by Alex Lamb
She kissed him on the cheek and disappeared into the room Five had opened for her. Mark blinked in astonishment. Venetia grinned at his amusement.
‘Weren’t expecting that? You should have been paying more attention.’ She elbowed him in the ribs. ‘Look on the bright side, Mark. Massimo thinks we’re hilarious and we’re not dead yet. It could be worse.’
15.4: SAM
Sam listened patiently to questions in yet another meeting about camouflage. The whole idea that Carter’s evac-ark would be less visible when broadcasting a signal wasn’t something the people of New Luxor could wrap their heads around. And the delays were getting scary.
‘Exactly how accurate does signal reproduction have to be?’ asked a woman in a brown utili-sari sitting in the front row. ‘I mean, what happens if our transmitter equipment isn’t as good as yours? Are we going to make ourselves more obvious than if we’d just dropped our albedo?’
Sam smiled blandly. The Nems could show up at any time now, and if they still had access to a target this size he’d have to move to the nuclear option. If they wasted one more hour of his time in meetings, he might just nuke them anyway.
As Sam nodded sagely and prepared to respond, a high-priority call-waiting icon from Keir Vorn appeared in the corner of his view. He held up a hand.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he told the woman in the front row. ‘I have to take an urgent call – I do hope you’ll excuse me.’
He strode from the meeting room to the study-space across the hall.
‘What’s up?’
‘Now we know why my surveybots couldn’t find your shipmates,’ said Keir. ‘The leader of our local Flag problem has them.’
Sam groaned … then checked himself. This was something he could use. He’d been fretting about the disappearance of Mark and the others since they vanished from the transit pod. The fact that they were out of his hair had been the only consolation. But now, if he played things right, they were someone else’s problem. The Flags could take the blame if anything happened to them. Mark dead at the hands of religious fanatics would mesh quite nicely into his narrative.
‘Stall him,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll talk to him myself, but you need to give me a minute.’
Before allowing a connection, Sam checked Keir’s database on the man calling – one Massimo Singh, apparently. Then he quickly assembled some data in readiness, culling content from the Gulliver’s logs. When he was ready, he pinged Keir and got Singh on the video link. He sat down at the closest desk with a private camera.
Singh looked like a classic lower-echelon Leading wannabe. The sort that Earth families usually packed off to manage their ghastly little remote-ghettos. In Singh’s case, he’d clearly spent too much money on muscle augs and not enough on diet pills.
‘I have your friends,’ said Singh. He sounded inordinately pleased with himself. ‘Either you explain what’s going on or you won’t see them again. You should know that I’ve investigated their story. I see your ship and others manoeuvring in orbit so I know something is up. You can’t hide it. And now I want you to tell me exactly what you’re doing.’
Sam twisted his face into a furious sneer. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but what do you imagine is going on here?’
‘A ruse to create panic, most likely,’ said Singh, sounding amused. ‘It’s a clever story designed to convince me to evacuate my territory and beg the great, beneficent Fleet for help to leave. But in my experience, people faced with the kind of disaster your friends describe are seldom given warning. Particularly in such an approachable format. You should know that our claim is not going to be relinquished.’
‘I’m glad you have them,’ Sam growled. ‘You can keep them – they’ve caused enough trouble already. We’re getting the hell out of here. They can take what’s coming to them.’
Massimo’s smile drooped. ‘Oh, really? You know, it’d be very easy for me to send a message drone to Earth. I wonder how this story would play out if the IPSO senate got hold of it.’
Sam glowered at him. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Maybe your drone will beat ours there. You can even tell them you’ve got Will Monet’s adopted son with you. See what good it does you. How do you think they’re going to treat you when everyone discovers you’re harbouring the son of the man who set this disaster loose? The man who kicked off humanity’s first interspecies war. Do you have any idea how many people are likely to die because of what Monet did? Do you? And for what?’ Sam sneered. ‘To regain his place in the history books?’ He shook his head in despair and let a hint of tears creep into the corners of his eyes. ‘Those people you’re hiding are Monet’s creatures,’ he said. ‘They have good reason to hide.’
Singh looked thunderstruck.
‘You don’t believe me?’ said Sam, knowing full well that he’d already won. ‘Watch this.’
He passed Singh the data package he’d edited. It opened with footage of the Ariel Two firing on Tiwanaku amid a swarm of alien ships. He watched Singh’s eyes go wide, and then widen some more.
‘They think you’ll spare them because we want to hold them accountable for their crimes,’ said Sam. ‘You decide. It’s your problem now.’
‘Wait,’ said Singh. ‘We need to discuss safe passage on your—’
Sam cut the link and chuckled to himself. Then he opened a channel to Keir Vorn.
‘Be on high alert for messenger drones leaving from Flag satellites,’ he said. ‘Any and all drones should be intercepted and destroyed immediately. Our lives depend on it.’
‘Consider it done,’ said Keir.
Sam leaned back in his chair and smiled. That would give the Flag fucker something to think about. The Earthers had been wanting to paint Monet as a villain since the war. This should be right up their alley.
