Children of Scarabaeus

by Sara Creasy

  Pris shrugged, then thought about it for a moment. “I think I want that house. The trees and fields and the river with flat guppy. Someone to show me how to do stuff, like Finn is showing Galeon how to make that game.”

  That all sounded pretty good to Edie, too. Normal kid stuff. Something these children would never have as Crib wards and invaluable cyphertecks.

  “What about Natesa? She wants to adopt you. We think she’s on that ship in orbit, coming for you.”

  “I still prefer a house and a dog. And real parents for all of us.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Edie stared at the creature on her pillow. Spindly legs, curled antennae poking out from a spiral head. A polished carapace, turquoise and black, gleaming under the habitat’s night lights. Its head was tilted whimsically to one side.

  She rubbed her eyes and took it between her fingers. It was hard and cold, made of plazalloy wires and bits of paper wrap.

  Finn had made this, a gift for her. A parting gift? In a panic, she threw off her blanket and got up. The pod murmured with the children’s light breathing. She rushed to the other pod, where Cat and Corinth dozed on bunks, and hit the scopes to search for him.

  “He walked out about an hour ago,” Corinth said from his bunk. He hadn’t been sleeping after all.

  “But why?”

  “Said he wanted to take a look around. He took a commlink.”

  Edie hit the comm switch on the driver’s console. No response. She checked the scopes. A green dot that represented Finn’s body heat moved slowly and apparently randomly across an area on the near side of the city. He had no boots…Why would he go out there in bare feet? What the hell was he doing?

  A warm breeze lifted Edie’s hair as she clambered over moss-covered rocks, feeling her way in the diffuse violet light coming from the nearby city where the spires were lit with spiraling phosphorescent channels. She retraced her steps from the day before, over the ridge leading to the oasis. It was where the scope had shown Finn’s last position.

  The rippling water gleamed with reflected light. Edie heard the occasional scuffle of creatures moving about in the dense greenery draped over the banks. Otherwise it was silent and perfectly serene. Irresistibly inviting. Exquisite, the way all of Scarabaeus was supposed to be.

  A few meters from the bank, the water’s surface broke and Finn emerged, swimming away from her. His arms flashed silver with each slow, powerful stroke. Edie noticed his pants lying crumpled on the bank, the commlink clipped to the belt. So that was why he hadn’t answered. She sat and watched Finn turn at the far bank and swim back.

  When he was halfway, he saw her. He stopped and stood up. His skin glistened in the strange light. The water lapped against his shoulders as he regarded her, motionless.

  Her fingers had already worked her boots loose. She wriggled out of her pants, then got to her feet, her toes curling in the cool moss. Finn had started to wade toward her. When she stepped out of her underpants and pulled her tee over her head, he was still again, watching her.

  Cautiously negotiating the steep bank, she walked to the edge and slipped into the water. The lake bed was gritty under her feet. A couple of steps in, the water was already up to her waist—cool, but not unpleasantly so. Warmth from the previous day’s sunshine lingered, taking the edge off.

  Finn waited for her as she waded out. The water crept up her rib cage and under her breasts, tickling like a lover’s fingers. She stopped a couple of meters in front of him.

  “You don’t have an e-shield,” she said, noticing the lack of a shield’s aura around him.

  “The slaters dispersed so I figured it was safe enough.” By now, something must have sampled his DNA—the brush of a plant frond, the bite of an insect—and the planet knew who he was. “I decided to check out the lay of the land,” he said. “Following my instincts, I guess. You didn’t mention this place.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She was looking at him when she said it.

  Finn slapped the water. “It’s good to get dirtside for a change. Too much time on stations and ships—you can forget what living is supposed to be.”

  Natesa could send death at any moment. A pointless death, on her whim. Involuntarily, Edie looked up at the night sky, as if she might see it coming. Finn followed her gaze for a moment, then sank back in the water.

  “I couldn’t die in that tin can.”

  So he really thought this was the end. His certainty forced her to face it, too.

