Children of Time (37 page)

Portia, already ground down by the vicissitudes of the day so far, hunches low, foregoing all the usual physical posturing and bluster.
Don’t drive me away. You have few allies in Great Nest now.

Only you?

Only me.
Portia studies Bianca’s body language, seeing the larger female change stance slightly, reconsidering.

I have no names to reveal, no others to betray to you
, the accused warns the inquisitor.
My beliefs are my own. I do not need a brood around me to tell me how right I am.

Leaving aside the fact that many of Bianca’s accomplices have already been seized and sentenced under the Temple’s authority, Portia has already decided to abandon that line of enquiry. There remains only one thing at stake.
I am here to save you. Only you, sister.

Bianca’s palps move slightly, an unconscious expression of interest, but she says nothing.

I do not wish a home that I cannot share with you
, Portia tells her, her steps and gestures careful, weighty with consideration.
If you are gone, there will be a hole torn in my world, so that all else falls out of shape. If you recant, I will go to my fellows at Temple, and they will listen to me. You will fall from favour, but you will remain free.

Recant?
Bianca echoes.

If you explain to Temple that you were mistaken or misled, then I can spare you. I shall have you for my own, to work alongside me.

But I am
not
mistaken.
Bianca’s movements were categorical and firm.

You must be.

If you turn lenses on the night sky, lenses of the strength and purity that we can now produce, you will see it too
, Bianca explains calmly.

That is a mystery that cannot be comprehended by those outside Temple
, Portia reprimands her.

So say those inside Temple. But I have looked; I have seen the face of the Messenger, and measured and studied it as it passes above. I have set out my plates and analysed the light that it seems to shed. Light reflected from the sun only. And the mystery is that there is no mystery. I can tell you the size and speed of the Messenger. I can even guess at what it is constructed from. The Messenger is a rock of metal, no more.

They will exile you
, Portia tells her.
You know what that means?
For females do not kill other females any more, and the harshest sentence of Great Nest is to deny the accused that metropolis’s wonders. Such felons receive a chemical branding that marks them out for death if they approach any of the city’s ant colonies – and many other colonies beyond, as the mark does not discriminate. To be exiled all too often means a return to solitary barbarism in the depths of the wilds, forever retreating before civilization’s steady spread.

I have taken on many Understandings in my life
, Bianca clearly might as well not have heard.
I have listened to another Messenger’s incomprehensible signals in the night. The thing you call God is not even alone in the sky. It is a thing of metal that demands we make more things of metal – and I have seen it, how small it is.

Portia skitters nervously, if only because, in her lowest hours, she herself has played host to similar thoughts.
Bianca, you cannot turn away from Temple. Our people have followed the words of the Messenger since our earliest days – from long before we could understand Her purpose. Even if you have your personal doubts, you cannot deny that the traditions that have built Great Nest have allowed us to survive many threats. They have made us what we are.

Bianca seems sad.
And now they prevent us from being all that we could be
, she suggests.
And that is at the heart of me. If I were to cut myself away from it, there would be nothing left of me. I do not just feel Temple is mistaken, I believe that Temple has become a burden. And you know that I am not alone. You will have spoken with the temples in other cities – even those cities that Great Nest is hostile to. You know that others feel as I do.

And they will be punished, in turn
, Portia tells her.
As will you.

5.3
OLD FRIENDS

Four of them met in an old service room that seemed to represent neutral ground in the midst of those parts of the ship claimed by the various cliques. Lain and the other two all had retinues who waited outside, eyeing each other nervously like hostile soldiers in a cold war.

Inside, it was a reunion.

Vitas hadn’t changed – Holsten suspected that overall she had not been out of the freezer much longer than he had, or perhaps she just wore the extra time well: a neat, trim woman with her feelings buried sufficiently deep that her face remained a cypher. She wore a shipsuit, still, as though she had stepped straight from Holsten’s memories without being touched by the chaos that the
Gilgamesh
was apparently falling into. Lain had already explained how Vitas had been enlisted by Guyen to help with the uploader. The woman’s thoughts on this were unknown, but she had come when Lain got a message to her, slipping through the circles of Guyen’s cult like smoke, shadowed by a handful of her assistants.

