“Why haven’t they mended their original ship?” Meili asked.
“We must have completely incapacitated it. They can’t create, only replicate and imitate. If they reach the city engines, they could copy them.”
Reuben nodded. “And the same with any ships, I presume? We need to leave our dock and put some clear space between us and the city.”
“They can build bridges, so it will need to be a significant distance.”
“How many other ships are docked here?”
“Only about twenty. We’d just had a large trade convoy leave, and we put out a quarantine signal as soon as I realised what had happened.”
“Eskil,” Reuben said. “Can you get onto those ships and fly them out of the dock?”
Eskil nodded. “I can transport in and out. Might take a few hours, though.”
“Get started,” Chanthavy told him. “Can we keep them from the main engines?”
“Only by slowing their progress. If they’re following their normal pattern, they’ll be moving along the surface of the city and only digging into underground areas in the second stage. If we c-could e-expose those areas, they will go back to convert them again.”
“By expose, you mean…?” Eskil asked.
Vairya clenched his fists into the hem of his shirt. “There are more warheads, if we can access Defence Command. We can—” He swallowed hard.
Reuben reached out and took his hand. “Your people are safe in your memory. What is left is just bricks and steel.”
“How do we access Defence Command?” Chanthavy asked, eyeing Reuben with a faint air of disapproval.
“I can get you into the network from here. Do any of you have any experience with long-range weapons?”
“We have the ability to defend ourselves,” Chanthavy said. “If we cannot access your missiles, we have some of our own, although not of similar strength. I can fire them.”
“Good,” Reuben said, looking at Vairya. “What else?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“I don’t care.”
Vairya’s hand tightened around his. “I do.”
Meili sighed impatiently. “And that’s very sweet, but we’re dead anyway, and I want to come back as a lion next time, not a virus. Give me something worthwhile to do so that actually happens.”
Vairya squinted at her. “That’s your theology?”
“Works for me.”
“The dangerous task?” Reuben prompted before they got distracted.
Vairya sighed. “They spread by two means. The first you have seen. Cell by cell, they transform matter, drawing out what they need to replicate themselves before they turn it into diamond and sweep onwards.” He quirked a humourless smile at Reuben. “‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land.’”
“And the other means?”
“They have— well, I hesitate to call them either humans or cyborgs. They were human once, centuries ago. When they became diamond, they kept their form but became servants of the controlling impulse, automatons with no minds or will of their own. They roam ahead of the tide. Whatever they touch becomes infused with fresh nanites, and the tide grows again.” He closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “That was how my creators fell, and my brothers and sisters who never escaped Earth.”
“Zombie apocalypse,” Meili said, nodding sharply, even as Reuben murmured, “Hollow men.”
“‘Shape without form, shade without colour,’” Vairya agreed.
“How do we kill them?” Meili demanded.
“How did someone as bloodthirsty as you ever become a doctor?” Reuben asked.
“I like eradicating bad things, like plagues. What’s your excuse?”
“Pretty much the same,” Reuben said. “Vairya, do they have a weakness?”
“If you hit them hard enough, they’ll shatter.”
“How hard are we talking?” Meili asked.
“There’s an armoury on the lower rim where we keep shoulder-mounted grenade launchers.” At Meili’s wide-eyed stare, he added defensively, “We had some problems with pirates sending remote drones into our atmosphere to hack our defences.”
“No excuses needed,” Reuben said. “Eskil can beam Meili and me down there.”
“I’ll come too,” Vairya said.
But Reuben had been thinking about this. “No. You have your entire people inside your head, and we need someone up here who can have an overview and transport us out if we need to change our strategy.”
“And send you down there alone?”
Reuben dragged a smirk out. “I won’t be alone. I’ll have Meili.”
“But—”
“If we’re going to do this,” Meili interrupted, her voice harsher than her expression, “can we do it now, before I lose my nerve? Cooper, kiss your boy toy goodbye and get your mind in the game.”
Vairya was afraid again; Reuben could see it in his eyes. There was nothing he could do to solve that, so he kissed Vairya, ignoring Chanthavy’s pursed lips, and then stepped away to suit up as Eskil transported out to the first ship. He and Meili checked each other’s suits, the familiar routine calming him a little. When they were ready, he turned back to Vairya. “We’re on coms. Can they hear us?”
“No,” Vairya said, not looking away from him. “And they wouldn’t understand if they could.”
“Then keep talking to us,” Reuben said and moved to stand beside Meili. “Ready when you are.”
“I’m ready,” she said. He couldn’t see her face through the screen of the helmet, but he could hear the determination cracking her voice.
“Transporting you on three… two… one…”
The bridge of the Juniper blurred and went milky around them, fading into white light as the transport disassembled and remade them.
The light faded into shadows, and Reuben breathed in quickly as the cold and broken landscape of the real city came into focus around him.
