Song of Scarabaeus

by Sara Creasy

  “We just got the telemetry from a direct survey of the planet. You need to take a look. And turn your comm back on. You’re on duty.”

  It was already an hour into the nightshift, but Edie avoided making a sarcastic comment about the duty roster. From Haller’s attitude, he must think the telemetry meant bad news. She hurried along behind him, eager—

  despite her exhaustion—to examine new information about Scarabaeus.

  “What happened back there on the skiff,” he asked as they climbed up the decks, “right before we launched you?”

  “The inner hatch was jammed.”

  He stopped and eyed her with suspicion. “Jammed. How?”

  “A glitch with the servo. I don’t know, sir. Finn gave it a kick and it was okay.”

  “What a hero.” From his sneer, she got the feeling he didn’t entirely buy her explanation. “Tell me, what’s your history with that Natesa woman? All in all we had a rather…unpleasant encounter.”

  As they continued through the common area and into the briefing room, Edie took a moment to enjoy the idea of Haller and Natesa having to put up with each other.

  “She’s on a holy mission and I’m her lucky charm.”

  Haller scowled. “You’ve brought us precious little luck.” He flicked on the holoviz and it projected Scarabaeus, a serene globe suspended in midair, slowly rotating. “That planet down there is seething with life.”

  “You knew from my reports that there’s life there. Too much life for CCU to have been messing with it in the first place.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Haller tapped the holo, and the image zoomed in on one of the continents. “These survey scans are showing regions of high concentrations of life, and the distribution exactly matches the distribution of the BRATs.”

  Edie stepped closer and studied the holoviz. Surrounding each tiny red dot that represented a BRAT was a green splotch. An inkblot of life.

  “Maybe the local wildlife has moved in around the BRAT seed husks, established habitats,” she suggested.

  “No, no, no!” He jabbed his finger at the ghostly image of the planet to punctuate his words. “I’m talking about regions of intensely concentrated life spreading out from each BRAT for a radius of several kilometers. What the hell is going on down there?” His words tumbled out as he worked himself up into a state of panic.

  Edie dropped into the nearest seat and puzzled over the display. The BRAT seeds did not germinate—she’d made sure of it. That’s what CCU’s unmanned probe had reported, and that’s how she’d interpreted the data from the advance probe.

  Could the germination have been delayed for a year? She’d never heard of that happening. And even if it had, this pattern of localized concentrations of life was entirely atypical. In fact, this looked like something she’d only read about, and if she was right, it was very bad news.

  “I need to study this. I can’t give you an answer right now.”

  From the look on Haller’s face, that wasn’t going to be enough. He needed something to latch on to, a convincing explanation, a plan of action. Behind him, she saw Finn leaning in the hatchway. She hadn’t seen him arrive and Haller hadn’t noticed him.

  “Have you heard of a megabiosis?” she asked Haller. “It’s theoretical. In sims it happens when the target ideal is lost.”

  “A mega what?”

  She called up a basic seeding routine via a softlink to illustrate her point. “The BRATs release cyphviruses to sample the biosphere. Then the biocyph models the biosphere and figures out how to transform it into the target ideal—a Terran world. It writes new programming, creates heritable cyphviruses that infiltrate the genome of every living thing in order to remodel the ecosystem. One biochemical pathway at a time, planetwide.”

  The sim followed her lead and bloomed with new life.

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.” Haller was one notch short of yelling. He pushed his red face closer to hers, and Finn tensed at the aggressive stance. “The bioreadings on this place are bizarre. I can’t make head or tail of them. It’s one big mutated mess down there.”

  “Scarabaeus had advanced lifeforms—if the BRAT seeds did germinate, the results were always going to be unpre dictable.” Edie’s thoughts raced, her throat tightening as she contemplated the implications. “The biocyph is meant to adapt. My best guess is that it couldn’t cope.”

  She’d studied dozens of seeding operations, knew more than most people about how biocyph worked. But this pattern of distribution was more than unique—it should be impossible. She wanted it to be impossible.

  “I’ve only seen this in sims. Theoretically, you get systemic feedback loops. Pockets of hotbed activity. A megabiosis. The cyphviruses are changing the genomes they encounter but with no clear direction. Each of these pockets”—she highlighted a few green areas on the holo—“is like an independent organism, caught in a feedback loop that keeps it localized but constantly evolving under the instructions of biocyph that’s lost its target ideal.”

  “So what does this mean for the mission?” Haller sounded somewhat placated now that she’d given him an explanation, however little he understood it.

  “Let me take a closer look at the data. I’ll write you a nice report if that’s what you want, but in the end all that matters is the BRATs have germinated. They’ve been brewing for perhaps as long as six years, put down taproots. We can’t extract them.”

  “Nonsense. We can’t leave empty-handed. We have to salvage something.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  Nothing she could do. It was the worst possible outcome she could have imagined. Scarabaeus was surely beyond healing.

