by Gary Gibson
Kim closed her eyes for a few moments, took a deep breath, then exhaled. Set in front of her and Elias was a series of screens which fed visual data from outside the ship. ‘Okay.’ She tapped some buttons. ‘Everything’s online,’ she muttered, then turned around. ‘Vincent, close up the airlock and lock it off, will you?’
She hit some more buttons and sat back, blowing a few loose strands of dark hair out of her face. ‘Okay, now we wait for departure confirmation. That might take several minutes.’
Vincent floated around behind them, examining almost everything with curiosity. Elias felt the minutes pass very slowly, and registered the look of relief on her face when confirmation finally came through.
Kim
She guided the Goblin away from the Angel Station. The screens showed only stars and the blackness of space beyond, but various other displays revealed the positions of every ship in the vicinity. She charted a course toward the Jager.
Kim did not want to know what Murray was intending once he reached the Jager. She did not believe his story, and doubts had niggled at her incessantly since he had appeared. I am doing the wrong thing, she had thought, over and over. Whatever he’s paying me, it’s not worth any more trouble with the law.
On the other hand, she had reminded herself, the authorities on the Angel Station currently had their hands too full to think of anything else. She hadn’t allowed herself to think further what that might mean in the long run. Whether there might be anything to return to, for instance. If it hadn’t been for Vincent’s sudden appearance, she might well have headed deep into the Kasper system until things blew over.
And if it didn’t get sorted out, if something drastic happened to the Angel Station? But there were other ships out there, capable of keeping a lot of people alive for a long time.
After that, well, there was always Kasper itself, if it came to that. She wondered how the military transports would react, under those circumstances – if contact with Earth was lost. Shoot people down for getting too close to the forbidden planet? Under normal circumstances, the military were legally entitled to do so, but these were hardly normal circumstances.
Later. She would think about these things later.
She excused herself, got up and went through to the aft section, the closest place she had to a real home, leaving Vincent alone with Elias.
When she eventually came back into the cockpit, Elias was still in the co-pilot’s seat, chatting quietly to Vincent. It was small-talk, mostly from Vincent, about academic life back home. She wondered if he’d mentioned anything to Murray about what he feared might happen to the Kaspians.
Kim climbed back into the pilot’s seat and made some minor course adjustments. They were almost there. She pressed a button and a screen to her right, just above Elias’s forehead, sprang to life. It revealed a grey-white shape floating against a sea of darkness. It was the Jager.
She glanced at Elias, who was watching the screen intently. There was a look of . . . of hunger on his face, an expression of such intense desire it made Kim feel voyeuristic to watch him. Elias glanced across at her, smiled awkwardly, then turned back to the screen, his expression a bit more guarded.
Kim glanced up at the overhead screens, just in time to see the Jager explode.
Or rather, it seemed to come apart as if being unfolded by an invisible hand. The cargo transport simply shattered into a cloud of silver fragments that blossomed towards them, moving fast. Kim gaped at the screen, watching the cloud approach. It was as if her eyes couldn’t quite register what they’d just witnessed. As the cloud came closer, it resolved itself differently. She reached over Elias’s shoulder and touched a screen to increase the magnification.
Silver bugs – millions of them – drifting straight towards the Goblin. She put her hand to her mouth. Oh my God, she thought, what if there were people on board? What happened to them?
Larger sections of the fragmenting Jager were becoming visible. She could see the naked engine core, and that too was coming apart. She knew how she would describe this scene for the rest of her life; it was like a child unwrapping shiny metallic paper from around a gift, and the paper being reduced to a blizzard of fragments. Except it was a cargo ship coming apart. She felt a dull heaviness in the pit of her stomach.
She glanced at Elias to her right. He looked shaken and pale, but he was studying the screen closely.
After a few minutes it became clear the components of the expanding cloud were now streaming towards the Angel Station. The Goblin lay directly between the Station and the Jager’s prior location.
‘Is there any way we can avoid them?’ asked Vincent from behind her.
Kim was about to answer, but just then the Goblin shuddered, as if making its own response. For a moment they heard a sound not unlike the patter of rain against a window pane.
‘They’re not stopping,’ said Vincent with relief. She followed his gaze to the screen displaying the scene behind them. Far behind them now, the bugs were moving towards the Station.
She wondered what would happen when they eventually got there.
Thirteen
Pierce
As the Station started to come apart, Pierce thought: If I make it through this, I’ll have such a story to tell.
The whole Station was getting quieter, quieter than Pierce had ever known it to be. He’d been assuring everyone he met this evacuation was just a temporary measure, that the authorities back on Earth knew what was happening. The news of the invasion of silver bugs had finally gone public all across the Grid, and constantly updated reports were running on all the public datafeeds. Headlines and videos blazed on smartsheets everywhere, held anxiously in the hands of refugees waiting for rescue, or lying discarded in the abandoned corridors of the Hub.
Other reports were coming through, too, about a wave of radiation moving towards the Kaspian system, and only days away. It wasn’t hard to guess someone somewhere had been withholding information, almost certainly someone high up in the chain of command.
