Children of Time (59 page)

If the spiders possessed a certain form of determination, then they would be able to enter the ark ship without needing to find a weak point. After all, they have access to chemical explosives that carry their own oxygen and would trigger in a vacuum. Their space-age technology has its limits, though. Tearing the ship open is not a preferred option. If nothing else, Portia and her peers are intending to rely on the ark ship’s air, even though it is short of oxygen compared to their usual needs. The respirators about the spiders’ abdomens have a limited lifespan, and Portia is keenly aware that they would prefer to return home across the void as well. Better to establish a controlled breach, and then seal it off once her spiders are inside.

A curious sensation washes over her, like nothing she has experienced before, setting her tactile sense organs quivering. The nearest equivalent she could name would be that a wind had blown past her, but out here there is no air to move. Her fellows, and other peer groups currently engaged on the assault, have felt it too. In its wake, radio communications become patchy for a brief while. Portia cannot know that her adversaries inside the ship have improvised an electromagnetic pulse to attack the spiders’ electronics. The two technologies have passed each other in the night, barely touching. Even Portia’s radio is biological. What little the pulse can touch of it is instantly replaced; the technology is mortal, born to die, and so every component has replacements growing behind it like shark’s teeth.

Portia has located a hatch now, a vast square entryway sealed behind heavy metal doors. Immediately she broadcasts her position to nearby teams who begin to converge on her position, ready to follow her in.

She calls forwards her specialist, who begins drawing the outlines of the hole they will make with her acids. The metal will withstand them for a while yet, and Portia steps from foot to foot, anxious and impatient. She does not know what will greet them once they get inside – giant defenders, hostile environments, incomprehensible machines. She has never been one to just sit and wait: she needs to plan or she needs to act. Denied either, she frets.

As the acid begins to work, reacting violently with the hull and producing a frill of vapour that disperses almost immediately, others of the team begin weaving an airtight net of synthetic silk between them, which will close up the breach once the team is inside.

Then radio contact is gone abruptly, swallowed by a vast ocean-wash of white noise. The denizens of the ark ship have struck again. Immediately Portia begins searching for clear frequencies. She knows the giants also use radio to speak, hence it seems likely that they may have held some channels open. In the interim, though, her squad is cut off – as are all of the hull squads. But they know the plan. They already have their instructions on precisely how to deal with the human menace – both the waking crew and the vastly greater number of sleepers that Kern has described. The precise details will now be down to Portia’s discretion.

Uppermost in her mind at this point is that the inhabitants of the
Gilgamesh
are taking an active hand in their own defence, at last. She has no idea how this might manifest, but she knows what she would do if an attacker were gnawing at the walls of her very home. The Portiid spiders have never been a passive or defensive species. No patient web-lurkers they – they attack or counterattack. They are made to go on the offensive.

Without the radio, close-range communication remains possible, just.
Be ready, they will be coming
, she taps out on the hull, flashing her palps for emphasis. Those not directly involved in breaching the hull fan out, watching to all sides with many eyes.

7.7
THE WAR OUTSIDE

‘Hah!’ Karst shouted at the screens. ‘That screws over their fucking radio.’

‘It’s not exactly a killer blow.’ Lain rubbed at her eyes with the heel of one hand.

‘It doesn’t deal with the implications of them having radio in the first place,’ Holsten remarked. ‘What are we dealing with here? Why aren’t we even asking that question?’

‘It’s obvious,’ came the terse voice of Vitas from over the comms.

‘Then please explain, because precious little is looking obvious to me right now,’ Lain suggested. She was concentrating on the screens, and Holsten had the impression that her words had more to do with being irritated at Vitas’s superior manner.

‘Kern’s World was some sort of bioengineering planet,’ Vitas’s disembodied voice explained. ‘She was creating these things. Then, knowing we were returning, she’s broken them out of stasis at last, and has deployed them against us. They’re fulfilling their programming even after the destruction of her satellite.’

Holsten tried to catch the eyes of Lain or Karst or, indeed, anyone, but he seemed to have faded into the background again.

‘What does that mean the surface is going to be like?’ Karst asked uneasily.

‘We may have to conduct some widespread cleansing,’ Vitas confirmed with apparent enthusiasm.

‘Wait,’ Holsten muttered.

Lain cocked an eyebrow at him.

