Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Meshner’s breath is loud in his ears; his fear is loud in his mind. He wants to clutch in on himself like a dead spider, to blunder away through the debris-drifting chambers of the dead station until he finds himself back in the womblike safety of the Lightfoot. Most of all he wants to have said “no” when he had the chance, except he isn’t sure he ever quite had the chance.

He feels his emotions as though they are powered servos on the spacesuit he wears, moving him without his express permission. That overriding excitement drives him onwards, making him its slave. When he lets it, it fills him to the brim, overstated, absurd in its richness, so that he finds himself luxuriating in it, indulging himself in ridiculous heights of anticipation. Easier perhaps to give in to it and just become a vessel, but there is a core of Meshner left over, and Meshner au naturel has never been that excited about anything. And Fabian has, really? He can’t imagine the fussy little Portiid displaying this level of intense feeling, but perhaps that is his Human prejudice speaking.

Or perhaps this isn’t just bleed-through from Fabian’s Understandings that he’s experiencing. Perhaps he is tapping his own subconscious, drawing deep from the well of the id so that all the inner life he has always kept a lid on is now venting like steam from the ruptured pipes of his mind.

Who’d have thought the old man had so much blood in him? issues the thought, and it terrifies him because it comes like a long-familiar quotation and yet he has never heard it before.

“Keep up!” The snappy voice in his ear is welcome, because at least it is real. Zaine has stopped to wait for him again. Meshner slogs over to her along the wall, fighting the magnetic seals of his boots which are supposed to lock and unlock based on his movements, but apparently he isn’t moving right or something because every step seems to be a battle.

He gives her an aggrieved look that she probably can’t catch through his faceplate. The chamber they are just entering has ice coating all the walls, a needling forest of it reaching in from all sides in a way Meshner finds frankly nightmarish. The airless interior shimmers in the beams of their torches. Oh look, a magical glade. How nice. He has no intention of stopping to pick the flowers. Boots useless, they have to kick and glide slowly across the sharp-edged space. He makes a mess of that, too, of course.

Zaine obviously wishes he hadn’t been foisted on her. Zaine is fit and has plenty of EVA experience, moving easily in her suit. Meshner can boast none of the above, but agreeing with Zaine on this issue isn’t likely to win him any points with her.

“Signal ping from the local ships has increased by forty per cent in the last ten minutes,” Kern observes to them both. “They are becoming much more interested in what we are doing.” Followed by a telemetry-heavy discussion he doesn’t feel up to parsing right then.

“Going as fast as we can,” Zaine replies, doubtless with a murderous look at Meshner. They are at the airlock now, with its pliable, alien controls. Kern brings up a diagram based on Artifabian’s original exploration of it, and Zaine wrestles, back and forth, until at last springing it open. Meshner imagines tentacles entwined about its prongs and folds, a fluid, omnidirectional exertion of pressure. Easy enough to think about the same applied to a human body. His suit chimes a polite little warning about heart rate but refuses to give him anything that might calm him down.

There follows a clumsy, foot-dragging dance where first Zaine goes in, closes the first door, opens the second, then seals that behind her before Meshner can follow suit. Artifabian, of course, has had to consent to being locked within the prison room so that they can navigate the airlock doors at all. The interior of the lock is horribly claustrophobic, even beyond the innate enclosure of his suit, and Meshner fumbles and fumbles repeatedly with the controls, following the step-by-baby-step instructions of ever-patient Kern, before at last he tumbles out into the air-filled chamber beyond.

And don’t forget to latch the second door open because no handle on the inside, remember?

Zaine is already at the console here, working at its levers with bulky, gloved hands. Meshner feels his suit adapt to the increased pressure. Readouts tell him the atmosphere is breathable, kept fresh after all these years, and he tells the readouts he really doesn’t think he wants to try it. Instead he ends up looking over Zaine’s shoulder as she tries to coax a response from the console.

“Weirdly primitive stuff,” she mutters on the open channel. “There’s no real interface—it’s nothing like human technology but they made it for humans to use. Or maybe not, maybe that’s just the human in us… Wait… did something happen?”

