All Fall Down

by Astrotomato

“Well what do you suggest?” They were both shouting now, “Thousands of people are about to die! We have to try and save some of them.”

  “Look at it coldly, Win. Each person picked will have family. Friends. A lover they'll want to take. You pick one person and you take one, two, three others. Suddenly you can only pick six people each. But which six? Professionals or civilians? A miner? A biologist? Which of these people has more right to live?”

  “Which would you condemn to death? All of them by the sounds of it.”

  “You have to make difficult decisions in command.”

  The O of Win's mouth collapsed as soon as it had formed. His lower jaw jutted, “That's what I just said. We have to…”

  “What's that? On your wrist?” Djembe still held Win's sleeve, pulled up, the wrist communicator patiently flashing. Win touched it, holicons burst out, mushroomed in the air, interlocked into a message, a recording. A warning.

  A holo sprang from his wrist. A great mass of black slid through the holo room. Win and Djembe watched the planetoid, annotated with physical descriptions, glide over their heads. Silent. In the far distance they saw the planet, Fall. They looked at each other, and it was Win who spoke first, “This is a game changer.” His voice dropped, tensed, “I'm not arguing any more. I'm getting the AI's cortex up to the ship. The engines are prepped. You look for her if you want to. I'm not waiting.”

  “But the infection.” Djembe waved back at his simulation cells.

  “We need to rescue something from here. The research. The colonists' memories. We have to take the AI, even if it's to dissect it and find out what's going on in its deep code, what the sentients are.”

  While the holo looped, Djembe watched the planetoid mutely thundering towards Fall, “Go then. I will feed this data into the consequence map. Try to run some crude modelling on its trajectory, the physics your probe has collected.”

  At the door, Win turned back, “Be in the hangar within thirty minutes.”

  Weakly, “Go.”

  He watched the door close on Win.

  Djembe turned, and looked in the face of the Over Angel. It reflected his face, the darkness passing over it, light and shade, as Fall's neighbour approached ever closer.

  As she left the dark tunnel, Kate shielded her eyes. Daoud stepped through the door after her, pushed, sealed it.

  He put a hand to her shoulder, “Kate.”

  “Get off me.”

  Back in the Colony and its LocalSysNet, her wrist communicator squalled into life at the same time as Daoud's. They looked down, then at each other, showed under-wrists, pressed fingers, buttons. Simultaneously, with different voices, different heads, with the same urgency, “Where are you? We have a situation.”

  Their eyes remained locked, hands out, supplicant to the messages, “Yes?”

  “Something's coming.” Identical words, different meanings. The same meaning.

  “What do you mean?”

  “From space. We're not alone.”

  “I'll be right there.”

  Kate stepped into the all-but empty holo room, where Djembe sat on a bare throne, hands immersed in well clothed consequence vines.

  “What's that?” her face turned up to the looping black mass above his head.

  “That is just coming into orbit around the planet. Win's probe picked it up. We've been trying to contact you for fifteen minutes. Where have you been?”

  “Later. What is it?”

  “It's one of the system's inner planetoids. It left its orbit around the sun, and entered orbit around Fall. We don't know if it's because of the forthcoming eclipse.”

  She stared, unblinking, “The eclipse is more significant than we thought, then. Has Win run the simulations?”

  “Yes and no. He ran the simulations for the system, they didn't predict this, the planetoid being flung out of its orbit. But they do show with almost certainty that Fall is going to be destroyed. The sun, planets, wormhole are all approaching conjunction. The gravity changes are going to rip the planet apart. We have to evacuate within fifteen minutes. Win is taking the AI's cortex to the ship. He should be loading it up by now.”

  “Who gave him permission to do that?”

  “He's acting on his own initiative, as a Commander,” Djembe stood from his throne, he looked sick with worry. “The ship needs to leave in fifteen minutes to give us enough time to reach a safe distance. Any later and we will surely die.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “Kate? General?”

  “What?”

  “We need to evacuate.”

  “The others...” This was too much. After what Daoud had told her. Alien life everywhere. A war he wanted to start. And now they were approaching, the size of planets.

