Angel Stations (28 page)

Pierce watched along with the others as the tube appeared to fracture, its smooth, metallic-blue surface rapidly developing a series of cracks. It looked like the cracked mud of a dried-out riverbed, except rendered in metal. ‘This is in realtime. The whole transformation took only a minute or so.’

The cracks deepened, then suddenly the cylinder crumbled to pieces.

Pierce stared in horror and he heard others around him gasping, or muttering under their breath. The pieces were
moving
. Moving like something living.

Pierce realized he was looking at the metal bugs everyone had been hearing about – seen by somebody they knew, or by somebody who knew somebody they knew. Pierce had heard a hundred stories in the space of only a few days, but hadn’t seen anything himself. Until now.

‘We don’t know what triggered the change,’ said Mansell, shrugging. ‘But there are theoretical precedents for this kind of thing.’

‘Like what?’ asked Holmes, an appalled expression on his face.

‘What I think we’re looking at are viral machines,’ said Tomason, stepping forward to stand next to Mansell. By now, on the screen, the bits of cylinder had scurried off out of sight into different parts of the laboratory, moving, it seemed, on tiny metal legs. ‘Self-reproducing cybernetic organisms.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ said one of the Escort Commanders, a heavy-set man who looked like he’d started to sweat a lot. These were professionals, used to commanding thousands, but they all seemed out of their depth on this one. Pierce noticed one or two others casting occasional worried glances at the floor or at the corners of the room. It took Pierce a second to realize why. They were looking for bugs, and the realization sent a thrill of fear down his spine. He even glanced down at his own feet, wondering if anything could have scurried by without his noticing.

‘Machines that replicate,’ said Tomason, looking weary. ‘The idea’s been around for centuries. There’s even the possibility that the Stations themselves are self-replicating, although of course nobody really knows – can know, yet. Mayor Pierce is right, people are seeing them everywhere. The footage you’ve just watched shows perhaps a dozen individual bugs at most. Everywhere you go now, people are talking about them, and from the way they talk there must be hundreds of them, if not thousands, by now. All happening in only three days.’

‘Commander Holmes, sir, I appreciate the limits of my role on the Station,’ said Pierce, ‘but the fact is, I must insist that you now have no choice but to abandon the Angel Station, at least temporarily. We don’t know if these things are a threat or not, whether they mean us harm or not.’ Pierce turned to look at Tomason and Mansell in turn, looking from one to the other, his voice rising as if to a question.

‘Professor Tomason, do these things mean us any harm?’ asked Holmes.
He’s out of his depth
, thought Pierce.
This isn’t the kind of thing he ever expected to deal with. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? We became complacent even after returning post-Hiatus and finding an Angel Station abandoned by its original crew, vanished, with no trace of them anywhere in the system. And now it’s happening again
.

‘Sir, I don’t know,’ said Tomason. ‘All this is brand new. What I can say is that if these things are replicating – and I believe that they are – then they must be obtaining their raw material from somewhere else. That means either the original Angel Station itself, or else the human-habitable portion of it.’

‘They’re eating the Station?’ said Johoba.

Tomason shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t have the resources—’

‘There is one other matter to consider,’ said the Asian Commander, stepping forward. ‘Abandoning the Station may not be a choice we’re able to make.’

Holmes stared at him. ‘Can you explain that?’

‘Okay, put it this way. We – or rather the Station, plus hopefully only a few of the escort vehicles guarding the Station – are infected with some kind of plague, possibly alien, possibly even intelligent. That’s as much as we know, and apart from that we’re in the dark. For the majority of people living and working on board this Station, the only immediate alternative is to return through this Station to the next Station in the chain, the one at Hellas. That would almost certainly mean infecting that Station as well, and so on, until finally these creatures would be delivered to the Sol System. And if they do turn out to be non-benign, and if they somehow arrive on Earth—’

Pandemonium erupted.

People were yelling all around Pierce, and he was surprised at how calm he felt. He wondered why, and then he realized. It was too late already.

