that lead to the interior, Bianca instructs. Continue to destroy sensors as you travel, to hamper their ability to respond. You are looking for either a large square . . . With meticulous patience Bianca gives concise descriptions of the various possible means of access to the Gilgamesh’s interior, as dredged from Avrana Kern’s memory of her own encounter with the ark ship: where they launch their shuttles, where there are maintenance hatches, airlocks, drone chutes . . . Much is conjecture, but at least Kern was once of the same species as the ark ship’s builders. She has a common frame of reference, while Portia cannot even guess at the purpose or function of the profusion of details on the Gilgamesh’s hull.

  If the spiders possessed a certain form of determination, then they would be able to enter the ark ship without needing to find a weak point. After all, they have access to chemical explosives that carry their own oxygen and would trigger in a vacuum. Their space-age technology has its limits, though. Tearing the ship open is not a preferred option. If nothing else, Portia and her peers are intending to rely on the ark ship’s air, even though it is short of oxygen compared to their usual needs. The respirators about the spiders’ abdomens have a limited lifespan, and Portia is keenly aware that they would prefer to return home across the void as well. Better to establish a controlled breach, and then seal it off once her spiders are inside.

  A curious sensation washes over her, like nothing she has experienced before, setting her tactile sense organs quivering. The nearest equivalent she could name would be that a wind had blown past her, but out here there is no air to move. Her fellows, and other peer groups currently engaged on the assault, have felt it too. In its wake, radio communications become patchy for a brief while. Portia cannot know that her adversaries inside the ship have improvised an electromagnetic pulse to attack the spiders’ electronics. The two technologies have passed each other in the night, barely touching. Even Portia’s radio is biological. What little the pulse can touch of it is instantly replaced; the technology is mortal, born to die, and so every component has replacements growing behind it like shark’s teeth.

  Portia has located a hatch now, a vast square entryway sealed behind heavy metal doors. Immediately she broadcasts her position to nearby teams who begin to converge on her position, ready to follow her in.

  She calls forwards her specialist, who begins drawing the outlines of the hole they will make with her acids. The metal will withstand them for a while yet, and Portia steps from foot to foot, anxious and impatient. She does not know what will greet them once they get inside – giant defenders, hostile environments, incomprehensible machines. She has never been one to just sit and wait: she needs to plan or she needs to act. Denied either, she frets.

  As the acid begins to work, reacting violently with the hull and producing a frill of vapour that disperses almost immediately, others of the team begin weaving an airtight net of synthetic silk between them, which will close up the breach once the team is inside.

  Then radio contact is gone abruptly, swallowed by a vast ocean-wash of white noise. The denizens of the ark ship have struck again. Immediately Portia begins searching for clear frequencies. She knows the giants also use radio to speak, hence it seems likely that they may have held some channels open. In the interim, though, her squad is cut off – as are all of the hull squads. But they know the plan. They already have their instructions on precisely how to deal with the human menace – both the waking crew and the vastly greater number of sleepers that Kern has described. The precise details will now be down to Portia’s discretion.

  Uppermost in her mind at this point is that the inhabitants of the Gilgamesh are taking an active hand in their own defence, at last. She has no idea how this might manifest, but she knows what she would do if an attacker were gnawing at the walls of her very home. The Portiid spiders have never been a passive or defensive species. No patient web-lurkers they – they attack or counterattack. They are made to go on the offensive.

  Without the radio, close-range communication remains possible, just. Be ready, they will be coming, she taps out on the hull, flashing her palps for emphasis. Those not directly involved in breaching the hull fan out, watching to all sides with many eyes.

  7.7 THE WAR OUTSIDE

  ‘Hah!’ Karst shouted at the screens. ‘That screws over their fucking radio.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a killer blow.’ Lain rubbed at her eyes with the heel of one hand.

  ‘It doesn’t deal with the implications of them having radio in the first place,’ Holsten remarked. ‘What are we dealing with here? Why aren’t we even asking that question?’

