Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Vitas is wrong,’ he told her. ‘They’re not biological machines. They’re not just Kern’s puppets.’

‘And how are you supposed to have worked that one out?’

‘Because of how they communicate.’

She frowned. ‘You’ve cracked that now? And didn’t think to tell anyone?’

‘No… not what they’re saying, but the structure. Isa, I’m a classicist, and a lot of that is a study of language – old languages, dead languages, languages from an age of humanity that doesn’t exist any more. I’d stake my life that these signals are actually language rather than just some sort of instructions. It’s too complex, too intricately structured. It’s inefficient, Isa. Language is inefficient. It evolves organically. This is language – real language.’

Lain squinted down at the screen for a few seconds until the transmissions abruptly cut off, as the jamming switched frequencies. ‘What difference does it make?’ she asked quietly. ‘Does it get Vitas’s fucking prisoners out of their cells? It doesn’t, Holsten.’

‘But—’

‘Tell me how it helps us,’ she invited. ‘Tell me how any of this… speculation does us any good. Or is it just like all the rest of your bag of tricks? Academic in every sense of the word.’

‘We’re ready,’ came Karst’s voice at that moment, as though he had been politely waiting for her to finish. ‘We’re in the airlock. We’re about to open the hatch.’

Lain’s face was like a death mask. She had never been intended as a commander, either. Holsten could see every one of those centuries of hard decisions in the lines on her face.

‘Go,’ she confirmed, ‘and good luck.’

Karst had a squad of twenty-two ready to go, and that used up all the heavy EVA suits that were still functioning. Another twelve were currently being worked on, and he was only grateful that the Tribe had needed to go out and make patch repairs on the hull, or he might not even be able to field that many soldiers. Soldiers : he thought of them as soldiers. Some of them actually were soldiers, military woken up from cargo either this time or the last time, added piecemeal to the security detail whenever he had needed a bit more muscle. Others were veterans of his team: Key Crew who had been with him from the start. He was taking only the best, which in this case meant almost everyone who had the appropriate EVA training.

He remembered very clearly when he himself had gone through that training. It had seemed a complete waste of time, but he had wanted to win a place in Key Crew on the Gilgamesh and it had been something they had been looking for. He had spent months bumbling about in orbit, learning how to move in zero gravity, how to step with magnetic boots, acclimatizing to the nausea and the disorientation of such a hostile and inimical environment.

Nobody had mentioned fighting an army of spiders for the survival of the human race, but Karst half-fancied he might have imagined it, day-dreamed it back when he was young and the Gilgamesh project was still just an idea. Surely he had seen himself standing on the hull of a mighty, embattled colony ship, weapon to hand, beating away the alien horde.

Now, in the airlock, his breath loud in his ears and the suit’s confines pressing and leaden, it didn’t seem at all as much fun as he had imagined.

The hatch they were about to exit through was set in the floor, from where he was standing. There would be a vertiginous shift of perspective as they got out, carabinered to one another and trying not to be flung off the ship’s side by the rotating section’s centripetal force. Then they would have to trust to their boots to hold them, progressing along a surface that would constantly try to dislodge them. Things would have been easier, perversely, had they been accelerating or decelerating in deep space, with the inner sense of ‘down’ falling towards the front or the rear of the ship, and the rotating sections stilled, but they were in orbit now, free falling around the planet, and therefore forced to fake their own gravity.

‘Chief!’ one of his team warned. ‘We’re losing air.’

‘Of course we’re—’ Then he stopped, because he hadn’t given the order to open the external doors. They had been standing here on the brink for some time and the words had been reluctant to emerge. Now someone – some thing – was forcing his hand.

Somewhere on the hatch there must be a pinhole letting out their air. The spiders were out there, right now, trying to claw their way in.

‘Everyone latch down and lock your boots,’ he ordered and, now he was faced with action, the thoughts were coming smoothly and without undue emotional embroidery. ‘You’d better crouch low. I want the outer door opened quick as you like, without the air venting first.’

One of the Tribe confirmed his instructions in his ear, and Karst followed his own advice.

Instead of the steady grinding of the hatch that he expected, someone had obviously taken that ‘quick as you like’ to heart and activated some sort of emergency override, snapping the hatch open within seconds so that the pressurized air around them thundered through the resulting breach like a hammer. Karst felt it raking at him, trying to drag him out with it, to enjoy the vast open vistas of the universe. But his lines and boots held, and he weathered the storm. One of his team was immediately torn loose beside him, yanked halfway through the opening and only saved by her anchoring line. Karst reached out and grabbed her glove, clumsily pulling her back until she was against the subjective floor beside the gaping hole.

He saw some fragments, then: jointed legs and a torn-open something that must have been most of a body caught by the mechanism of the hatch. Beyond…

Beyond were the enemy.

They were in disarray, crawling over one another. Several had been battered away by the decompression, and he hoped that a few had been lost to space, but there were at least three or four dangling out at the end of threads and beginning to climb back up towards the hatch. Karst aimed his gun. It was built into his glove, and was a refreshingly simple piece of kit, overall. Nothing in the airless wastes of vacuum would stop a chemical propellant working if it contained its own oxygen, and the airless void should be a perfect marksman’s paradise, his range limited only by the curve of the Gilgamesh’ s hull.

He wanted to say something inspiring or dramatic but, in the end, the sight of the creeping, leg-waving, spasmodically scuttling monsters so horrified him that, ‘Kill the fuckers,’ was all he could manage.

He shot but missed three times, trying to adjust for the surreal perspective and mistaking the distance and size of his quarry, his suit’s targeting system mulish about locking on to the little vermin. Then he caught it, sending one of the beasts that still remained on the hull spinning away. His team were shooting as well, careful and controlled, and the spiders were plainly utterly unprepared for what was happening. Karst saw their angular, leggy bodies being hurled away on all sides, the dead ones dangling straight out from the hull like macabre balloons.

Some of them were returning fire, which gave him a nasty turn. They had some sort of weapons, though the projectiles were slow and bulky compared to the sleek zip of bullets from the human-made guns. For a moment Karst thought that they were throwing stones again, but the missiles were something like ice or glass. They shattered against the armoured suits, causing no damage.

The spiders were unexpectedly resilient, clad in some sort of close-woven armour that had them dancing about under the impact of the bullets without necessarily letting any penetrate, and Karst and his fellows had to hose several of them with shot before something got through.