Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

A generation later.

Salome’s vessel has a crew of nine but a living compliment of one hundred and seventeen. Salome is not the name she gives herself, of course. The octopuses have a gestalt of motion, colour and skin texture by which their Crowns identify themselves to one another, and this shifts over time, or after great events or trauma, variations on the same theme so that they are recognizable whilst showing the world that they are not quite the individual once known. A name itself can be exquisite performance poetry. Their Reach knows itself by another designation, though, something written in the ancient coding carried down from nerve-cluster to nerve-cluster, communicated by the fumbling of suckers and tentacles, and this is still drawn from the long-ago Biblical monikers that Disra Senkovi, in his humour, gave them. In the electronic systems that she is constantly connected to, she is indeed a Salome, one of many, with a string of numbers after to distinguish her from the rest.

The craft she dominates was made as a Homeship, an orbital habitat to pipette off some of the excess population below, spitting into the hurricane brewing down in the planet’s cities. At least some of the intended occupants had taken up residence before a shift in opinion resulted in the vessel being commandeered for another purpose entirely, and these civilians remain on board despite the risk, because quarters on-ship are far preferable to the murderous chaos of the cities.

Salome’s ship—call it The Requisitioner of Small Things, as a poor imitation of her meaning when she refers to it—is a sphere, as are most of the octopus spacecraft. Its hull is a double-skinned membrane that can be rigid or malleable as required, growing or shrinking as the water volume of the interior might vary. Its inner surface is riddled with regular holes, a thousand at least, each one made as living space for one octopus. When the ship cruises peacefully, as now, these are held open and the occupants have a window to view the stars on one side, access to the great watery ship’s interior on the other. The command centre, where Salome and her crew labour, is held at the vessel’s centre, buffered by the surrounding living space, connected to the thrusters that stud the exterior, and to other systems too, bolted on and not originally intended for such a sedentary vessel.

Had they evolved naturally, of course, most likely space would have been forever denied them. The Requisitioner weighs a thousand times what an equivalent human vessel would. Mere rocket science would not suffice to get a water-filled Apollo or Vostok programme into orbit. The octopuses would have been prisoners of their gravity well if they hadn’t already had a lifeline to space. As it is, the water that fills the Requisitioner came from tardigrade asteroid mining, jetti-soned from the outer solar system towards the catch points near Damascus to be cleaned up and repurposed as living space. The energy required to haul so much fluid weight from the planet would be simply impractical.

It is those catch points that Salome is flying to inspect. The asteroid belt holds a wealth of minerals, fuel and all good things sufficient to regenerate the entire planet, allowing the octopuses to expand further into space and solving all the problems except one: time. Even though the tardigrades multiply in the dark reaches of the belt, their rate of extraction is too slow to let the Damascans get ahead of the disaster curve. Supply is limited, which means supply is disputed. A thousand shifting factions ally with and then abandon one another, and all too often it comes down to fighting. The little brawls and bullying of their native state have scaled up into spaceborne conflict.

This catch point is a vast object in space, itself a great sink of resources. Since it ceased broadcasting, Salome had feared some group had destroyed it, but now she hears from her crew that instruments have found it where it is supposed to be, but tilted at the wrong angle, so that the resources slung into its electromagnetic field by the distant miners are being redirected elsewhere. Even as she watches, another consignment reaches the huge dish’s magnetic field and is curved away to some distant enemy receptacle, the catch point alternating opposing launch angles so that the Newtonian displacement of each load shunts it back to its central waiting position. Salome is unsurprised. The ship’s systems broadcast a flurry of pale colours, warning of danger. She would not deign to issue commands to the civilians she has dragged along with her, but the wise amongst them will abandon their homes and seek the shelters built up alongside the command core. Normal water circulation around the perimeter ceases, and if the ship manoeuvres at all, the water mass about the outside will begin to spin, lagging behind events with its colossal inertia. The outer dwellings will all be closed off and any free swimmers left exposed will likely be killed. Only close to the centre, where the movement is least, will there be any safety to be had. Not that the Requisitioner can exactly dance through space like a butterfly: once that amount of mass is cruising in any given direction, considerable notice is required to change its bearing.