  “Come on, we need to go.” Djembe moved past her, turned off the holo. He addressed the computer, “Clear memory, MI authorisation CDC Article Seven.”

  “The others. We need to bring the others,” she turned to face him, her face open, eyes locked beyond his.

  “The colonists will have to face their fate. There's no time.” He pulled her toward the door, “Kate!”

  “No. The others. You don't understand. The twenty three.”

  “General, I need you to take command here. This is outside my experience. The planet is about to be destroyed. Do you understand? This planet is going to crack apart. We have less than fifteen minutes to evacuate.” Djembe grabbed Kate's hand, yanked her to the door. She muttered as she followed him to the hangar.

  “What is it?”

  “Something's come out of the wormhole.” Sophie was wary. She spoke professionally, in clipped tones, as he was used to.

  “Show me.” Daoud's face was lit from beneath by the holo. “The parents?”

  “Something, anyway.”

  “Have you initiated the plan?”

  “I've activated the satellites, yes.”

  “How close are the visitors to orbit?”

  “I haven't had time to check. I'll call it up. Computer, planetary orbit status please.”

  “There are four unknown objects in orbit around Fall. They are not responding to hails.”

  “Four? What do you mean? There are only two in the holo.”

  Daoud waved away the question, “I think we need to find General Leland. She may have the answer. Computer, locate General Leland.”

  “General Leland is in lift shaft six, heading to the hangar.”

  “I'll meet her there. Stick with the plan. Hook the satellites to my wrist control.” Daoud nodded to his words, his intensity grew him in stature, “Prep then seal the tunnel. Then prep and release the ground defences: mech and emplacements. Update me in twenty minutes. Our time has come.”

  The lift juddered, bumped upwards, threw Kate and Djembe against the wall. When the doors opened, everything was dark.

  Slowly, soft emergency light - produced by biological phosphorescence - illuminated the corridor. The Colony was riddled with tubes of organisms that depended not on an electrical power supply, but on being plugged into the facility's waste management system. The corridor went from pitch to dim, lit red and a sickly green-white, depending on the state of the biotubes. For the first time, both Kate and Djembe felt they were underground, oppressed by the weight of the planet's surface above them.

  Shouts echoed round the corridor's curves, questions, alarm. Footsteps ricocheted. They exited the lift. “The eclipse?”

  “People are panicking.”

  They ran to the hangar door, dodging Colonists.

  Suddenly the Colony shook, the corridors lurched. People fell to the floor, into the walls.

  “Must be the eclipse, causing seismic disturbances.” The shouts turned to screams, crying children, frozen eyes and held breath. Dust drifted from the ceiling.

  The lurching continued, throwing the panicked colonists around as they ran down corridors to secure equipment, loved ones.

  Kate opened the hangar door. In the distance they could just make ou
t Win and the ship's pilot, fighting the palsied floor to load the AI's cortex into the ship's hold. The hangar was dark. The cavity above, normally lit with guide lights, was senseless. The gloom dripped down the walls, pooling around the bays. Dust rained softly after it. The ship's landing lights drew the eye. Silence flooded the space, broken only by the timpani of the footsteps Kate and Djembe created running through it. There was the dry smell of the lifeless surface.

  As she ran, Kate found a new focus. Djembe was usually so secure in his work, in himself. Seeing him on the edge of panic had thrown her off. He was their beat, the steady one they could cling to when surrounded by chaos. The realist. She'd gone into shock.

  “Not now.”

  “Sorry?” Djembe looked over as they ran. “Not what?”

  “I'm going to find a way through this mess. This doesn't happen on my watch.”

  As they reached the ship, a voice echoed across the lightless floor, “General Leland.” Daoud's voice was a blurred silhouette against the door, backlit by a dusky red.

  Kate looked at Djembe and Win, “Go ahead. Leave whether I'm on board or not. That's an order.” She turned. “Administrator.” She jogged back, crossing her footsteps, equipment clattering out of the murk with each seismic upheaval. “What's going on?” she indicated the shaking.

