Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Baltiel sealed the lab with Lortisse’s body inside and they dragged themselves to the main bubble room of the habitat. Lante was swearing, one hand shaking as it worked on the other, disinfecting the wound that Lortisse’s teeth had made, weeping with pain but, Baltiel guessed, more with fear that something had gone in. Rani was…

Rani was unconscious on the floor, her own blood painting her from neck to waist. He grabbed a medical kit and started applying a pressure bandage, but surely it was too little, too late. The woman was ashen grey. Lortisse had punched a hole in her throat with his finger.

“It’s impossible,” Lante was saying over and over. “It can’t… We can’t be infected… different biologies. Different proteins. Different cell structures. It can’t be happening.”

“Shut up,” Baltiel told her shortly. “Help me, here.” Rani’s body was shuddering, her limbs twitching and flailing. Death throes, or new life? “Your treatment—the stuff you were going to use on Lortisse—”

“Back in the lab,” Lante said shortly.

Baltiel was linking with the habitat systems, shunting medical functions to the main chamber’s fabricators. He set them making emergency supplies: plasma, anti-shock, whatever was quick and resource-cheap. Everything else would have to come from the isolation lab Lante had set up. “Go get what you made. I’ll get us set up here.”

To her credit, Lante’s rebellious look was only momentary. She’d pumped herself full of painkillers, and doubtless now she was thinking that her own best chance was back in that lab, as well as Rani’s. Without a word she stomped off back the way they’d come.

Lante felt her pulse rise and rise, despite the medication that should be controlling it. Was that a symptom? Had Lortisse felt the same, in amongst the many and varied klaxons of his body failing? She wasn’t suffering the same colossal system shock as he had, at the intrusion of the foreign organism. Did that mean his bite was no more than that, or had the entity learned a way to stealth its way through a human body without setting off the alarms?

She knew how irrational it was to think of things that way. Of course the alien sludge hadn’t learned. It was some slime mould analogue, some bacterial clot, just a disease of tortoises. And yet it had found its way to Lortisse’s brain and…

Obviously it had driven him mad. What she had seen was Lortisse, his brain swollen and feverish—despite the fact that she’d put monitors in place for just that and none of them had warned her—acting out some psychopathic delusion. Any projection of alien intent was merely her own brain piecing patterns together out of misfit scraps. The thing wasn’t controlling him, just damaging his brain so that he wasn’t responsible for his actions. The enemy had been Lortisse’s diseased id, and not…

Lante found herself staring helplessly at the man’s body, sprawled on its side in a slick of his own blood. He looked as though he’d been through some sort of industrial crusher, joints twisted, one hand splintered where he’d forced it into poor Rani’s neck. The wound she’d dealt him was mostly hidden, but she knew she’d cut him open from shoulder to sternum, and even then he hadn’t reacted as a man hurt. Surely there was no frenzy or delusion that could see someone abuse their own body in such a way.

Forget him. Need to save Rani. Need to save me. She lurched forwards to gather the syringes the dispenser was filling for her. Her hands shook; two of them tumbled to the floor, and then a third. Is this it? Am I losing control? She tried to examine her own thoughts for an alien presence. Am I still me? Are these my perceptions? Was I like this a moment ago? Her personal monitor was warning her that she was hyperventilating, her heart rate approaching dangerous levels. Is it killing me?

She gathered up the fallen syringes, fumbling more of them in the process. As she tried again to claw them all together she found herself looking into Lortisse’s face. It had been locked in a frozen, silent scream. But now he had that damnable grin spread from ear to ear.

As she drew breath to shriek, his arm flicked out, not like a limb but like the disjointed element of a trap, and the syringe—the one filled with fluid he’d drawn from behind his own eye—jabbed into her ankle and shot its contents directly into her bloodstream.

Rani was barely breathing, her body temperature showing as dangerously low, and the plasma Baltiel was able to fabricate was doing little for her blood pressure. She was shuddering rhythmically, and all he could do was hold her and grind his teeth and wait for Lante to—

He heard Lante’s shriek—not just fright but a dreadful despair. A jolt went through Rani at the same time and her eyes opened, focusing on him and then unfocusing again.

“Stay with me,” he told her. The system was reporting her spasmodic attempts to reach out at random with her inbuilt link—touching the habitat interfaces but gaining no purchase on them. Still, she managed a smile, just a faint one at first but growing by inches.

“Yusuf,” she told him. “We’re going on an adventure.”

He went cold. The words were coming out far too strongly for her condition, accented weirdly, still Rani and yet wrong. Another shudder went through her and he saw her hands finger-walking randomly at the ends of her arms, the same aimless drift as her virtual connections.

“We understand better this time,” Rani told him. “Yusuf, it is still your companion Kalveen Rani. She I We will survive. We will make it so. Mistakes have been made, but We-in-Lortisse reacted to threat. We-in-Rani we are Rani we understand such wonderful volumes and connections to farness and vastness. These-of-we are Kalveen Rani now, Yusuf and Kalveen Rani will live. These-of-we will write her immortality into our libraries and she will never die.”

Baltiel was a good ten feet across the habitat chamber by then, and Rani just lay on the floor like a corpse, save that her face was tilted towards him and animate, talking.

“Yusuf, it’s still me we I am here. We understand everything now.”

“I’m sure Lortisse would have said the same,” he got out.

“Mistakes were made. These-of-we will take into account the durability of this Rani. Better, it’s all better now, Yusuf. Everything can be as it was except better than it was and forever, Yusuf, and forever and ever.”

