Children of Time (24 page)

‘H-hh . . .’ he managed.

‘Fuck.’ He heard her fumbling about next to him, and then she was muttering, ‘Come on, come on, we must have emergency power. I can see your fucking lights, you bitch. You don’t flash your fucking lights at me to tell me there’s no . . .’ and then a dim amber illumination seeped in from a strip that encircled the cabin near the ceiling, revealing a surprisingly tidy crash scene. Aside from the one luckless deceased, the rest of them were still strapped into their seats: Scoles, Nessel, the pilot and one other man and woman of the mutineers, plus Lain and Holsten. The fact that the landing had been survivable by mere fragile humans meant that most of the cabin interior was still intact, though almost nothing appeared to be functioning. Even the comms panel appeared to have been exorcized from Avrana Kern’s malign ghost.

‘Thank you, whoever that was,’ Scoles said, then saw it was Lain and scowled. ‘Everyone speak up. Who’s hurt? Tevik?’

Tevik turned out to be the pilot, Holsten somewhat belatedly discovered. He had done something to his hand, he said; perhaps broken something. Of the others, nobody had escaped bruises and broken blood vessels – every eye was red almost to the iris – but only Holsten appeared to be seriously injured, with what Lain reckoned was a cracked rib.

Scoles hobbled from his seat, fetched medical supplies and began handing out painkillers, with a double dose for Tevik and Holsten. ‘These are emergency grade,’ he warned. ‘Means you won’t feel pain much at all – including when you should. You can end up tearing your muscles really easily by overdoing it.’

‘I don’t feel like overdoing it,’ Holsten said weakly. Lain stripped his shipsuit down to the waist and strapped a pressure bandage about his chest. Tevik got a gel cast to keep his hand together.

‘What’s the plan?’ Lain was asking as she worked. ‘Seven of us to populate a new Earth, is that it?’ When she looked up, she found Scoles was training a gun on her. Holsten saw the thought occur to her to say something sarcastic, but she wisely fought it down.

‘We can do it with five,’ the mutineer chief said quietly. His people were watching him uncertainly. ‘And if I can’t count on you, we will. If we’re going to survive out there, it’ll be tough. We’ll all need to rely on one another. Either you’re part of the team now, or you’re a waste of resources that could be allotted to someone more deserving.’

Lain’s eyes flicked between his face and the gun. ‘I don’t see that I have a choice – and I don’t mean that because you’re about to shoot me. We’re here now. What else is there?’

‘Right.’ Scoles nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re the engineer. Help us salvage everything from this thing that’s going to be useful. Anything we can use for heat or light. Any supplies here in the cabin.’ A tacit acknowledgement that all the gear he had
planned
to use, to build his brave new world, had been cut from him along with the bulk of his followers, up at the atmosphere’s edge.

‘I’ve got readings from outside,’ Tevik reported, having jury-rigged something on his console one-handed. ‘Temperature’s six over ship standard, atmosphere is five per cent oxygen over ship standard. Nothing poisonous.’

‘Biohazard?’ Nessel asked him.

‘Who knows? What I can tell you, however, is that we have precisely one sealed suit between us, because the rest were back in the hold when it blew. And without the scrubbers working, my dial here says we’ve got about two hours breathable air max.’

Everyone was silent for a while after that, thinking about killer viruses, flesh-eating bacteria, fungal spores.

‘The airlock’ll work on manual,’ Lain said, at last. While everyone else had been thinking about impending doom, she had just been
thinking
. ‘The medical kit can run an analysis on the microbial content of the air. If it’s alien stuff we’re fucked, because it won’t know what to make of it, but this is a terraformed world, so any bugs out there should be Earth-style, let’s hope. Someone needs to go out and wave it around.’

‘You’re volunteering?’ Scoles asked acidly.

‘Sure I am.’

‘Not you. Bales, suit up.’ He prodded the other female mutineer, who nodded grimly, shooting an evil look at Lain.

‘You know how to work the medical analyst?’ Lain asked her.

‘I was a clinician’s assistant, so better than you do,’ the woman Bales replied tartly, and Holsten recalled that she had been the one to case up Tevik’s hand.

