Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Fabian has been in a fugue state. It happens to both genders, although the Portiids still tacitly consider it a male condition despite centuries of social change. There was a great deal of heat, which the spiders cannot shift as quickly as mammals. There was a lot of noise and movement that came to him like the thundering voice of a god. There was fear. All together the sensory load simply overwhelmed his sense of self and he ceased to be Fabian for a while. Some fuguing Portiids run around like mad things but Fabian feels that he has been frozen still, clinging to a wall that is now a ceiling.

They are down.

He cannot process what that means quite yet. He feels the fugue hovering nearby, waiting for its moment. It is enough to enjoy the comparative quiet. Enough to consider that there is a slightly uncomfortable amount of gravity that has the distinctive savour of the real thing, and not its rotational stepsister. None of that makes sense but he holds off on too much analysis in case he turns up answers he won’t like. Not that, he considers, any answers to be had are likely to be amiable in any way.

Meshner, he sends out, finding that he can access the ship’s comms channels. He has no sense of Kern, meaning nothing he has to say would mean anything to his Human confederate.

And of course Meshner isn’t there. Meshner went onto the orbiting station. Meshner is gone.

The fugue leaps on him. Fabian hasn’t had an attack for many years before this, but when he was a moult or two off full adulthood he suffered greatly from the fits. Back in the old days, that would have been a death sentence for a male—either killed out of annoyance or for sport, or starving because he could not be useful in the way males were supposed to be. Nowadays the times are more enlightened; a little handicap is recognized as nothing more than that. Even in a male.

And he fights it off, this time. He goes straight through it and out the other side, because to forget Fabian, comforting though that might be, would be to forget Meshner, and that would be poor service to his colleague and experimental subject.

He is already wondering if there might possibly be a way to retrieve the implant. Cold, he knows, but… science!

He builds on that, slowly re-establishing his understanding of what has happened. The fugue has several more goes at him, because (as suspected), nothing he works out is remotely encouraging.

The crew section of the Lightfoot is considerably rounder than it was, its walls buttressed. He recognizes this from drills back over Kern’s World. Their chamber has been made an emergency capsule, the walls thickened to become strong but yielding and flexible, able to cushion impacts and shed heat. What remains of the rest of the ship is unknown so far. He is not finding Kern on his personal comms menu, and he is not sure how to engage damage control without the computer. It is possible that this capsule, containing two Portiids, is all that is left. The light is bluish, drawn from chemicals mingled from reservoirs broken when the chamber reconfigured into its emergency state. Possibly there is no power, which means that the continued congeniality of the air is going to be a problem.

Viola is present, bandaging herself, mostly ignoring him even though it’s literally just the two of them. Two of her legs are broken, left three and four, and she is sealing the breaches in her exoskeleton before her internal structure loses too much fluid. Fabian feels a keen need inside himself to ask her what has happened and what must be done, which he irritably rejects as the result of a lifetime of social conditioning. That irritability completes him, makes him fully Fabian again, and he takes stock.

They were attacked and the Lightfoot’s defensive measures were inadequate to protect them from a long-range barrage that hit them almost on the heels of the first warning they had of it. This raises some uncomfortable implications, including (1) the locals were able to analyse Kern’s evasion and detection ability from the first clash and neutralize it; (2) the locals could effectively have destroyed the Lightfoot at any time after becoming aware of it, and at any distance, and perhaps only their bizarre factionalism left the action so long.

On the other hand, Fabian and Viola, at least, remain very much alive. Fabian marks that up as a substantial plus.

On the other, other hand, they are evidently no longer spacebound. In fact the only place they can reasonably be is on the surface of the planet they were formerly orbiting, and Fabian now knows a remarkable amount about the biology of this alien world. What he also knows, although he has no explicable mechanism for it, is that something on this world has the ability to infect Earth-born life.

We remain inviolate, Viola states, without turning her major eyes on him or pausing in her patient medical attention. Fabian deduces that his feet had been betraying his thoughts.

