Children of Time (25 page)

‘Did we poison them or something?’ Scoles asked, stamping on the closest just to be on the safe side.

‘No idea. Maybe we killed them with our germs.’ Lain collapsed next to Holsten. ‘What next, chief? Most of our kit’s on fire.’

Scoles stared about him with the baffled, angry look of a man who has lost control of the last shreds of his own destiny. ‘We . . .’ he started, but no plan followed the word.

‘Look,’ said Nessel, in a hushed voice.

There was something approaching from the treeline, something that was not an ant: bigger, and with more legs. It was watching them; there was no other way to put it. It had enormous great dark orbs, like the eyesockets of a skull, and it approached in sudden fits of movement, a rapid scuttle, then it was still and regarding them once more.

It was a spider, a monster spider like a bristling, crooked hand. Holsten stared at its ragged, hairy body, its splayed legs, the hooked fangs curled beneath it. When his gaze strayed to the two large eyes that made up so much of its front, he felt an unbearable shock of connection, as though it was trespassing on territory he had only ever shared with another human being before.

Scoles levelled his pistol, hand shaking.

‘Like on the drone recording,’ Lain said slowly. ‘Fuck me, it’s as long as my
arm
.’

‘Why is it watching us?’ Nessel demanded.

Scoles swore, and then the gun boomed in his hand, and Holsten saw the crouching monster spin away in a sudden flurry of convulsing limbs. The mutineer chief’s expression was slowly turning to one of despair – that of a man who, it seemed, would next turn the gun on himself.

‘What am I hearing?’ Nessel asked.

Holsten had somehow just thought it was a rolling echo of the gunshot, but now he realized that there was something more, something like thunder. He looked up.

He didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. There was a shape in the sky. It grew larger as he watched, slowly descending towards them. A moment later a bright wash of light seared down from it, illuminating the entire crash site in its pale radiance.

‘Karst’s shuttle,’ Lain breathed. ‘Never thought I’d be glad to see him.’

Holsten looked over to Scoles. The man was staring up at the descending vehicle, and who could guess at what bitter, desperate thoughts were passing through his head?

The approaching shuttle got to about ten feet off the ground, jockeyed a little, and then picked a landing site some way back down the devastated scar that the crash-landing cabin had created. Even as it came down, the side-hatch was opening, and Holsten saw a trio of figures in security detail armour, two of them with rifles already levelled.

‘Drop the weapon!’ boomed Karst’s amplified voice. ‘Surrender and drop the weapon! Prepare to be evacuated.’

Scoles’s hand was shaking, and there were tears at the corners of his eyes, but Nessel put a hand on his arm.

‘It’s over,’ she told him. ‘We’re done here. There’s nothing left for us. I’m sorry, Scoles.’

The mutineer chief gave a final glance around at the looming forest that no longer seemed so wonderfully vibrant and green and Earth-like. The shadows seemed to throng with unseen eyes, with chitinous motion.

He dropped the pistol disgustedly, a man whose dreams had been shattered.

‘Okay, Lain, Mason, you come right over here first. I want to check you’re unharmed.’

Lain did not hesitate, and Holsten shambled after her, feeling only the faintest deadened sense of pain, yet still having to labour at both breathing and walking, weirdly disconnected from his own body.

‘Get in,’ Karst told them.

Lain paused in the hatch. ‘Thank you,’ she said, without so much of her usual mockery.

‘You think I’d leave you here?’ Karst asked her, visor still looking outwards.

‘I thought Guyen might.’

‘That’s what he wanted them to think.’

Lain didn’t look convinced, but she helped Holsten up after her. ‘Come on, get your prisoners and let’s get out of here.’

‘No prisoners,’ Karst stated.

‘What?’ Holsten asked, and then Karst’s men started shooting.

Both of them had taken Scoles as their first target, and the mutineer leader went down instantly with barely a yell. Then they were turning their guns on the other two – Holsten barrelled into them, shouting, demanding that they stop. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Orders.’ Karst shoved him back. Holsten had a wheeling glimpse of Tevik and Nessel trying to put the crashed cabin between themselves and the rifles. The mutineer pilot fell, struggled to his feet clutching at his injured leg, and then jerked as one of the security men picked him off.

