Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Portia transmits over and over: Lightfoot, Portia present, are you there? Something has gone wrong, but Helena feels deaf and blind: her translation system is still configured to wring what meaning she can from the octopus visual language, and she receives only the most basic of translation as Portia and Viola speak. And now Viola has just stopped replying.

Helena doesn’t need to stretch her imagination to come up with possibilities. Her mind is still full of the images that Baltiel recorded, long, long ago. Something deadly lives on that planet, the one he’d called Nod. Something insidious, that gets inside you. It got inside Lante and her fellows. It got inside Baltiel.

She turns back to the octopuses, still watching her—or at least mostly keeping one eye on her during their constant back and forth amongst themselves. She sees a lot of agitated hues and textures there. Whatever the plague of Nod actually is, the locals are terrified of it.

And yet, and yet… She focuses on the oddities, the flickerings and undercurrents across their skins that go against the chroma of the majority. She is already seeing a great deal of something she loosely translates as “forbidden”, backed up by code from the data channel that repurposes warnings and prohibitions used in Old Empire computer routines. Except there are a few flickers that seemed to contradict this. She already knows that contradictory emotions and thoughts are the very meat and drink of her hosts, but these are covert, flashed just between a couple of her interrogators; a minimal targeted display, one to another, the baglike bulk of their body hiding the aside from the rest. If they thought of her fully as a sentient creature then perhaps they would conceal the sentiment from her as well, but apparently she doesn’t rank so highly.

She focuses, recording, running the sequences back and forth through her internal software. The implications are of some tempering of the forbiddance—she has the sense of this linking to past associations, but not in the same way as Senkovi or Baltiel are referred to, so: more recent events? Were there those who had not let that forbiddance curtail them, perhaps? But here the recipient replies with warnings, a covert flicker of danger colours almost lost in the general alarm that seem to carry a separate message.

Be careful what you say, she translates tentatively. The furtiveness of the communication suggests that. More divisions amongst the molluscs, more factions. And what these two are worried about isn’t just the plague of Nod, but discovery by their peers.

Then Portia twitches, and a scrambled communication comes in from Viola that Helena has to beg interpretation for, to her chagrin. Portia shakes herself—she saw the old Baltiel recordings as well—and just says, “It has Meshner.”

“The others?”

“Well.” Portia bristles. “What are the creatures here doing?”

“Talking, or the nearest equivalent.”

“No.” Portia flags up segments of the data channel—incoming not from their interrogators but a whole separate stream of staccato chatter received from elsewhere. “There’s some other thing going on.” She returns to the Lightfoot channel and Helena can just follow, Viola, get the ship moving now.

Everything about the Portiid is agitated, aggressive. Portia is in the full throes of threat-response and Helena doesn’t waste time asking questions. She goes back over the data channel, following from flag to flag, trying to understand what her friend has seen. She had been concentrating on the visual displays, but Portia had focused on the data channels.

She finds it there: a section of communications dealing entirely with the course and position of the Lightfoot, along with the disposition of several octopus vessels already out patrolling near the inner planet. They are given ludicrously grand labels, explosions of joy and pride, anger and exhilaration. Her linguist’s instincts twitch, but she has no time to decode them because the closest of them (and her rebellious mind thinks its name might be the Profundity of Depth to a Human) has been shadowing the Lightfoot, running on minimal emissions to avoid detection. Tags drawn from a dozen different Old Empire conventions that nonetheless indicated combat readiness.

She thrusts her slate at their interrogators, wrestling with language in order to ask the simplest of questions. “What are you doing? Why? Make it stop!” Because why have they let Portia speak to Viola so freely if at the self-same time they were planning an attack?

Portia has found that most human of things hidden in the numbers: a countdown.

One of the octopuses drifts down to the console and begins communicating, its skin flushing and stuttering with didactic meanings. Mostly it does not understand the question, and much of the rest seems to be some personal recounting of its own attitudes that is utterly impenetrable, but she gets just enough for the bleak understanding: There are some who wish this thing done. There is a threat; there is a response to a threat. And it is plainly something entirely everyday, that random members of their race might decide to go blow up some visiting alien ambassadors without any recourse to higher powers or consensus. They fear; they seek a solution; they act.

Acted. She understands the qualifier to all these emotive messages. The gloss has faded from the feelings because they are in the past, now being twice-told over to her. The decisions Helena rails against have already been concluded, only now coming to fruition across the vast reach of space. All this diplomatic talk, and the attack was already on its way.

Kern’s voice comes over the channel, flat, stripped of the last vestige of her humanity.

“I am detecting incoming missiles, many of them homing. Deploying countermeasures. Portia, Helena, confirm receipt.”

“Confirmed,” Helena whispers into the gap of long minutes and millions of kilometres.

“It has Meshner. The thing from the station.” Kern’s voice fuzzes with static. It almost sounds like a jag of emotion. “I am trying to regain contact with him. There is a signal from his implants.”

“Kern, the attack!” Helena shouts at her. “Why are you—?”

“I need him,” comes Kern’s affectless drone. “Incoming now. I think they’ve learnt. I think the chaff won’t be enough. I’m diverting all free mass and reinforcing the crew section. I—”

Helena blinks, waiting for that “I” to be followed by a verb, even one as bizarre and meaningless as I need.

And she waits, waits longer, knowing that, by the time that severed dog-end of transmission reached her, the Lightfoot had already been struck, the battle over.

Later, Portia finds a reconstruction one of the octopus systems created, drawn from long-range scanner data of the incident: how the Lightfoot was light and nimble, but not quite enough. How the impacts tore into the scout ship’s drive section, rupturing the engines. How Kern jettisoned the damage, changing the ship’s aspect, fighting with centres of gravity as great spools and sheathes of hull material unwound into space to intercept the next barrage.

How they were struck, unravelling, swatted from orbit like a fly, sent spiralling down into the atmosphere of the planet below.