Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

They exploded quite satisfactorily, though, once they died.

Soon, if there were any enemy survivors, they had fled; Karst paused a moment, reporting back to Lain before taking the big step of putting himself outside on the hull, out before the curtailed horizon of the Gilgamesh .

Then there was nothing for it – so he went.

The heavy EVA suits were proper military technology, although most of the actual military systems Karst would have liked to have accessed were not online or had been removed entirely. After all, the engineers had not needed sophisticated targeting programs when going out to make repairs. Like everything else that survived of the human race, a tyranny of priorities had come into force. Still, the suits were reinforced at the joints, and armoured everywhere else, with servos to help the determined space warrior actually move about in them. They had an extended air supply, recycled waste, controlled temperature and, if the hull sensors had actually been left intact, then Karst would have had a lovely little map of everything around him. As it was, he climbed laboriously through the hatch in a second skin that bulked out his torso and each limb to twice its actual circumference, feeling hot and cramped, sensing the slight shudder as ancient and lovingly maintained servomotors considered each second whether or not they would relinquish the ghost and seize up. Some of the suits still had functioning jet packs to allow for limited manoeuvring while away from the hull, but fuel was at a premium, and Karst had given the order to save it for emergencies. He was unconvinced that using the antiquated, oft-repaired flight packs was not just one step too far towards a death-trap.

His image of his surroundings was the cluttered and narrow view from his faceplate, and a handful of feeds from cameras on his squad-mates’ suits, which he was having difficulty matching up to the actual individuals concerned.

‘Lain, can you send everyone instructions on a formation, and their place in it?’ It felt like admitting defeat, but he did not have the tools that the suit’s inventor had anticipated to hand. ‘I need eyes looking out every way. We’re heading for Shuttle Bay Seven doors. Close this airlock behind us. And the outer door’s compromised somewhere—’

‘It’s not closing,’ came Alpash’s voice. ‘It… something’s gone wrong.’

‘Well…’ and then Karst realized he had nothing much to say to that. He could hardly demand they came out and fixed it right now. ‘Well, seal the inner door until we return. We’re going now.’

Then Lain’s instructions came through: showing them her best guess at a route to take, and a formation for the security team to fall into, eyes focused all around.

‘We’ve got another drone launching,’ she added. ‘I’ll send it far out to look down on you, and patch it into your… fuck.’

‘What?’ Karst demanded immediately.

‘No drone. Just get to the shuttle bay, double-time.’

‘You try fucking double-time in these things.’ But Karst was moving, the point of the arrow, and his team shambled into place, step after hulking metal step along the hull. ‘And let me guess: drone bay after the shuttle, right?’

‘Well done.’

The drone had simply not got out of the bay, hanging tangled in webbing that its sensors could not even detect, its launch hatch still open. Holsten had no idea what sort of access the drone bays gave to the rest of the ship, but Lain was already sending people that way, so presumably that meant the creatures were aboard.

They had camera feeds from Karst and a handful of his people, though by no means all, recording their slogging progress outside on the hull, constantly surveying the ground before them over that truncated horizon.

‘Blind!’ hissed Lain furiously. The network of hull sensors was in pieces, hundreds of maintenance-hours of damage inflicted in just minutes. ‘Where are they, then? Where else?’

Holsten opened his mouth – another chance for a trite and meaningless remark, and then alarms began to go off.

‘Hull breach in cargo,’ Alpash said flatly, and then, with a curious deadness to his tone, ‘That’s a second breach, of course. After the impact earlier.’

‘There’s already a hole in cargo,’ Lain echoed the sentiment, eyes seeking out Holsten’s. ‘They’re probably already inside.’

‘Then why make another hole?’

‘Cargo’s big,’ Alpash said. ‘They must be boring in all over the ship. They don’t need hatches. We…’ His eyes were wide as he looked at Lain beseechingly. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Cargo…’ Holsten thought of those thousands of sleepers, oblivious in their little plastic coffins. He thought of spiders descending upon them, coasting in the gravity-free vacuum towards their prey. He thought of eggs.

Perhaps Lain harboured similar thoughts. ‘Karst!’ she snapped. ‘Karst, we need your people inside.’

‘We’re coming up on the shuttle-bay hatch now,’ Karst reported, as though he hadn’t heard.

‘Karst, they’re inside,’ Lain insisted.

There was a pause, though the clomping progress of the cameras didn’t slow. ‘Get people there from the inside. I’ll deal with this, then we’ll head back in. Or do you want them actually right outside your door?’

‘Karst, cargo is without gravity and atmosphere, I can’t just send—’ Lain started.

‘Let me kill this nest and then we’ll be back,’ Karst spoke over her. ‘We’ll keep a lid on it, don’t worry.’ He sounded maddeningly calm.

Then another transmission came in from aboard the ship, a moment of garbled shouting and screaming… then nothing.

Silence followed. Lain and Alpash and Holsten stared at one another, appalled.

‘Who was that?’ the ancient engineer asked at last. ‘Alpash, what did we…?’

‘I don’t know. I’m trying… Call in, please, call in, all…’

There was a flurry of brief acknowledgements from different groups of the Tribe and reawakened military across the ship, and Holsten could see Alpash checking them off. Even before they had finished someone was shouting, ‘They’re here! Get out, get out. They’re inside!’

‘Confirm your position.’ Alpash’s voice was strained. ‘Lori, confirm your position!’

‘Alpash—’ Lain started.

‘That’s my family,’ the younger engineer said. He was away from his station, suddenly. ‘That’s our living quarters. They’re all in there: my kin, our children.’

‘Alpash, stay at your post!’ Lain ordered him, hand trembling on her stick, but her authority – the leverage of her age and pedigree – was right now just smoke. Alpash had the hatch open and was gone.

‘There they are,’ came Karst’s triumphant shout over the comms, and then: ‘Where are the rest of them?’

Lain’s mouth opened, her eyes dragged irresistibly towards the screens. There was a handful of spiders about the shuttle-bay hatch, caught in the glare of the sun, long, angular shadows cast down the length of the hull. Less, though, than there had been, and perhaps that just meant that the others had gone for easier access points. The chaos over the comms showed that the creatures were establishing beachheads all over the ship.

‘Karst…’ from Lain, surely too quietly for him to respond.

Holsten saw one of the spiders abruptly shatter, torn open by a shot from Karst or one of his team. Then someone shouted, ‘Behind us,’ and the camera views were swinging around, giving wheeling views of the hull and the stars.

‘I’m caught!’ came from someone, and others of the security team were no longer moving. Holsten saw one man, pinned in the camera view of a comrade, fighting something unseen, slapping and pulling at his suit, the drifting net of threads that had ensnared him invisible yet too strong to break.