Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

We are. Portia feels a swelling of angry determination at the destruction. The deaths, the destruction of the Messenger, the heedless brutality of it all, fire her up with righteous zeal. We will show them.

We will show them , Bianca echoes, sounding equally determined. You are the swiftest, the strongest, the cleverest. You are the defenders of your world. If you fail, then it will be as though we never lived at all. All our Understandings will be nothing but dust. I ask you to keep the plan in mind at all times. I know that some of you have qualms. This is not the time for them. The great minds of our people have determined that what you are to do is what must be done, if we are to preserve who and what we are.

We understand . Portia is aware that the great star-blotting form of the ark ship is nearing. Already other detachments are launching.

Good hunting , Bianca exhorts them all.

All around, the orbital weapons of the web are in action. Each consists of a single piece of debris, a rock hauled up by the space elevator or captured from the void, held under enormous tension within the net – and now suddenly released, hurled at great speed into the vacuum towards the ark ship.

But tiny , Portia considers. Those vast boulders she remembers seeing are nothing to the ark ship. Surely its shell must be proof against any such missiles.

But the spiders are not simply throwing rocks. The hurled missiles have multiple purposes, but mostly they are a distraction.

Portia feels the webbing tense around her. Ensure your lines are properly coiled , she sends to her peers. This will be rough.

Seconds later, she and her peers are flung into the void on an oblique line that will intercept the Gilgamesh ’s pass as it enters a stable orbit.

She clutches her legs tightly into her body by instinct at first, a shock of terror erupting in her mind and threatening to overwhelm her. Then her training takes over and she begins checking on her soldiers. They are spreading out as they fall towards their rendezvous with the Gilgamesh , but they are still linked by lines to a central hub, forming a rotating wheel, just one of many now spinning towards the Gilgamesh .

The ark ship’s lasers burn the first few rocks, heating them explosively at carefully calculated points to send them tumbling out of its path. Others slam into the vast vessel’s sides, rebounding or embedding. Portia sees at least one thin plume of lost air from a lucky or unlucky strike.

Then she and her peers are bracing for impact. Her radio feeds them second-by-second instructions from the computing colonies on the orbital web, to help them slow down their approach with their little jets and their meagre supply of propellant. Portia is very aware that this is quite likely to be a one-way trip. If they fail, there will be nothing to journey back to.

She has slowed as much as she is able, spinning out more line from the centre of the wheel to put her further away from her sisters. She spreads her legs and hopes that she has managed to do away with just enough momentum.

She lands badly, fails to catch hold with the hooks of her insulated gloves, bounds back from the Gilgamesh ’s hull. Others of her team have been luckier and now they latch on with six legs and reel in their errant peers, Portia included. One is unluckier, landing at an angle and smashing her mask. She dies in an agonized flurry of twitching legs, her helpless cries coming to her companions through the metal of the hull.

There is no time for sentiment. Her corpse is secured to the hull with a little webbing, and then they are on the move. They have a war to fight, after all.

We will show them , Portia thinks. We will show them the error of their ways.

‘Rocks! They’re throwing rocks at us!’ Karst declared incredulously. ‘They’re space-age stone-age!’

One of the console displays flickered and went out and others began to dot with baleful amber displays.

‘Karst, this isn’t a warship,’ Lain’s brittle voice snapped. ‘The Gilgamesh wasn’t designed for any sort of stresses except acceleration and deceleration, certainly not impact—’

‘We have a hull breach in cargo,’ Alpash reported, sounding as though someone had trampled over his holy places. ‘Internal doors are…’ For a moment, apparently, it wasn’t clear whether they were or weren’t, but then he got out, ‘Sealed off, the section’s sealed off. We have… cargo loss—’

‘Cargo is already in vacuum, or close to. Exposure shouldn’t cause any harm,’ Vitas broke in.

‘We have damage to forty-nine chambers,’ Alpash told her. ‘From the impact, and from electrical surges resulting from the damage. Forty-nine.’

For a moment nobody felt up to following that. Half a hundred deaths from a single hit. Trivial, compared to the overall cargo manifest. Horrifying, though, to go behind that word ‘cargo’ and think about the implications.

‘We’re in orbit, one hundred and eighty kilometres out from the web,’ Karst said. ‘We need to fight back. They’ll be throwing more stones at us.’

‘Will they?’ Holsten’s meagre contribution.

‘Maybe they’re reloading.’

‘What other damage?’ Vitas asked.

‘I… don’t know,’ Alpash admitted. ‘Hull sensors are… unreliable, and some have been lost. I don’t believe any essential systems have been damaged, but there may be weakening of the hull in other areas… our damage-control systems have been refined so as to concentrate on emergencies and critical areas.’ Meaning that they simply hadn’t been able to properly maintain the entire network.

‘We can reposition the lasers,’ Karst stated, as though it was a natural sequitur to what had last been said. Perhaps in Karst’s head it was.

‘We can probably reposition the ship rather more easily,’ Lain told him. ‘Just turn him round so that the asteroid arrays are aiming towards the web. In orbit, our orientation doesn’t matter.’

Karst blinked at that, obviously still somewhat married to the idea that the front end should go first, but then he nodded. ‘Well, let’s start on that, then. How long?’

‘Depends how responsive the systems are. We may need to do some spot repairs.’

‘We may not have—’

‘Fuck off, Karst. I am literally in the same boat as you. I will do it as fast as it can be done.’

‘Well, right.’ Karst grimaced, apparently remembering that his status as acting commander had been sidelined once they woke up Lain.

The ancient engineer lowered herself in front of one of the working consoles, a handful of her Tribe gathered around her to do her bidding. She looked terribly tired, Holsten thought, and yet there was still an energy to her he recognized. Time had fought with Lain for possession of this bent, fragile body, and so far time had lost.

‘We are simply not going to be able to burn our way to control of the planet,’ Vitas stated.

‘Sure we are,’ Karst said stubbornly. ‘Seriously, we can probably cut across that entire web, just send it fucking off into space like an old… sock or something.’ And then, ‘Shut up, Holsten,’ when the classicist seemed about to take issue with his simile.

‘Karst, please check the available power to the asteroid array,’ Vitas said patiently.

Karst scowled. ‘So we recharge them.’

‘Using all the energy that is currently ensuring that systems like life-support or reactor-containment keep working,’ Vitas agreed. ‘And, even if you get it right, what then? What about the planet, Karst?’

‘The planet?’ He blinked at her.