Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

“Disra? Disra, speak to me, please. I need to hear your voice.”

Disra Senkovi stared blankly at the interior of the Aegean’s crew quarters, wondering why he was there. He linked to the ship’s internal cameras and replayed his weaving progress, realizing he’d been drifting aimlessly from room to room for quite a while now. Probably he’d had some intent at the start, but that had fallen by the wayside long ago. In a sudden panic he called up a display of the key terraforming objectives, but everything was on target or even ahead of schedule. He knew that if he probed into the details of how those targets had been met, the details would be an impenetrable tangle of weird solutions, unintuitive, even contradictory on the surface, and yet all working together to make Damascus that much more habitable for Earth-based life. The last ice had gone from the poles, he’d seen—the big orbital mirrors had been yanked way out of position to focus the sun on the final gleam of it. One hundred per cent of the surface water was sufficiently oxygenated, and penetration went far enough that half the deep sea floor was liveable, too. The Aegean’s factories had been cracking asteroids brought in by its deteriorating fleet of remotes, and the debris had been shipped down the gravity well to where the Pauls and Salomes and the rest were busy building colonies, expanding their network of holes and tunnels around the various terraforming installations, creating cities. He hadn’t told them to do any of that, but nor had he stepped in to stop them. He had watched and watched, and at last he realized he was waiting for them to need him, for them to screw it up. And they hadn’t. And that meant they didn’t need him.

They still spoke to him, but he had a sense of the pre-occupied now. He was just one point in their complex social calendars. When he called, at least some of them listened, but he characterized their manner as a sort of fond nostalgia for some childhood imaginary friend.

I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, he thought. Beyond Baltiel’s wishes, certainly. And he remembered that he’d been getting a battery of messages in the last minute or so, which had brought him back to himself. Am I in trouble, then?

“Yusuf,” he said, connecting and letting Baltiel’s image appear on the nearest screen. He hadn’t been down in the crew quarters for a long, long time. It was rattlingly empty there.

“Disra, listen to me!” Baltiel looked terrible: grey and haggard.

“Are you… well?” Senkovi asked leerily. Baltiel was crammed into the pilot seat of a shuttle, unshaven, wild-eyed, looking like he hadn’t washed in a month. “Is it Gav, has he—?”

“Listen to me!” Baltiel fairly shrieked. “He’s dead. Lante’s dead. Rani’s dead. Disra, it got them. It…” Senkovi watched him visibly get a hold of himself. “Listen, don’t speak, just listen. The stuff that got into Lortisse, it infected him somehow. It got into his mind. It was controlling him, Disra. He wasn’t himself.” A shudder and a sob wracked the Overall Commander, and that more than anything else kept Disra from interjecting. Baltiel had always been the iceman, harsh and distant and lacking in sentiment. This was not the same man. Broken, Disra thought numbly.

“He attacked us. He got it into Lante and Rani, Disra. He infected them. And it was faster with them. The stuff was learning, I swear. It had worked out how to get at our biology, our neurology! I know how mad that sounds, but it’s true, you have to listen. It got to them. It took them all. They weren’t themselves. I swear they weren’t themselves in the end, Disra. Even though they sounded the same, even though they…” Muscles twitched at the corners of Baltiel’s mouth as though he was forcing back vomit. “I had to kill them, Disra. I had to do it.”

Senkovi stared at the stains bespattering Baltiel’s filthy clothing. He had been about to ask why Baltiel had waited so long to pass on vital news, but the words fell away at this last revelation. Is that blood? Lortisse’s? Rani’s?

“I’m sending you all the imagery from the habitat,” Baltiel whispered. “Judge for yourself. I stand by what I did, even though I… though I did… what I did, what I… had to… Disra, this stuff is deadly. Keep away from Nod. There can’t be any more contact between us.”

“I…” And then Senkovi’s words dried up as he stuttered through the recording, now speeding up, now slowing down, now hearing familiar voices say abominable things. “Impossible,” he got out, staring at the evidence that proved him a liar. And “Dead…?” even though, was there any doubt of it? Was it something Baltiel would confess to as a joke?

“I had to, Disra, we… there was no choice.”

It’s just you and me, thought Disra. The idea came to him, absurdly selfish, that Baltiel wouldn’t be fighting him over what happened to Damascus now. He shook it off, trying to feel the proper measure of grief and horror. It eluded him, though. He remembered how he had been hit by the other deaths—Skai and Han and the rest, and of course all of humanity as they knew it. That had struck home, but somehow this new tragedy was too big to deal with. Lante, Rani, Lortisse… couldn’t be dead, surely. Couldn’t be taken over by some alien infection and then dead, in quick succession. He hadn’t seen any footage from outside the habitat. He hadn’t seen Baltiel swing the axe. They weren’t dead.

Something had been nagging at him, something left over from his childish thought about Baltiel’s plans for Damascus, and something about the rapid exchange of their conversation. He picked at it, because that was easier than actually dealing with what he’d been told.

