Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘It is adjusting its positioning,’ from the science team.

‘Pointing at us,’ Guyen concluded.

‘It’s an inexact comparison, but…’ But yes , in the minds of everyone there.

Holsten could feel his heart hammering madly. Travellers in distress. Do not initiate hostile action. Civilian transport ship requires assistance. But the message wasn’t getting through.

Guyen opened his mouth to issue some desperate order, but Lain burst out, ‘Send it back its own distress call, for fuck’s sake!’

Holsten goggled at her for a moment, then let out a cry of some nameless emotion – triumph inextricably mixed with annoyance at not having thought of it himself. Moments later it was done.

There were some hard minutes, then, waiting to see how the satellite would react, to see if they had been in time. Even as Holsten returned the satellite’s own distress signal to it, the attack could already have been sent leaping across space towards them, fast enough that they would not even know until it struck.

Finally, Holsten sagged back in his seat with relief. The others were crowding round, staring at his screen, but none of them had the classical education to translate it, until he put them out of their suspense.

‘“Please hold for further communication”,’ he told them, ‘or something like that. I think – I hope – it’s gone to wake up something more sophisticated.’

There was a murmur of conversation behind him, but he was counting the minutes until the next transmission arrived. When the screen filled instantly with code, he was elated for a fraction of a second before letting out a hiss of exasperation. ‘It’s gibberish. It’s just a wall of nonsense. Why is it—?’

‘Wait, wait,’ Lain interrupted him. ‘It’s a different sort of signal, that’s all. Gilgamesh has matched the encoding with some stuff in your archives, old man. It’s… hah, it’s audio. It’s speech.’

Everyone was silent once more. Holsten glanced around at a cramped room full of bald men and women, all looking in less than good health, still shivering from the aftereffects of their unthinkably long suspension, and all unable to keep up with the revelations and emotional trauma of their current situation. I’m honestly not sure who’s even still following this . ‘Probably it’s still an automated…’ he started, but tailed off, not sure if he even had the energy for the argument.

‘Right. Gilgamesh has done his best to decode, based on the fragments in archive,’ Lain reported. ‘Everyone want to hear this?’

‘Yes,’ Guyen decided.

What came to them from the ship’s speakers was hideous: a corroded, static-spiked mess in which a female voice could just be discerned, nothing but isolated words breaking in and out of the interference – words in a language that nobody but Holsten could comprehend. Holsten had been watching the commander’s face, because it had been obvious to him what they would get, and he saw a spasm of rage spike there briefly before being fought down. Oh, that’s not good.

‘Mason, translate.’

‘Give me time. And if you can clean it up any, Lain…?’

‘Already on it,’ she muttered.

Behind them, the others began speculating cautiously. What had been speaking? Was it merely an automatic message or… Vitas was speculating on the Old Empire’s supposed intelligent machines – not just a sophisticated autonomous engine like the Gilgamesh but devices that could think and interact as if they were human. Or more than human.

Holsten hunched over his console, phones to his ears, listening to the incrementally clearer versions that Lain was scrubbing for him. At first he couldn’t understand more than a few words, having to slow the transmission down and focus on small slices of it, while trying to wrestle with a thoroughly unexpected intonation and pattern of speech. There was a lot of interference, too: a weird, irregular rise and fall of static that kept interfering with the actual message.

‘I’ve got the drone into the atmosphere,’ Karst announced abruptly. Everyone had almost forgotten him, as he sent instructions to his one surviving remote, with no idea of whether each refinement to its course would arrive in time to prevent its destruction. When he had the attention of the majority, he added, ‘Who wants to see our new home?’

The drone’s images were grainy and distorted, a high-altitude scan of a world so green that one of the scientists asked if the picture had been recoloured.

‘You’re seeing exactly what the drone’s seeing,’ Karst assured them.

‘It’s beautiful,’ someone put in. Most others simply stared. It was beyond their experience and their imagination. The Earth that they remembered had not looked like this. Any such verdant explosion had been locked away in the years before the ice, and it never returned after the toxic thaw. They came from a planet immeasurably poorer than this one.

‘All right.’ The conversation behind Holsten had grown into a hubbub of speculation, then died away into ennui in the time it had taken him to adjust to the new transmission. ‘Translation, here.’

He sent it to their screens: The Second Brin Sentry Habitation acknowledges your request for assistance. You are currently on a heading that will bring you to a quarantine planet, and no interference with this planet will be countenanced. Please provide full details of your emergency situation so that habitat systems may analyse and advise. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in any way.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Karst declared, and, ‘Doesn’t know about the last drone, then. I’ve set it so as to try and keep to the far side of the planet from that thing.’

Mason was still playing back the message, trying to work out what that continuing interference was. Like the distress call, it sounded as though there was some other message hitching a ride along with the satellite’s signal.

‘Is it still sending down to the planet?’ he asked Lain.

‘It is, but I’ve compensated for that. You shouldn’t be getting…’

‘Kern’s World?’ Vitas noted. ‘Is that a name?’

‘“Kern” and “Brin” are phonetic,’ Holsten admitted. ‘If they’re words, then they’re not in my vocabulary files. What response?’

‘Will it understand if we speak to it?’ Guyen pressed.

‘I’ll send an encoded message, like before,’ Holsten told him. ‘I… whatever it is, it’s not speaking Imperial C the way the textbooks think it should be spoken. Different accent, different culture maybe. I don’t think I could speak to it well enough to be properly understood.’

‘Send this.’ Guyen shunted over a block of text for Holsten to translate and encode. We are the ark ship Gilgamesh , carrying five hundred thousand humans in suspension. It is of utmost priority that we are able to establish a presence on your planet. This is a matter of the survival of the human species. We require your assistance in preserving our cargo.

‘It’s not going to work.’ Holsten wondered whether Guyen had somehow heard some other message from the satellite, because that wasn’t an appropriate response as far as he was concerned. He sent it off, though, and returned to listening to the previous transmission, recruiting Lain to try and parse out the rider signal, to separate out something comprehensible. And then abruptly he began to hear it, listening between the words, stock-still and gripping his console as the meaning came through to him.

‘Uh…’ Mason had kicked his seat back from his position, but the voice still droned and grated in his earphones – absolutely the same voice as the main message’s formal efficiency, but twisted by a terrible despair. ‘We may have a problem…’