Nessel made it to the treeline and vanished into the deeper darkness there. Holsten stared after her, feeling a crawling horror.

Would I rather be shot? Surely I would.
But it wasn’t a choice anyone was asking of him.

‘We have to get her back, alive,’ he insisted. ‘She’s . . . valuable. She’s a scholar, she’s got—’

‘No prisoners. No ringleaders for a future mutiny,’ Karst told him with a shrug. ‘And your woman up there doesn’t care so long as there’s no interference to her precious planet.’

Holsten blinked. ‘Kern?’

‘We’re here to clear up the mess for her,’ Karst confirmed. ‘She’s listening right now. She’s got her finger on the switch of all our systems. So it’s straight in, straight out.’

‘You bargained with Kern to come and get us?’ Lain clarified.

Karst shrugged. ‘She wanted you out of the picture down here. We wanted you back. We cut a deal. But we need to get going now.’

‘You can’t . . .’ Holsten stared out from the hatch at the deep forest beyond.
Call Nessel back just to have her executed?
He subsided, realizing only that, at heart, he was just glad to be safe.

‘So, Kern,’ Karst called out, ‘what now? I don’t much fancy going into
that
to get her, and I reckon that would just involve more of that interference you don’t want.’

The clipped, hostile tones of Avrana Kern issued from the comms panel. ‘Your inefficiency is remarkable.’

‘Whatever,’ Karst grunted. ‘We’re coming back to orbit, right? Is that okay?’

‘It would seem the least undesirable option at this point,’ Kern agreed, still sounding disgusted. ‘Leave now, and I will destroy the crashed vessel.’

‘The . . . ? She can
do
that?’ Lain hissed. ‘You mean she could have . . .’

‘It’s kind of a one-shot. She’s got our drone up there under her control,’ Karst explained. She’s going to stick it into the crash there and then do some kind of controlled detonation of its reactor – burn up the wreck without flattening the entire area. Doesn’t want her precious monkeys playing with grown-up toys or something.’

‘Yeah, well, we didn’t see any fucking monkeys,’ Lain muttered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

3.10
GIANTS IN THE EARTH

Portia examines the creature as it sleeps.

She was not in time to see any of the momentous, inexplicable events that left a great, burning scar across the face of her world – the fires that are still burning despite the ants’ best efforts to contain them. From others of her kind she has heard a garbled version of events, crippled by the tellers’ inability to understand what it is they have witnessed.

It will all be remembered though, through the generations to come. This Understanding, this contact with the unknowable, will be one of the most analysed and reinterpreted events of all her species’ histories.

Something fell from the sky. It was not the Messenger, which clearly retains its regular circuit of the heavens, but in the mind of Portia and her kin it seems linked to that orbiting mote. It is a promise that the skies are host to more than one mobile star, and that even stars may fall. Some hypothesize that it was a herald or forerunner, a message from the Messenger, and that if its meaning can only be interpreted, then the Messenger will have new lessons to teach. Over the generations, this view – that a test has been set beyond the simple, pure manipulation of numbers – will gain in popularity, whilst simultaneously being viewed as a kind of heresy.

The events themselves seem inarguable, however. Something fell, and now it is a blackened shell of metals and other unknown materials that defy analysis. Something else came to earth, and then returned to the sky. Most crucially, there were living things. There were giants that came from the sky.

They were fighting off scouts from the ant colony when Portia’s people first saw them. Then, when the scouts had been killed or converted, the giants killed one of Portia’s own people – one of Bianca’s assistants. After they departed, they left some bodies of their own kind, some killed by the ants, others just dead from mysterious wounds. Swift work by Bianca’s team removed these remains from the scene, with fortunate timing given the explosion that occurred soon after, ending any useful enquiry, and killing a further handful of Bianca’s males.

At the time, nobody realized that one of the star-creatures had remained alive and entered the forest.