  His eyes went over her shoulder, “I'm not sure. Sophie's checking it for me. An earthquake perhaps.” His eyes flicked back to hers, “We both received news. What was yours?”

  Quickly, “Win thinks he has a lead on your... visitor.”

  “Yes?”

  Firmly, “Yes. What was your news?”

  “There are ships in orbit. I was wondering if you knew what they were.”

  The Colony shook again. Daoud caught her arm, pulled her into the door frame. She looked at him, bewildered. She still suspected him of arranging the murders of Doctors Maki and Cassel. And now he was pulling her to safety?

  And these ships? Could the MI fleet be here so quickly? She thought the soonest they could arrive was another few hours from now. Maybe there had already been a back-up fleet in the wormhole, waiting? That intrusion, maybe. Decisively, “Come to the ship. There's a holo I want to show you.”

  “Very well.”

  Across the floor their silence multiplied as the tremors increased.

  The Colony suffered a massive quake. Lumps of rock fell from the ceiling above, narrowly missing them as they ran. Sandstone exploded around them. They made the ship's entrance ramp as the hangar floor buckled and one of the transport craft was shifted several metres.

  In the ship's briefing room Kate took charge, “Sit down Administrator. Computer, play the last data feed from the Lagrange One probe.” While inky space burst into life in the briefing room, the ship lurched under them again. “This is one of Fall's planetoids, which until recently orbited the yellow sun. It's in orbit around Fall, Administrator.”

  Daoud just looked at it.

  Engine noise rumbled through the ship, frothed with a distant whine. Kate continued, having to shout above the wrenching noise outside, “The two suns are about to eclipse, at the same time as a conjunction of Fall with the system's gas giant and wormhole. Five bodies in conjunction. Our projections show Fall being ripped apart. Undoubtedly the system's smaller bodies are being affected, too.”

  Daoud looked around, snapped out of his intense stare at the hologram, “Why are the ship engines on?”

  “Because we're getting out of here. We only have a few minutes.”

  He glanced over to Kate, mute. She looked into his eyes, sharp as knives.

  The ship's comms system chimed and the pilot spoke to them, “Strap yourselves in. We're about to leave the Colony.”

  “You can't take me away from here,” Daoud went to rise. “There's more going on than you realise.”

  Kate unbuckled herself and flew at him, pinning him in his chair. “You're coming with us,” Kate sat, finally ready for the confrontation she'd been avoiding, rising to her position as General, “I'm placing you under military arrest. You're going to have a long time to explain what's been going on here when we're back in MI custody.”

  “General Leland, you've seen the twenty three. You know what they mean.”

  “In about twenty minutes they'll no longer exist, Daoud. The planet's about to be destroyed. Everything you showed me will be no more than ashes and dust.” The ship rocked, dropped sickeningly. “So much for choice and not getting in the way, Administrator.” Turbulence rocked the ship again. Kate steadied herself and tapped a comms device, “Pilot, what's going on?”

  “General, we're airborne but stuck in some sort of tractor field. I'm trying to gain altitude to escape it.” Massive vibrations shook the ship. A grinding moaned the air around them.

  “Your pilot is going to tear the ship apart, Kate. Whatever's in orbit is preventing us from leaving. I suggest you put down.”

  “Can you tell the orbiting ships to let us pass?”

  “They were not answering hails.” Daoud looked into the holo, “They are not human.”

  She stared at him now. When another violent bout seized the ship, she jabbed her comms device, “Pilot. Put the ship down.”

  “The Colony's hangar doors are stuck halfway, General. We can't get back in.”

  “Then put down on the surface, clear of the Colony entrances and sub-surface pods. Get some solid rock beneath us.”

  Two city-sized green ships hung above the planet. Sophie watched them on the satellite feed, while her hand automatically tapped out a security code.

  “Medical labs. Emergency evacuation drill. All personnel to deep bunkers.”