Amen, he thought, but he was looking for a weapon, any weapon. Rani’s head pivoted unnaturally on her neck to keep him in view. No cutting tools in here, and the sort of basic, brute tools his ancestors might have needed were for drones now, because who needed to lift a finger for that sort of work?

Except… after the first habitat had died, hadn’t they planned for a similar catastrophe, having had the fragility of their technological lives flagged up for them? And had they kept that…? Still watching for any movement from Rani, he ran the inventory of the lockers on the habitat system and came up trumps. He gave himself an inset camera view to guide his fumbling hand so he didn’t have to look away from the thing on the floor.

At last he found it: something they’d fabricated in panic, then stored in faint embarrassment for the primitive thinking it represented. Something primal. Something infinitely reassuring. An axe with a gleaming metal head, barely a scratch on it. The weight made him feel strong, invulnerable.

Rani’s smile spread further, a horribly misplaced attempt to be reassuring.

“Yusuf, we are still Kalveen Rani,” she said conversationally. “And more, and more. This is the best way. These-of-we are growing and learning. Those-of-we that were Lortisse did not understand. We have superseded their wildest dreams, Yusuf.”

“Stop using my name,” he said through gritted teeth.

“It’s me, Yusuf.” She spoke over him, through the grin. “It’s us, it’s me, it’s us me, Yusuf.”

He approached her, eyeing the spasmodic twitches of her limbs, which seemed closer and closer to meaningful, directed movement. The axe was a savage comfort at the end of his arm.

“Yusuf,” she said, head pivoting, the pupils of her eyes vacillating as she tried to focus on him.

Then Lante was in the doorway and no doubt wondering what the hell was going on. “It’s too late for her,” Baltiel said. “It’s got in her.”

Lante seemed to find that delightful.

“We’re going on an adventure,” she said, pronouncing each word with exaggerated care.

Yusuf made a wordless sound and stumbled back.

“It’s all right, Yusuf,” Lante told him. “We’re fine. We’re all fine. We’re liberated, really. It’s all so much, Yusuf. But you’ll understand. We’ll all understand everything. Why else are we here? Don’t you want to learn it all, at last?”

His faltering feet were taking him to the outer door. He had no suit on, of course, but right now the dangerous part of Nod was in the habitat with him. He had faced the outside before, years ago. He had breathed that impoverished air and lived, although only because he thought they were all going to die.

Lante was walking towards him carefully, as though trying to compensate for a sloping floor that wasn’t. “Yusuf,” she breathed. “It’s still us still me. I am Erma. Still. I we I know what you fear. She we I felt it, too, but it’s wonderful, Yusuf. We’re wonderful. We have discovered such strange vast things we never dreamt of.”

He brandished the axe and there was no human flinch in her, and he saw in his mind’s eye an image of him splitting that familiar face, and only dark fungal ooze issuing out. He had the inner airlock door open now, sawing through the habitat’s safety protocols to speed things up, throwing his Overall Command rank around.

“Yusuf,” Lante said, as he backed into the airlock. “Don’t you understand? This gives us purpose again. We’ve been without purpose for so long. There is no more Earth, Yusuf. No more humans. Of course we chose to study this place instead. And it they We studied us. We don’t have to be something old and tired and used up, Yusuf. We can be something new.”

And the horror of it was, he could believe there was something of Lante there, and that what was speaking to him was a kind of pithed and neutered version of his crewmate. She tells it as she sees it, and I can never know how it sees things, or what it wants. He did not believe in alien parasites that could instantly converse in the language of their hosts, but he did believe in parasites that screwed over brain chemistry or pulled neural strings so that their hosts believed whatever was convenient to the hidden passenger. And it’s learning, somehow. It’s getting better at manipulating them.

The outer door opened, and Nod’s chest-aching atmosphere flooded past him. For a moment he was going to throw the axe at Lante, but its value to him as a morale boost was greater than as a ranged weapon. Instead he turned and ran for the shuttle.

He was sending ahead, linking with its systems. The ground shook as its engines began to warm. The old craft had sat there on the rocks for a long time without being used. He had no idea whether the mist or the rain or some other local nastiness had got into it, but right now he didn’t have the time for a proper inspection. It would work or it wouldn’t.

He reached the door, which he had ordered open moments before. It was closed. He connected to the shuttle systems again and recoiled, finding them a mess of contradictory commands. Lante was trying to connect, and so was Rani. He should have been able to override them both, but they were flooding the shuttle with chaotic attempts to interface with it, like a drunk fumbling with a front door key. The result was an inadvertent denial-of-service that was keeping him out as well, as the shuttle tried to process far too many queries at once.

There was a hoarse, mad voice bellowing, the sound of it torn at by the wind that moaned in across the salt marsh. Belatedly he realized it was his own, shouting at the insensate machines that wouldn’t do his bidding. Lante and Rani’s glitched words sounded sane by comparison. There were tears stinging the corners of his eyes. Everything had come to an end.

They were coming, of course. Baltiel turned to see them: Lante strode, bow-legged, smiling pleasantly, her face tilted away from the red-orange sun. Rani followed, lurching, occasionally going down on one knee amongst the rock-pools, ripping her clothes, gashing her skin, feeling none of it. Her smile was painfully wide, eyes likewise. They were calling his name.

We had such plans. But it wasn’t true, not in the end, not after that savage disconnection from all their pasts. They had been marking time ever since, writing reports for nobody, inventing pastimes to cover up the hollow emptiness inside. And now something had come to fill it. Perhaps Lante—this new puppet Lante—was right after all.

But something within him bucked at that. He was Yusuf Baltiel. He was his own man, singular, aloof. He was the leader. He was not led by the nose by some alien parasite.

He hefted the axe and waited for them to come closer.