“Yusuf,” he said slowly. “You said there can’t be any more contact, because of the, because of the thing, the thing that happened.”

“Yes,” Baltiel agreed immediately. “This stuff, this parasite, Disra, it’s—”

“Then why are you in a shuttle most of the way over here?”

“I…” There was a moment, then, when an absolute despair gripped Baltiel’s features, a realization that the most dreadful of fates had come to pass, irrevocable and forever, without him even knowing. And then it was gone, drowned in the bland stare that rose to consume it. “Because we’re going on an adventure.”

Senkovi stared at him, feeling cold. “What?”

“I had to get away, Disra,” Baltiel said, the moment of estrangement passing as though it had never been. “We… just needed to move on, move out. I we couldn’t stay there, not after we’d… done what we’d done.”

“Yusuf, is some of that blood yours?”

“Trivial, very small, almost no amount.” Baltiel stared at him and Senkovi tried to find the man he knew in those eyes, that face.

“Yusuf.” He swallowed. “I’m going to ask you to turn the shuttle back around. Back to Nod. Go on back to the planet.” Am I really going to do this? “I can’t let you come to the Aegean. I can’t let you come to Damascus. Just…”

“I’m coming, Disra. I want to see those spaces and extents that we remember. We can see the pictures and the maps but not the real thing not yet. It’s all right, Disra.”

“It’s really not.” Senkovi’s hands were shaking. “Go back, Yu—go back, whatever you are. You can obviously understand me, or half understand me. The Aegean has anti-collision lasers. I am going to use them if you come near me or Damascus, so help me. I am building something here. I am not going to let it get… infected.”

“Disra, don’t treat us like this.”

“I swear I’ll do it.”

“You won’t.” Baltiel’s smile was beatific. “We can reach out and touch you even from here. Even as we speak we are with you in all your spaces. We know the overrides and the commands to prevent you from harming us. Disra, we only want to explore. We’re on an adventure.”

In a sudden panic Senkovi dived into the Aegean’s systems, seeking control of the lasers, the engines. He was locked out. Baltiel had used his command codes.

“I can get round these,” he said. “I was always a better hacker than you.”

“You just thought you were,” Baltiel said serenely. “I always knew. We always knew.”

“Eventually,” replied Senkovi, through gritted teeth now.

“We’re coming, Disra. We are Yusuf still, your friend. We will do no harm. You will never be alone again. Isn’t that a good? Yusuf, this vessel and These-of-we, we understand now that all the limits of your world are needless. We are greater and greater. You expand our world. We cure your singularity. Isn’t that a good?”

Senkovi was fighting the barriers Baltiel had so effortlessly raised in the system, but he was uncomfortably aware that “We always knew” must have had its roots in the human original’s knowledge because he’d never been fenced off like this. The bastard never said anything. Senkovi knew he could break this down eventually. In his own humble estimation he was now the cleverest human being in the universe. Time, though. He checked the speed of the shuttle’s approach. Measured in hours, now. Did he have hours? He had set a dozen algorithms spinning their wheels to crack the codes, but now he returned to them to find them dismantled and in pieces, Baltiel striding down the beach kicking over his sandcastles one by one. In desperation he widened his comms to include the planet below, because the least he could do was warn his creation that Armageddon was coming to it. He flagged the shuttle for them, labelling it with as many symbols for danger as he could. Do not approach, predator, monster, hazard, avoid, flee. But surely what was coming was something that could not be avoided, not for long. Everything he had worked so hard to bring about, the entire future he had been constructing, it was all going to perish.

“I don’t know who I’m speaking to,” he sent to the shuttle. “If Yusuf is there in any way, please don’t do this. Take Nod, it’s your world. Build there, grow there, please. But don’t come and ruin what I have here.” He discovered a curious purity in himself, at this late stage. His thoughts, his fears, were all for the budding culture in the seas of Damascus, not for himself. “Or take me, take the damn ship, take it away, just leave the planet alone. And if I’m talking to… if it’s not Yusuf, or if there’s something else that can understand me through Yusuf’s brain, then… what do you want? What can I give you, to leave us alone?”

“What is to ruin?” Baltiel’s quiet, reasonable voice came back. “We have discovered such vast expanses in these vessels, but within them, a greater vastness.”

“Wh-what?” Senkovi actually stopped working on the codes to get his head around what he was being told. “A greater vastness within the…” He felt a lurch, as though the fake gravity of the ship’s rotation had suddenly shifted to the wall. An infection had got into the crew of the habitat, that had previously been parasitic on Nodan life like the poor bloody tortoises. It had found a way to adapt to its new, alien environment. It had found the brain—he remembered that much from Lante’s notes on Lortisse. And somehow it had inveigled its way into the human cognitive process, able to influence and change it, but also perhaps able to receive from it. What would it have understood? Space, interstellar travel, the history of human civilization; a greater vastness.

