Children of Time (53 page)

Over in comms, Karst looked refreshingly the same. The big security chief had been given the time to get some stubble going on his ravaged face, and he had obviously not been wheeled out much since Holsten last saw him, because he had barely aged.

As the surviving Key Crew filed in, he grinned at them, an expression equally of anticipation and strain.

‘Come in and find a seat, or stand, whatever you like. Vitas, can you hear me?’

‘I hear,’ the science chief’s voice crackled and spat from an unseen speaker. ‘I’ll continue to supervise the unpacking, but I’m listening.’

Karst grimaced, shrugged. ‘Right,’ he turned to address them all, looking from face to face. When he met Holsten’s eyes there was none of the expected dislike. Gone was any hint that the security man had never much cared for Holsten Mason. Absent, too, was the expected air of dismissal, that of a man of action who had no use for the man of letters. Instead, Karst’s grin dwindled to a smaller but much more sincere smile. It was a look of things shared, a commonality between two people who had been there right at the start, and were still here now.

‘We’re going to fight,’ the security chief told them all. ‘We’ve basically got just one good chance at it. You all know the score, or you should do. There’s a satellite out there that can probably rip open the
Gil
in a blink if we give it the chance. Now, we bolted on some sort of diffusion shielding, back when we were pirating that terraforming station – some of you maybe weren’t awake for that, but there’s a summary in the system of the changes we made. We also hardened our computer systems, so that bitch – so the satellite – can’t just shut us down or open the airlocks, that sort of trick. We’ve taken every precaution, and I still reckon toe-to-toe we might be screwed.’ He was grinning again, though.

‘But I’ve had some drones fitted out in the workshops. They’ve got shielded systems as well, and lasers that I think can burn the satellite. That’s the plan, basically. Best defence is a good offence, and so on. As we come in towards our orbit, we burn the fucker up and hope it’s enough. Otherwise it’s down to using the
Gil
’s forward array, and that puts us within range of retaliation.’ He paused, then finished: ‘So you’re probably wondering what the fuck I need with all of you guys, yeah?’

Holsten cleared his throat. ‘Well, Vitas asked me if I could use a gun. I appreciate I’m no great tactician, but if it comes to needing that against the satellite, we’ve probably already lost.’

Karst actually laughed. ‘Yeah, well, I’m planning ahead – planning to win. Cos if we don’t win against the satellite, there’s no point in planning anyway. So let’s assume we burn it out. What next?’

‘The planet,’ someone said. There was a curious ripple through the room, of hope and dread together.

Karst nodded moodily. ‘Yeah, most of you never saw it but, believe me, it’s not going to be an easy place to settle down on, at least at the start. Am I right, Mason?’

Holsten started at unexpectedly having his opinion solicited.
But, of course, there’s just him and me who were down there on the surface.
‘You’re right,’ he confirmed.

‘That’s where guns come in, for those that feel they can lower themselves to use them.’ Karst, already pre-lowered, winched his grin up a notch. ‘Basically the planet’s full of all sorts of beasties – spiders and bugs and all manner of shit. So, while we get ourselves set up, we’re going to be burning
them
out, too: clearing forest, driving off the wildlife, exterminating anything that looks at us funny. It’ll be fun. Frankly it’s the sort of thing I’ve been looking forward to since I first got aboard. Hard work, though. And everyone works. Remember, we’re Key Crew. Us and the chiefs of the new engineers, like Al here, it’s our responsibility. We make this work. Everyone’s depending on us. Think about that: when I say
everyone
I really mean it. The
Gilgamesh
is all there is.’

He clapped his hands, as though that entire speech had reinvigorated him and boosted his personal morale. ‘Security team, whoever’s got the pad with our new recruits, sort them out and get them armed. Teach them which end not to look down. You lot all get to join us on the bug hunt, afterwards.’

Holsten assumed that meant everyone fool enough to say ‘yes’ when Vitas had asked them if they could use a gun.