Again, he will not simply ask for orders or reassurance. Instead, he tries to coax anything at all out of the panels and consoles despite the universal lack of power. He feels Viola’s disdain through the prickling hairs of his abdomen, but then has a flash of triumph as the ship thrums about them and minimalist readouts sprout dimly on some of the screens.

Did I do that? he wonders, briefly taken by his own capability, followed by the resignation of: No, it’s Kern.

For a long, yawning moment there is no more, as though this fragment of the brilliant mind of Doctor Avrana Kern has been reduced to nothing but dumb numbers, but then she speaks to them, directly into their individual comms. To the Portiid senses, Kern’s voice can be a fantastically rich and expressive thing—she has been talking to them for far longer than she ever spoke to her own kind—but right now it is shorn of qualifiers, a mere transmission of information; she is either damaged or occupied in dealing with damage.

Yes, crew section intact. Quarantine section located, reports damaged. Power minimal but under restoration. Life support adequate but under restoration. External comms minimal but under restoration. Motive ability, none. Fabrication ability, none but investigating.

Fabian and Viola look sidelong at each other, something they are uniquely designed to do.

Quarantine section? he asks timidly because, last he checked, the Lightfoot didn’t have one.

Zaine, Viola states. She hobbles forward: no jumping for this spider for the foreseeable future, until she can get some prosthetics manufactured. And she’s right, of course. Zaine got back to the ship, unlike poor Meshner, but she was put into quarantine for fear of airborne particles of whatever-that-was on her suit. She had been undergoing, or about to undergo, decontamination when the attack hit.

Quarantine section reports dwindling power and danger of structural integrity loss. Zaine Alpash Vannix alive. Request received for replacement environment suit and retrieval. Artifabian unit not detected. No other mechanical units available.

Artifabian was, of course, in the quarantined section as well, and that Kern cannot link to it does not bode well for Fabian’s research assistant. Viola is eyeing him, though, and he is aware that she is currently excused the traditional bold and venturesome female’s role. Not that she would likely have taken the chance to prove her valour, in his assessment. Viola is neither bold nor venturesome by temperament, and in the old days she would have had males scuttling about to perform her every whim, especially anything that involved the expenditure of energy or the assumption of risk. Or so his bitter thoughts run now, as he dons the cumbersome all-over hazard suit Viola finds for him. Most Portiid environment suits just focus on those parts of the exoskeleton that give ingress to the innards, but Fabian is more than happy to deny the hostile biosphere outside any access to him.

By using up most of the energy she has accumulated, Kern reforms a hull section into a cramped airlock and lets him in, and then out the other side. He checks the readouts: yes, probably there will be sufficient power for the reverse transition; yes, probably the atmosphere scrubbers and generators will be able to keep up with attrition if they have to traipse in and out a few times. Probably. Kern is being frighteningly vague on topics where Fabian would prefer a computer to be rigorous and exacting.

Higher functions restoration? he asks, none-too-tactfully.

I am very well, thank you. Kern’s reply is acid, a decided taste of her usual manner, and therefore infinitely reassuring. I am working on keeping you all alive. By all means continue to distract me from that.

Fabian goes outside.

The readouts from his hazard suit (which has its own power and seems almost painfully cheery in its enthusiastic reporting, compared to dour, wounded Kern) tell him that the atmosphere is thin and oxygen-deficient (a bigger problem to Fabian than to a Human but he has no intention of breathing it anyway), and he attributes this at least in part to altitude, because the Lightfoot’s remnants have come down on a mountainous altiplano, and in one direction the ground simply shears away to distant, hazy valleys. He sends a brief description back and Kern informs him, I selected a landing spot that seemed isolated and was also remote from the location of the earlier human colony on this planet, in the hope that the threat they faced was local. Her use of the concept “landing” is reassuring.

Within a half-kilometre there is a slumped mess of hull material, partially unspooled into great drifts of filaments, which is the quarantine section. It plainly must have come down attached to the rest of the ship to be so close, either broken loose or intentionally jettisoned on impact. Fabian gives the intervening ground a careful look, because this high plain is not devoid of life. The ground is stippled with hollows, and each hollow holds something like an upturned nine-legged starfish, or perhaps a leathery flower. The face it presents to the wan sunlight is so uniformly black that it gives the impression of a hole into the darkness of space. The sides and underside, where the tendrils have curled up slightly, are dust-orange and rugged. They move very slightly, canting and flexing in extreme slow motion to make the most of the light. Between the hollows, there are groups of far smaller specimens which Fabian decides are juveniles, but which might be vagabond males seeking mates or hive-drones serving their sessile queens for all he truly knows. These little stars inch across the bare rock at a pace a slug would scoff at.

