Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Doctor Avrana Kern is suspicious by nature. Partly this is a deeply-ingrained trauma resulting from a betrayal by an underling, back when she was human and alive and (relatively) sane. Partly it is simply building on a suspicion that was always part of her nature. This suspicion has survived in her despite the many forms she has taken: from human to human-AI hybrid to pure AI (that believed itself human) through to a complex program running on an organic operating system arising out of the interactions of millions of ants.

Which means that when an alien fleet hoves into view, she starts looking for weapons and analysing technology and constructing elaborate countermeasures and emergency plans that even she had not thought would suddenly become necessary.

Abruptly, they are necessary. She was watching the energy signatures of the alien ships—all built on enough of an Old Empire foundation that she can understand them. Within seconds of the Lightfoot’s first visual transmission she senses a moment of utter chaos—as though the vessels are brains undergoing a seizure. Everything lights up: they are manoeuvring; they are activating their weapons. Kern reacts instantly, her hypotheticals becoming the new reality.

Humans, back when they built spaceships, constructed them with a hard outer shell to protect their vulnerable insides. Portiids build ships with an internal skeleton but a flexible outer sheath that Kern can trim by shifting the ship’s bones. The outer hull comprises multiple layers of a fabric that is to the ancestral spider silk as a thrown stone is to the weapons the aliens are deploying, but it retains many of that substance’s virtues. It has an incredible tensile strength for its weight; it can stretch without rupturing; it can be produced in large quantities in a short period of time.

Kern starts shedding hull in great loose swatches, each one carrying with it a fluctuating electromagnetic signature. The Lightfoot becomes the centre of an expanding haze of urticated silk that writhes and clumps and forms constellations of matter even as the ship itself alters course. That suffices to confuse the targeting systems of the missiles now heading towards it: they veer off, spinning into snarling skeins that drag them off course, chasing electronic ghosts created in their sensor feedback by the arachnid chaff. The first lasers fall foul of the same defences, wasting their energy on a vacuum abruptly cluttered. By then, the Lightfoot is already moving on a different heading, shifting tack so suddenly that its effective length halves, its internal buttressing compressing about the crew quarters, preserving that little bubble of air intact.

The alien vessels are also turning, but they lumber where the Lightfoot darts. Kern has calculated the sort of mass they are hauling and it is, by her reckoning, insane. Yes, the ships are huge, but even for such massive craft they appear to be carrying an absurd momentum, a thousand times more than she can account for as they utterly fail to match her swift course correction.

Of course, that is why they have launched a scattering of smaller craft, she surmises, which are tiny, each barely larger than a couple of Humans end to end and with engines every which way, apparently, so that they spin about any axis they need to, to come and bother the Lightfoot with their weapons.

She deploys more silk, aware that she is boiling away the mass of the ship, making some of that inertial shortening a permanent fixture as she cannibalizes her own substance. At least one of the incoming fighters ploughs straight into a mass of the stuff, loses half its thrusters and spins off into the void, but the rest are doggedly on her. She briefly considers consulting Bianca about permission to fire, but she is, after all, Avrana Kern. Who better to make such decisions? She has a brief fugue moment of memory: unleashing her tiny satellite’s weaponry against the Gilgamesh’s shuttles and drones, killing humans before they became Humans.

She never said, because neither Portiids nor Humans would understand, but she enjoyed herself, doing that. Cathartic, was the word that occurred to her. And once they started putting her into spaceships, she always wondered if there might be some war, somewhere, with a hostile power. She decides that some other Kerns out there might get to be proper warships one day, and wouldn’t that be fine? For now she resolves that she will try to kill a few of these drones or fighters or whatever they are. She has decided that, based on technological similarity, the “aliens” here are some human successor state. Probably Portiid diplomacy will make them Humans eventually, but for now she will blow a few of them up and see how it makes her feel.

Of course the Lightfoot, hastily prepared scout craft, is not exactly a gunboat, but she has lasers—rather more so than her captain or crew are aware of, more even than the Kern instance on the Voyager knew, because she went behind her own back when building this ship-body. Now she lights them up, the Lightfoot’s malleable hull breaking out in ugly warts that each house a lens. She begins painting the dark sky with lights, trying to pin down the enemy even as they overtake her. They are very swift, though, and she begins to realize they are also good at what they do, whether they are organic or automatic. Their all-direction thrusters allow them to make lightning-fast changes in trajectory, bouncing about like monkeys as she tries to track them. She clips a couple, but they adapt to whatever minor damage she deals out. Their own lasers blister at her, crisping silk that her repair spinnerets replace as quickly as possible, frying some hubs of her ant-network. They have overshot her and are now spinning about, fighting their own momentum with a rapid patter of thrust.