‘Tribe,’ Karst added, then seemed to lose momentum. ‘I won’t bother telling you, as you know what you’re doing. Been doing it long enough, anyway. Alpash, stick close, though. I want you as liaison.’

‘Tribe’ seemed to be the engineers, or those descendants of theirs currently keeping the ship together. The few of them still there now bolted off, with the air of people who had found the entire proceedings boring and unnecessary, but had been aware that they should be on their best behaviour nonetheless, like children during a religious service.

‘Right, Mason . . . Harlen?’

‘Holsten.’

‘Right.’ Karst nodded, unapologetic. ‘Something special for you, right? You actually get to do your job. The satellite’s transmitting all sorts of shit, and you’re the only person who might know what it’s saying.’

‘Transmitting . . . to us?’

‘Yes. Maybe. Alpash?’

‘Probably no,’ the young engineer confirmed.

‘Anyway, whatever, take Mason here and plug him in. Mason, if you can make anything out of it, let me know. Personally I reckon it’s just gone mad.’

‘Madder,’ Holsten corrected and, although this hadn’t been a joke, Karst laughed.

‘We’re all in the boat, aren’t we?’ he said almost fondly, glancing around at the battered confines of the
Gilgamesh
. ‘All of us on the same old boat.’ The mask slipped, and for a second Holsten was looking into the stress-fractures and botch-job repairs that made up Karst’s over-strained soul. The man had always been a follower, and now he was in charge, the last general of the human race facing unknown odds with the highest possible stakes. His somewhat disjointed briefing now looked in retrospect like a man fighting for his composure – and holding on to it, just. Against all expectations, Karst was coping. Come the hour, come the man.

Also, he might be drunk. Holsten realized he couldn’t tell.

Alpash led him to a console, still acting as though Holsten and Karst and the rest were heroes of legend brought to life, but turning out to be somewhat disappointing in the flesh. Holsten wondered, with a professional curiosity, whether some crazy myth cycle had grown up amongst the Tribe, with himself and the rest of Key Crew as a pantheon of fractious gods, trickster heroes and monsters. He had no idea how many generations had gone by since their last actual contact with anyone not born on the
Gilgamesh
, since . . .

He had been about to ask, but a piece clicked into place and he knew that he wouldn’t ask, not now. Not when he had thought of Lain at last. For Lain must have died long, long ago. Had she thought of him, at the end? Had she come to look into the cold stillness of his coffin, her sleeping prince who she had never permitted to come back for her?

Alpash gave a nervous cough, picking up on Holsten’s suddenly changed mood.

The classicist scowled, waved off the man’s concern. ‘Tell me about these transmissions.’

With a worried look, Alpash turned to the console. The machinery looked battered, something that had been taken apart and put back together more than once. There was some sort of symbol and some graffiti stencilled on the side, which looked new. Holsten stared at it for a moment before disentangling the words.

Do not open. No user-serviceable parts inside.

He laughed, thinking that he saw the joke, the sort of bleak humour that he recalled engineers resorting to in extremis. There was nothing on Alpash’s face to suggest that he saw any humour in it, though, or that the slogan was anything other than a sacred symbol of the Tribe. Abruptly Holsten felt bitter and sick again. He felt like Karst must feel. He was just a thing of the lost past trying to recapture an almost-lost future.

‘There’s a lot of it,’ Alpash explained. ‘It’s constant, on multiple frequencies. We can’t understand any of it. I don’t know what this Avrana Kern is, but I think the commander may be right. It sounds like madness. It’s like the planet is whispering to itself.’

‘The planet?’ Holsten queried.

‘We’re not getting these signals direct from the satellite, as far as we can understand.’ Now that Alpash began speaking more, Holsten heard unfamiliar rhythms and inflections in his words – a little of Lain, a little of the
Gilgamesh
’s automatic systems, a little of something new. There was obviously a ship-born accent now.

