by Alex Lamb
At first, it looked hopeless. Warnings from network defence began to accumulate in his sensorium by the dozen. Then came the counter-attacks. Not content with rebuffing Will’s constant attempts to infiltrate the system with bogus traffic, the League’s defensive program began to feign collapse, leading Will’s code into access-traps before cracking it and shutting it down. Ironically, they couldn’t have helped him more. Under tightened selection pressure, Will’s bio-progams rose impressively to the challenge. Within five minutes, station security was quietly, unquestionably broken.
Will kept his nuisance program aimlessly running so they wouldn’t notice the change and tsked to himself. The League should have known better. Software models of people worked just fine for crowds. For individuals, though, they couldn’t stand up for long when confronted with a little genuine creativity. Pari should never have told him how her security worked. Without that clue, Will might have struggled for hours and given up hope.
With the room under his control, he reached out with half his mind to the bio-lab database and started sucking down files. With the rest of his attention, he started inserting little pieces of himself into the station architecture. When the time came, he’d be ready to move.
14.4: MARK
Venetia strode off along the ledge with Mark and Zoe hurrying behind. She took them to the nearest junction point – a narrow oval gap in the tunnel wall – and through to a ledge on the other side. But for the thin, dusty light pouring through the opening, this new tunnel lay in complete darkness.
‘There should be another raft here,’ she said, fumbling blindly along the wall. ‘There’s supposed to be one at each of these junctions for the research crews to use. Got it!’ she said, and lifted another yellow capsule into the meagre light.
She set it down on the floor in front of them and fumbled with the tags on the side, activating an LED lamp. The flare of light revealed a second canal of still, black water lying before them, surrounded by another tunnel lined with alien art. Venetia inflated the raft and dropped it quietly onto the chill liquid below.
‘Research rafts are larger,’ she told them. ‘Plus they come with engines – assuming there’s still charge in this battery, of course. It’s probably been a while.’
‘Any heating?’ said Zoe, wrapping her arms around herself.
Venetia shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not. It’s going to be a cold afternoon. Better get used to it.’
They gingerly lowered themselves down into a plastic inflatable craft little different from the one they’d just left. This time, Mark exercised care not to get wet. Venetia handed him a telescopic paddle to push off from the edge.
‘Here goes nothing,’ she said and fired up the electric motor.
They all cheered a little as it purred to life. Venetia took them out into the middle of the canal and away from the junction. Darkness swallowed them instantly.
‘Won’t they come looking here as soon as they find the pod?’ said Mark.
Venetia nodded. ‘Undoubtedly, but if they want to find us, they’ll have their work cut out for them.’
Just a few minutes later they encountered another junction, this one set low enough in the side of the tunnel that they could navigate straight through it. After that, the branches came swiftly. Venetia took them this way and that through an apparently endless labyrinth of identical waterlogged tubes, each narrower than the last. Friezes of cavorting Fecund figures crowded them on every side. The frail light from the raft’s lamp cast heavy shadows against the stone. The turret-shaped eyes on every beaked face seemed to track them as they passed.
‘I get it,’ said Mark, glancing up at the gargoyles closing in over his head. ‘Plenty of room to get lost.’
‘Once you leave the main arteries, things get complicated quickly,’ said Venetia. ‘This is a delivery system for habitation warrens – the Fecund equivalent of that suburb we saw on the way to New Luxor.’
‘Some suburb,’ said Zoe, gazing out at the lightless maze surrounding them.
Abruptly, their tunnel opened onto a narrow space that had to be at least fifty metres high. Rows of identical holes lined the walls, each about large enough for a person to crawl into, presuming they had no intention of ever coming back out. Narrow metallic ladders protruded from the stone between each column of cells. Stalks that might once have held lighting bulbs hung far overhead.
‘See,’ said Venetia. ‘Luxury accommodation. For disposable child-slaves this would have felt pretty cushy.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Zoe.