Some of them open up with magnetically accelerated projectiles, and Kern laughs quietly to herself because she can mend any external holes as swiftly as they open, and the Lightfoot simply lacks the solid parts for such miniscule missiles to disrupt. They would need a lucky shot, a very lucky shot—

A string of such little beads rip through her hull. One punches a hole in a main strut of her skeleton, but there is plenty of redundancy there. The trailing edge of the salvo punches a dozen holes in the crew compartment, so swiftly that the crew themselves would not even realize, had not Bianca, the captain, been directly in the path of one shot. Her death is instant, explosive. For the projectile itself, her presence does not affect its course—she is incidental to its path, that takes it into and out of the Lightfoot in the flash of an eye.

For Meshner, the moment is experienced only in retrospect. Bianca had been at her post, stamping out orders that the machines translated only sluggishly for the Human crew—Kern was concentrating too much on their defence to spend too much of herself on the niceties of interspecies communication. Then Bianca was… all around them, without any transitional state, the fluid-filled sack of her body burst asunder.

Everyone is engaged in the fight, all the Lightfoot’s small crew. Bianca’s coordination has been taken from them but nobody can spare more than a heartbeat to register it. Kern may make all the decisions, but the crew is providing her with supplementary computing power in the form of their own grey matter. Portia and Viola are suggesting firing solutions, trying to understand the apparently random patterns of the enemy fighters/drones. Zaine and Helena manage energy budgeting: the Lightfoot’s drive is good, but like the Voyager it is optimized for long-term use, not extreme short-term drain, and space combat is nothing if not draining. Kern draws what she needs and the two Humans do their best to juggle other less-critical systems, like life support. Fabian and Meshner work on wider predictions, with particular reference to the big ships out there that are each erupting with weapons fire from a dozen different angles.

Meshner plots arcs and angles, trying to work out the best way to thread that particular needle. Space is a desert with no cover, and the enemy vessels have no “front”, meaning that any angle invites a broadside, and no sure way to know when it might come.

Fabian passes over his best guess, paths to take that might dodge the worst of the incoming fire as they accelerate out of this mess; Meshner counters. Kern shoots them both down, figuratively speaking, modelling worst-case scenarios for them that see the Lightfoot smeared across a kilometre of empty space. The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.

Back to the drawing board. Fabian stamps out a little fit of anger against his controls, which are above Meshner’s head.

There’s no way we can get clear unless we break from the fighters, Fabian insists. Even as he does so, Meshner registers that another three railgun projectiles have just clipped through the crew compartment, striking nothing vital and having no effect other than a tiny loss of atmosphere before the infinitesimal wounds in the hull seal themselves. The lasers are potentially worse, but the enemy fighters only use them in brief stabs, rather than trying to slice the Lightfoot open. Most likely the tiny ships have even more limited energy reserves than their victim and lasers are a colossal power sink.

Meshner blinks, frowning, because abruptly his view of the screen is fuzzing, lines breaking apart into spectra of colours, the controls seeming to jump and writhe under his fingers.

Not a good time, not a good time, he knows, watching his hands rattle with sudden palsy.

Also: Artifabian didn’t translate Fabian for me. He understood the Portiid’s words direct, somehow, or imagined he had. He opens his mouth to advise Kern he’s having issues. His tongue waves; words don’t come.

He turns and looks at the ocean sunset, both it and him running mad with colours he doesn’t know, and that his mind baulks at simply calling “purple”. When the waves crash on the shore they are silent, yet they speak to him in a roar, insisting on their own provenance and immortality before reducing to a grumbling nothing.

Meshner freezes, clutching for the controls he knows are there. His fingertips come back to him with a riot of sensory overload, a complexity of tactile data he simply lacks the equipment to decode. The approximate shape of his console is in there somewhere, camouflaged within the tumult.

The ocean waves crash, same as before, exactly the same, cycling: a broken stub of memory recorded in too many colours, missing channels of data he would need before any of it felt real. It looks like corrupted recordings, ancient video data, flickering and phasing, repeating over and over.

Not now!

And, at the same time: Is this it? Has the fight shaken this loose? Have we succeeded at last? And yet this doesn’t feel… first person. He is Meshner, the Human. This isn’t what he was hunting for, in trying to graft Portiid Understandings into his implant and his Human brain. He feels as though he is watching the information from the outside, through some sort of third party mediation.