Fabian does not fancy the trip at all, but a moment later he is skittering madly for the quarantine section, vaulting high over any living thing in his way. When he is almost at his target a shadow ghosts over him and he quails, his upper eyes registering a long, trailing thing like a kite left to its own recognisance, rippling through the sky above. He guesses it is about twenty metres long, more than enough to make a meal of any Portiid or Human should it be so inclined. Like the starfish, though, it pays him no need at all, and perhaps its upper side is also a solar collector and it lives an endless, mindless round of sunbathing, following noon about the planet’s circumference.

Or perhaps not. He had believed himself fairly knowledgeable about the local biology before setting foot on the surface, given the recorded research diaries of Lante, but there is a world of difference between hearing a scientist’s analyses of protein formation and cellular structure and standing on an alien world, viewing its alien denizens with his own eyes.

It comes to him, as he reaches the quarantine pod, that this, this, is the Understanding he will bequeath to his species, should he survive. He is the first Portiid to be here, to see these things. His scientific genius may be lost, but this moment of fear and wonder will survive.

If he had considered that ahead of time, he would have been thinking brave and creditable thoughts throughout, instead of the panicky twitching he has given free rein to.

He finds an access to the pod, but he needs to know the conditions inside. Hopefully Zaine has been told to expect him. He links to the internal comms.

Arrived. Your situation?

Do you have suit?

He does, of course, and confirms it.

Will open small lock, comes the next message. No power for more. Put suit in. Wait.

He is receiving untranslated Portiid communication, he realizes, which seems precocious for Zaine, but the instructions are sound and he follows them.

Suit applied ready we are coming out.

Fabian skitters back a little, because he is not sure who or what he is talking to right now. Is it Kern? It doesn’t sound enough like her to inspire confidence. And then the wall of the quarantine section is unseamed and, just before it becomes obvious, he works it out: Artifabian, but an Artifabian that is not linking properly to his comms but operating the manual transmitter in the downed section. Then the slit wall bulges, and a suited figure slumps out: Zaine, but plainly not conscious or well. Fabian finds Human injuries hard to analyse even without a suit in the way—they are so fleshy and unfinished, with all their organs trapped between their hard skeletons and the hazards of the outside world!

How is she? he taps out for Artifabian, and the robot responds exactly as another male Portiid might, body language and all.

We were both harmed in the landing. She lives but has sustained injury. We must get her more substantial help.

Despite the medical emergency, Fabian is fascinated. The robot stands there just like the thing it feigns, moving its palps in a repeated idling pattern because being too still is, for the Portiids, a stance filled with emotional meaning, either predator or prey. Casual fidgeting is their smiling and nodding, a low-level reinforcement of their often-fraught social contracts. And obviously, simulating a Portiid is the point of Kern’s experiment with Artifabian, but it appears to have forgotten to simulate Kern. Its casing is dented in many places and one leg is askew, but there has plainly been some deeper damage with unexpected results. The scientist in Fabian twitches to study, but they have other priorities.

Two Portiids might just be able to move a Human, but not over rough ground in such a way as to maintain anyone’s suit integrity. Thankfully this problem solves itself as a tracked drone approaches them from the main body of the crashed ship, which now resembles little more than a gigantic half-deflated tent. The drone’s tracks are unkind to those starfish-things they grind over, leaving a dark, leaking ichor in its wake, but it has a flatbed that they can at least lever Zaine’s torso onto, and by unspoken agreement they fold her arms over her chest and each take a leg, the whole endeavour having the sense of some horrifying farce.

Halfway to the main body of the Lightfoot—now not worthy of that name—Fabian discovers that, of course, the plateau ecosystem is not a monoculture, because something has come to investigate.