He’d glanced down once more at his feet, and noticed something that hadn’t been there before. There was a tiny little hole in the floor, right next to his shoe. Something small and shiny was pushing its way through. And it did look like an insect, at least at first glance.

There was something almost endearing about the way it probed and heaved its way through, its tiny legs – at least a dozen of them – waving and scraping at the hole. Had that hole been there before? Unless his foot had been over it, Pierce certainly hadn’t noticed it before. The thing pushed its way right through, then seemed to orient itself by turning in a full circle, something like an insect’s feelers waving at the front of it.

On closer inspection, of course, it wasn’t really an insect: more an artefact, or a machine with insect-like properties. It looked strangely half-formed, as if it had been assembled carelessly in a hurry.

Another insect machine next pushed its way through. This one joined the first in looking around itself. Then they scurried off alongside one wall, destination unknown.

Pierce wondered how he could get his hands on a Goblin at short notice.

Vincent

They had gone down to the arrivals bay, near the hub of the Angel Station. It looked as if it had originally been designed with pomp and circumstance in mind, for the arrival of dignitaries or politicians or such. Seats were bolted to the floor (this area being near enough to the Station’s central core for its curious pseudo-gravity to exert a gentle but not insubstantial pull), and a wide viewport through which the complexity of the Station’s human-built add-ons could be viewed in comfort. They were alone here, although Vincent kept expecting someone to walk in on them at any second. He had folded his arms and crossed his legs, prey to a permanent vague uncertainty of how he should arrange his limbs when at rest.

‘So when did all this start?’

‘When do you think? It was just after . . .’ Kim waved a hand at him without actually looking at him. She stared out of the viewport instead. ‘I had a hard time. A really hard time. I didn’t think I could cope. In fact I couldn’t.’

‘Perhaps the money would have helped,’ said Vincent gently. ‘I know how much money was due to you after your discoveries were catalogued, studied. You’d be amazed at what’s been achieved but, of course,’ he said with a grin, ‘I can’t really tell you that.’ She turned to him with a frown. ‘It’s a secret,’ he continued, thinking of tiny starships flitting about the galaxy, all without the aid of the Angel Stations.
The universe is really ours now
, he thought for maybe the millionth time.
We’ll be able to go where we want
. He looked at her.

‘I
will
tell you, but just not yet. When this is all over.’ He would, since she deserved to know, had to know.

‘Thanks.’

He’d told her everything he could about the radiation now approaching the Station. In turn, she’d told him about Pasquale’s claim of seeing some kind of artificial insect. Now it seemed that lots of other people had seen them.

What you were doing, he wanted to say to her, was suicide. She had told him about the Books, about her attempts at exorcizing the knowledge of her lover’s death by becoming her, albeit only for a little while. A long, protracted suicide of the mind.

He remembered Susan, for he had known them both when they had been involved in post-graduate work at the University, a long time ago. It had been an interesting time, and they had crossed paths time and time again at interdepartmental parties and also through mutual friends. There had been . . .

But this was all so long in the past now, and after Kim had travelled here with the woman who had become her lover, to study the ruins that Vincent knew had fascinated her since she was a child, he had heard of them only through professional connections as his and their personal lives had diverged. And then, finally, only through the main news channels on the Grid, as early triumph had rapidly dissolved into disaster.

You were the love of my life, he wanted to say to her, realizing, even as he thought it, that it was indeed true. He had not expressed himself well enough at the time to communicate this either through deed or word, and he had – he suspected – paid the price. And now here they were again, both so far from home.

‘About the bugs,’ he said, casting for something else to think about. ‘If they’re real, I think I know who might have something to do with them.’ Kim stared at him. ‘There’s a woman called Tomason.’

Kim nodded like she’d heard the name. ‘She’s head of the exoscience research facilities on the other side of the Station. I met her a couple of times.’