‘Please let’s . . . not repeat their mistakes. The Empire’s mistakes.’
Because sometimes I feel that’s all we’ve been doing.
‘It sounds like you’re talking about poisoning the planet to death, so we can live on it.’

‘It may be necessary, depending on surface conditions. Allowing uncontrolled biotechnology to remain on the surface would be considerably worse,’ Vitas stated.

‘What if they’re sentient?’ Holsten asked.

Lain just watched, eyes hooded, and it looked as though Karst hadn’t really understood the question. It was now Holsten versus the voice of Vitas.

‘If that is the case,’ Vitas considered, ‘it will only be in the sense that a computer might be considered sentient. They will be following instructions, possibly in a way that gives them considerable leeway in order to react to local conditions, but that will be all.’

‘No,’ said Holsten patiently, ‘what if they are actually sentient. Alive and independent, evolved?’
Exalted
, came the word inside his head.
The exaltation of beasts
. But Kern had spoken only of her beloved monkeys.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Vitas snapped, and surely they all heard the tremble in her voice. ‘In any event, it doesn’t matter. The logic of the prisoners’ choice holds. Whatever we are ranged against, it is doing its best to destroy us. We must respond accordingly.’

‘Another drone gone,’ Karst announced.

‘What?’ Lain demanded.

‘With the hull sensors being picked off I’m trying to keep tabs on the fuckers with drones, but they’re taking them out. I’ve only got a handful left.’

‘Any armed like the ones that took down Kern?’ the old engineer asked.

‘No, and we couldn’t use them, anyway. They’re on the hull. We’d damage the ship.’

‘It may be too late for that,’ Alpash commented levelly. He showed them one of the last drone images. A group of spiders was clustered at one of the shuttle-bay doors. A new line in the metal was visible, flagged by a ghost of dispersing vapour down its length.

‘Fuckers,’ said Karst solemnly. ‘You’re sure we can’t electrify the hull?’ That had been a hot topic of conversation before they tried the EMP burst. Alpash had been trying to work up a solution for a localized electrical grid around wherever the spiders were located, but the infrastructure for it simply was not there, let alone the enormous energy that would be needed to accomplish it. Talk had then devolved towards lower-tech solutions.

‘You’ve got your people armed and ready?’

‘I’ve got a fucking army. We’ve woken up a few hundred of the best candidates from cargo and put disruptors into their hands. Assuming the little bastards
can
be disrupted. If not, well, we’ve broken out the armoury. I mean,’ and his voice trembled a little, small cracks evident from a deep, deep stress, ‘the ship’s so fucked a few more holes won’t make any difference, will they? And anyway, we can still stop them getting in. But if they do get in . . . we may not be able to contain them.’ He fought over that ‘may’, his need for optimism crashing brutally into the wall of circumstances. ‘It’s not like this ship was laid out with this kind of situation in mind. Fucking oversight, that was.’ And a rictus grin.

‘Karst . . .’ Lain began, and Holsten – always a little behind – thought she just wanted to shut him up and spare him embarrassment.

‘I’ll get suited up,’ the security chief said.

Lain just watched him, saying nothing.

‘What?’ Holsten stared. ‘Wait, no . . .’

Karst essentially ignored him, eyes fixed on the ancient engineer.

‘You’re sure?’ Lain herself seemed anything but.

Karst shrugged brutally. ‘I’m doing fuck all good up here. We need to go clear those vermin off the hull.’ There was precious little enthusiasm in his voice. Perhaps he was waiting for Lain to give some convincing reason that he should stay. Her creased face was twisted in indecision, though, an engineer seeking a solution to a technical problem she could not overcome.

At that point Holsten’s console flickered into activity again, and he realized the attackers on the outside had located the clear channels that Karst had been using to control his drones; and that Karst would soon be using to communicate with the ship. It was Holsten’s job to notify everyone the moment the spiders made this discovery, but he said nothing, part of him staring at the sudden patchy scatter of signals being picked up by the
Gilgamesh
’s surviving receivers, the rest of him listening to the conversation going on behind him.

‘Your team?’ Lain prompted at last.