  “I didn’t want you to die alone,” she said, almost choking on the words. Then she grew angry. Facing it didn’t mean accepting it. “There’s still a chance…If she would just talk to us, I could make her stop. I’ll do whatever it takes, whatever she wants. I’ll tell her that I’ll go to CCU and plead with them to give Ardra another chance. That’s all she really wants—to leave her mark on the Reach. If she lets you live, I’ll help her do that. I’ll figure out how to make Ardra work eventually, no matter how many worlds it ruins along the way.”

  “You’d destroy the galaxy to save me?”

  She smiled at him through her tears. He made it all sound so tragically romantic. To her it was just unbearably tragic.

  “I would. Even if you left me behind. You should leave me behind. Everything you want is out there—your home and family, the Saeth, the Fringers you swore to help. That’s where you should be. Not tangled up in my life.”

  “Maybe that’s true. It doesn’t matter now.” He moved closer to push strands of damp hair off her forehead. “You were the first person I trusted in a long time. I know I tested you. You never wavered. You were always on my side—I don’t know why. But I love you for it.”

  Why did those words that should have made her joyful sound like a deathbed confession? She couldn’t bear to remember that he was a condemned man. That this would soon be over. Natesa would take the children. Edie would go back to the Crib. They’d send more men to this planet to probe it, abuse it, most likely destroy it. There was no one left on her side.

  And Finn would die here, in her arms.

  “I wish I could take you home with me,” he said. “Just…home. Someplace where you don’t feel used or hunted, where you don’t feel you have to save the galaxy, or someone else’s kids, or even me. I want to know who you are when it’s just you and me.”

  His intensity made it hard for her to breathe. She slid into his arms and his finger trailed down her cheek and across her lips.

  “Now I don’t have time,” he said.

  “Pretend that you do.”

  Finn kissed her and the bad thoughts fled. His lips were confident, demanding. His hands were tentative, as if he feared he might be dragged away from her at any moment. Edie wrapped herself around him, melding skin to skin. Everywhere they touched, his heat soaked into her. Everywhere else, cool water.

  Weightless, they glided through the water. Lifting her onto the sloping bank, Finn slid his weight over her in a single smooth movement. She still sensed his hesitation. Before he could change his mind, she wrestled him onto his back and drew him inside her as she straddled his hips. In the ethereal light, her hands looked unnaturally pale, his darker skin richly luminous and shimmering with violet-tinged water drops. With her palms pressed to the hard muscle of his chest, she felt his heart beating—racing, as if to outrun its fate.

  This world had killed so many. Lying on the lake’s bank with Finn, their limbs loosely tangled, her thoughts turned morbid. He, too, waited to die here, this time through someone else’s murderous intent.

  She imagined the slaters finding his body and ripping apart the flesh, as they had no doubt done to the bodies from the crash sites, and as their smaller ancestors had done to the rover team that died here a year ago…Zeke, the cheerful op-teck injured by Rackham’s flash bomb, and five serfs, all devoured by slaters when their e-shields failed. The hapless Kristos, buried alive and crushed by a particularly persistent carnivorous plant.

  And Haller, the Hoi’s unstable, slea
zy XO. There was a man she avoided thinking about when at all possible. Unlike the others, he’d been entombed by the slithering vines of the jungle and taken apart, piece by piece. Under the control of retroviruses, the vines had performed the delicate task of vivisecting Haller over the course of several hours, until she’d killed him out of mercy with her neuroxin implant.

  What else was this world capable of?

  —I can feel it inside me, thinking my thoughts…

  She shuddered as Haller’s dying words came back to her. Finn’s arms closed tighter around her, his hand stroking her back as if he thought she might be cold. She wasn’t cold. She was unnerved by the memory of Haller’s slow, messy death as the biocyph invaded his brain.

  Invaded him, cracked open his skull…

  —I’m thinking its thoughts…

  Edie bolted upright, her blood turned to ice. Haller was here. He wasn’t dead at all. His consciousness had been absorbed into the biocyph as it invaded his brain.

