Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

The switch from calm to chaos is without warning. Helena and Portia’s readouts are replaced by warnings that the alien ships are lumbering into motion, weapons systems lighting up across their curved hulls. The Lightfoot is already pulling away—not that a little distance will make any odds—and readying its defensive measures. One screen reads out their available mass capable of being used as anti-missile chaff or to absorb laser energy, which has dwindled alarmingly since their first engagement. Meshner, himself in no position to contribute to the effort, hopes that at least the Voyager is watching somehow. Someone should learn something from this mess.

The aliens—the octopuses or whatever they are—seem infinitely mercurial. After his own shutdown he is entirely prepared to accept that he might have missed some nuance, but everyone seems equally taken unawares. The other side have gone from cautious diplomacy to full battle stations like a flipped coin.

“Is there another ship coming in?” he croaks. “They were fighting each other.”

“No other vessel, Meshner,” Kern says in his ear, sounding weirdly solicitous.

Fabian stamps out a new message that Artifabian translates as “The bubble’s lost its field.”

For a moment Meshner can’t work out what that means; then his stomach plunges. If asked, he would say his relationship with Helena and Portia is about as distant as you could reasonably get on a small ship, but in that moment he discovers that the prospect of losing more comrades is too much. He lurches over to a console, calling up information, already halfway through plotting some mad rescue attempt, scooping the pair of them from the rapidly expanding ice-grit of their habitat. Except the ice is only expanding the regular way, not dispersing. The smooth, perfectly round surface of the bubble is now a jagged tectonic chaos, as plates of freezing water shoulder against each other, rupturing into miniature mountain chains, cracking and shattering, spitting retorts of crystals and water vapour into the void. Yet the whole remains miraculously intact. Two of the alien ships have drifted into a stately opposing orbit around the smaller sphere—or around each other, with the iceball caught between them—denying the Lightfoot any chance to get at it. The third vessel is executing a very slow manoeuvre, clearing its colleagues to have an unimpeded view of them.

“Plenty of signals, for what it’s worth,” Zaine says. The vessels are all showing jagged red images against white backgrounds, veined with black and funereal purple. Nobody has any doubt about their emotional content.

Viola’s next utterance goes untranslated—Kern is focused on a lot of things right then. Meshner guesses she is stating the obvious, though: the weapons are all live but the aliens are not attacking or even launching fighters. Instead they have somehow secured the iceball between the two ships—no visible tethers but the electromagnetic sensors are giving utterly conflicting readings—and the entire assemblage is starting to accelerate away at a snail’s pace in the general direction of the nearest planet, the water world.

Meshner turns every instrument on the iceball, pillaging it for information. Are they still alive? No clear answer. He would have said they’d been crushed by the ice, except that the aliens are plainly keen to keep their prize, and he guesses not just as a trophy of their triumph over the invaders.

“Missiles launched,” Kern says calmly. “I’m taking countermeasures. Ensure you’re strapped in. Meshner, you in particular.”

He frowns at that, because Kern has never been the mothering type before, but she is right to be cautious. To his further annoyance, Fabian insists on helping secure him. When he tries to do without the help, his hands shake so much he can’t use them.

“I think I’ve fucked my brain,” he blurts out.

The two ships and their frozen cargo are properly underway now, their companion putting itself ponderously between their escape and the Lightfoot. A handful of missiles have been taken off by Kern’s webwork chaff but the vessel hasn’t launched its complement of small craft or undertaken a full attack. The initial panic seems to be calming—the signals are still reds and whites, but other hues have crept in.

“They’re telling us something,” Zaine reports. “It’s like—I don’t know, could they be having a succession of mutinies? It’s like different people keep getting control of the helm over there.”

“Telling us something we can’t understand,” Meshner complains. “What’s the point?”

“I have Helena’s work on translation,” Kern says, sounding abruptly far less like a human being because nothing in her tone admits Helena is gone. “I will do what I can and I invite other perspectives. However, the undertone of technical data indicates-s-s-s…” And she trails off, turning over the word end while she tries to calculate what she means.

“They’re getting further away!” Viola’s words, via Artifabian, match the agitation of her shuffling legs.

“We are being warned off,” Zaine decides. “And if we decide to go after them, they can make short work of us. We have very little of ourselves left to spend.” A beat. “I’m sorry, I am. I don’t want to abandon them if there’s any chance but… you’re all looking at the same numbers I am.”

“Their technical data includes coordinates for the next planet in,” Kern says, merely a flat delivery of information.

“How is that relevant?” from Viola.

Meshner watches the map on his screen, seeing the distances increase, the iceball and its escorts now clipping along and still accelerating. I’m sorry, Helena. Sorry, Portia.

“There was a signal,” Kern says, still with her poker face, and now the lack of affect becomes suspicious. Meshner feels his implant twinge again, and grips his harness in case another attack is on its way.

“Fabian,” he says, “my… head’s open. I think…”

Fabian flicks his palps, a common enough movement that Meshner knows means, Yes, but not now.

“Tell us about this signal,” says Viola.

“There was a signal,” Kern repeats. “It was in an antique format, one familiar to me from when I was human. It was not like the signals of these creatures. It came from the inner planet.” The screens run with data to supplement her words, including a capture of the signal itself, or part of it. There is no beginning, no end, just a ragged-edged chunk of transmission in Imperial C that reads…

Meshner squints. He can translate that ancient language easily enough, but what is he reading? There are visual files as well, he sees, but the base transmission is a fragment of…

“A natural history?” he wonders. “Or… a fiction, is it? This is all…” He looks over details of biochemistry, ecology, descriptions of impossible animals, or plants, or things that are neither or both. “Why would anyone…?”

“What is this? How is it relevant?” Viola demands.

“The change in attitude of the locals came immediately after I acknowledged receipt of the signal,” Kern tells her. “I believe it was that contact that convinced them we were hostile. I propose that they associate humans with threat because of some pre-existing situation here in this system. They are now sending us threats or warnings which are associated with that inner planet.”

“You think there are humans there?” Zaine asks incredulously.

“Humans who are sending out… this?” adds Meshner, still wading through it. “This is…?” Incredible. Or else nonsense.

“I believe that we are receiving a signal from something akin to myself,” Kern announces, and Meshner wonders if the slightly nervous tone was his imagination. “I do not believe this is direct human contact, but it seems to me that there could be a hybrid human system surviving here, just as I survived. Perhaps it has acted in a hostile manner towards these other locals prior to this. They appear frightened of it. But perhaps it will speak to us. Perhaps it will aid us in recovering our crew… if they are still alive.”

Why should it? But Meshner doesn’t voice the words. Kern is a thing, an operating system, and yet at that moment he is sure he can sense a yearning in her, almost as if it is his own. To find something that is like you, after ten thousand years of being unique. He always felt Kern rather valued being singular, but perhaps that was only because she had never been given another option.

“We’re short on other choices,” Viola grumbles. “But if this is a force that the water creatures are afraid of, it may give us some much-needed leverage. And they are definitely trying to get us to go away, so we may as well go and speak to this voice and see if it can hear us. Whoever it is.”

“There is a sender identity,” Kern puts in. “It claims that its name is Erma Lante.”