Communication comes to her—her Reach connected by her undulating controls to the Reaches of her crew—that another vessel has been detected, smaller than the Requisitioner but still a substantial ship and likely better designed for warfare. Attempts at communication are being ignored. Salome feels a great need not to continue on a predictable course; her Reach gives out orders to the crew controlling the thrusters and the Homeship begins its ponderous attempt to deviate from its course, the drives on one side accelerating their mass-energy conversion to emergency levels, breaking down the atoms of fuel and channelling the resulting energy outwards. In emergencies the thrusters feed on the very water of the ship, breaking it down and breaking it down again until it combusts. A pitched battle can see an octopus vessel devouring thirty per cent of its overall volume as reaction mass.

The enemy vessel is launching: missiles first, that will guide themselves towards the lumbering mass that is the Requisitioner, fighters after that. Salome has anticipated this. Her more gung-ho crew are already in their own command centres; their smaller vessels, that had been huddled in the Homeship’s belly like eggs, now break through the outer-hull membrane in a spray of sudden ice. The largest is a destroyer that will orbit the Requisitioner and screen it from the missiles and smaller ships, the rest are a half-dozen fighters that can skitter through space in ways the larger ships could never do. These fighters mostly consist of engine and weaponry, with a tiny compartment for a single pilot, enclosed by a tight membrane, arms coiled about the controls and a recycled flow of water across their mantle. They wheel about one another, the discharge of their thrusters shaking their occupants like thunder, trying to get close to the big enemy ships. There, they will use cutting lasers to unseam the foe, to spill the fluid guts of the great vessels in long comet-tails of ice particles. Some might try magnetically-accelerated projectiles as well. The hydrostatic shock of their ripping through the Homeship would kill any octopuses loose in the water, but unless they can hit the deep-buried command core, the swift rounds will just plunge through the ships and harmlessly away, the membranes sealing behind them with barely a teacup of water lost each time.

There was no great moment when the octopuses realized they had surpassed the technological achievements of their creators, but the engineering that made the Requisitioner possible is beyond anything the Aegean’s makers would have recognized in a hundred different ways.

Salome has already sent a distress signal back towards Damascus. Most likely there are no friendly ships that could possibly intervene in time. Most likely her repurposed civilian habitat is outclassed by whatever craft was lurking out here waiting for her. Nonetheless, she will give her all, as will her crew, and perhaps whoever she fights here is as unprepared as she is. Her people hold no certainties, nor do they let themselves be ruled by tradition or history or even how they themselves felt yesterday, but they live in the moment, and in this moment Salome and her crew will fight. Tomorrow perhaps she and her enemy will be friends again, united against some other front. For now, her skin sings a furious hymn of battle and her arms calculate vectors and suggest firing solutions.

Rebekah pilots one of the Requisitioner’s fighters, crammed into its tiny central hub that is little bigger than a human torso. Her eight arms extend into the guts of the machine, linked directly to its systems. The vessel is also spherical, surrounded by thrusters, but where the Requisitioner can only lumber, a prisoner of its colossal momentum, the fighter craft weighs almost nothing, a lattice of superlight alloys about the tiny bauble of its crew compartment. It spins wildly as it flies, changing direction with the speed of Rebekah’s thoughts, burning off its reactive mass to swing wide of the ordnance being thrown from the enemy vessel towards the Homeship. That will be the job of the orbiting destroyer to intercept and shoot down. Rebekah is fired up with aggression, on the offensive.

Right now, she calls her tiny mote of a vessel That Part of Wonder That is Mine, or at least that is the closest translation to the way she thinks about it. She changes the name often, varying the theme just as she varies her own precise nomenclature: always the same ship, always different.

Enemy fighters speed towards her. That part of her Reach that is manning the sensors communicates with her colleagues in the other fighters. The consensus wins out: her mission is to press the attack. Others will dogfight with and harry the enemy. Rebekah only knows a renewed sense of aggression and righteous anger. Smite them, is perhaps the best approximation of her desire, and her Reach contorts and flexes to make such desires a reality.

