Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

It has taken the creature outside the best part of a day to cut its way in.

If the Lightfoot was still spaceworthy, Fabian thinks the hull would be proof against anything the creature could do. Although, seeing it go about the task, he is less and less sure of that. It learns. From simple flailing it has modified its “suit”, the case of debris that contains it and gives it shape. It has improvised shears from shells and knapped stones, and possibly from first principles. It has identified the weaknesses in the unspooling tangle of the Lightfoot’s walls and has sawn and severed its way in with a dreadful patience. No, perhaps patience is the wrong word. Fabian is imputing rational arachnid thought to something probably not capable of it, but it seems enthusiastic, a worker fired up for its task.

At one point he lost his nerve and attacked it with the drone, ramming into the creature and smashing open its body, as well as wrecking the remote itself. He did not think he had solved the problem, then, and when Artifabian went out through the makeshift airlock, the creature had mostly reconstituted its casing, or another like it, the same pieces in random organization to give a similar not-quite-human shape. Even as they watched, it went back to cutting, picking up exactly where it had left off, its tools perhaps slightly better suited to the task thanks to its opportunity to remodel them.

They are all suited up now—Fabian, Viola and Zaine, though the Human’s suit is the theoretically contaminated one she came over from the quarantine pod in because they have no way of fabricating a new one. Contamination, Fabian suspects, is going to be a moot point very shortly.

They have hauled Zaine back and the three of them huddle against the far wall, watching the light wax along the line where the creature is carving its way in. Artifabian is still out there, ready to make a desperate assault on the creature, but the robot is only Portiid-size, far smaller than a Human. Fabian can’t see that it will make a dent.

I suppose we have free rein in respect of final messages, he shuffles out, his words heavy and laboured through the encumbrance of his suit.

It is possible that we are still being recorded and that the recording will eventually reach the Voyager, Viola tells him primly. I recommend dignity, therefore.

Fabian had a great many things to say in the certain assurance none of it would ever be heard by the wider world, and so that puts the kybosh on that. Some of those things were about Viola, others about the matriarchy and his experience of it and his great bitterness about not achieving his potential, and being driven onto this ludicrously dangerous mission as the only way he could pursue his researches unimpeded. And probably something regretful about Meshner but, right now, that is far down the list. Now Viola has introduced the threat of posterity and he feels the clamp of social pressure again, even looking death in the piecemeal face.

For death is here, come through the wall after all that cutting, squeezing its body through too small a slit, its casing bulging and rippling to fit, giving the lie to any suggestion of humanity. Fabian sees parts of it vibrate, buzzing into motion so rapid he can barely see it. Zaine chokes and shudders, and Fabian guesses the monster has said something human ears can hear, because to speak like a human is part of its sham, even though it lacks anything like the requisite organs and parts.

Probably it was something about an adventure.

Artifabian charges in, legs flailing, and scales the monster’s irregular surface, trying to tear in with palps and fangs. The entity does not acknowledge the robot’s attempt at all, even when parts of it are ripped loose. Instead it takes one slumping step and then another, and something like an arm unfurls from its side to reach for them, almost a comradely gesture, almost a gentlemanly offer to help Zaine to her feet.

I really wish I hadn’t come. It’s not exactly the searing diatribe about social injustice he had planned, but it is from the heart.

I share those feelings, Viola says. I would rather spend my last moments with a female who was my intellectual peer. At his furious twitch, his legs raised in raging, impotent threat, she clarifies: Humour, Fabian. You are adequate as companionship goes. And a competent researcher, if that is what you are seeking.

Zaine starts again, kicking herself up to half stand, half lean against the curved wall. She is looking up and around, not at the slowly approaching creature. Her mouth moves, but Artifabian is too busy to translate.

A heartbeat later the message is repeated for Portiid senses. Do nothing rash. A flat pronouncement from the ship itself.

Kern? Viola demands. Where have you been?

Too complex to tell you. Make no contact. Wait. No, wait, I said. Fabian, are you well? Are you hurt?

Fabian does not like Kern singling him out. It seems a likely prelude to being commanded to do something dangerous. And yet the voice is filling out now, little taps and scraps of character jolting along with the words. It doesn’t seem like Kern to him, though. She had a very definite, forceful, female manner. This Kern seems almost… male.

What’s that? There is a roaring sound outside and something passes over the ship, a shadow against the pale translucence of the ceiling. Fabian sees a flare from outside, the Lightfoot’s hull shrivelling slightly in a wash of heat. Something metal is coming down, gleaming in the sun, glowing slightly from a hurried re-entry. It is a drone, not his little eye-in-the-sky but one of the space exploration drones they deployed to look at the orbital. For a moment he’d thought that it was another missile come to make an end of them all.