He had forgotten, lost in Vairya’s gardens, just how bad it was down here. The city had turned towards the sun, noon local time, and white light spilled across an airless landscape that glittered with ice. They stood before a high door, cracked cobbles stretching out before them to fill a courtyard which must have been pleasant once: there was an iced-over fountain in the middle of it, and blackened vines covered one wall.
“I have you on camera,” Vairya said. “You’ll need to go through the door behind you. Normally it would need a DNA scan and a keycode, but I’m adjusting the programming. You should be able to get inside in a few seconds.”
“No rush,” Meili said. “It’s not as if, oh, our air supply was limited.”
“Patience,” Vairya said, and the door slid open. “You need to go to the end of the corridor and enter the room on the right. You’re looking for a Thierry-Ng Mk 12 Propulsion Unit and the accompanying ordnance. I can try describing what it looks like.”
“I’ve seen them before,” Reuben said and started into the armoury trying to keep his steps as short as possible so he could check the entrances to the other rooms.
“The place was locked,” Meili pointed out, bounding past him. “Stop being so paranoid.”
“Better paranoid than dead.”
“Don’t bicker, children,” Vairya said.
Reuben glimpsed a body in one of the rooms they passed, slumped in front of a dead wallscreen. His first instinct was to go in, discover who it was, and how she had died.
But the time for counting the dead was over. This was war now.
He found the grenade launchers easily enough and helped Meili strap one on. There was plenty of ammunition for them too, and he slung two extra ammo packs around his waist.
“Lighter than I was expecting,” Meili commented, hefting it.
“It’s designed to be lightweight, and we’re in reduced gravity. You’ll find the recoil is worse than you’d expect in normal gravity.”
“You ever shot one of these before?”
“Only on the practice range.”
�
��Oh, this is going to go well,” she muttered. “Vairya, any idea where we should start?”
“I’ve lost cameras in the transformed areas, but I’m picking up some movement at the city centre end of Commercial Avenue. I can put you down on a side road about a quarter of a mile off.”
“Sounds good,” Reuben said.
“Be careful.”
The world blurred around them again, and then they were in an alleyway. It contained the first graffiti Reuben had seen in Caelestia, an inevitable cock and balls sprayed onto the side of a dumpster. Carefully, Reuben crept to the mouth of the alley, trying not to kick up any trash which might drift out to betray their position.
He peered around the corner and along the road. This was one of Caelestia’s main avenues, stretching along the entire length of the station, from the docks, past the Senate, and out into the residential districts beyond. It had been the first road they walked along when they entered Caelestia, the first place where they had realised the scale of the disaster.
Further along the road, a shining figure was running forwards. The sunlight broke through it, wreathing it in rainbows and making it too bright to focus on. Behind it, swelling out like the wake of ship, the road was changing, first the ground and next the surrounding walls fading and then becoming transparent and glittering.
Reuben’s vision dimmed suddenly as his suit adjusted his screen to protect his eyes, and for a few seconds all he could see was shadows.
When his vision cleared, the creature had covered half the distance between them.
“How fast do they move?” Meili gasped.
“Too fast,” Reuben said and steadied his weapon, reminding himself that this was the enemy, no matter that it held no weapons of its own.
He fired, and the recoil pushed him back into the alley. Meili pulled him down smoothly, and they crouched as the air around them flashed brightly and then shook around them in a soundless wave of destruction that belled outwards from the place where the runner had been.
When it stopped, Reuben peered out of the alley again.
The shining runner was gone, though shards of crystal were still sinking slowly towards the ground. As they touched the road, each one glimmered and then melted. From each, a gleaming puddle spread, and then began to roll back to rejoin the main sweep of diamond, transforming everything in its path.
“Time to go,” Meili said.
Reuben agreed. Bounding after her, he rasped, “Vairya, we have a kill. Those things are fast.”
“We need more distance if you transport us in again,” Meili said and brought her knees up on the next step, turning in the air to swing her weapon round. “Incoming. Cooper, get down!”
He threw himself backwards instead, out of the path of her shot, and watched it go arching along the side street ahead of them, where another runner was approaching.
They had no shelter this time, and the flash and shockwave blacked out their helmets and sent them rising from the airless street.
Reuben twisted as he rose, until he managed to push his feet against what felt like a piece of wall, and he went arching away, his gloved hands brushing what could have been the ridge of a roof. He could only see glimmers: the bright sky, Meili’s suit moving beside him, the dim outline of walls.
They came back to the ground in a different road, the whole world still as vague as a pencil sketch but growing steadily more distinct as their helmets adapted.
“Vairya, we’re blind,” Meili said. “Can you see us?”
“You’re off camera,” Vairya said, sounding frightened. “Reuben!”
“Still here,” Reuben said, turning to look around. “Air and gravity would be good. Our suits are working against us.”
“Let me see what I can do. Okay, there’s private security cameras on the buildings around you. Searching, searching. Got you. You’re in a courtyard behind warehouses, no sign of trolls. Sit tight.”
“Trolls?” Reuben asked, amused.
“They’re evil, made of stone, and killed by big flashing lights. Got a better idea?”