  “There has to be a way to cut the taproot—”

  “You can’t just—”

  “—drill a parallel shaft, or bomb the damn thing out of the ground.” Haller paced the deck, looking up and away again without comment when he noticed Finn. “These BRATs were supposed to be dead.”

  “We’d be wasting our time,” Edie choked out through the grip of despair squeezing her chest. She caught and held Finn’s gaze, knowing he sensed the weight of her feelings if not their exact nature. They weren’t supposed to be here. They didn’t belong on this ship with these people, or on this mission, or on Scarabaeus. They belonged in the Charme, in that timeless bubble where nothing mattered but the two of them.

  Haller’s pacing came to a halt. “We are not leaving here without getting something from that planet.”

  In an attempt to satisfy him, to make him go away, she said, “I’ll think of something. Maybe Zeke has some ideas.” In truth, Zeke was the last person who’d persevere in the face of this kind of setback.

  Haller leaned over her, grabbing the arms of her chair. Finn stiffened.

  “It’s time to prove your worth, teckie, and justify the risk we undertook to bring you on board, not to mention the expense. Figure out a way to get those BRATs out of the ground. Final briefing is at four tomorrow morning.”

  He pushed past Finn and stormed out.

  Edie sagged in the chair, her energy drained, eyes stinging with tears. Finn came into the room and leaned against the far end of the console. Between them floated the glowing sphere of the planet that awaited them on the other side of nodespace.

  “You still think you can fix it?” When she shook her head, he leaned toward her and the patterns of light created by the holoviz played across his skin. “I don’t understand. It’s a rock with some wildlife. Nothing sentient. Nothing to ponder what’s happened, nothing to feel regret or grief. Why does it mean so much to you?”

  He was right, of course. As a sixteen-year-old, her impulsive decision to save Scarabaeus had come from an emotional reaction to that unthinking, unfeeling wildlife. But over the years, it had come to mean so much more—her greatest act of defiance.

  “It was the only time I truly beat them. Or thought I had.”

  “Did we come all this way for nothing? No paycheck?”r />
  The leash, the creds to unhook it—that was what they were really here for. Scarabaeus was not the priority, no matter how she felt about it.

  A shudder swept the ship, combined with a sudden change in engine noise, indicating their reentry into realspace.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to system VAL-One-Four,” Cat said over the shipwide comm. “We reach orbit in nine hours.”

  Nine hours to figure out how to turn the BRATs on Scarabaeus into their freedom ticket. Edie flicked off the holoviz. The image dissolved and she stared at the empty space it had occupied.

  “I’ll find a way.”

  Finn nodded with a look of trust that she hoped she could live up to.

  “You get some rest,” she told him. “No point in both of us being exhausted.”

  He hesitated, as if he might protest, but then nodded and straightened, rubbing his hand across his forehead. He looked as tired as she felt—but she had work to do.

  More than ever, the mission now depended on Edie. If she was going to get paid, she had to come up with a solution.

  Zeke thought the whole thing was a joke. No bonus pay for this mission, but what did he care? There would be other missions, and there was no way anyone could blame him for this failure. So he wasn’t too happy when, at the briefing early the following morning, Edie put forward a plan of action that placed a large share of responsibility for success squarely on his shoulders. She knew exactly what the objections would be, and the op-teck didn’t disappoint her.

  “You’re gonna get inside the BRATs and rip out their guts?” The stark whites of Zeke’s eyes flared as he crudely paraphrased her idea. “There’s fuckin’ milit-grade security holding those BRATs together. Every time we’ve tried before, we’ve wrecked the damn things. You may be able to jack in and talk to the biocyph, but no way are you gonna get physically inside one after it’s germinated. And even if you can, the biocyph will be useless. We’ve taken stuff that’s twelve, maybe eighteen months old before, but after it’s been brewing for six years? It’s hardwired into that planet’s ecosystem now, no good anywhere else. It’s worth shit to us.”

  He turned his incredulous look on Haller, but the XO wasn’t interested in Zeke’s opinion. He was waiting for Edie to salvage his mission. Kristos and Finn stood nearby, taking everything in. Having worked through the night, Edie was in no mood to pretty things up for any of them. She explained as concisely as she could.

  “It’s not as valuable as embryonic biocyph, that’s true. I still think I can hijack it and merge it with some of the seeding machinery you’ve got lying around here, and put together something useable for your Fringe-world customers. Not keystones. Maybe some sort of gene jiggler.”

  “Can’t we just reboot it?” Kristos asked. He had little comprehension of what was going on, but had picked up on the nervousness of everyone else.

  “We’d need the biocyph templates in order to reboot.” Edie glared at Zeke. “And unless Zeke’s been doing some real creative trading lately, I know you don’t have those.”

  Haller ignored the implied accusation about Zeke’s extracurricular activities and moved on. “What about the inbuilt security?”

