Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Or it may be—’ Lain started.

‘It’s possible,’ Vitas cut her off. The very suggestion seemed abhorrent to her. ‘It changes nothing.’

‘Right,’ Karst backed her up. ‘I mean, even if they’re – if Kern’s – saying, yeah, come on down, what do we do? Because, if she’s got all her stuff, she can cut us up as we touch orbit. And that’s not even thinking about that bastard mess and what that could do. I mean, if it’s something that’s grown up from the planet, well, it’s Kern’s experiment, isn’t it? Maybe it does what she says.’

There was an awkward pause, everyone waiting to see if someone, anyone, would argue the other side, just for the form of it. Holsten turned the words over, trying to put together a sentence that didn’t sound flat-out crazy.

‘There was a tradition the Old Empire once had,’ Vitas stated slowly. ‘It was a choice they gave to their criminals, their prisoners. They would take two of them and ask them to spare or to accuse each other, each making the decision quite alone without a chance to confer. All went very well indeed if they both chose to spare one another, but they suffered some degree of punishment if they both accused each other. But, oh, if you were the prisoner who decided to spare his friend, only to find you’d been accused in turn…’ She smiled, and in that smile Holsten saw suddenly that she had grown old, but that it showed so little on her face – kept at bay by all the expressions she did not give rein to.

‘So what was the right choice?’ Karst asked her. ‘How did the prisoners get out of it?’

‘The logical choice depended on the stakes: the weighting of punishments for the different outcomes,’ Vitas explained. ‘I’m afraid the facts and the stakes here are very stark and very plain. We could approach the planet in the hope that we were, against all past experience, now being welcomed. As Karst says, that will leave us vulnerable. We will put the ship at risk if it turns out that this is really a trick, or even that Mason has simply made some error in his translation.’ Her eyes passed over Holsten, daring him to object, but in truth he was by no ways that confident of his own abilities. ‘Or we attack – use the drones now, and prepare to back up that first strike when the Gilgamesh reaches the planet. If we do that, and we are wrong, we are throwing away a priceless chance to reach an accommodation with an Old Empire intelligence of some sort.’ There was genuine regret in her voice. ‘If we go in peace, and we are wrong, we are most likely all dead, all of us, all the human race. I don’t think we can argue with the weighting that we have been given. For me there is only one rational choice at this point.’

Karst nodded grimly. ‘That bitch never liked us,’ he pointed out. ‘No way she’d suddenly change her mind.’

Several centuries later and a lot of spiders is a long way from ‘suddenly’ , Holsten thought, but the words stayed unspoken in his head. Lain was looking at him, though, obviously expecting a contribution. So now people actually want to listen to the classicist? He just shrugged. He suspected that the loss, if they went to war on false pretences, might be far greater than Vitas claimed, but he could not argue with her assessment of the complete total loss of everything there was if they erred too far on the path of peace.

‘More importantly, the logic is universal,’ Vitas added, looking from face to face. ‘It truly doesn’t matter what is waiting for us at the planet. It’s mathematics, that’s all. Our adversary faces the same choice, the same weighting. Even if to welcome us with open arms and have us then play the responsible guest may give the best results all round, the cost of being betrayed is too high. So we can look into the minds of our opponents. We know that they must make the same decision that we must make: because the cost of fighting needlessly is so much less than the cost of opting for peace and getting it wrong. And that same logic will inform the decision of whatever is there, whether it’s a human mind or a machine, or…’

Spiders? But it was plain that Vitas wouldn’t even utter the word, and when Lain spoke it for her, the science chief twitched ever so slightly.

So Vitas doesn’t like spiders , Holsten considered morosely. Well, she wasn’t down on the bloody planet, was she? She didn’t see those bloated monsters. His eyes strayed to the image of the webbed world. Can it be sentience? Or is Vitas right and it’s just some mad experiment gone wrong – gone right, even? Would the Old Empire have wanted giant space-spiders for some purpose? Why not? As a historian I must concur that they did a lot of stupid things.

‘Come on, then,’ Karst prompted. ‘I’m pressing the button, or what?’

In the end everyone was looking at Lain.

The old engineer took a few careful steps forward, stick clacking on the floor, staring at the drone’s camera image of the shrouded planet. Her eyes, that had witnessed centuries pass in a kind of punctuated stop-motion, tried to take it all in. She had the look of a woman staring bleak destiny in the eye.

‘Take out the satellite,’ she decided at last, quietly. ‘We go in fighting. You’re right, there’s too much at stake. There’s everything at stake. Bring it down.’

Karst sent the order briskly, as though afraid that someone would get cold feet or change their mind. Millions of kilometres away, in the direction of the Gilgamesh ’s inexorable progress, the drones received their instructions. They already had the metal fist of the satellite targeted, trapped as it was in that vast equatorial web.

They carried the best lasers that the Tribe had been able to restore, linked to the remote vessels’ little fusion reactors. They had already drifted as close as they dared, jockeying for geostationary orbit above the trapped satellite with as little expenditure of energy as they could get away with.

They loosed, the two of them together, striking at the same spot on the satellite’s hull. Somewhere far distant, Karst would be tensing, but the image he would be reacting to would already be old by the time he saw it.

For a moment nothing happened, as energy was poured into the ancient, ravaged shell of the Brin 2 Sentry Pod. Karst would have his fists clenched, staring at the screens with veins standing out on his forehead, as though his will could cross space and time in order to make things happen.

Then, with a silent flowering of fire almost instantly extinguished, the drilling beams reached something vital within, and the millennia-old home of Doctor Avrana Kern was ripped open, the webs on either side shrivelling and springing away under the sudden excess of heat. Still gouting out its contents into the hungry emptiness of space, the shattered satellite slipped free from its tangle of moorings, burning a hole in the great web, and was propelled away from the drones by the outrush of material from its jagged wounds.

The drones themselves had given their all, the discharge of their weapons leaving their reactors cold and draining them dry. They tumbled off across the face of the web, to fall or to drift away.

The satellite, though, had a more definite fate. It fell. Like Kern’s experimental subjects so very very long before, it was jolted out of its orbit, to be gathered up by the arms of the planet’s gravity, spiralling helplessly into the atmosphere, where it streaked across the sky, just an old barrel with a single ancient monkey in withered residence, delivering a final message to the anxious eyes below.

They watched it burn its way across the sky.