Meshner feels a sudden spike of that overbearing excitement even as Kern’s calm voice says, “I have an active channel from the console. It registers a user.” A patch of the wall beyond the controls glows a lambent grey now, as though it has become translucent. There is no screen there, but some manner of coating in an irregular splotch that has abruptly become active. “You’ve awoken it.”

Awoken is not a word designed to make Meshner comfortable in the circumstances, and he is just stepping away when Kern adds, “Let Meshner take over.”

“What?” says Zaine, and Meshner echoes her a moment later.

“Meshner, step to the controls,” Kern insists. “Zaine, step away.”

There follows a long pause, which Meshner feels they share with the two Portiids back on the Lightfoot.

“Perhaps Zaine can conduct a brief survey to see what else might be salvaged,” says Kern-translating-Viola.

Zaine makes a dissatisfied noise but gives up her place at the console to Meshner, which he is none too happy to accept. Kern is in his ear, though, and the jagged thread of anticipation running through him seems to pulse with the rhythm of her voice.

“Take the controls,” she directs, and then, “Please, Meshner, this is very important.”

He does so, and they feel organic and unpleasant through the tactile receptors of his gloves. The screen flickers and pulses, random bursts of light and colour dancing on it as though he just rubbed his eyes too hard.

“This is a momentous occasion,” Kern tells him—and with the words comes a certainty that it is just him she’s speaking to, not Zaine or the others. “We are going to contact something here, Meshner. You and I, we are going to speak to a new mind. Are you ready?”

No. But in truth he is too terrified to say even that.

“Follow my directions.” He sees a sequence of motions in his mind’s eye, how to operate an alien console to make it do what Kern wants. “I am investigating the channel now,” Kern continues. “When it responds, this Lante, we will reply. We will extend the hand of friendship, just as the Portiids did with your people.”

Portiids don’t have hands. But she is doing it, and he’s in no position to stop her. He imagines Kern reaching out through the mediation of his hands, exploring the electronic architecture of this place, searching for the signal-maker, this Lante.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he murmurs. “Why set this up for a human, if this is where your computer system is?”

“Perhaps they had an Old Empire computer that would only respond to humans?” Zaine asks idly. She is inspecting the lamps on the far wall without any great interest, then crosses the chamber, giving the empty chair a none-too-accidental kick on the way. She obviously feels Meshner has stolen her thunder, which he would be only too happy to return to her if he could.

“What humans, though?” he demands. He has activated some kind of archive and Kern is investigating, directing his hands. He can almost feel the twists and turns of her search within the walls of this place.

“Maybe they found some in cold sleep?”

But Meshner isn’t really listening. He can feel Kern’s exploration. Just turning his mind that way brings a definite rush of sensation, dizzying and strange. The implants. He feels himself slipping into the boxy construct he bolted to the back of his own head, its huge virtual spaces now mapping out what Kern finds, until he stands there with that severe, long-dead woman, somewhere his mind has constructed as a mirror to the real space around him, but far more decayed, half-rotted away and blackened with mould.

“Where is it?” Kern asks, not of him, but of herself. He feels frustration seething from her; feels it, because it is being felt through him. His implant throws up a chaining list of errors and usage warnings. Kern is riddled through it like an infection, spinning its every wheel to produce this verisimilitude of annoyance. “I don’t understand. There’s nothing here.”

“No data?” he asks timidly and she rounds on him.

“One incomplete archive. Some long-dead natural historian’s travelogue. But there’s barely more than we already received. It’s not complete. And there’s… no more than this. Where is the system? Where is the intelligence?”

“Someone was sending,” he says. “Or something. Like an operator, someone said.” He can’t remember who. Perhaps it was him. “But there’s no operator here.”

“This does not accord with my theories,” Kern tells him, as though it is the greatest affront the universe could offer. “There should be something persisting from the station’s origin. I wanted to…” She trails off, her virtual avatar staring at Meshner without expression.

“What’s going on?” he asks, more pitifully than he had intended. Around them, the non-existent space creaks and groans, as though decay still eats into the heart of it, devouring its structural integrity.