  In the satellite feed, a glow like electric water showed the atmosphere's outer limits. The ships, like sea shells, held position above, limpets on the solid certainty of Fall's gravity. To her left another holo display showed the system's two inner planetoids now in far orbit around the planet. Four objects: two ships; two minor planets, visiting moons.

  “This is Masjid. What the hell are you doing? The drill isn't due to start for another forty minutes. Why have you turned the power off?”

  She kept his visual feed off, “Like I said, Doctor, emergencies don't wait. Immediate evacuation. The service lifts aren't working from your floor. Please use the stairs.”

  “It's three hundred metr...” Sophie turned off the audio. She stopped to check that the schools had begun their evacuation to deep bunkers, too, and left the office. She took a restricted transport tube to the lower levels, manually operating its winch system. They had prepared well for this eventuality. In the Central Operations Room all was silence and stolen light.

  “'bout time you showed up. What the hell's going on?” Jonah poked his head from under a console, his face a ghostly blue in the torch balanced on his chest

  “I was hoping you could shed some light on that.”

  Tools rolled away as he got to his knees, “Main electrical system's down. Emergency biotubes are keeping us lit. Major servo-systems, anything with a motor or charge induced movement, are off line. Automata will be down, too. Makes maintenance or emergency response tricky. If the robots aren't working we'll have to send in humans. Some of the shafts are pretty tight. It's slow work.”

  “Hence the lights and lifts not working.”

  “Yeah, mining too. Hangar bay doors to the surface are stuck open. There's a bigger problem, though.”

  “Bigger than the power being off?”

  “Verigua's gone.” Jonah dusted his clothes, “His cortex is offline. Can't figure out if it's due to the outage or something else. Got my crews out on all levels keeping people calm, in their quarters. Emergency procedures're working well. Just trying to get some emergency power going. Should've kicked in by now.”

  “Well done. Did you manage to check sensor logs before the AI went down?” Jonah shook his head as he rose to his feet. The torch clipped to his shirt rocked from side to side, showing different sides of his face, “Then let me tell you that th
ere are hostiles in orbit. Two ships, equivalent to Settlement-class, and two unknowns which are… bigger.”

  “Bigger? Ain't anything in the fleet bigger than Settlement-class.”

  “They're not from the fleet. Any fleet. They're Fallen bodies. The system's inner planetoids. They've entered orbit around the planet.”

  Jonah grabbed the torch from his chest, pointed it at Sophie's face, “I was just about to fire up the emergency computer core. It's shielded, should be protected from whatever's knocked out everything else. You won't mind if I check what you said.”

  Sophie dipped her head. While Jonah dropped to the console, she sank into her cyberware. There was a faint trace from Verigua, the bond they'd established still active. Whatever had happened, its core was still online. She checked progress on the control code: it was still active in her implants, but its nanocode was erupting like a chain of fire crackers. It wouldn't be long now until she could be sure she was making her own decisions.

  Jonah dropped under the console. A panel lit, silent, flat. Jonah was tapping at the screen even as he got back to his feet.

  “Have you found the sensor logs?”

  “Yup. And an unauthorized ship movement. Your MI friends have scarpered, by the looks of it.”

  “Then our problems are much reduced.” She walked to his side, “We need to deploy ground defences.”

  “Not gonna be easy, Sophie. They'll need manual deployment. 's gonna take time.”

  “Do it as fast as you can. This is Colony Defence Level One initiation. All hands to mecha and emplacements.”

  “What about evacuation? The lifts're out.”

  “Already started.” It wasn't part of the plan, at least not this early. Daoud needed a reason for a war to start. He needed exposure, risk. “Get a message to the mining colonies: 'Lock Down'. Return to this Colony structure. Full shielding. Emergency comms network. And see if you can restore a link to the satellite network.”

  “What about the MI ship?”

  “If we're lucky, they've escaped and will bring back reinforcements.” She wasn't sure if she meant it. Feuding thoughts occupied her. Follow the plan. Resist the plan. The more she monitored the control code inside her, the more she could feel its effects. She watched Jonah following her instructions. She must have said something right, he hadn't questioned her.