‘It was nicer ten million years ago,’ Venetia assured them. ‘They had something like our biofabric on the walls and quite a lot of tech infrastructure down here. None of it held for long after the suntap flare, though.’
The hive area ended as abruptly as it had begun. Then, half a kilometre further downstream, the tunnel opened out again, this time onto banks of glass-fronted compartments like windows in a giant vending machine. Filthy streaks of brownish film covered most of the surface. The glass in many had eroded away in oddly rounded chunks.
‘Check this out,’ said Venetia, her eyes shining. ‘Bio-enclosures, probably for weapons testing. Isn’t it amazing that the glass lasted this long? They’re still figuring out how to make that stuff, you know. Looks like it grows straight out of the stone but it was clearly nanofactured. We don’t have anything even half that durable. Each one of those cells used to have a seal on it so they could expose the young inside to whatever organism from outside they wanted to test. It was an incredibly efficient system. That scum you can see on the glass? That’s probably what’s left of the ones trapped inside after the flare went up. This deep underground, the preservation of biomaterial is way better.’
‘They did biological experiments on their young?’ said Mark. ‘Every time I hear about the Fecund, they sound a little more disgusting.’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to have that reaction,’ Venetia assured him. ‘But they were just different from us. The Fecund didn’t really solve problems with smarts, they threw resources at them instead. And they had an inexhaustible supply of spawn. Their reasoning style was more like what we associate with the evolution of disease. They tried things out, kept what worked and ditched the rest. Their young were more like tools or experiments than treasured offspring. They didn’t have much of what humans would call creativity. On the other hand, the engineering solutions they came up with were often incredibly robust – as evidenced by the fact that any of this stuff is still here.’
‘If they were so uncreative, what’s with all the art on the walls?’ said Zoe.
Venetia laughed. ‘That’s not art. That’s education. For the Fecund, language was a means of communicating workable solutions to problems. Lining the tunnels with knowledge was just another kind of Fecund efficiency – you train up your kids even while you’re squirting them down a tube to their next high-risk assignment. Those young who made it to adulthood were revered like gods. Every one of them that came down here would have scanned the walls every day, trying to figure out a trick to make it past age five.’
‘Lovely,’ said Zoe. ‘Kindergarten pipes.’
‘Right,’ said Venetia. ‘Oliver Twist on an industrial scale.’
Over the hours that followed, it became clear that anyone looking for them would have an impossible job. Even if they filled the tunnels with robotic drones, there would still be too much twisting ground to cover. The Fecund tube-system ran for dozens of kilometres, dwarfing the New Luxor settlement outside.
‘I’m amazed they bother to keep this lot oxygenated,’ said Mark.
Venetia shot him a look. ‘Are you kidding? This is where all the money comes from. Once they repaired the original seals on the old network, there was no point dumping the air when the economy started to tank. They just don’t bother cycling it that often. The whole time I was here, though, I can’t recall mor
e than two carbon-monoxide incidents.’
‘Oh, great,’ said Zoe. ‘In that case I can finally start enjoying myself.’
Venetia took them through a bewildering array of echoing underground chambers. Some spaces resembled huge tiled swimming pools. In others, canals joined and split in interlocking loops like a maze of aquatic roundabouts. To Mark’s eye, the place looked like a deranged mash-up of the sort of ancient Earth sites you found in virtual museums. A cross of Angkor Wat with a Victorian bathhouse, perhaps, with a little bit of Alcatraz thrown in for good measure.
His fear of being pursued by the colonists slowly gave way to a pressing sense of reverent unease. Something about the organic layout of the tunnel system, coupled with the cryptically ornate chambers, left him speechless. He could feel the incredible age of the place creeping into his bones along with the cold. No wonder so many scientists found Fecund sites fascinating. However, he didn’t really understand why they’d want to stay and explore. For all his awe, Mark couldn’t wait to get out. A deep, persistent chill had worked its way into his body by then and the foot he’d soaked ached constantly. He huddled in the boat and shivered. The dark felt intent on combing the heat off his skin. He wished he was wearing something other than a thin ship-suit. His stomach growled.