This is more difficult than I’d anticipated. Kern, saying un-Kernish things in an un-Kernish way, but a voice more and more familiar as Fabian receives it.

The drone lands badly, falls over and rolls against one of the starfish, which withers away from the hot metal.

Artifabian, I need… please… take this and apply directly to the organism. The drone’s casing pops even with the words, and something is ejected, to rattle against the stone of the altiplano. Artifabian leaps on it, a single predatory motion, then patters hurriedly back. Fabian can make out a drill-head, part of the drone’s regular arsenal.

The monster, by that time, is standing right before them. Its faceplate now is a spiral, segmented shell like a centipede at rest, like a single compound eye. It seems to regard them, and Fabian shuffles left and Viola right, trying to split its attention. Zaine is its focus, though, and she is in no physical state to get away from it. Her face is twitching like something caught in a web, her eyes very wide.

Artifabian leaps, driving the drill-piece into the gap already torn in the creature’s outer shell. For a moment it seems a magnificently pointless gesture to Fabian. Then Viola is at a console, having shuffled considerably further than he did, and is receiving data from Kern, or from whoever is sitting in Kern’s place.

A makeshift syringe, that drill: containing… more of the same. Viola cannot understand it. Artifabian has just injected the creature with a shot of the same organism, the specimen from the orbital.

Just wait, the computer’s voice tells them, still filling out with personality. It’ll be fine. We’re golden, Fabian. There’s so much I need to tell you.

Meshner…? Fabian asks timidly.

Partly. I’ve assumed Kern’s functions, or I’m trying to. She put me in here, but none of it runs as easily as she said it would.

And where is Kern? Viola demanded.

She withdrew to the implant, Meshner says. She… This is her plan. I’m just doing my part.

What’s it doing? This is Artifabian, translating for Zaine, because the creature has not moved since the robot struck. It might as well be an ungainly statue, one arm outstretched towards nothing.

It’s receiving an ambassador, Meshner tells them. It is hearing a revelation. It’s like religion, really. And if we’re right, it’s not a threat, any more. And just maybe it’s an opportunity.

****

Meshner does his best to keep the Lightfoot in repair over the next several days, enough that none of them starve or run out of power or are forced to trust the vagaries of the local atmosphere. Staying suited is a profound inconvenience for everyone concerned but, even if the parasitic entity is not airborne, nobody wants to risk there being something else with which no diplomatic treaties have been drawn up.

The thing itself, the humanoid thing of rock and shell and slime-mould ooze, has gone but not far. It squats out on the plateau, and the starfish have laboriously crept away from it because they can sense what it is. To Fabian it has a weirdly tragic air, a thing rejected even by its own world. Meshner has explained what Kern did, by then; what she made the parasite understand. And what one sample understands can be instantly assumed by any other colony it comes into contact with. The organism is many, but it is also one, microscopic cells trading encoded understandings like Earth bacteria exchange immunity genes. The parasite will be different going forwards, Meshner claims. It will not seek to come as a devourer, but as a co-traveller. Viola is already considering how such a thing might be of use, how its Understandings might be put in service of the Portiid drive for knowledge and discovery. Fabian has already decided that this is one branch of science she can have sole dominion over, as far as he’s concerned.

And at last the cavalry arrives. One day they glance at the sky above and there is something there, like a second moon. Not the science vessel, nor its military escort; certainly not the Voyager which still lurks in the outer system, too far to ever tender aid. Instead, Meshner introduces his crew to the Profundity of Depth, the curved hull of which shimmers with colours as though it is shouting insults at the planet below. Insults perhaps, but no warheads.

The rescue comes soon after, a spherical vessel tumbling from orbit, unmanned, to scream like a banshee on jets of superheated steam as it hovers over the altiplano, spooling out tendrils to gather up the Lightfoot entire and repatriate it to space rather than just snatch up the individual crew—which, from Meshner’s disembodied point of view, is just as well. They will be kept in strict quarantine for some time, but time is what they have regained now they have escaped being stranded on an inhospitable alien world.

Eventually, the science vessel and its escort arrive, and the Lightfoot crew are reunited with Helena and Portia. The scientists themselves have already lost interest in their new allies. They are going over the orbital with great enthusiasm, dismantling a great clutter of mechanisms for further study. They have come after their scion, Noah, whose work was so rudely interrupted. For them, the fate of the parasite and the alien ambassadors was only ever a sideline, a gambit to keep the warmongers away while they worked, and one that has paid off.