With that thought he can move his point of perspective—he has no physical body, or rather his body is not here, all its sensory data and proprioception locked in another room. And surely Fabian cannot just go wandering through his own memories like this; he would be locked to the perspective he—or his ancestor—had occupied when the Understanding was first encoded. So how can he, Meshner, take apart and analyse the sensory data in this way? I’m modelling it, extrapolating a whole from Fabian’s limited perspective. Which means that probably half of what he experiences is his own invention, but fascinating nonetheless. If he wasn’t about to die in—of all the stupid things—a space battle he would be exhilarated by this development.

He turns around and sees Fabian there, the same Fabian he knows, looking out at that sunset. Why did the spider choose this moment? The Portiid—or some past Portiid whose likeness was lost but whom Meshner has reconstructed as modern-day Fabian—had loved this sunset, this seascape, enough. Perhaps that was all.

You cannot interrogate this, the spider tells him, the usual dance of feet and waving palps, and yet the meaning is crystal clear in Meshner’s mind. This is all your own conjecture, building on reconstructed data in virtual space.

“Then who am I talking to?” he demands, and the spider stamps out, Work it out yourself. I’m busy.

The means of communication is unfamiliar, the sharp tone less so. “Kern?” Or some limited sub-system of hers?

Make yourself useful, it instructs him, and he has a sudden sense of wider space beyond this looping moment.

It occurs to him that this could go very badly if he lets himself get trapped in the same five seconds of Fabian’s recollection forever. And yet how is this even still present in his brain?

It isn’t, idiot. His own sharpness now, his own thoughts, not Kern’s. But it’s still in your implant. Like Kern said, it’s a virtual space. The implant is a potent computing tool built to translate and model memory data, after all. Now, at the worst moment, he has finally accessed that space, except he didn’t ask to and potentially cannot escape from it.

Even as he thinks it, another part of his brain seizes on a lifeline, the only thing here that comes from outside other than his own lost consciousness. He is linked to the ship, to Kern. The implant gives him access to her somehow, far beyond a crewmember’s regular comms. He feels dizzy for a moment at the thought that he is participating in a neural link with a computer, something nobody had done before without Old Empire technology, and not terribly successfully even then.

He follows the breadcrumbs of Kern’s link and abruptly the sunset turns off, leaving him in dimness. Before him is a spider, huge beyond the dreams of Portiids, save that of course he views it from the low-slung perspective of Fabian. Meshner’s mind floods with raw emotional input, some of it translated into base urges he can name: fear and desire inextricably linked, the ragged raw edge of excitement, desperation, a dread of failure. Other information batters at his brain looking for somewhere to roost, square-peg emotions ramming themselves at the round holes of his mind, trying to make themselves known. He asked for something that would be unmistakably arachnid, and surely this matches his specifications: Portiids doing Portiid things to one another, incomprehensible, alien. The Understanding he has been given is visually simple, but that is just a thin skin riding on a great sea of experiential data. And I will drown unless I get clear.

Again he follows the link of Kern until he finds himself in another place.

Space.

A frozen moment. He stands in the void (although he is not standing, not really, but his viewpoint suggests a presence and he goes with it; otherwise madness awaits), gazing down on the stretched silvery shimmer of the Lightfoot, looking buckled as it is caught midway through shifting its hull profile to cushion against another high-speed manoeuvre. Now the image pulls out: there are the enemy fighters, tiny spheres within a net of thrust and weapons systems. One is just erupting open into loose matter as Kern’s lasers finally pinpoint it, the firing solution courtesy of Portia and Viola having predicted the next way it would jink. Beyond are the larger vessels, their formation now a cluttered mess, their own weapons systems quite busy. And the Lightfoot is coming back that way, because that is the best path to avoid the worst of the fighter barrage.

“This is intolerable,” a sharp female voice tells him, and he flinches with an instinct still held over from the Portiid historical male deference to the female.

Kern manifests herself in space on the far side of the Lightfoot, her chosen scale making the ships seem like toys floating at the level of her waist. Meshner sees a tall, severe woman, grey hair tied back, wearing an ornate one-piece garment that might perhaps be what Old Empire shipsuits looked like, back when such things were more than tatters and dust. He wonders how authentic the simulacra is, because surely Avrana Kern does not really hold an accurate self-image after so many millennia?

“You are occupying too much space,” she snaps at him, for all that she has a virtual body twice the size of the largest alien ship and he has a notional point of view that could dance upon the head of a pin. “You are draining my resources. Who or what are you?” Without a half-second’s pause she seems to catch up with that fragment of herself he encountered a moment before, “Meshner Osten Oslam, the self-made lab animal,” and he reflects that answering her own questions is probably a large part of her stock in trade these days. “Why are you here?”

