Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Cutting off areas that haven’t been infected?’

‘I’m afraid it’s quite widespread,’ Vitas’s voice confirmed almost briskly, like a doctor trying to cover bad news with a smile. ‘I think I can work around those areas and restore a limited air circulation that’s uncontaminated, but for now…’

‘How do you know all this?’ Lain demanded.

‘My assistants in the lab here have all collapsed. They’re suffering some sort of fit. They’re completely oblivious.’ A tiny, swiftly quashed tremor lay behind the words. ‘I myself am in a sealed test chamber. I was working on a biological weapon of my own to win the war, annihilate the species without having to fire a shot. How could we know they’d beat us to it?’

‘I don’t suppose that’s near completion?’ Lain asked, without much hope.

‘I’m close, I think. The Gilgamesh ’s records on old Earth zoology are rather incomplete. Lain, we’re going to have to—’

‘Route uncontaminated air,’ the engineer finished. She was hunched over a console, trembling hands stabbing at it in desperate, jagged flurries. She looked older, as though the last hour had loaded another decade on to her shoulders. ‘I’m on it. Holsten, you need to warn our people, get them to put on masks, or fall back to… to… to wherever I’ll tell you in…’

Holsten was already doing his best, fighting the Gilgamesh ’s intermittently unreliable interface, calling up each group he could locate on the system. Some did not answer. The spiders’ weapon was spreading invisibly from compartment to compartment even as Vitas and Lain fought to seal it off.

He raised Alpash with a surge of relief. ‘They’re using gas or something—’

‘I know,’ the Tribe engineer confirmed. ‘We’re masked. Won’t work for long, though. This is emergency kit.’ His voice sounded weirdly exhilarated, despite it all.

‘Lain’s preparing a…’ the proper words fell into place just in time ‘…fall-back position. Have you seen any—?’

‘We just shot the fuck out of one bunch of them,’ Alpash confirmed fiercely. It occurred to Holsten that the fight was different for the Tribe. Yes, intellectually he knew that the Gil was the only haven for all mankind, and that his species’ survival depended on it right now, but it was still just a ship to him, a means of crossing from one place to another. To Alpash and his people it was home . ‘Right, well you should fall back to…’ and by that time Lain had prepared a route, working with furious concentration while her breath wheezed in and out between her lips.

‘Vitas?’ the old engineer barked.

‘Still here.’ The bodiless voice sounding no more distant than the scientist’s usual tones.

‘All this compartmentalization is going to hamper your own weapon’s dispersal, I take it?’

Vitas made a curious noise: perhaps it was meant as a laugh, but there was a knife edge of hysteria to sabotage it. ‘I’m… behind enemy lines. I’m cut off, Lain. If I can brew something up, I can get it to the… to them . And I’m close. I’ll poison the lot of them.’

Holsten made contact with another band of fighters, heard a brief cacophonic slice of shouting and screaming, and then lost them. ‘I think you’d better hurry,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Fuck,’ Lain spat. ‘I’ve lost… we’re losing safe areas.’ She bunched her crabbed hands. ‘What’s—?’

‘They’re moving through the ship,’ came Vitas’s ghostly voice. ‘They’re cutting through the doors, the walls, the ducts.’ The shakiness was growing in her tone. ‘Machines, they’re just machines. Machines of a dead technology. That’s all they can be. Biological weapons.’

‘Who the fuck would make giant spiders as biological weapons?’ Lain growled, still recalibrating her sealed areas, sending fresh instructions for Holsten to relay to the rest of the crew.

‘Lain…’

There was something in the scientist’s voice that made the two of them stop.

‘What is it?’ Lain demanded.

There was a long gap into which Lain spoke Vitas’s name several times without response, and then: ‘They’re here. In the lab. They’re here.’

‘You’re safe? Sealed off?’

‘Lain, they’re here,’ and it was as though all the human emotion that Vitas so seldom gave rein to had been saved up for this moment, just to cram into her quivering voice and scream out of every word. ‘They’re here, they’re here, they’re looking at me. Lain, please, send someone. Send help, someone, please. They’re coming towards me, they’re—’ And then a shriek so loud that it cut the transmission into static for a second. ‘They’re on the glass! They’re on the glass! They’re coming through! They’re eating through the glass! Lain! Lain, help me! Please, Lain! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

Holsten never got to know what Vitas was sorry for, and there were no more words. Even over the woman’s screaming, they actually heard the almighty crack as the spiders broke into her test chamber.

Then Vitas’s voice abruptly died away, just a shuddering exhalation left out of all that terrified noise. Lain and Holsten exchanged glances, neither of them finding much to be hopeful about.

‘Alpash,’ the classicist tried. ‘Alpash, report?’

No more words from Alpash. Either the ambusher had become the ambushed, or perhaps the radio wasn’t functioning any more. Like everything else, like their defence of the ship itself, it was falling apart.

The lights were going out all over the Gilgamesh , one by one. The safe zones that Lain set up were compromised just as quickly, or were not as safe as the computers told her. Each band of defenders encountered its final battle, the spiders within the ship becoming only more numerous, more confident.

And in the hold, the tens of thousands who were the balance of the human race slept on, never knowing that the battle for their future was being lost. There were no nightmares in suspension. Holsten wondered if he should envy them. He didn’t, though. Rather face the final moment with open eyes .

‘It’s not looking good.’ It was a rather laboured piece of understatement, an attempt to lighten Lain’s mind just for a moment. Her creased, time-worn face turned to him, and she reached out and clasped his hand with her own.

‘We’ve come so far.’ No indication as to whether she meant the ship or just the two of them.

They each spent a few moments in assessment of the spreading damage, and when they next spoke, it was almost together.

‘I can’t raise anyone,’ from Holsten.

‘I’ve lost integrity in the next chamber,’ from Lain.

Just us left. Or the computers are on the blink again. We lasted too long, in the end. Holsten the classicist felt that he was a man uniquely qualified to look down the road that time had set them all on. What a history! From monkey to mankind, through tool-use, family, community, mastery of the environment around them, competition, war, the ongoing extinction of so many of the species who had shared the planet with them. There had been that fragile pinnacle of the Old Empire then, when they had been like gods, and walked between the stars, and created abominations on planets far from Earth. And killed each other in ways undreamt of by their monkey ancestors.

And then us ; the inheritors of a damaged world, reaching for the stars even as the ground died beneath their feet, the human race’s desperate gamble with the ark ships. Ark ship, singular now, as we’ve not heard from the rest. And still they had squabbled and fought, given way to private ambition, to feuding, to civil war. And all that while our enemy, our unknown enemy has grown stronger.