Karst looked older, closing in on Holsten’s age. His beard had returned – patchy, greying in uneven degrees – and he wore his hair tied back. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, barrel downwards, and he had come in armour, a full suit of the kind that Holsten remembered him favouring before – good against Lain’s gun, perhaps not so much against a knife. His technological advantage was being eroded by the backwards nature of the times.

He was also working with Guyen, but Lain had explained that Karst was something of a law unto himself these days. He controlled the ship’s armoury and only he had ready access to firearms in any quantity; his security detail, and whatever conscripts he had enlisted, were loyal to him first and foremost. And so was he, of course: Karst was Karst’s chief priority, or so Lain believed.

Now the security chief let out a loud bark of what sounded like derision. ‘You even broke the old man out of his grave for us! That sick for nostalgia, Lain? Or maybe for something else?’

‘I broke him from a cage in Guyen’s sector,’ Lain stated. ‘He’s been there for days. I guess you didn’t know.’

Karst glowered at her, then at Holsten himself, who confirmed it with a nod. Even Vitas seemed to be unsurprised, and the security chief threw up his hands.

‘Nobody tells me fucking
anything
,’ he spat. ‘Well, well, here we all are. How fucking
pleasant
. So how about you speak your piece.’

‘How’ve you been, Karst?’ Holsten asked quietly, wrong-footing everyone, including Lain.

‘Seriously?’ The security chief’s eyebrows disappeared into his shaggy hairline. ‘You actually want to do the small-talk thing?’

‘I want to know how this can possibly work, this . . . what Lain’s told me is going on.’ Holsten had decided, on the way over, that he was not merely going to be the engineer’s yes-man. ‘I mean . . . how long’s this been going on for? It just seems . . . insane. Guyen’s got a cult? He’s been futtering with this upload thing for, what, decades? Generations? Why? He could just have brought this business before the Key Crew and talked it over.’ He caught an awkward look shared between the three others. ‘Or . . . right, ok. So maybe that did happen. I suppose I wasn’t Key Crew enough to be invited.’

‘It wasn’t as though anyone needed anything translated,’ Karst said, with a shrug.

‘At the time there was some considerable debate,’ Vitas added crisply. ‘However, on balance it was decided that there was too much unknown about the process, especially its effect on the
Gilgamesh
’s systems. Personally I was in favour of experimentation and trial.’

‘So, what, Guyen just set himself to wake early, got a replacement tech crew out of cargo, and started work?’ Holsten hazarded.

‘All in place when he woke me. And frankly, I don’t pretend to understand the technical arguments.’ Karst shrugged. ‘So he needed me to track down people who were escaping from his little prison-camp cult thing. I figured the best thing I could do was look after my own people and make sure nobody else got hold of the guns. So, Lain, you want the guns now? Is that it?’

Lain cast a glance at Holsten to see if he was about to go off on another tangent, then nodded shortly. ‘I want the help of your people. I want to stop Guyen. The ship’s falling apart – any more and the main systems are going to be irretrievably compromised.’

‘Says you,’ Karst replied. ‘Guyen says that once he actually does the . . . does the
thing,
then everything goes back to normal – that he’ll be in the computer, or some copy of him, and everything’ll run as sweet as you like.’

‘And this is possible,’ Vitas added. ‘Not certain, but possible. So we must compare the potential danger of Guyen completing his project with that of an attempt to interrupt him. It is not an easy judgement to make.’

Lain looked from face to face. ‘And yet here you both are, and I’ll bet Guyen doesn’t know.’

‘Knowledge is never wasted,’ Vitas observed calmly.

‘And what if I told you that Guyen’s withholding knowledge from you?’ Lain pressed. ‘How about transmissions from the moon colony we left behind? Heard any of those lately?’

Karst looked sidelong at Vitas. ‘Yeah? What’ve they got to say?’

‘Fucking little. They’re all dead.’

Lain smiled grimly into the silence that generated. ‘They died while we were still on our way to the grey planet system. They called the ship; Guyen intercepted their messages. Did he tell any of you? He certainly didn’t tell me. I found the signals archived, by chance.’

‘What happened to them?’ Karst said reluctantly.