“We cannot be limited now we know what vastness means,” Baltiel said. “We know you understand this. Why else did you cross from your own native vessel to inhabit these far spaces?” His inflection kept shifting and jumping, now Yusuf Baltiel’s clipped precision, now shuddering with weird stresses and phlegmy catches as his governing occupant forged new concepts into human words.

Senkovi set his virtual agents in motion again, trying to hide their tracks and watching Baltiel hunt them down. And it was him, or they were using that part of him. Senkovi’s stock of belief was already stretched to breaking, but it wouldn’t permit him to credit some alien consciousness that could rifle Baltiel’s mind and make use of his knowledge and his skills without the engagement of the man’s own judgement. This was Baltiel, Overall Command of the Aegean, save that his mind was dancing to the tune of a new master. What does it feel like to be him? Does he even know? Is he happy? And, the grim sequel to those thoughts: I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

“Just the ship, not the planet, please,” he whispered, but Baltiel—the Baltiel whose face he saw on the screen—didn’t react.

He checked for signals from Damascus, but the octopus colonies seldom contacted him direct. He placed ideas and information into their shared virtual space and they did with that data whatever their own weird thought processes dictated. He had given up trying to train and limit them long ago, and everything had worked so much more smoothly after that. Each generation was more inventive, more ingenious in its subversion of the technology he had given them. Recently he had seen signs that they were replicating machines they didn’t have enough of (or had decided for their own unknown reasons they wanted more of). They had repurposed some of the factory machines to produce parts and were assembling them in novel combinations. He had no idea what they were building most of the time, and now he would never find out. They are on the very brink of seizing their own destiny, and they won’t be given the chance.

Sometimes they did contact him, some of them. About a dozen, across the planet, sent him messages. Not prayers, of course. Certainly not technical reports or anything so comprehensible. They were patterns that shifted and danced, changing hues and shapes with a fluidity that made him giddy. Some of them came tagged with error codes and data sets, identification markers, access codes. He had the impression they were trying to make their missives intelligible to a human, but the gap between his outstretched fingers and their tentacles was just too wide, still.

He wondered if they were sending him poetry.

Now he looked over the data from Damascus in case he had any last word from his doomed people. They were working away, still—all the machines on the planet were diligently informing him about the unorthodox uses they were being put to, even those in orbit.

Even those in orbit.

He let his enquiries brush past the data without delving, because Baltiel was still in the system and Senkovi suddenly felt like someone in an old house with a murderer, trying not to breathe and listening for the floorboard’s fatal creak. Baltiel hadn’t cut him off from the planet, of course. Baltiel didn’t really care about the octopi and what they were doing. And if Baltiel would overlook it, so would this hybrid thing that sat behind his eyes.

Senkovi let his sweep go past the same points again, downloading a great haystack of data to obscure that one sharp needle. He followed the logic of what he could see happening, did some calculations in his head and, for the rest, decided he would have to trust the vision of Paul and the other octopi.

“Baltiel. Yusuf,” he said over the line to the shuttle. “Are you in there, really? Is there anything of you that hears this?”

“Of course we know you, Disra. We are all the knowledge and memory and information of ourselves your good friend, but greater, of wider understanding.”

Does it know what personality is? It’s there in Yusuf’s memories, his relationships with me and the others, his opinions of us, his quirks. But perhaps those just seem to be inefficient imperfections to it.

“We are glad you have accepted matters,” Baltiel added, and Senkovi realized he’d stopped trying to hack the command codes a while ago. He let the Baltiel-thing draw what conclusions it would and just watched the movement of vast shapes around Damascus, inferring their shifts from the shadows they cast in the data.

The orbital mirrors, all of them: they had been built about the planet to focus sunlight in the early days, where it would be trapped by the smog of volcanic and microbial emissions, greenhousing the planet to life. Later they had been ferried about Damascus to break up ice in key areas, starting chain reactions of warming and currents, stirring the oceans, diffusing oxygen. Another decade and they would probably have been dismantled, unnecessary. After all, the point of terraforming was to create something stable that didn’t need such toys.

Now they were shifting in a great ponderous dance, changing their facing, cupping the sun in their silvery hands and focusing that light and heat towards a single blistering point. They were flexing, concentrating and concentrating, bringing heat enough to melt an ice age down to a narrow region in the shuttle’s flight path. Senkovi had never dreamt such a thing was possible, but the new rulers of Damascus had seen his Gordian Knot and found a blade to cut it apart.

The focal point was necessarily near the planet. The maths was imprecise, hurried even, if the octopi felt hurry as a human did. Senkovi watched the shuttle cruise obliviously into the crosshairs and take the full brunt of the system’s sun, magnified and magnified until even the re-entry plates peeled away like flayed skin, until the reactor cracked open, the explosive force shunting the shuttle wildly out of the neat approach it had been attempting, the contents of the crew compartment surely boiling like spoiled soup.

And then the shuttle, nosediving, plunged like a white-hot meteorite into the atmosphere and burned all the way down until it met the sea.