Zoe pressed up next to him. ‘We should stay close,’ she said, her teeth chattering. ‘It’s too fucking cold in here.’
Mark squeezed closer. Proximity certainly helped.
‘Put your arms around me, you idiot,’ she told him. ‘I’m dying here.’
He did as she asked and felt a little better. He chose to ignore how pleasant it felt. Despite the hours of panic they’d endured, somehow her hair still managed to smell nice. Zoe made a small sigh of relief.
‘You want some of this?’ he asked Venetia.
‘Don’t worry about me – the engine’s keeping me warm,’ she said. ‘You guys huddle up. And besides, we’ll unbalance the boat if we’re all in the same spot.’
Gloomy hours slid by. By Mark’s reckoning, there couldn’t be much daylight left. He felt like he’d been underground for ever. It would be dark by the time they reached the coast, which would only compound their temperature problems. Then, just as he decided to ask Venetia where they were, she spoke up.
‘Look!’ she said, her voice hushed and excited.
She pointed ahead to a place where the wall-art had been damaged. The faces had been smashed off the statues.
‘We must be close. The sect Leading have that done to stop the Following from worshiping the Fecund.’
‘Does that really happen?’ said Zoe, her voice trembling from the cold.
‘It did at least once. There was this group that got hold of a working Fecund food machine and retro-fitted it for human-compatible protein. As soon as the Following had an independent food supply with no drugs in it, they started to get their own ideas. Weird ones, admittedly. It didn’t end well, I’m told.’
Mark wrapped his arms tighter around Zoe and frowned. He suspected that half the horror stories made up about Flags had been concocted by the FPP. He found it hard to believe that the kind of people he’d lived with in New York could be reduced to worshiping parrot-monkeys in a frozen tunnel. Those were the kind of lies you invented about people you wanted to dehumanise.
‘Please tell me these guys aren’t going to be scumbags,’ said Zoe quietly. ‘Tell me we’re not walking into the arms of a bunch of rapists.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mark. ‘They’re just people. But if anyone so much as touches you, I’ll rip their head off.’
‘If I thought there was a risk of that kind of behaviour we wouldn’t be here,’ said Venetia. ‘Flag colonies are grim, don’t get me wrong, but the sect Leading are big on moral order. They have to be. They sit on powder kegs full of angry young men. The moment someone steps out of line, they string them up. So long as you keep your mouth shut and don’t piss anybody off, they aren’t likely to do much more than stare at you.’
A kilometre further on, the canal gave way to chunks of ice, forcing them to abandon the raft and walk. Though the air temperature kept dropping, Mark could feel himself warming a little from the exercise. He was glad of it. Without something to warm them up they were heading for hypothermia. His breath made pale clouds in the shafts of meagre lamplight.
‘Here!’ said Venetia. ‘We have to be right near the coastal cliffs. Look.’
She pointed along the tunnel ahead where the braille had been smashed off the walls with flenser fire. Spent flechettes littered the floor.
‘Knocking off that braille is like trashing the local signposts,’ said Venetia. ‘Makes it hard for anyone exploring down here to tell where they are, or how to get out. We must be close. This is kidnap country.’
She strode ahead of them, taking the lantern with her. Mark and Zoe had to jog to keep up.
‘If they find us, let me do the talking,’ Venetia warned. ‘Some of these groups brainwash their soldiers for aggression – one word against their faith and they’ll cut you open without thinking.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Mark. He couldn’t help himself. With Sam’s words still ringing in his ears, this was a slander too far. ‘Have you seen that yourself, or did somebody tell you?’
‘I study culture, Mark. I’ve not seen it myself but there are accounts—’
‘Mind programming was the very first thing to be banned after the war,’ he said. ‘Every sect in the Kingdom signed up. They wrote half the damned treaty. You’re telling me they’re breaking that now?’
