Children of Time (54 page)

He thought again about Alpash’s accent. These transmissions seemed almost as if someone out there was speaking some barbarous version of that ancient language, encoded just as Kern encoded her transmissions; some degraded or evolved or simply corrupted attempt at the ancient tongue.

It was proper historian work, just poring over it. He could almost forget the trouble they were all in, and pretend he was on the brink of some great discovery that anyone would care about.
What if this isn’t just the crazed gibberish of a dying computer? What if this means something?
If it was Kern trying to talk to them, though, then she had obviously lost most of what she was – the woman/machine that Holsten remembered had no difficulty in making herself understood.

So what was she trying to say now?

The more he listened to the clearest of those decoded transmissions – those sent directly along the line of the
Gilgamesh
’s approach – the more he felt that someone was trying to speak to him, across millions of kilometres and across a gap of comprehension that was far greater. He could even fool himself that little snippets of phrasing were coming together into something resembling a coherent message.

Stay away. We do not wish to fight. Go back.

Holsten stared at what he had.
Am I just imagining this?
None of it had been clear – the transmission was in poor shape, and nothing about it fitted in with Kern’s earlier behaviour. The more he looked, though, the more he became sure that this
was
a message, and that it was intended specifically for them. They were being warned off again, as though by dozens of different voices. Even in those sections he could not disentangle, he could pick out individual words.
Leave. Peace. Alone. Death.

He wondered what he could possibly tell Karst.

He slept on it for a while, in the end, and then shambled off to find the acting commander in the comms room.

‘You’re cutting it fine,’ Karst told him. ‘I launched the drones hours back. I calculate about two hours before they do what they do, if it can be done at all.’

‘Burning Kern?’

‘Fucking right.’ Karst stared at the working screens surrounding him with haunted, desperate eyes that belied the easy grin he kept trying to keep pinned on his face. ‘Come on then, Holsten, out with it.’

‘Well, it’s a message and it’s intended for us – that much I’m reasonably certain about.’

‘“Reasonably certain”? Fucking academics,’ but it was almost good-natured, even so. ‘So Kern’s down to basically bombarding us with baby talk, wanting us to go away.’

‘I can’t translate most of it, but those pieces that make any sense at all seem to be consistently along that theme,’ Holsten confirmed. In fact he was feeling unhappy about his own efforts, as though in this, the last professional challenge of his career, he had made some student-level error and failed. The transmissions had been in front of him, a large body of material to cross-reference, and he had constantly felt on the edge of a breakthrough that would make it all crystal clear to him. It had never come, though, and now there was no time to go back to it. He felt that he had shackled himself too much to the way the Old Empire did things, just as everyone always had. If he had come to those transmissions with more of an open mind, rather than trying to recast them in the shape of Kern’s earlier work, what might he have found?

‘Well, fuck her,’ was Karst’s informed opinion. ‘We’re not going anywhere. We don’t have that option any more. It all comes down to this, just like it was always going to. Am I right?’

‘You are,’ Holsten replied hollowly. ‘Are we getting anything from the drones?’

‘I don’t want them transmitting anything until they’re close enough to actually get to work,’ Karst said. ‘Believe me, I remember what fucking Kern can do. You weren’t in that shuttle where she just took the whole thing over, remember? Just drifting in space with nothing but life-support, while she worked out what she wanted to do with us. That was no fun at all, believe me.’

‘And yet she let you come down and pick us up,’ Holsten recalled. He thought Karst might come back at him angrily for that, accuse him of going soft, but the security chief’s face took on a thoughtful air.

‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘And if I thought that there was any chance . . . but she’s not going to let us on to that planet, Holsten. We tried that one, over and over. She’s going to sit there and hoard the last chance for the human race, and let us all die out in space.’

Holsten nodded. His mind was full of that planet balefully whispering for them to go away. ‘Can I send from the ship? It might even take her attention from the drones . . . I don’t know.’

‘No. Complete silence from us. If she’s so crazy that she hasn’t seen us, I don’t want you clueing her in.’

Karst could not keep still. He checked with his seconds in Security; he checked with the senior members – chiefs? – of the Tribe. He paced and fretted, and tried to get some passive data on the drones’ progress, without running the risk of alerting Kern.

‘You really think she won’t see them coming?’ Holsten objected.

‘Who can know? She’s old, Holsten, really old – older than us by a long way. She was crazy before. Maybe she’s gone completely mad, now. I’m not giving her anything more than I have to. We get one shot at this before it’s down to the
Gil
itself. Literally one shot. Seriously, you know how much power a decent laser takes up? And believe me, those are our two best functioning drones – fucking patchwork jobs from all the working bits we could find.’ He clenched his fists, fighting against the weight of his responsibilities. ‘Everything’s falling
apart
, Holsten. We’ve got to get on to that planet. The ship’s dying. That stupid moon base thing of Guyen’s – that died. Earth . . .’

‘I know.’ Holsten hunted about for some sort of reassurance, but he honestly couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Chief,’ interrupted one of the Tribe, ‘transmissions from the drones, coming in. They’re coming up on the planet, ready to deploy.’

‘At
last
!’ Karst practically shouted, and stared about him. ‘Which screen’s best? Which is working?’

Four screens flared with the new images, one flickering and dying but the other three holding steady. They saw that familiar green orb: a thing of dreams, the promised land. The drones were following their path towards the satellite’s orbital track, darting in to intercept it and bring an end to it. They didn’t care about what they were seeing, unlike the human eyes now watching vicariously through their lenses.

Karst’s mouth hung open. At this moment, even the ability to curse seemed to have deserted him. He fumbled backwards for a seat, and then sat down heavily. Everyone in comms had stopped work, instead staring at the screen, at what had been done to their paradise.