“Trolls it is.”
Meili sighed. “Am I going to have to put up with this all mission?”
“Almost certainly,” Reuben said, smiling behind his helmet. “Keep talking, Vairya.”
“Concentrating here. What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to keep talking so I know immediately if we lose coms.”
“Oh.”
He could see Meili swinging round to face him, but all she said was, “I’m glad one of us has some idea what we’re doing.”
“Did you hit your head?” Reuben demanded. “What was that? Respect? From you?”
“Fuck off, Cooper.”
“Yeah, she’s fine,” Vairya said. “Reuben, I do need to concentrate on this. The city systems have been chewed apart by this stuff. You get something I have memorised, I’m afraid.”
“Should keep us going for a while if we go through every poem in your head,” Meili muttered.
“And by a while, you mean approximately thirteen centuries,” Vairya said, and then his voice shifted, losing a little warmth and humour to recite, “‘So all day long the noise of battle roll’d among the mountains by the winter sea—’”
“Could you not find anything less morbidly sentimental?” Reuben asked acidly.
“Always a critic. Would you like me to find something a little more jolly? I have plenty of limericks in here.”
“Adventure,” Meili said, “if you’re taking requests. Something with some good fights. I need inspiration.”
Vairya chuckled. “Fine. ‘Sing. O muse, of the wrath of Achilles—’”
“Fuck off,” Reuben said mildly. “I’m not putting up with nine books worth of chariots and tantrums.”
“‘This day is called the feast of Crispian—’”
“No.”
“Stop interrupting the man, Cooper,” Meili said. “He needs to concentrate. Go back to the original, Vairya. I’ll shoot Cooper if he keeps whining.”
“I hate Tennyson,” Reuben muttered, but she was right, and he was being a fool, demanding Vairya’s attention just because he wanted to hear that wry tone turned at him.
“‘Until King Arthur’s table, man by man, had fall’n in Lyonnesse about their Lord…’” Vairya continued, and Reuben sat and listened as his vision cleared, and the world around him filled with sunlight again. It was bright today, pouring over them with a fury that made him glad they were suited up. How much closer had the city carried them? How soon would it be too hot for anything to survive?
When the light changed, he assumed it was his helmet again until Vairya paused in his recitation to say, “Atmospheric shields up and secure. Working on the air supply and gravity now.”
“Good,” Reuben said. “Let us know as soon as we can get these helmets off.”
“Will do. Eskil’s got four more ships away. Now where was I? Ah, yes. ‘Such a sleep they sleep— the men I loved. I think that we shall never more, at any future time, delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, walking about the gardens and the halls…’”
Meili sat down on the cobbles, laying her gun aside. “Okay, you were right. Don’t you two know any poetry which isn’t depressing and tedious?”
“Barbarian,” Reuben said, but it lacked some of the venom he might have used a few weeks ago.
It could have been half an hour later, or even an hour, when Meili held up her hand and showed him the atmospheric scanner in her glove. It had changed from red to amber, and was already green tinted.
“Good systems,” she said.
“Gravity’s about to come back on,” Vairya said. “Brace yourselves. Oh, and Reuben, I’m about to start on Paradise Lost.”
“Only ever read extracts of that,” Reuben said, cheering up a little.
He felt the lurch and sudden drop of his stomach as the gravity kicked in, and swallowed back the urge to vomit into his helmet.
Meili checked her scanner again, and
said, “Seriously, Cooper, what is the appeal of all this? You trying to read everything ever written?”
“Just the highlights,” Reuben said, “and I never got much beyond one language and two millennia.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Cooper.”
He looked up at the blazing sky. “Because they didn’t know anything. They didn’t know what the stars were, or how planets circled the sun, or why our hearts beat, and our bodies grew old. It didn’t stop them, though. They loved, and they lived, and they never stopped wondering what it meant to be—”
It was more than he had meant to say, and he stopped himself.
“To be?”
“Human,” he finished. “What it meant to be human.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Did they find an answer?”
“No. No one ever has. That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“They never stopped asking,” he said. “That’s the point.”
She was quiet, and into their silence, Vairya said, his voice soft, “You have breathable atmosphere at ground level.”
“Thank you,” Reuben said and stood up to peel his outer suit off. “Keep monitoring. We’ll need instant extraction if we lose air again.”
“Understood.”
The grenade launcher was heavier now, and he couldn’t carry quite so much ammunition. Nonetheless, it felt good to breathe in deeply and rub some of the gathered sweat out of his hair. The air was hot, and he was glad of the inner suit, which would still offer some protection from the sun.
“Where next?” he said.
“I’m still having trouble maintaining a complete camera network,” Vairya said, “but I’m watching the spread of the diamond across the city. There are outlying spars in the Chahar Bagh district, ninety-five degrees clockwise and three kilometres from your position.”
“On our way,” Meili said and led them out of the courtyard.
After a moment, Vairya started, his voice whisper soft, “‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree…’”
Chapter Nine
In Heaven and Earth Page 8