The excitement is gone, switched off and deleted from him. In its place he is momentarily exposed to a welter of negative feelings: bitterness, pride, contempt, desperation, misery. Each one is raised up in his mind, held like a gem to the light and then discarded. Kern’s lips are crooked in a hard smile.

“Yes,” she tells him. “Even in defeat, even in nothing, there is treasure. You don’t know how much you miss being disappointed until you can no longer truly savour the feel of disappointment.”

In the hollow echo of that, and when he feels that his situation can truly get neither stranger nor worse, Zaine’s voice comes to his real physical ears, saying, “I have a signal.”

“There is no signal,” Kern insists. “There is nothing but a dead recording.” Again that self-indulgent playing on Meshner’s heartstrings, his implant reconfiguring to deal with the additional load, folding virtual space into more virtual space, straw into gold, until Meshner feels like his poor brain contains whole worlds. He is beginning to understand what is going on, now: the interaction between Kern and the implant and the poor meat within his skull, but now isn’t the time to get too introspective. His introspection has been rented out to his lodger, after all.

“Meshner, open your channel to the ship!” Zaine tells him.

I have, I am, I—but then he finds that he has been locked in his head with Kern instead. Did she cut me off from them, or did I do that by going inward to the implant? He resets his comms to find a babble of chat coming from the Lightfoot. Jumping in halfway he can’t work out what has happened. It’s the octopus things, the aliens, he thinks, and checks their progress: still sailing closer across the gulf between planets, moving at quite a rate now, at an angled trajectory that might be the prelude to an interception, but the distances are vast and they are days away. And anyway, everyone sounds too happy about whatever is going on for it to be an attack.

Then he clicks: Helena and Portia have signalled them.

He reviews precisely what had been said in his absence, disconnecting from his implant as much as he can and skimming over the logs. There was a signal. The pair of them are not only alive but have some manner of détente with their captors. Helena is very positive about that, but there is something else she said…

When the other signal comes through to his helmet’s display, he barely glances at it: just a line of text, presumably from Zaine, except that Zaine is simultaneously asking, “What was that, Meshner?”

And now Fabian is signalling as well, even as Viola replies to the far-off Portia, demanding to know what is going on.

“Fabian?” Meshner asks.

“I am watching you through Artifabian’s eyes,” the Portiid tells him. “Who is that with you?”

“What?” Meshner’s eyes stray to the text-line he just received.

We’re going on an adventure.

“Zaine?” he asks, turning. Zaine isn’t alone.

“Apparently there’s something here the locals don’t like,” comes Kern-translating-Viola, but Meshner isn’t really listening any more.

It’s a suit, an environment suit—not like he or Zaine are wearing, of course. It is the suit that was wrapped about the chair when he first saw this room through Artifabian’s electronic eyes, which he realizes with a start that he hadn’t seen through his visor’s narrow window later, when Zaine was stomping about. It is an ancient piece of technology just like the rest of this place, patched and abandoned, just another fragment of detritus to be seen once and then forgotten. Now it is standing in front of them, like a drowned man weighed down with stones.

Its boots are clasped to the metal floor just like his, but the rest of it waves and ripples in the absence of gravity, boneless as waterweed. There is not enough volume in the folds of that suit to comprise a human body, and yet the suit compresses it, defines it into something fluidly humanoid as it stands at Zaine’s shoulder like a whispering advisor.

Meshner’s instincts take the moment out of any technologically adept hands and he bellows Zaine’s name in the close confines of his helmet, half-deafening himself; half-deafening Zaine to judge by her jerking flinch. Then the thing has a flowing glove on Zaine’s shoulder and she catches the image from Meshner’s camera, seeing herself, seeing her companion.

Her own shriek is soundless, communicated only by the spasm of her limbs. She flings the thing off and loses touch with the floor, boots detached but failing to kick off properly so that she is left with limbs flailing, turning head over heels in the centre of the room directly before the thing, which lazily reaches out an arm that ripples beneath the fabric of the suit.