Bullies and exploiters they might be, but Mark had trouble believing the sects’ leadership would stoop to thought-control. He couldn’t reconcile that picture with the planet full of struggling people where he’d lived. Life on Earth was cheap, but not that cheap.
Venetia gave him a sad look. ‘Mark, I can only go by what I’ve read. I’m not trying to insult anyone here.’
‘Any chance you’ve been reading propaganda?’
She looked disappointed in him. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to be careful, does it?’
She stopped at the entrance to yet another lab lined with nearly human-looking workbenches of featureless metal. Smashed equipment filled it from end to end. This one was different from the others they’d seen by simple virtue of having windows. The Fecund glass here had obviously been left exposed to the elements when the planet died as most of it had been scoured to a matte opacity. In a few curious patches, though, Mark could make out the dry ocean bed many stories below, overlooked by a thick blanket of stars.
‘Flags have been here recently,’ said Venetia as she picked her way through the glass and shrapnel on the floor. ‘See how new these breaks are? There’s no dust on them. This equipment must have been sealed up in those wall pods until just weeks ago.’ She pointed at boot prints on the floor. ‘They poach electronics mostly,’ she explained, picking up a piece of ceramic tubing. ‘Lab equipment if they can get it. There’s a huge market for this stuff in the home system. The sect Leading like to decorate their private worlds with genuine alien tech. That’s before you even start counting the odd medical or engineering miracle people sometimes find down here.’
‘Do you think they’ll come back here tonight?’ said Mark.
‘No way of knowing,’ said Venetia, ‘but there’s reason to hope. Last I heard, activity in this area was red hot, but that was a few years ago. And they keep moving around to avoid the colony patrols. If nobody shows, we’re in trouble,’ she added. ‘If the cold doesn’t get us, starvation will. Either that or Sam’s people will find us. They’ll put two and two together eventually.’
‘Little worry of that,’ said Zoe, her voice strained.
Mark turned back towards her. She was standing with her arms in the air. In the doorway behind them stood a young man in a black thermal jacket. He was pointing a flenser rig
ht at them.
‘Nobody move,’ he said. ‘You move, you die.’
14.5: ANN
While the hours ticked painfully by, Ann sat in her suite, planned her next move and tried not to scream at the walls. They were about to wreak havoc on the human race and apparently no one wanted to know about it. And by ‘no one’, of course, she meant Parisa Voss. Ann shuddered with anger. Was the senator in on Sam’s scheme or simply guilty of the most unforgivable self-serving myopia?
Ann knew she had to get out but they’d cut off her access to the network and locked the door. The room only had one exit and that was through the guards. Her choices, as she saw them, were twofold. First, to try to make Senator Voss see reason. That was likely to be difficult given the woman’s intransigence so far. Ann didn’t even have a way to reach the senator other than by talking at the walls and hoping they had surveillance running.
The other option was to trick her way past the guards. Given that they had fibre-optic nerve enhancements, accelerator glands and biopolymer-assisted muscle tissue, that would probably require some serious finessing. One wrong move and they’d kill her. Fleet Spatials had a reputation for taking orders extremely literally.
Before Ann could devise a solution, a shrieking alarm cut the air.
‘What’s that?’ she demanded of the walls. ‘Anybody care to explain what’s going on?’
She strode over to hammer on the door just as the guards opened it.
‘Come with us,’ said the larger of the two. ‘You’re wanted on the command deck. Quickly.’
Ann stood her ground. ‘For what?’
They simply gestured with their guns.
Ann marched out of the room, glad of the opportunity but nervous all the same. Nobody appeared to be evacuating. If anything, the Fleet scientists looked even busier than usual. Had Monet done something? Then one monitor she passed showed a familiar spectroscopic spike – the kind that indicated a major Nem arrival event. She stalled, staring at the signal in horror. If that data was fresh, the implication was definitely not good. It would indicate Nem behaviour way outside the predicted paradigm.