  It made sense. Everything she’d seen here had the unnatural touch of a human about it, too much high-level order and not enough basic organisms. The creepy, impossible conversation through the biocyph link. It knew her name. It knew what a human being was, a ship, a commsat. It knew she had created Scarabaeus with the kill-code. She’d been talking to Haller, what was left of him—or rather, what he had become.

  “What is it?” Finn’s hand rested on her shoulder blade, where he must have felt her heart thumping against her ribs.

  A second realization hit, even more overwhelming than the first. “Finn, I think Scarabaeus can help you.”

  He sat up beside her. “What?”

  “Remember Haller? The jungle dissected him while keeping him alive. Perhaps it could remove the bomb from your skull without damaging you.” Something stopped her from telling him the full extent of her realization. She stuck with the part that really mattered. “The bomb is integrated into your splinter, and the splinter is biocyph. That’s something the planet can understand and manipulate…and destroy.”

  She got to her feet and grabbed his hand to pull him up. She had to get back to the cavern and talk to Scarabaeus. To Haller. That part she couldn’t tell Finn. He would never put his life in Haller’s hands. The two men had hated each other, and for generally good reasons.

  They scrambled into their clothes. Finn, who had only pants to put on, watched her finish dressing. She got the feeling he was humoring her, that he’d rather stay right here on the riverbank and wait it out.

  “It might work,” she said breathlessly. “A wet-teck interface can’t be extracted from the cortex, but this is different. You only have a sliver of it in your head. The way the jungle dealt with Haller’s body and brain—so precise and delicate…It might work.”

  She started up the bank, pausing when Finn did not follow.

  “Finn, please. This is your only chance.”

  “Brain surgery performed by plants. That’s my only chance?”

  “Just come with me.”

  He did, without further protests. They ran to the city’s edge, Finn apparently immune to the discomfort of travel ing barefoot over rocky ground. Edie found the tunnel where she’d entered before.

  “This way.”

  As they jogged through the twists and turns, Edie spoke her thoughts aloud, hoping to reassure him.

  “These aren’t really plants. This entire place is one being. One creature. One consciousness. It has autonomous functions, like the instinctive reactions of the wildlife to intrusions and the everyday calculations that keep it evolving. And it has a thinking, creative component that plans ahead and molds the evolution according to its desires.”

  That part was Haller, she now knew. He’d spent the last year learning how to control the biocyph—not very successfully, but certainly well enough to confound Theron’s team.

  “Why would it help me?” Finn said.

  “Because it wants my help.”

  That was going to be the tricky part—persuading Haller to help Finn, to not kill him. Haller would demand a price. Edie would agree to it. She’d help him turn this world into whatever he wanted. What did it matter now? In the future, humans were sure to try again to tame Scarabaeus—let them try. Finn would be alive and safe and free.

  They entered the cavern. Phosphorescent patterns spun in greeting across the floor and along the stalactites. The retroviruses of Scarabaeus could taste her presence, and the planet was evidently pleased at her return.

  “Jezus…” Finn looked around, marveling.

  Edie pushed through to the BRAT. She’d left the jury-rigged biocyph commlink back at the pod, so she reeled out a hardlink and jacked in.

  —I have been waiting.

  “I’m here to make a deal, Haller,” she sent down the link, not speaking aloud. She’d debated whether to let Haller know that she knew who he was. Their relationship when he was a man had been tense at best, and sometimes abusive. But maintaining the deception would only waste time.

  —A deal? What I offer you is so immense, so gratifying, it will be its own reward.

  “No games. I know it’s you. I don’t care why you pretended otherwise—”

  —I’m not the same as I used to be. But I didn’t know if you would see that.

  Fair enough. She’d detested Haller the man, and he knew it.

  “Well, I’m here and I’m prepared to work with you. I need more from you than the joy of experiencing your planet-sized brain. I’ve brought Finn with me—he’s unshielded, so you know he’s here.” Finn wandered around the chambers of the cavern, coming in and out of Edie’s view as he examined everything with a critical eye.