Alpash brought up a numerical display that was apparently intended to be educational. ‘You can see here what we can tell from the transmissions.’ Holsten was used to the
Gilgamesh
sugar-coating that sort of data in a form that a layman could understand, but that concession was apparently not something the Tribe felt it needed.

Seeing his blank look, the engineer went on, ‘Our best bet is that these are transmissions being directed at the planet, just like the original numerical sequence, and we’re now catching bounce-back. They’re definitely coming to us by way of the planet, though.’

‘You’ve had any other classicists working on this, out of cargo? There must be a few students or . . .’

Alpash looked solemn. ‘I’m afraid not. We have searched the manifest. There were only a very few at the start. You are the last.’

Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society had possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of one old man’s head?
All that history, and if . . . when I die . . . ?
He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s survivalist Eden.

He shivered – not from the usual human sense of mortality, but from a feeling of vast, invisible things falling away into oblivion, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Grimly he turned to the messages that Alpash was now showing him.

After some work, Holsten finally deciphered the display enough to register just how many of the recordings there were, and these presumably just a fraction of the total.
What’s Kern playing at? Maybe she has gone off the deep end, after all.
He accessed one, but it wasn’t anything like the other transmissions from the satellite which he remembered. Still . . . Holsten felt long-unused academic parts of his brain try to sit up and take notice, seeing complexity, repeated patterns. He performed whatever analysis and modelling the console allowed him. This wasn’t random static, but nor was it the Old Empire messages that Kern/Eliza had used previously. ‘Perhaps it’s encrypted,’ he mused to himself.

‘There’s a second type as well,’ Alpash explained. ‘This is how the majority go, but there are some that seem different. Here.’

Holsten listened to the chosen recording, another sequence of pulses, but this time seeming closer to what he would actually recognize as a message. ‘Just this, though? No distress signal? No number sequences?’

‘This – and as much of this as you could want,’ Alpash confirmed.

‘How much time do we have before . . . before things start?’

‘At least thirty hours.’

Holsten nodded. ‘Can I get something to eat?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then leave me with this and I’ll see if I can find anything in it for Karst.’ Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask him that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study:
What is it like to be you?
A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.

With some help from the Tribe, he was able to hunt through the
Gilgamesh
’s systems for at least some of his electronic toolkit to try and unpick the messages. He was given what he wanted, then left alone to work. He had a sense that, across the ship, a great many ship-born and woken were bracing themselves for the moment their lives had been leading up to for generations, and during sleeping centuries, respectively. He was happy to be out of it. Here, at this failing end of time, the classicist Holsten Mason was glad to be poring over some incomprehensible transmissions in a futile search for meaning. He was not Karst. Nor was he Alpash, or his kin.
Old, I’m old
,
in so many ways.
Old, and yet still lively enough that he was even going to outlive the ark ship itself, by the look of things.

He realized he could make nothing out of the majority of the messages. They were generally faint, and he guessed that they were being sent from the planet in all directions, just radiating out into space.

Rather, bounced off the planet. Not sent, of course not sent. He blinked, obscurely uncomfortable. Whatever their source, though, they were sufficiently far from anything he knew that he could not even be sure that they
were
messages, couched in any kind of code or language. Only a stubborn streak of structure to them convinced him that they were not some natural interference or just white noise.

The others, though, they were stronger, and recent analysis conducted by the Tribe suggested that they might actually be targeted towards the
Gilgamesh
’s line of approach, as though Kern was using the planet as a sounding board to rant incomprehensibly at them. Or the planet itself was shouting at them.

Or the planet was shouting?

Holsten rubbed at his eyes. He had been working for too long. He was beginning to come adrift from rational speculation.

These transmissions, though – at first he had thought they were as much babble as the rest, but he had cross-referenced them with some old stored records of messages from the satellite, and tried to treat them in the same way, varying the encoding by trial and error until something like a message had abruptly sprung out from the white noise. There had been words, or at least he had fooled himself that he had decoded words there. Imperial C words, words out of history, the dead language given new and mutated life.