  “Zeke’s right,” she said. “We can’t force the BRATs open, not without destroying them. My plan is to jack in and try and persuade them to open up.”

  “Uh-huh. Just like that?” Zeke said.

  “Those BRATs are primed to respond to cyphertecks, although not usually after germination. There has to be a way in.”

  “And you’ve done this before?” Haller looked dubious, but interested—he was willing to be convinced that it would work.

  “More or less.” Closer to less, but she tried to sound confident.

  As Zeke opened his mouth to protest again, Haller waved him into silence. “What about the alarm system? If the Laoch is still out there, two jumps away, we don’t want any alarms triggered.”

  Edie drew forward a holoviz display of a standard terraforming BRAT six years after germination—a honeycomb of biocyph matrix housed inside a six-meter-tall plazalloy case, half buried in the ground and anchored by a taproot five times its own height. A network of organomeck rootlets reached out from the taproot, spreading hundreds of kilometers in every direction, growing ever finer toward the periphery—some breaking the surface to form shrublike growths on the landscape, some intercepting and intertwining with the rootlets of neighboring BRATs.

  “We need to set up a shield around the immediate area, about fifteen meters in diameter.” She demonstrated this on the simulation by a fuzzy purple sphere to represent the boundaries of the shield. “We use trackers to monitor the flow of information between the BRATs, and to prevent the BRAT talking to the satellite and raising any alarms.”

  “My rigs can’t do that.” Zeke was unwilling to agree to a job that sounded impossible.

  “Yes, they can. Won’t be easy because the biocyph in your rigs has been hijacked, stalled, de-merged, reprogrammed, and tripped so many times it’s virtually senile.” Zeke looked taken aback, but he was listening.

  “Once I’ve jacked in, there’ll be Crib security locks to bypass. Then, if I can find my way down to the original initiating sequences, I should be able to persuade it to open up.”

  “And once we get inside,” Haller said, “how do we take out the circuitry?”

  Zeke snorted. “Wire cutters.”

  “Very careful use of wire cutters,” Edie corrected him. “We’ll need containers to store it—about half a cubic meter per BRAT.”

  “That’s what the lags are for. Easiest assignment they’ve ever had,” Haller said. “How long will this take? We can make up some of the lost time, but we’ll only have five days dirtside if we’re to make our rendezvous on the Fringe.”

  “The first one will take the longest. Maybe eight hours.”

  Haller looked horrified. She was fairly sure it would take no more than one—either she could do it or she couldn’t, and she’d know after one hour—but she intended to use the rest of that time for something else entirely. Once jacked in, she planned to find out exactly what had happened on Scarabaeus, and if possible do something about it. She couldn’t reverse the process but perhaps she could halt it. Perhaps there was something of Scarabaeus’s original beauty left to preserve. She only needed to adjust the programming of one BRAT. Within minutes it would communicate with all the others and spread the new code. The rovers planned to remove only a small percentage of the BRATs, not enough to severely impact her plan.

  “After the first one,” Edie continued, “we’ve got an average one hour’s flight between each site, plus two or three hours working on each BRAT.”

  Haller had his own ideas. “That’s not enough. We’ll be working with about seven hours of daylight, six of dark. Gravity is point-nine-four, weather is temperate. Ideal conditions for fast work. We’ll split into two teams—

  you’ll rotate between them. You’ll crack open a BRAT for team one to work on, and then Cat will ferry you to the next site, where team two will have already prepped the area.”

  “Uh, are you allowing any downtime in that schedule?” Zeke said. “I can’t work five days straight.”

  “We’ll play it by ear.” That was the best Haller would offer.

  Edie had a headache just thinking of the workload ahead, but she had an even greater concern. The BRATs were hundreds of kilometers apart, well beyond the range of the leash. Outside the bulkheads of the Hoi, there was a real chance she and Finn could get separated by a lethal distance.

  Zeke turned to Edie. “You said there was advanced life on the planet. Anything we need to worry about?”

  “The ecosystem was analogous to a late-Paleozoic period of evolution.” She was met with blank looks.

  “Nothing a standard e-shield can’t handle.”

  They seemed satisfied with that.

  “Obviously, Finn will stick with me.”

  “Obviously,” Haller echoed with a smirk. “So, any idea how
we’re going to fool our buyers on the Fringe that they’re getting what they paid for?”

  Edie returned his smirk. “That’s your job, sir, not mine.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Once they reached orbit, Haller allowed Edie a one-hour break before showtime while the rest of the crew continued working. Her mind was on overdrive. Unable to nap, she’d spent the time going over the specs for the toms they were taking with them. When her eyes refused to focus anymore, she grabbed a change of clothes and headed across the corridor for a shower. Maybe that would wake her up.

  Just as she flicked on the water, a dark shadow approached the stall—Cat, stripping as she moved, leaving her clothes where they fell. Due to her untidy habits, Edie had found her belongings in the bathroom before. Bangles and scarves and pretty scraps of underwear.