Pierce was located in Central Command, a bundle of habitats and office units, watching the coordination of the rescue effort. There were going to be a lot of questions asked about delays in the evacuation effort. For the moment at least, no traffic was heading in or out of the singularity. Avoiding the bugs anywhere throughout the Station was no longer possible. They were even infesting Central Command.
Pierce heard a loud clang, and the operations room around him shook. A klaxon sounded, then came a crunching noise like a steel girder being bent double in one instant by some huge malevolent hand.
He had already abandoned the idea of looking for a Goblin to escape in, finding a streak of integrity within himself he’d never suspected existed. He acted as the Mayor for the people who lived on the Angel Station, even though that in itself was a kind of joke. Somewhere along the line, however, he’d come to believe in his role. There was no one else between the military administrators of the Station and the civilians who made up the bulk of its population, so he’d decided to stick around to help as best he could, and accept a military evacuation when the time came.
And because he was officially an employee of Central Command – being a civilian as well didn’t seem to make a difference – he was obliged to go last. Like the captain of a sinking ship, he thought, with less bitterness than he would have thought he’d feel.
One of Holmes’s aides ran through the door. ‘That’s it. Out, everybody, now. We’re losing atmosphere. Get down to Bay Green Seven.’
Pierce watched as everybody else got up from their consoles. Well, what are you waiting for? he thought, and ran for the door.
Along the corridor, silver bugs coated the walls and ceiling. Huge holes had been eaten out of the bulkheads. Emergency lights now functioned in many parts of the Station; communications and power had been shut down in several sections. But thankfully most people were out of harm’s way. Can’t they shut the damn klaxons off? he thought.
Oh, not go
od, he thought, when they got to the corridor connecting that part of Central Command to the rest of the Station. The corridor had sealed itself off, swinging the emergency airlock down from the ceiling on its enormous hinge. Pierce and the others peered through the tiny viewing window set into it.
Only stars visible. No sign of the connecting corridor beyond. He wondered if that was the loud noise he had heard – that they had all heard. No access to Bay Green Seven, then.
He looked at the sweating faces all around him. ‘Six?’ suggested someone wearing the uniform of a lieutenant. ‘It’s back down this way. If we go back down here,’ he pointed down another passageway, ‘and cut right, that connects to the Hub.’ The lieutenant didn’t wait to see if anybody disagreed and took off at a run. Pierce ran after the lieutenant. They all ran.
The corridor leading to the Hub and Green Six was still intact, but it was getting hard to breathe. ‘That’s the atmosphere dropping low,’ he heard somebody explain. Pierce turned and recognized Holmes’s aide. He could not remember the young man’s name. The bulkheads shuddered around them. Pierce glanced back the way they had come, and saw the whole corridor behind them twisting out of shape.
Any pretence at order, at military discipline, went out of the window as they scurried down the corridor connecting into the Hub.
Kim
Kim increased the magnification on the rear viewscreen until they could see the whole Kasper Station in all its glory. Something was wrong with it too. Sections of the human-habitable portion had come adrift, were floating near the mouth of the singularity. Other sections were twisted and bent.
‘You know,’ said Vincent, ‘when all this started, I even wondered if those bugs were intelligent.’ Kim and Elias stared at him. ‘They’re artefacts, obviously. Machines. So, even if they’re not living creatures as such, they’re definitely programmed to perform certain tasks. The question is,’ he said, ‘just what it is they’re programmed for.’
‘Do you think they were intended to destroy?’ asked Elias. ‘Some kind of weapon?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. But the main factor that’s been obvious all along is that they consume metals in order to reproduce, no, duplicate themselves. Like Von Neumann machines.’
How does he do that? wondered Kim. He just talked away in that calm voice, and somehow the tense atmosphere had been defused. They were all still frightened, unsure what was going to happen next, but they were now thinking about other things too, like the whys and the hows. ‘Machines that make copies of themselves?’ she asked.
Vincent shrugged. ‘It’s pretty obvious that’s what they are.’ He pursed his lips. ‘You know, there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about. I mean the Angel Station – the main body of it that isn’t human. They don’t seem to have been eating that, do they?’
‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ Murray scowled. ‘Just look at it. The whole thing’s coming apart.’
‘No, the human-inhabited bit of it is, those sections added on to the original alien Station after humans arrived in this system. The original Angel Station – the part that encircles the singularity – they haven’t touched it.’
Kim was thunderstruck. ‘Do you think they’ve got some connection with the Station, the bugs?’
A hint of a smile twisted the corner of Vincent’s mouth. ‘I don’t know – nobody does – but I’ve got an idea. What if they’re some kind of defence mechanism?’
They stared at him. ‘I mean, think about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what happened to the original human crew of the Angel Station when the Hiatus started. Something else might have attacked them. Something from the original Station itself.’ Vincent looked pleased with himself, but Kim noticed Murray was staring blankly into some place inside himself. He looked bleak and miserable. She remembered. Of course.
‘Your friend. I’m sorry,’ she said, moving towards him until he could see her properly. ‘Do you think he was on board?’