They got her into the suit, with difficulty – it wasn’t a hard suit like the security detail had been wearing, just a ribbed white one-piece that hung slack off her frame, given that they wouldn’t need to pressurize it. The helm had a selection of visors to guard against anything ranging from abrasive dust to the searing naked glare of the sun, and enough cameras and heads-up displays to let the wearer run around blindfold, if need be. Working patiently, Nessel connected the medical scanner to the suit systems, and Lain managed to use emergency power to resurrect one of the small view-screens in the cabin to receive Bales’s camera feed. Nobody said anything about the vast scope of unknown dangers that could be waiting out there for this woman, and which her suit could not possibly have been designed for.

Scoles hauled open the airlock, and then shut it behind her. With no power to the doors, she would have to do the rest herself.

They were watching through her lenses as she got the external door open, whereupon the dark of the airlock was replaced by a dull, amber glare, the camera’s viewpoint swinging wildly as Bales stepped down from the hatch. When their vantage point stabilized, the scene revealed looked like some vision of hell: blackened, smoking, some of it still on fire, the external emergency lamps lighting up the choked air in an unhealthy yellowish fog.

‘It’s a wasteland,’ someone remarked, and then Bales stopped looking back down the charred furrow the shuttle cabin had raked in the soil, and turned her lens, and her eyes, on the forest instead.

Green
, was Holsten’s first helpless thought. In fact it was mostly shadowed darkness, but he remembered what the planet had looked like from orbit, and this was it: this was that great verdant band that had clad most of the tropical and temperate regions. He examined his memories of Earth – distant, poisoned Earth. By his generation, there had been nothing left like this, no riot of trees towering high, stretching into a vaulted, many-pillared space, out from the splintered hole that the shuttle’s fist had broken into it. It was
life
, and only now did Holsten realize that he had never really seen Earth life, as it had been intended. The home he remembered was just a dying, browning stub, but
this . . .
Gently, almost imperceptibly, Holsten felt something breaking up inside him.

‘Looks better than the inside of the
Gil
,’ Nessel suggested tentatively.

‘But is it safe?’ Lain pressed.

‘Safer than suffocating in here, you mean?’ Tevik asked derisively. ‘Anyway, the medical scanner is working. Sampling now, it says here.’

‘. . . hear me . . . ?’ came a faint voice from his console, and he jumped.

‘Comms is fried,’ Lain said tersely. ‘There’s a lot of crap in here that can be repurposed as a receiver, though. Don’t think we can answer yet.’

‘. . . know if you’re getting this . . .’ Bales’s voice ghosted in and out of audibility. ‘I can’t believe we’re . . .’

‘How long for the scanner?’ Scoles demanded.

‘It’s working,’ Tevik said noncommittally. ‘High microbial count already. Some of it recognized, some not. Nothing definitely harmful.’

‘Gather the kit and be ready to get out as soon as we get the all-clear.’

‘. . . not seeing any sign of biohazard . . .’ from Bales.

‘Give it
time
, come on,’ Tevik’s answering, unheard complaint. ‘All sorts of crap out there. Still no yellow lights, but . . .’

Bales screamed.

They heard it: tinny and distant as though it was some tiny person locked away within the cabin’s workings. The camera view was suddenly wavering wildly, then Bales appeared to be fighting with her own suit.

‘Fuck me, look at that!’ Lain spat. Holsten had only a blurred view of something spiny, leggy, attached to the woman’s boot. The screaming continued, and now there were audible words, ‘Let me in! Please!’

‘Open the airlock!’ Scoles shouted.

‘Wait, no!’ from Tevik. ‘Look, we can’t flush the air out. Nothing’s working. The air out there is planet-air. If there’s shit in it, we get it the moment we open the inner door!’

‘Open the fucking thing!’

And now Nessel was hauling on the lever, dragging the door open. Holsten had a mad moment of holding his breath against the anticipated plague before recognizing the stupidity of it.

Well, we’ve all got it now.

‘Get the guns. Get the gear. We’re here now, and it’s survive outside or die inside,’ Scoles snapped. ‘Everybody out, and quick!’

Nessel was already dragging at the outer door, tearing open their little illusion of security. Beyond was the real world.

They could hear Bales screaming as soon as the outer door opened. The woman lay on the ground just outside, smashing both hands against her suit, kicking and flailing as though beset by an invisible attacker. Everyone except Holsten and Tevik piled out to help her, trying to get her under control. They were shouting her name now, but she was oblivious, thrashing out at them, then trying to force her helmet off as though she was suffocating. One foot was a red ruin – seeming half cut away – the leg of her suit slashed open with a weird precision.