16: DESPAIR
16.1: WILL
The other side of the boarding lock had been left open. A ladder fixed against the side descended into a surprisingly warm and bright space below. Will had to squint against the glare as he climbed down. Chains of shining bioluminescent spheres hung on vines all around him, filling the air with a cool green-white light. Below them, basking in their glow, lay an indoor fairyland.
A pale, greasy substance that looked like tofu covered the interior walls of the tube. Where the walls curved in to form the floor lay a knee-high Technicolor forest of organisms that might have been plants, or fungi, or something in between. The dominant colours were deep reds and purples but Will could see the whole spectrum down there. A narrow stream ran along the bottom of the tube, giving the place the feeling of a small, enclosed river valley dreamed up by a mad painter.
The soft breeze that blew through the tunnel felt surprisingly moist and carried a musty scent, like a cross between soil and whisky. Creatures of some sort called to each other with high-pitched squeaks and clicks. Behind them Will could hear the trickle of the running water. The tube stretched away in either direction, nearly circular in cross section. It curved and bent until its undulations blocked further sight.
Will climbed down to the spongy floor beside Ann, took in the view and sneezed. Ann watched him nervously.
‘It’s started,’ she said. ‘Brace yourself. I recommend not trying to fight the planet. You’ll only make it worse. The first visitors down here had antibacterial augs. It confused the hell out of the local flora and knocked those guys out for days.’
‘Okay,’ said Will uncertainly. ‘I’m holding off.’
As he spoke, his throat constricted and a wave of disorientation overtook him. He fell to his knees while warning messages from his smart-cells crowded his sensorium. He kept his interior defences at the ready and dived through his body-map to monitor this new invasion at the micro-scale. He might not be putting up any resistance, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t keep a close eye on it.
The microbes visiting his lungs and hands impressed him as
much as they scared him. They were the same as the ones he’d encountered outside, but far more numerous here and more active in their intent. Will had a good idea what their problem was: they couldn’t figure him out.
Since the Transcended changed Will from the inside, he’d had plenty of time to study what they’d done. They’d essentially added an extra nucleus to each cell in his body. Those nuclei didn’t so much store information as process it. They doubled as factories designed to churn out biologically inert compounds engineered at the molecular scale. Unfortunately, the contents of Will’s secondary nuclei never stopped updating. Any microbe trying to map the contents of his cells was likely to get very confused.
As he watched the tiny machines work, Will’s own modifications started to look cheap by comparison. The Transcended had basically cobbled something together out of what was available in his own blood. It had seemed like magic to him at the time because he’d never known what good molecular engineering looked like. He did now. Being impressed didn’t make him feel any less ill, though. The air here made him weaker than he’d felt at any time since the war. It scared him.
‘Are you okay?’ said Ann.
Will nodded and managed to stand upright. He’d left a patch of broken rainbow-hued foliage where he’d fallen. It looked like a piece of accidental expressionist art.
‘I’m managing it,’ he said.
She laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You let me know any time we need to stop.’
Will wasn’t used to other people’s sympathy. He peered up the tunnel rather than meet her gaze.
‘So we just follow the tube?’
Ann nodded. ‘There are joins we’ll have to navigate, but the League keeps the routes from the access locks to the science stations marked. We just need to look for the green flags.’ She pointed to a square of plastic dangling from a piece of stiff wire up ahead. ‘Ready?’
Will nodded and let Ann lead the way along the bank of the stream, heading slightly uphill and away from the sea.
‘So how come the life here doesn’t want to instantly kill me like that stuff up on the station?’ he said. His throat felt sore.
‘Most of the life on this planet tries to support foreign organisms,’ said Ann. ‘That’s one of the most amazing things about it. So long as you’re not actively damaging the environment, the planet wants you to stay and participate. The complexity of the local organisms actually degrades around foreign tissue. It starts to mimic it.’
Will frowned. ‘Why would it do that?’
‘No idea,’ said Ann. ‘But that’s how it works. The defensive nodes are different, though. They’re basically the planet’s immune system. They take foreign organisms apart before trying to work out how to emulate them. It’s the shoot-first version of the same biology. Or that’s how the research team explained it to me, anyway. When the League decided to develop a weapon that would work against you, they took defensive cells as their starting point.’
Will gazed around at the pale tunnel walls. It was, he thought, rather like walking through the belly of a sleeping dragon. It could kill them in an instant but apparently didn’t want to. So what did it want? He glanced back at the trail of damaged vegetation behind them.
‘If anyone comes after us it’s going to be pretty obvious where we went.’
Ann shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it – this stuff grows fast. Stand still for long enough and you can watch it. It makes kudzu look lazy.’
They walked for hours. Will couldn’t remember having ever felt so weary. Thankfully the environment around them provided plenty of distraction. His unease about the native biology slowly gave way to outright awe as the magical grotto yielded an unending string of surprises.
At one point, the tunnel opened up into a vast junction like a grand ballroom filled with slanted columns and a meadow of scarlet mushrooms. A dozen tubes joined there, their mouths spilling out surreal life like Daliesque cornucopia. The lighting vines hung low in clumps, like organic chandeliers.