Now she has a good view of the enemy’s main craft, her arms sending data back to the Requisitioner even as her little Wonder skims close. This is a purpose-made military vessel, a teardrop in space surrounded by the ugly scaffolding of its weapons systems. It has seen plenty of fighting already, though. She feels its presence like a huge old sea monster, ragged and scarred, weak from blood loss. There was a battle to take over the catch point and this ship was probably the lone survivor.

It unloads another salvo towards the far-distant Requisitioner and Rebekah feels a sudden sense of fright for her mothership. Her Reach translates this into a compact report on trajectory and payload that outstrips the projectiles to get back to Salome, who will hopefully be able to use it to shoot the barrage down.

The military ship outguns the Requisitioner, but it has no companion destroyer to orbit it and take down nimble little fighters like the Wonder. Its own fighters—a severe undercompliment, another indication of its damage—are mostly off fighting Rebekah’s fellows, but she spots one lurking along the gunship’s belly, even as it opens fire on her.

Her will is that it misses her, and it was her instinctive affinity for high-speed manoeuvres that landed her this role. Her Reach calculates and executes, spinning her about and launching her past the great gun batteries, the projectiles of the enemy fighter going wide. Her opponent is coming after her, but she has an uninterrupted four seconds of flight across the broad expanse of the gunship’s dorsal surface. She has a sense of reaching out with lethal intent, to strangle, to crush. The distributed neurons of her Reach run quick mathematics on the energy reserves remaining within the ship, how much mass they can still burn, how much power is stored within the cells that make up half the Wonder’s payload. The enemy fighter is close. Rebekah’s desires are insistent. All of it, is her wish. Strike true.

The cutting laser—not so different from a civilian tool save for the range and power it can manifest—goes into action, lancing into the silvery teardrop’s membrane. For the first second and a half the advanced heat-distribution network of the gunship’s outer skin holds her off, but she is emptying the Wonder’s hoarded energy, focusing it all into that single beam. A moment later and she hits old damage, badly repaired, and is through, the blade of energy driving deep, carving away a thruster, sawing at the edge of the weapons framework. Incidental damage: the catastrophic blow is when all that energy meets all the water within and flash-boils it into instant expansion. The tear she cut in the membrane, which would normally seal itself within .25 of a second, is abruptly a third of the ship’s length, the watery interior venting into space and becoming a great tail of ice crystals.

The enemy fighter’s four seconds are up and he buzzes furiously about the gunship’s hull before flaying himself in the venting column of ice, his ship practically disintegrating from a million high-speed impacts. The force of the water loss shunts the gunship in the opposite direction, its thrusters firing erratically as its crew try to get their vessel back under control. The next salvo from the guns, the work of crewmembers too caught up in the joy of devastation to stop themselves, compounds the problem, the teardrop ship spinning uncontrollably about its axis. A reaching claw of jagged ice lashes across the Wonder, wrecking thrusters and deforming its light frame, sending Rebekah spinning off into space, locked in her own fight for control.

Half-crippled she manages to regain some measure of mastery and uses what drive she has to send her ship limping back towards the Requisitioner, reaching out with her comms to see if her mothership is even still here. All that is subconscious, though. Her Crown is engrossed in the sight of the gunship’s final tumble, end over end now, half its frame obscured by a great solidified plume of ice. The catch point is not vast enough for a gravitational pull, but the gunship’s helpless drift slews it into the ever-greedy grasp of its magnetic field, which tries gamely to dispatch it to the enemy depot at an acceleration the gunship was never designed to endure. One moment there is something resembling a ship there, then there is an expanding cloud of ice and metal and a little organic material, and the catch point itself is off balance, starting to drift as it overcompensates, reacting against the anticipated mass of an asteroid that isn’t there.

Glorious, says Rebekah’s skin, and then the comms of the Requisitioner are signalling the battered comms of the Wonder, saying, Come home, come home.