‘Well, I went looking for her. I knew her name through some academic papers she’d published, and I’d even requested research material from her directly at different times while I was still back home, so she also knows who I am.’ Kim nodded, watching him with interest. ‘Of course, we’d never actually met, but I have all my requisite credentials with me.’

‘None of which have actually helped you get anywhere since you arrived here,’ she said.

‘Exactly. So I thought, if there’s anyone I can talk to about this stuff, it’s Tomason. She’s high enough in the scale of things to have the ear of the Commander here, or at least that much I was hoping.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. They’ve locked down that secure facility you mentioned.’ He gave her a significant look. ‘Neither Tomason nor any members of her core research staff are currently available, and the only place they could be is—’

‘The Central Command facility,’ Kim finished for him. ‘That’s the centre of everything around here. That’s where all the decisions are made. You can’t get in without a pass.’

‘I don’t have a pass,’ said Vincent, ‘and it doesn’t look likely I’ll acquire one.’

‘You really think the Kaspians are doomed?’

‘I’m not a defeatist by nature,’ he said after several seconds, ‘but I don’t know what can be done to help. They obviously have their own emergency to deal with here. Maybe it’s got something to do with what happened post-Hiatus, when the Station was abandoned the first time.’

‘The first time?’ said Kim, raising an eyebrow.

‘As opposed to the second time, yes. But we should be making plans.’

‘There hasn’t been an evacuation order. I haven’t even seen any of these bugs myself, so I can’t quite believe they exist. I can’t help thinking they’re the product of some kind of mass hysteria, or . . . oh.’

She fell silent and followed Vincent as he took her gently by the wrist and led her closer to the viewport. It provided a realtime display of the environs of the Station. Three of the military escorts were visible, far beyond the Station’s boundaries. There was a set of controls next to the viewport that allowed you to zoom in on different sections of the Station. She had just noticed something that looked like mercury flowing across the outer surface of a habitat pod, one of the big ones housing part of the Hub. Vincent played with the controls, finally bringing them to focus at extreme magnification.

‘I came down here the other day,’ he said. ‘Not many people seem to pass through this part of the Station nowadays, and I find I can think here. I started playing with the controls. They really are everywhere, I’m afraid.’

She could see them clearly now, flowing across the outer surface of the Station. They were small and shiny, their carapaces rough-hued. For the first time in a very long time, she felt truly afraid.

‘Where the hell did they come from?’ she breathed.

‘Well, what are the two places I can’t get into just now?’

‘Central Command and – oh, right.’ The secure facility, where they’d brought the Angel artefacts. Great. Where else would they have come from?

Or not so great.
I don’t know who I am anymore
, she thought.
I don’t feel ready to be Kim, to deal with – the things that happened. I want to be Susan, strong, capable Susan
. But the Books – her supply was running low. She ached even to think of them. She could be Susan again with them, could feel that strength and clarity and courage in her.

Just being herself, Kim thought, seemed something of a disappointment. She walked over to the memorial plaque set into the far wall. It was silver and huge, measuring six feet high by maybe ten wide. It listed the names of all the disappeared: the original crew of the Angel Station.
There are people much worse off than me
, she reflected.

There had to be a plan of action. As first the rumours and then confirmed sightings of the insects had spread, she had expected some kind of an evacuation order to be announced. There were military escorts on permanent patrol, of course, for exactly this kind of eventuality. To transport people from the Station out to them would require no great feat of organization. There were a couple of hundred Goblins as well, not even counting the ones currently out in the depths of the Kaspian System, hoping to become the next Pasquale.

Vincent joined her, standing next to her to study the plaque. He’d examined it several times himself already, on previous visits. Somehow, sharing this moment with someone he knew made it seem all the more real. ‘It’s strange to think it really happened.’ She looked at him as if she didn’t understand what he meant. ‘What I mean is, it’s one thing to know what happened here in the abstract. It’s another to come here and stand in front of real, solid evidence that something so bizarre could really take place. It beggars the imagination, you know what I mean?’