  —Edie, I’ve no interest in deals. I could take you by force if I chose.

  She doubted that. “What use would that be? I’m a cypherteck. Biocyph is my playground, not yours. If you force me, I’ll overpower you.”

  —Perhaps. You will give your cooperation once you realize the wonders we can create together.

  “I’ll do what you want, but here’s what I want. Remove the bomb from Finn’s brain. It’s integrated into his biocyph splinter.”

  —What makes you think I’m capable of that?

  “Scarabaeus pulled you apart cell by cell in order to merge with you. The biocyph knows how to do that. You just need to guide it so it knows when to stop. If you succeed, if he survives, I’ll help you.”

  —You’ll help me?

  She could sense Haller thinking it through.

  —Edie, helping me is not enough. You must merge with me completely. I will take your body as Scarabaeus took mine. Your mind will integrate with the planet’s biocyph and you will join me. We will be Scarabaeus. It’s the only way to take complete control over this world.

  Edie felt sick as visions of Haller’s grisly demise—his physical demise, anyway—came back to her. I don’t want to control this world, her mind screamed. She wanted Finn to be safe. She wanted him to rejoin his friends and restart his life.

  To get what she wanted, she had to give Haller everything.

  Huddled against the BRAT seed, she found herself staring at her hands. This is what she would lose—skin, muscle, bone, but so much more. What would remain? Only the memory of what it felt like to touch another human. Would she even recognize herself?

  There wasn’t time for philosophical pondering. Just as he’d done a year ago, Haller offered her an escape from the Crib. Perhaps, if she merged with Scarabaeus, she could even save it from the Crib’s interference. That, and Finn’s life, would have to be enough.

  “I’ll agree to merge with you,” she sent to Haller.

  —You will be amazed. Together we—

  “But only if Finn survives,” she broke in. “And you need to hurry. Natesa’s on the way with a detonator to kill him at any moment.”

  —Natesa! That woman will not cease trying to steal you from me until she’s dead.

  Edie felt Haller’s attention fading. She called him back, desperately.

&nb
sp; “Don’t destroy her ship, Haller. There are innocents on board. Save Finn from her, and then she won’t matter. She won’t have power over me anymore.”

  The entire cavern vibrated in frustrated anger. Finn came over, alarmed.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’ve arranged it.” Finn looked confused, and she felt guilty about deceiving him. If she was going to set him free, it had to start now—she had to give him the freedom to make the decision even knowing what it involved. “Finn, the consciousness of the planet—it’s John Haller. His mind merged with the biocyph.”

  “And you trust him?” Finn seemed more amazed by that than he did by the idea of a planet with a mind.

  “Yes, because I promised to help him if it works—and he really wants my help. He won’t harm you.”

  She kept the rest from him, knowing he’d refuse if he knew the cost. If he knew, he’d sacrifice himself for her, just as she’d chosen to sacrifice herself for him.

  Finn didn’t look any happier, but to Edie’s relief he nodded. “He can’t kill me any more dead than Natesa will.”

  “Haller.” She spoke aloud now, as well as through the link. “He’s ready.”

  —Tell him to return to the chamber where he just was.

  Edie cut the link and walked between the resin drapes at one side of the BRAT, beckoning for Finn to follow. The small chamber looked much like any other, its walls dripping with sticky fluid. The ground under Finn’s feet opened up. Instinctively, Edie backed away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, only because she was terrified.

  As Finn was knocked to his knees, a milky, shimmering mass erupted from the disturbed ground and engulfed him. Hundreds of vines snaked around his body and lifted him up spread-eagled. She caught a split-second glimpse of his face—his trusting gaze locked with hers—before the column of vines raised him higher still. More vines dropped from the ceiling of the chamber and locked together to create a sturdy, twisted stalk as wide as the BRAT itself and three times taller. Finn’s body was suspended halfway up the column.