‘My core team are suited and ready,’ Karst confirmed. ‘It looks like we might have a fight the moment we open the airlock. Little bastards could be out there already, cutting
in
.’ Nobody was arguing with him, but he went on, ‘I can’t ask them to go and me stay behind,’ and then, ‘This is what I’m for, isn’t it? I’m not a strategist. I’m not a commander. I lead people: my team.’ He stood before Lain like a general who had disappointed his queen and now felt that he had only one way to redeem himself. ‘Let’s face it. Security was only ever here to keep Key Crew and cargo in place for the duration of the trip. But if we have to be soldiers, then we’ll be soldiers, and I’ll lead.’

‘Karst . . .’ Lain started, and then dried up. Holsten wondered whether she had been about to say something bizarrely trite, some piece of social ornament like,
If you don’t want to go, then don’t
. But they were long past what people did or didn’t want to do. Nobody had wanted the situation they found themselves in now, and their language, like their technology, had been pared down to only those things essential to life. Nothing else, none of the fripperies and flourishes, had been cost-effective to maintain.

‘I’ll get suited up,’ the security chief repeated tiredly, with a nod. He paused as though he wanted to throw out some more military form of acknowledgement, a salute from those about to die, and then he turned and left.

Lain watched him go, leaning on her metal stick, and there was a similar ramrod stiffness to her bearing despite her crooked spine. Her bony knuckles were white, and everyone in that room was watching her.

She took two deliberate steps until she was at Holsten’s shoulder, then glowered about her at the handful of Tribe engineers still left in comms.

‘Get to work!’ she snapped at them. ‘There’s always something that needs fixing.’ Having dispersed their attention, she took a deep breath, then let it out, close enough to Holsten’s ear that he heard the faint wheezing of her lungs. ‘He was right, wasn’t he?’ she said very softly, for his ears only. ‘We need to clear them from the hull, and the security detail will fight better if Karst’s out there with them.’ It was not that she had told the man to go, but a word from her might have stopped him.

Holsten glanced up at her and tried to make himself nod, but something went wrong with the motion, and the result was meaningless and noncommittal.

‘What’s this?’ Lain demanded abruptly, noticing the stream of signals on his screen.

‘They found our gap. They’re transmitting.’

‘Then why the fuck didn’t you say?’ She called out, ‘Karst?’ then waited until Alpash confirmed that she was connected to the man. ‘We’re changing frequencies, so get your people ready,’ next giving him the new clear channel. ‘Holsten—’

‘Vitas is wrong,’ he told her. ‘They’re not biological machines. They’re not just Kern’s puppets.’

‘And how are you supposed to have worked that one out?’

‘Because of how they communicate.’

She frowned. ‘You’ve cracked that now? And didn’t think to tell anyone?’

‘No . . . not what they’re saying, but the structure. Isa, I’m a classicist, and a lot of that is a study of language – old languages, dead languages, languages from an age of humanity that doesn’t exist any more. I’d stake my life that these signals are actually language rather than just some sort of instructions. It’s too complex, too intricately structured. It’s inefficient, Isa. Language is inefficient. It evolves organically. This is language – real language.’

Lain squinted down at the screen for a few seconds until the transmissions abruptly cut off, as the jamming switched frequencies. ‘What difference does it make?’ she asked quietly. ‘Does it get Vitas’s fucking prisoners out of their cells? It doesn’t, Holsten.’

‘But—’

‘Tell me how it helps us,’ she invited. ‘Tell me how any of this . . . speculation does us any good. Or is it just like all the rest of your bag of tricks? Academic in every sense of the word.’

‘We’re ready,’ came Karst’s voice at that moment, as though he had been politely waiting for her to finish. ‘We’re in the airlock. We’re about to open the hatch.’

Lain’s face was like a death mask. She had never been intended as a commander, either. Holsten could see every one of those centuries of hard decisions in the lines on her face.

‘Go,’ she confirmed, ‘and good luck.’

Karst had a squad of twenty-two ready to go, and that used up all the heavy EVA suits that were still functioning. Another twelve were currently being worked on, and he was only grateful that the Tribe had needed to go out and make patch repairs on the hull, or he might not even be able to field that many soldiers.
Soldiers
: he thought of them as soldiers. Some of them actually were soldiers, military woken up from cargo either this time or the last time, added piecemeal to the security detail whenever he had needed a bit more muscle. Others were veterans of his team: Key Crew who had been with him from the start. He was taking only the best, which in this case meant almost everyone who had the appropriate EVA training.