It was Nessel that released the catch and dragged Bales’s helmet off, but the screaming had already turned to a ghastly liquid sound before then, and what came out first, after the seal broke, was blood.

Bales’s head flopped aside, eyes wide, mouth open and running with red. Something moved at her throat. Holsten got sight of it just as everyone else suddenly recoiled: a head rising from the ruin of the woman’s throat, twin blades brandished at them under a pair of crooked antennae that flicked drops of Bales left and right as they fidgeted and danced.

Then Scoles shouted and kicked madly, flinging something away from him, and Holsten saw that the ground around them was crawling with ants, dozens of ants, each as large as his hand. Monkeys might be merely a memory of Old Empire, but spiders and ants had paced humanity to the ends of the Earth, and now here they were waiting on this distant world. In the leaping, dim light cast by the fires the insects had gone unnoticed, but now he saw them everywhere he looked. More of them were scissoring their way free of Bales’s suit, each emergent head accompanied by a slick of sluggish blood from the wounds the things had carved in her.

Scoles began shooting.

He was calm, ridiculously calm, as he levelled his pistol to pick out each target carefully, but he still hit only one out of two, unable to track the insects’ rapid, random movements. It was a forlorn hope. Everywhere Holsten looked on the ground there were ants, not a vast carpet of them but still dozens, and they were converging on their visitors.

‘Get in!’ Tevik shouted. ‘Inside, now, all of you!’ and he went down with a yell, rolling over, tearing at his thigh where an insect was clinging, its scissor jaws embedded in him, tail curling under itself to sting and sting. Nessel and Lain pushed past Holsten, almost knocking him out of the hatch in their hurry to get back in. Scoles was right behind them, shoving Tevik forwards and then frantically fumbling another clip into his gun. The remaining mutineer was trying to drag Bales after them.

‘Leave her!’ Scoles shouted at him, but the man didn’t seem to hear. The ants were already crawling over him, and yet he was still hauling at the ragged weight that was Bales, as blindly single-minded as the insects themselves.

Lain had ripped the ant off Tevik, but the insect’s head was left behind, still holding its grip, and the man’s leg was visibly swelling where the sting had lanced through his shipsuit. He was screaming, and now the man outside was screaming too; Scoles was trying to force the airlock closed, but there were ants already inside with them, rushing about the enclosed confines of the cabin, seeking out fresh victims.

Holsten crouched by Tevik, trying to work the ant’s head free of his leg and aware that his ribs should be vociferously complaining right then. In the end he had to pry it out with pliers, whilst Tevik clutched at the floor, emergency painkillers unequal to the task.

Holding up the head, Holsten stared at it. The bloodied mandibles looked weirdly heavy, metallic.

Scoles now had the airlock shut and he, Nessel and Lain had been stamping on every insect they found, whilst the cabin slowly filled up with an acrid reek from their crushed bodies. Holsten looked over just as they spotted one more ant up on the consoles.

‘Don’t smash the electronics,’ Lain warned. ‘We may need . . . was that a flame?’

There was a brief flash and flare at the ant’s abdomen, which it was directing aggressively towards them.

Aiming
was the word that came to Holsten’s mind.

Then that end of the cabin was on fire.

The crew reeled back from the sudden jet of flame that sprayed burning chemicals across the confined space. Nessel fell back over Holsten and Tevik, beating at her arm. Suddenly there was a line of fire between them and the airlock, leaping absurdly high, seeming to burn fiercer and faster than there was any reason for. And the ant was still spewing it out; now the plastics of the consoles were melting, filling the air with throat-catching fumes.

Lain lurched to the rear, coughing, and slapped at one of the panels, hunting for an emergency release. Holsten realized that she was trying to open the shutters to the hold – or where the hold had been. A moment later the back wall of the cabin irised out into open space and Lain almost fell through.

Scoles and Nessel went straight out with Tevik between them, and Lain hauled up Holsten under the armpits and helped him follow.

‘The ants . . .’ he managed.

Scoles was already looking around, but somehow the great host of insects they had seen earlier appeared to have disintegrated in just the few moments they were inside. Instead of the purposeful coalescing of an insect horde there were now just little knots of fighting insects all about – turning on one another or just wandering blankly around. They seemed to have lost all interest in the shuttle. Many were heading back into the trees.