It moves swiftly, certainly in contrast with the starfish. It comes into view from the cliff edge, having scaled the side, or perhaps arisen from its roost there. It is… Fabian has no ready comparison. It has a globular body and a number of limbs which appear pneumatic, so that it progresses in lurching fits, the limbs at its rear inflating and thrusting it forwards, then a pause as it works out where it has gone, then another sudden charge. The starfish things are reacting to it, their limbs curling up with painful slowness, hiding their photosynthetic vulnerables from what is apparently a predator.

Fabian has frozen; now he is dragged on as the tracked drone continues its progress. The predator obviously registers their movement—Fabian is unsure if it sees, exactly—and flails over, its limbs plunging rigid-flaccid-rigid-flaccid to bounce and jar it towards them. It is a fair match for Fabian in size, which is to say its body is smaller than a human head, and the greatest span of its limbs, fully extended, would be about a metre and a half. Fabian does the only thing he can think of and gives the alien monster a full-on threat display, limbs raised high to make himself as big as he can be, palps quivering as he dances back and forth.

The alien thing comes to a sudden slapping halt, and Fabian sees that there are whorls and pits studded about its body that presumably serve as sense organs. It waves some half-tumescent tentacles at him uncertainly—this space-suited arachnid visitor from another world. He pitches himself even higher, almost toppling over with his tiny ferocity, and miraculously the thing seems to get the message and shrugs off somewhat sullenly to go and molest one of the ruptured starfish.

When they get to the airlock of the Lightfoot and Viola begins the complex logistics of preserving quarantine whilst getting everyone safe and inside, Fabian glances back and sees half a dozen of the rubbery things feeding on those starfish that have not curled in on themselves in time, and also an entirely different beast, as much like an ambulatory pineapple as anything. None of them pay any attention to their visitors from the sky.

Zaine safely handed off, Fabian decides to take better stock of their surroundings, because the Lightfoot is plainly not going anywhere soon. He keeps loose tabs via comms on the situation inside. Zaine has been unsuited and placed in a sealed section with Artifabian, which is now coordinating with some of Kern’s attention to treat her injuries as best it can, whilst steadfastly refusing or unable to link to its mother computer.

Kern’s own resources are diverted elsewhere. Presumably she does not have the energy or focus to try and hack the robot and bring it back into the fold, and so must let it continue to patter about, lost in its own cover identity as a male Portiid.

Fabian scuttles around the crashed ship’s edge, stepping fastidiously over great spools of unstrung hull material. The ground rises sharply on the side away from the cliff edge. He is thinking about caves, and perhaps large things that might live in caves. The terrain that way is very rugged, thrown up into blocks and jags by some hopefully-distant volcanism. Or perhaps not volcanism… Fabian tries to adjust to what he is looking at, but then Kern has an announcement.

I have a long-range comms contact.

With the octopuses? Viola demands, because the locals have demonstrated a wide range of possible responses and coming over to finish the job is certainly in the running.

I have drones still in orbit. I have configured one as a receiver and relay station. I will be able to send out a signal that can reach the Voyager, Kern states, with more animation than before, drawing back her scattered resources from their many errands. Also: I have established contact with the station.

We do not want contact with the station, Viola decides emphatically.

We do, Kern says forcefully. I have made contact with Meshner.

Fabian twitches at the thought, because he is not sure that there is a “Meshner” left to make contact with, but there might be something wearing his face up there, and the idea is almost as upsetting to him as it would be to a Human. He gathers himself to give everyone the benefit of his sure-to-be-disregarded opinion, then his limbs go still and he stares, finally processing what he is looking at.

Portiids, like Humans, are very good at finding patterns, even when there are none to be found. As a scientist, Fabian has tried to train himself out of such behaviour, which is less the mother of inspiration than of false positives. It has taken him too long, therefore, to accept that what he is seeing is no freak of geology, after all.

Moments later Fabian gets through the airlock and bursts into the crew chamber, unsuited, legs flying in a blur as he tries to get his news out.

Outside, upslope, there! his feet stammer to Viola; and then, with more control, There is a city.