He stammers out that she led him here, but perhaps that part that left the breadcrumbs is only a subroutine that Kern herself disowns. He has a sense that somewhere, somehow, a kind of communication is being attempted, but it isn’t reaching Kern. She stalks about the sluggishly-moving display, simultaneously looking at all the spaceborne vessels and at him, giving everything her full attention all the time. Parts of his brain grind against each other trying to force this ersatz visual stimulus to conform to the laws of physical space.

Which it needn’t, he reminds himself. So: and he calls up information, arraying it in virtual space just as he did when testing out the implant the first time he awoke with it. For a split second he is back with the sunset and the ocean but then Kern bodily yanks him back to the battle map, the little dart of the Lightfoot; to the spreading formation of enemy ships (and his mind is processing, processing, still trying to do its job now he has this spectacular visual representation of the sky outside, and something has snagged his attention that surely Kern has already seen…).

And his information has got through, or else Kern looked past the battle to what his body was/is working on and has seen his meagre role in all of this.

“Your cognitive functions are overflowing into ship systems,” she tells him—still severe, but with a thoughtful edge; she is a scientist first and foremost, after all. “Your implant needs limiting functions. It is trying to process a fat bolus of sensory data and it’s just eating up all the processing power it can handle. I’m having to hold it off from rampaging through my own memory, and in holding it off I’m suffering a further drain on my capabilities. Idiot monkey.” Her expression—or that facet of it she spares him—is appraising. “Still, at any other time, an interesting toy. You have come somewhere close to an upload facility in the most backwards manner possible, creating an extended virtual simulation of your own cognitive functions in order to process a recorded medium not in any way intended for a Human.”

Wait—a virtual simulation? Is that all I am? This all feels entirely real to me. Again, he has no way of saying it, but it manages to reach Kern. He expects derision, but the look on her face is solemn, even sympathetic.

“It does, doesn’t it?” she agrees. “No matter how they peel you down. Even when you’re stripped down to something that can’t think, can’t feel, some pissant little shard of yourself that’s barely good for anything but calculating square roots and prime numbers, it still feels like you, until you try to do something and find that part of you is missing. I’m limiting you, Meshner Osten Oslam. I am fencing you off so you don’t cripple the ship with your existential crisis. And that way, this experience may end up repatriated with the rest of your mind and bring it out of the grand mal seizure you are currently experiencing.”

I… what?

“Your brain is a complicated toy. When you play carelessly with it, you might lose some pieces,” she says, and that sardonic edge is back, her sympathy apparently exhausted. “I’ve devised a solution to purge you from the system for now. I really do need all my wits about me. If you have the chance, there are ways to have your implant recalibrate its internal architecture to make your simulations far more resource-efficient, and thus get more done without involving me. Let me know if any of this stays with you.”

Wait! Meshner’s perspective lurches. He can feel reality ascending to meet him like the ground reaches for a falling man—either Kern’s doing or the fit he is apparently undergoing—and he tries to force more information up the pipe than mere words. He has a course for her, not frantic flight into the black but an approach to the enemy ships. It is threading the needle sideways and backwards and upside down, entirely beyond the parameters of the task he had been set, and yet perfect.

“Nonsense,” Kern snaps. “This exposes us to the weapons of three of the large vessels in sequence at extreme close range, one after another. Unacceptable.”

You have set the wrong limits on our search, he insists. The ocean returns briefly, pulsing like a slow heartbeat, so that he gains and loses Kern, gains and loses the battle. See their attacks. It is so obvious, and yet Kern hasn’t seen it because, in the final analysis, she is a self-regulating computer trying to maximize her limited computational power. She set herself a narrow task, and that task became her world. They are fighting each other, he manages at last, flagging up various of the combatants in different colours, some hostile, some at least neutral, deploying weapons on their fellows in an apparent attempt to defend the Lightfoot. Each ship has angles and arcs that are being used for countermeasures, casting vast shadows where their attentions pick the void clean of the ordnance of their neighbours. Space is abruptly not a desert, or at least it is a desert with a few rocks for shade. Enough cover, perhaps, to get up enough speed to outrange the enemy.

Kern stares at him, going in and out of his mind’s eye, but he sees her smile before he loses her.

Then he is arching his back, fingers clutching at the fabric of the cabin floor as Zaine clamps a medical scanner to his head, jarring his implant agonizingly. There is a great deal of chaos, and he feels his heart stop and get jolted back into action by Helena applying a muscle override. There is blood in his mouth and his vision glitters with ephemeral stars.