Kern’s satellite was not alone in its vigil.

Around the circumference of the planet, girdling its equator in a broad ring, was a vast band of tangled lines and strands and nodes: not satellites, but a whole orbiting network, interconnected and continuous around the entire world. It flared bright in the sunlight, opening green petals towards the system’s star. There were a thousand irregular nodes pulled into taut, angular shapes by their connecting conduits. There was a bustle to it, of constant activity.

It was a web. It was as though some unthinkable horror had begun the job of cocooning the planet before it fed on it. It was a single vast web in geostationary orbit about the planet, and Kern’s metal home was just one pinpoint within its myriad complexity.

Holsten thought about those thousand, thousand transmissions from Kern’s World, but not from Kern herself. He thought about those hateful whispers telling the
Gilgamesh
, impossibly, to turn around and go away.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter . . .

The drones were arrowing in now, still seeking out Kern’s satellite, because their programming had somehow not prepared them for this.

‘Spiders . . .’ said Karst slowly. His eyes were roving around, seeking desperately for inspiration. ‘It’s not possible.’ There was a pleading edge to his voice.

Holsten just stared at that vast snare laid around the planet, seeing more detail every second as the drones closed with it. He saw things moving across it, shuttling back and forth. He saw long strands reaching out into space from it, as though hungry for more prey. He thought he saw other lines reaching down towards the planet itself. His skin was crawling, and he remembered his brief stay on the planet, the deaths of the mutineers.

‘No,’ said Karst flatly, and, ‘No,’ again. ‘It’s ours. It’s
ours
. We
need
it. I don’t care what the fuck the bastards have done with it. We’ve nowhere else to go.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Holsten asked faintly.

‘
We
are going to fight,’ Karst stated, and his sense of purpose returned with those words. ‘We are going to fight Kern, and we are going to fight . . .
that
. We are coming home, you hear me? That’s home now. It’s all the home we’ll ever have. And we will mass-driver the fucking place from orbit if we have to, to make it ours. We’ll burn them out. We’ll burn them
all
out. What else have we got?’

He rubbed at his face. When he took his hands away, he seemed composed. ‘Right, I need more minds on this. Alpash, it’s time.’

The engineer nodded.

‘Time for what?’ Holsten demanded.

‘Time to wake up Lain,’ Karst replied.

7.2
WHAT ROUGH BEAST

Far beyond the physical tendrils with which they have ringed their planet, the spiders have extended a wider web. Biotechnological receptors in the cold of space hear radio messages, await the return of soundless calls into the void, and reach out for disturbances in gravity and the electromagnetic spectrum – the tremors on the strands that will let them know when a guest has arrived in their parlour.

They have been preparing for this day for many generations. The entire planet has, ever since they finally bridged that gap with God, fingertip to leg-tip. Their entire civilization has come together with a purpose, and that purpose is
survival
.

The Messenger had forever been trying to prepare them, to mould them into Her image and give them the weapons She thought they needed, in order to fight back. Only when She stopped treating them like children – like monkeys – was She able to do what perhaps She should have done from the start: communicate the problem to them; let them find a solution that was within the reach of their minds and their technology.

One advantage of God ceasing to move in mysterious ways is that the entire planet has found a hitherto unknown unity. Little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction. The Messenger was unstinting in Her assurances that the spiders would have nothing else to look forward to if the
Gilgamesh
was allowed to return unopposed. She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species’ history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection.

For generations, then, a political unity of the spider cities has worked towards creating this vast orbital presence, using all the tools available. The spiders have entered the space age with desperate vigour.

And Bianca looks up at the darkening sky, at the unseen filigree of Great Star Nest, the orbital city, and knows that she would rather this had not come about in her lifetime.

The enemy is coming.

She has never seen this enemy, but she knows what it looks like. She has sought out ancient Understandings, preserved across the centuries, that reach back to a time when her kind faced extinction at the jaws of a much more comprehensible foe. For, during their conquest of the ant super-colony, Bianca’s species encountered what she now knows as humanity. There were giants in the world, back in those days.

She now sees, through the long-gone eyes of a distant ancestor, the captive monster that had fallen from the sky – not from the Messenger, as had been believed, but from this approaching menace. Little did they know it was a herald of the end.

It seems so hard to believe that such a huge, ponderous thing could have been sentient, but apparently it was. More than sentient. Things like
that
– just as the Messenger had once been a thing like that – are the
ur
-race, the ancient astronauts responsible for all life that has evolved on Bianca’s world. And now they are returning to undo that mistake.

Bianca’s musings have taken her out of the vast reach of the Seven Trees conurbation and on to the closest anchor point, travelling swiftly by wire in a capsule powered by artificial, photosynthetic, self-sufficient muscle. Now she disembarks, feeling the great open space around her. Most of her world’s tropical and temperate land area is still forested, either for agricultural purposes, as wild reserves, or serving as the scaffolding that her species use to build their cities. The areas around the elevator anchor points are all kept clear, though, and she sees a great tent of silken walls a hundred feet high, culminating in a single point that stretches ever away into the high distance, beyond the ability of her eyes to follow it. She knows where it goes, though: heading up, up out of the planet’s atmosphere, then up further and further, as a slender thread that reaches halfway to the arc of the moon. The equator is studded with them.

That long-ago balloonist was right: there was an easier way to claw one’s way up and out of the planet’s gravity well and into orbit, and all it took was spinning a strong enough thread.

Bianca meets with her assistants, a subdued band of five females and two males, and they hurry inside to another capsule, this one moving by little more than simple mechanical principles utilized on a grand scale. Unimaginably far away is a comparable weight even now descending inwards towards the planet’s surface. By exercise of the sort of mathematics that Bianca’s species has been fluent in for centuries, Bianca’s own car begins its long, long ascent.