Meshner panics—he wants to run forwards and grab Zaine but he can’t move his feet, fear and magnetism immobilizing him. Instead, Artifabian leaps, just like the Portiid the robot resembles, striking Zaine in the chest and sending her end over end through the air, weirdly slowly because even an artificial Portiid weighs far less than a Human.

For a moment the spacesuited wraith just undulates, rooted, but then its own boots disconnect and it drifts into the air like a discarded piece of clothing. Some part of the antique suit emits a plume of stale gas and it flies towards them with the underwater lethargy of a jellyfish on the tide.

“Go! Meshner, go!” Zaine pushes off from the wall towards the airlock, but of course there is no hurrying the doors. Their makers made them well, and their later octopus masters only reinforced them. There is no swift escape from this chamber, because it is a prison and now they are face to face with its inmate.

Still, Zaine makes a game try of it, cramming herself into the narrow chamber with its awkward, inhuman controls. The yammer of comms from the Lightfoot clogs all the channels now but Meshner has no capacity to pay attention to it.

The suit is coming for him, drifting across the chamber. The helmet is turned towards him but he sees no face in its glass window, only darkness. He can’t get his boots to disengage properly. He backs away, each step tortuously slow, a nightmare making the effortless transition to the waking world.

Artifabian leaps again, tearing into the quivering spacesuit’s leg, dragging it sharply sideways. The intention was surely to simply pin it there, away from the vulnerable Humans, but instead the friable old fabric of the suit just shears off at the knee, leaving the robot in possession of a single boot, sending the remainder of the antique spinning, its torn leg vomiting… fluid.

Ichor, comes a word into Meshner’s head, he has no idea where from. It is an oily, dark substance, lumpy as though full of half-formed sinews and tissues, clumping and oozing over itself in the centre of the room.

For a handful of heartbeats, as Zaine screams at him, it roils and re-forms, bundling itself into the semblance of a human figure. There is a face turned to them, sightless eyes staring past Meshner. Protean lips move and he is horribly certain it is saying, We’re going on an adventure.

Then it breaks apart into pieces and the pieces become other living things: spiny urchinous protrusions, quivering raw tissues, whips, spasming amoebae, radially symmetrical jellyfish shapes that claw a purchase in the stagnant air, pulsing themselves forward in sudden bursts. Zaine is yelling for him to get into the airlock with her, but Meshner is still lurching, step after magnetically-locked step like a zombie.

He feels impacts on his back, soft, barely noticeable. Something dark begins to ooze-crawl its way across his faceplate. Zaine is still yelling at him—everyone is yelling at him—but he stops moving. His limbs are locked with terror. He watches more of the stuff accumulate around the release catch of his helmet. He can see it flow together, shift shapes, grow extrusions of itself until it is a pair of ragged claws, glutinous simulacra of human hands joined at the wrist, experimenting with an unfamiliar mechanism but learning, learning. The back of one of the hands boils. He sees features form and dissolve there: an eye, a mouth. We’re going on an adventure.

He swings his body to lock eyes with Zaine. She cannot open the far door until the first is shut. He tries one more leaden step, but his legs won’t work for him.

I will give you clarity. The voice is fabricated in the chambers of his implant, spoofed into the auditory centres of his brain. Kern’s voice. Get yourself out, Meshner. I need you. I will help you. And the panic is gone, the fear stripped from him. He is numb, as though a great weight of suppressing medication has flooded through his system. He can think terribly clearly, and no action he contemplates has the possibility of upsetting him. “Artifabian,” he instructs. “Get into the airlock and close the inner door.”

No! says Kern, spiking him with a sudden lance of outrage and fear and pain—his own, but played on a stage for her benefit—but the robot is already scuttling to obey. Perhaps it has its own survival to think about. It is a Kern-instance after all. Perhaps it argues furiously with its older sister all the way to the door.

He takes another step, for the form of it. Then those wriggling hands have understood the release catch from first principles and his suit—knowing only that there is a safe atmosphere outside—lets them open up his faceplate.

He has a brief glimpse of Zaine on the far side of the closing door before they reach for him.