‘I’ve put the messages up on the system, where you can both access them. I’ll direct you to them. Be quick, though. Unprotected data gets corrupted quickly nowadays, thanks to Guyen’s leftovers.’

‘Yeah, well, he blames
you
for that. Or Kern sometimes,’ Karst pointed out.

‘Kern?’ Holsten demanded. ‘The satellite thing?’

‘It was in our systems,’ Vitas remarked. ‘It’s possible it left some sort of ghost construct to monitor us. Guyen believes so.’ Her face wrinkled up, just a little. ‘Guyen has become somewhat obsessed. He believes that Kern is trying to stop him.’ She nodded cordially to Lain. ‘Kern and you.’

Lain folded her arms. ‘Cards on the table. I see no fucking benefit to Guyen becoming an immortal presence in our computer system. In fact, I see all manner of possible drawbacks, some of them fatal for us, the ship and the entire human race. Ergo: we stop him. Who’s in? Holsten’s with me.’

‘Well, shit, if you’ve got
him
, why’d you need the rest of us?’ Karst drawled.

‘He’s Key Crew.’

Karst’s expression was eloquent as to his opinion of that.

And is that it, for me? I’m just here to add my miniscule weight – unasked! – to Lain’s argument?
Holsten considered morosely.

‘I confess that I am curious as to the result of the commander’s experiment. The ability to preserve human minds electronically would certainly be advantageous,’ Vitas stated.

‘Planning to become Bride of Guyen?’ Karst asked, startling a glare from her.

‘Karst?’ Lain prompted.

The security chief threw his hands up. ‘Nobody tells me anything, not really. People just want me to do stuff and they’re never straight with me. Me? I’m for my people. Right now, Guyen’s got a whole bunch of weirdos who have been raised from the cradle on him being the fucking messiah. You’ve got a handful of decently tooled and trained lads and lasses here, but you’re not exactly the fighting elite. Take on Guyen and you’ll lose. Now I’m not a fucking
scientist
or anything, but my maths says why should I help you when I’ll likely just get my people hurt?’

‘Because you’ve got the guns to counter Guyen’s numbers.’

‘Not a good reason,’ Karst stated.

‘Because I’m right, and Guyen’s going to wreck the ship’s systems by trying to force his fucking ego into our computers.’

‘Says you. He says differently,’ Karst replied stubbornly. ‘Look, you reckon you’ve got an actual plan, as in an actual plan that would have a chance of success and not just “let Karst do all the work”? Come to me with that, and maybe I’ll listen. Until then . . .’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘You’ve not got enough, Lain. Not chances, nor arguments either.’

‘Then just give me enough guns,’ Lain insisted.

Karst sighed massively. ‘I only really got as far as making one rule: nobody gets the guns. You’re worried about the damage Guyen’ll do with this thing he wants to do? Well, I don’t get any of that. But the damage when everyone starts shooting everyone else – and all sorts of bits of the ship, too? Yeah, that I understand. The mutiny was bad enough. Like I say, come back when you’ve got more.’

‘Give me disruptors, then.’

The security chief shook his head. ‘Look, sorry to say it, but I still don’t think that’ll even the odds enough for you to actually
win
, and then Guyen’s not exactly going to be scratching his head about where all your dead people got their toys from, eh? Get me a proper idea. Show me you can actually pull it off.’

‘So you’ll help me if I can show I don’t actually need you?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re done here, aren’t we? Let me know when you’ve got a plan, Lain.’ He turned and lumbered off, the plates of his armoured suit scraping together slightly.

Lain was icily furious as Karst and Vitas left, fists clenching and re-clenching.

‘Pair of self-deluding fuckwits!’ she spat. ‘They know I’m right, but it’s Guyen – they’re so used to doing what that mad son of a bitch says.’

She glared at Holsten as if daring him to gainsay her. In fact, the historian had felt a certain sympathy with Karst’s position, but plainly that was not what Lain wanted to hear.

‘So what will you do?’ he asked.

‘Oh, we’ll act,’ Lain swore. ‘Let Karst keep his precious guns locked up. We’ve got one workshop up and running, and I’ve already started weapons production. They won’t be pretty, but they’re better than knives and clubs.’