  ‘It’s obvious,’ came the terse voice of Vitas from over the comms.

  ‘Then please explain, because precious little is looking obvious to me right now,’ Lain suggested. She was concentrating on the screens, and Holsten had the impression that her words had more to do with being irritated at Vitas’s superior manner.

  ‘Kern’s World was some sort of bioengineering planet,’ Vitas’s disembodied voice explained. ‘She was creating these things. Then, knowing we were returning, she’s broken them out of stasis at last, and has deployed them against us. They’re fulfilling their programming even after the destruction of her satellite.’

  Holsten tried to catch the eyes of Lain or Karst or, indeed, anyone, but he seemed to have faded into the background again.

  ‘What does that mean the surface is going to be like?’ Karst asked uneasily.

  ‘We may have to conduct some widespread cleansing,’ Vitas confirmed with apparent enthusiasm.

  ‘Wait,’ Holsten muttered.

  Lain cocked an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Please let’s . . . not repeat their mistakes. The Empire’s mistakes.’ Because sometimes I feel that’s all we’ve been doing. ‘It sounds like you’re talking about poisoning the planet to death, so we can live on it.’

  ‘It may be necessary, depending on surface conditions. Allowing uncontrolled biotechnology to remain on the surface would be considerably worse,’ Vitas stated.

  ‘What if they’re sentient?’ Holsten asked.

  Lain just watched, eyes hooded, and it looked as though Karst hadn’t really understood the question. It was now Holsten versus the voice of Vitas.

  ‘If that is the case,’ Vitas considered, ‘it will only be in the sense that a computer might be considered sentient. They will be following instructions, possibly in a way that gives them considerable leeway in order to react to local conditions, but that will be all.’

  ‘No,’ said Holsten patiently, ‘what if they are actually sentient. Alive and independent, evolved?’ Exalted, came the word inside his head. The exaltation of beasts. But Kern had spoken only of her beloved monkeys.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Vitas snapped, and surely they all heard the tremble in her voice. ‘In any event, it doesn’t matter. The logic of the prisoners�
� choice holds. Whatever we are ranged against, it is doing its best to destroy us. We must respond accordingly.’

  ‘Another drone gone,’ Karst announced.

  ‘What?’ Lain demanded.

  ‘With the hull sensors being picked off I’m trying to keep tabs on the fuckers with drones, but they’re taking them out. I’ve only got a handful left.’

  ‘Any armed like the ones that took down Kern?’ the old engineer asked.

  ‘No, and we couldn’t use them, anyway. They’re on the hull. We’d damage the ship.’

  ‘It may be too late for that,’ Alpash commented levelly. He showed them one of the last drone images. A group of spiders was clustered at one of the shuttle-bay doors. A new line in the metal was visible, flagged by a ghost of dispersing vapour down its length.

  ‘Fuckers,’ said Karst solemnly. ‘You’re sure we can’t electrify the hull?’ That had been a hot topic of conversation before they tried the EMP burst. Alpash had been trying to work up a solution for a localized electrical grid around wherever the spiders were located, but the infrastructure for it simply was not there, let alone the enormous energy that would be needed to accomplish it. Talk had then devolved towards lower-tech solutions.

  ‘You’ve got your people armed and ready?’

  ‘I’ve got a fucking army. We’ve woken up a few hundred of the best candidates from cargo and put disruptors into their hands. Assuming the little bastards can be disrupted. If not, well, we’ve broken out the armoury. I mean,’ and his voice trembled a little, small cracks evident from a deep, deep stress, ‘the ship’s so fucked a few more holes won’t make any difference, will they? And anyway, we can still stop them getting in. But if they do get in . . . we may not be able to contain them.’ He fought over that ‘may’, his need for optimism crashing brutally into the wall of circumstances. ‘It’s not like this ship was laid out with this kind of situation in mind. Fucking oversight, that was.’ And a rictus grin.