He looked up at her. ‘I have no reason to think he wasn’t,’ he said at length, clasping his hands helplessly in front of him. He looked like a man who had just found out that someone very important to him had died.
Pierce
The Station trembled around them. Something banged explosively far around the curve of the Hub, followed by a moaning, sucking sound that sent a freezing chill down Pierce’s spine. A gentle wind tossed his hair. Then the wind became stronger, then began to suck at him. It was getting much harder to breathe, or to think.
‘The Hub is breached. Green Six is this way,’ pointed the lieutenant. But everyone knew where Bay Green Six was and was already running. They were close to it, very close. Pierce knew there were military shuttles docked there ready for departure by the last remaining crew. The wind had become a hurricane.
Someone had reached the bay door, and punched in a security code. Each tap of a finger on a glass screen seemed to take an eternity. Then the door slid open. Slowly.
Black spots began appearing in front of Pierce’s eyes. He was panting for air; they all were. They squeezed and crushed their way through the door, giving way to blind panic. Pierce turned and glimpsed the lieutenant behind him. Something happened to the Hub behind the man. A strip seemed to peel away from one of the bulkheads, and Pierce saw blackness beyond. Then something invisible reached out for the lieutenant and the two men behind him, pulling them through the air towards that blackness. The door slid shut, cutting them off.
‘Come on.’ Someone tugged at the Mayor’s shoulder, as he stared through the reinforced glass in the door at the spot where the three men had last been seen. He’d never seen someone actually die before. He turned to see the other survivors boarding the shuttle. He followed, feeling numb.
Inside, he stood near the rear of the cockpit, watching the Station disintegrate from the outside. As they moved away from the docking link, the fat torus shape of the construction became visible. The human add-ons looked as if they had been shredded.
‘How could that happen in just a few hours?’ someone whispered.
Pierce knew what he meant. A few hours earlier, you could have harboured the notion that the bugs were a containable problem, that a solution still lay within reach. But they had won, he realized, whoever – or whatever – they were. Entire sections of the Hub and of Central Command were floating free now. To his surprise, Pierce realized that he missed the place already.
Elias
Elias had been watching Kim carefully as she worked the Goblin’s console. It looked easier to operate than any other Goblin he’d encountered, so he suspected this particular vessel was less versatile as a result, more limited in what it could do. She was standing up, facing away from him, studying some piece of information scrolling down a screen mounted high above the console panel.
He was still in the co-pilot’s seat. He studied the section of console before him until he found a set of controls for the viewscreens. Things had changed, he realized, but not that much.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, turning to Kim. ‘I need you to take a look at something.’
She glanced down at at him. ‘What is it?’
‘Before the Jager . . .’ He searched for the right word, but couldn’t find it. ‘Before it exploded, we were watching a high-magnification image on one of these screens. Is there any way I can see it again?’
She looked at him quizzically, shrugged. ‘Sure, here.’ She leaned over him, touched more panels on the console. The Jager magically reappeared on a view-screen, intact again. This time a date readout appeared in the lower right-hand corner. ‘Ten minutes before it came apart. What about it?’
Elias stared at the screen in fascination. ‘Can you fast-forward it, just a little?’
She touched the console again. The time on the screen shot forward, to just a couple of minutes before the ship finally dissolved. ‘There.’ He stood up out of the co-pilot’s seat and touched the screen with his finger. ‘Do you see that?’
Kim folded her arms and
watched. It looked like a shuttle leaving the Jager seconds before her destruction. She grunted in surprise. ‘I do.’
‘Where did it go?’ he asked. She shrugged, her expression saying I don’t know. She then zoomed in so they could see the tiny vessel moving rapidly away from the Jager. Seconds later, the cargo ship again blossomed into spinning fragments.
‘Whoever’s on board that shuttle made it out by the skin of their teeth,’ she said. ‘It must have been very bad there in the last moments.’ She looked at Murray. ‘You think your friend might be on that shuttle?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ he said.
‘What makes you feel so sure?’ asked Vincent. ‘It could be anybody on that shuttle.’
‘I know things,’ Elias replied, ‘that you don’t. I was on board the Jager myself, and found people there you really wouldn’t like to meet.’ I’ve already told you more than I should have, he thought. There was something too convenient about it all: Trencher being here, so far from home; then these bugs, the Jager exploding.
‘As I said before, I’m not interested in your reasons for visiting the Jager,’ snapped Kim. Elias noticed her lips were set in a thin line.
‘So what now?’ said Vincent. ‘Everybody either on the Angel Station or on the transports must have witnessed what happened to the Jager. Do we go back to the Station, if there’s anything left of it, or head for one of the transports?’
Kim, Elias could see, still had that tense expression on her face, and was deliberately trying not to catch his eye. She’s wondering what I’m going to do, he thought. And then he realized just what it was that he might need to do.
‘Mr Murray, I’ll be frank with you. The only reason I accepted this job was because I had to pay a fine to get my Goblin back. But whatever you’re involved in, I really don’t think I want a part in it. I don’t think you’re telling us enough,’ said Kim. ‘I’ve fulfilled half of the bargain. We came this far.’