Later they found their way narrowed to a keyhole-shaped slot barely wide enough to walk through and waist-deep in magenta foam. Will’s ship-suit rapidly became smeared with a plethora of different kinds of vegetable gunk.
Their path twisted as it rose, occasionally dipping to create deep pools of rose-tinted water where jellyfish-tadpole things wriggled. The League had bolted polymer filament bridges into the walls to act as crossings. Here and there, breaks between their tunnel and others passing above it resulted in tiny waterfalls surrounded by stands of mauve fern two metres tall.
Will had been to all the biosphere worlds and walked for dozens of kilometres through wild landscapes barely touched by man. Most of them looked the same. A bit of moss-analogue here, some lichen there, the odd weird stromatolite if you were lucky.
Snakepit resembled none of them. For starters, it was a truly indoor environment. On top of that, its diversity left Mars’s rainforest parks in the dust. But Will felt something more: Snakepit felt staged, somehow. Despite their curving organic lines, the tunnels felt like acts of engineering, albeit of an incredibly subtle sort. The place felt too careful, and too controlled, to be completely natural. There was something about the moist, knee-high forest that looked deliberately bijou.
‘This place is … unusual,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Ann. ‘The whole planet’s covered with these tunnels about ten layers deep. And that tofu-soil stuff is farmable. The bioscience teams have grown everything in it from beans to lemongrass. It all tastes a bit weird, apparently, but it matures even faster than it does under supposedly ideal hydroponic conditions. Something about enforced symbiosis, I gather. There was a big debate after they found this place. The League had been looking for a military advantage, as you guessed. But when they found this, the investigation team almost rioted at the idea that they couldn’t tell everyone back home. I mean, think about how many people could live down here?’
She gestured at the cavern before them and Will surveyed the blood-coloured meadow. If you lined both sides of the stream with ten-storey apartment blocks there would still be room for gardens.
‘But the League couldn’t afford to let IPSO know they’d been exploring off the books. That would have given the whole game away. And in any case, they knew there’d have been one hell of a fight over this place. Think about the money in patents alone that these tunnels represent.’
‘So what changed?’ said Will.
‘The discovery of the defensive nodes,’ said Ann darkly. ‘Ironically, a lot of the investigation team died in the first attack. After people figured out how dangerous the place could be, they stopped talking about releasing data.’
‘But this place was meant to be lived in,’ said Will. ‘That much is obvious. So where did all the original inhabitants go? I haven’t seen anything bigger than a lizard this entire time.’
‘The League position is that there never were any. The Transcended seeded this place some time after the Fecund extinction and left it for whichever race arose next – humanity, as it turns out. Our modelling SAPs all rated that as the most likely scenario.’
‘I still don’t buy it,’ said Will. ‘If that’s true, why isn’t this place recognising my smart-cells?’
‘There are other theories,’ said Ann.
‘Such as?’
‘Some people think the occupants transcended,’ said Ann. ‘They joined with whoever built the Penfield Lobe. And given the level of technology involved in this place, that feels like a real possibility. Then, after the first attack, a different theory gained a lot of traction. In that story, the builders lost control of their own synthetic biology. They got on the wrong side of their planet and it ate them.’
‘Also plausible,’ said Will.
‘So far, there’s no sign either way. Exactly who built this place is one of a huge pile of questions the League shoved in its figur
e-it-out-after-the-war pile.’
A wave of high-pitched chittering claimed Will’s attention.
‘Do you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ said Ann, frowning.
A huge flock of tiny bird-analogues rounded the bend ahead of them, emitting twittering cries. The air darkened with the storm of their approaching wings. Will and Ann ducked and covered their faces against the sudden flood of bodies.
Will straightened as the birds sped past. ‘What the hell was that about?’
Ann regarded him with concern. ‘Our time’s up,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen that before – when people bring ATVs in here it terrifies the local wildlife. Someone’s coming.’
Will ramped up his hearing, listening for sounds hidden beneath the fading bird cries and the trickle of water. It took far more effort than it should have. All of his abilities had become dangerously muted. Nevertheless, he could still make out the distant whine of electric motors.
‘My guess is they’re about half a klick out,’ he told Ann, ‘and headed our way.’
‘Then we backtrack, and fast. We passed a junction a few minutes ago – that’ll have to do.’ She turned around and started running.
Will hesitated. He felt too tired to flee. He’d followed Ann up to the point of exhaustion only to be discovered by Pari and her goons. That was about on par with how his luck had been running recently. Under any other conditions he might have been able to fight. Instead, he was as weak as a baby and ready for recapture.
Will experienced a fresh wave of doubt about Ann. Part of him wanted to stay put and smash whatever thugs they’d sent to bring him back, but he recognised that urge for foolishness even as it tempted him. He turned and forced himself to take off after Ann, cursing himself for agreeing to come this way.
He kept his senses at full extension as they hurried over the damp, uneven terrain. Hearing anything over the sound of his own wheezing represented a challenge, but the effort proved to be worth it when he picked out voices coming from the direction of the coast.