Now Portia examines the thing, as it appears to sleep. The shape of a human being sparks no ancestral recollection in her. Even had her distant antecedents any memories to pass on, their tiny keyhole’s span of vision would have been unable to appreciate the scale of anything so large. Portia herself is having difficulties: the sheer size and bulk of this alien monster give her pause for thought.

The creature has already killed two of her kind, when it encountered them. They had tried to approach, and the thing had attacked them on sight. Biting it had little or no effect – being designed for use against spiders, Portia’s venom has limited effect against vertebrates.

If it was just some monstrous, oversized beast, then to trap and kill it would be relatively simple, Portia decides. If the worst came to the worst, they could simply set the ants on it, as they are obviously more than equal to the task. The mystical significance of this creature is a different consideration, however. It has come from the sky: from the Messenger, ergo. It is not a threat to be confronted, but a mystery to be unravelled.

Portia feels the thrumming of destiny beneath her feet. She has a sense that everything that is past and everything that is to come are balanced at this point in time, the fulcrum resting within herself. This moment is one of divinely mandated significance. Here, in its monstrous living form, is some part of the Messenger’s message.

They will trap it. They will capture it and bring it back to Great Nest, using all the artifice and guile at their command. They will find some way to unravel its secret.

Portia glances upwards – the canopy of the forest keeps the stars from her view, but she is keenly aware of them: both the fixed constellations that wheel slowly across the arch of the year and the Messenger’s swift spark in the darkness. She thinks of them as her people’s birthright, if her people can only understand what they are being told.

Her kind has won a great victory over the ants, turning enemies into allies, reversing the tide of the war. From here on, colony after colony will fall to them. Surely it is in recognition of this, in reward for their cleverness and endurance and success, that the Messenger has sent them this sign.

With her body twanging with manifest destiny, Portia now plans the capture of her colossal prize.

3.11
THIS ISLAND GULAG

From the comms room, Holsten watched the last shuttle depart for the moon base, carrying its oblivious human cargo.

Guyen’s plan was simple. An active crew of fifty had been woken up and briefed on what was expected – or perhaps demanded – of them. The base was ready for them, everything constructed by the automatics during the
Gilgamesh
’s last long sleep, and tested fit for habitation. It would be the crew’s job to keep it running and operational, so as to turn it into a new home for the human race.

They would have another two hundred in suspension – ready to call on when they needed them – to replace losses or more hopefully to expand their active population when the base was ready for them. They would have children. Their children would inherit what they had built.

At some time in the future, generations later, it was anticipated that the
Gilgamesh
would return from its long voyage to the next terraforming project, hopefully carrying a cargo of pirated Old Empire technology that would, as Guyen said, make everyone’s lives that much easier.

Or enable him to mount an attack on the Kern’s satellite and claim her planet
, Holsten thought, and surely he wasn’t alone in thinking that, though nobody was voicing it.

If the
Gilgamesh
did not return – if, say, the next system had a more aggressive guardian than Kern, or some other mishap should befall the ark ship – then the moon colony would just have to . . .

‘Manage’ was the word that Guyen had used. Nobody was going behind that. Nobody wanted to think about the limited range of fates possible for such a speck of human dust in the vast face of the cosmos.

The newly appointed leader of the colonists was not another Scoles, certainly. That intrepid woman listened to her orders with grim acceptance. Looking into her face, Holsten told himself that he could see a terrible, bleak despair hiding in her eyes. What was she being handed, after all? At the worst a death sentence, at the best a life sentence. An undeserved penal term that her children would inherit straight from the womb.

He started when someone clapped him on the shoulder: Lain. The two of them – along with Karst and his team – had only recently got out of quarantine. The only good out of the whole of Scoles’s doomed excursion planetside was that there didn’t seem to be any bacteria or viruses down there that posed an immediate danger to human health. And why would there be? As Lain had pointed out, there hadn’t seemed to be anything human-like down there to incubate them.

‘Time for bed,’ the engineer told him. ‘Last shuttle’s away, so we’re ready to depart. You’ll want to be in suspension before we stop rotation. Until we get our acceleration up, gravity’s going to be all over the place.’