Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

They regarded her distrustfully, but Nessel’s reports seemed to confirm the same.

‘What would happen if an asteroid was going to hit us in the side?’ Holsten asked.

Lain gave him a look that said eloquently, And that’s what’s important right now? ‘The odds are vanishingly unlikely. It wasn’t resource-effective.’

‘To protect the entire human race?’ Nessel demanded, more as a jab at Lain than anything else.

‘The Gil was designed by engineers, not philosophers.’ Isa Lain shrugged – or as much as she could with her hands still secured. ‘Let me free. I need to work.’

‘You stay right there,’ Scoles told her. ‘We’re clear now. It’s not like they can just turn the Gil around and come after us. We’d be halfway across the system before they could build up any speed.’

‘And how far is this tin box going to get you exactly?’ Lain challenged him. ‘What supplies do you have? How much fuel?’

‘Enough. And we always knew this was a one-way trip,’ the chief mutineer said grimly.

‘You won’t even get one way,’ Lain told him. Immediately Scoles had his seat belt undone and fell the short distance towards them, gripping hand over hand along the seat backs. The movement was fish-like, effortless enough that the man had plainly put in some training time back home.

‘If the Gil isn’t shooting, I’m feeling less and less certain why we need you,’ he remarked.

‘Because it’s not the ship you need to worry about. That satellite out there is a killer. It’s got a defence laser that will just carve this boat into tiny pieces. The Gilgamesh ’s array is nothing to that.’

‘That’s why we have the esteemed Doctor Mason,’ Scoles told her, hovering over her like a cloud.

‘You need to let me loose on your systems. You need to give me full access and let me rip the fuck out of your comms panel.’ Lain smiled brightly. ‘Or we’re all dead, anyway, even if it doesn’t shoot. Mason, you tell them. Tell them about how Doctor Avrana Kern said hello.’

Their acceleration was levelling out, weightlessness replacing the heavy hand that had been pressing Holsten back into his seat. After a blank moment, then catching Lain’s eye, the classicist nodded animatedly. ‘It took over our systems completely. We had absolutely no control. It went through the Gilgamesh ’s computers in seconds, locked us out. It could have opened all the airlocks, poisoned the air, purged all the suspension chambers…’ His voice trailed off. At the time he had not quite appreciated just what might have happened.

‘Who is “Doctor Avrana Kern”?’ one of the mutineers asked.

Holsten exchanged looks with Lain. ‘It… she is what’s in the satellite. She’s one of the things in the satellite, rather. There are the basic computers, and then there’s something called Eliza which I… maybe it’s an AI, a proper AI, or maybe it’s just a very well-made computer. And then there’s Doctor Avrana Kern, who might also be an AI.’

‘Or might be what?’ Nessel prompted him.

‘Or might just be a stark raving mad psychotic human being left over from the Old Empire, who’s taken it into her head that keeping us off the planet is the single most important objective in the universe,’ he managed, looking from face to face.

‘Fuck,’ said someone, almost reverently. Evidently something in Holsten’s testimony had sounded convincing.

‘Or maybe she’ll be having a good day and she’ll just take over the shuttle’s systems and fly you back to the Gilgamesh ,’ Lain suggested sweetly.

‘Ah, on that subject,’ the pilot broke in, ‘it looks like our damage to the drone bays has paid off. There’s no sign of a remote launch, but… wait, Gil is launching a shuttle after us.’

Scoles spun himself around, and coasted over to see for himself.

‘Guyen is really pissed,’ came Lain’s voice sotto voce in Holsten’s ear.

‘He’s crazy,’ the classicist replied.

She regarded him impassively, and for a moment he thought she was going to defend the man, but then: ‘Yeah… no, he’s crazy all right. Perhaps it’s the sort of crazy you need to have got us all the way out here, but it’s starting to go off the bad end of the scale.’

‘They’re telling us to cut engines, surrender our weapons and give up the prisoners,’ the pilot relayed.

‘What makes them think we’d do that, now that we’re winning?’ Scoles stated.

The look that passed between Lain and Holsten was in complete accord that here, in spirit, was Vrie Guyen’s very double.

Then Scoles was hovering above them again, staring down. ‘You know that we’ll kill you if you try anything?’ he told Lain.

‘I’m trying to keep track of all the ways this venture is likely to kill me but, yes, that’s one of them.’ She looked up at him without flinching. ‘Seriously, I am more concerned about that satellite. You need to cut us free right now. You need me isolating the ship’s systems so that thing can’t just walk in and take over.’

‘Why not just cut the comms altogether?’ one of the mutineers asked.

‘Good luck on getting Mason to sweet-talk the satellite if we can’t transmit and receive,’ she pointed out acidly. ‘Feel free to have someone looking over my shoulder at all times. I’ll even talk them through what I’m doing.’

‘If we lose power or control for one moment, if I think you’re trying to slow us so the other shuttle can catch up with us…’ Scoles started.

‘I know, I know.’

With a scowl, the chief mutineer produced a knife and severed Lain’s bonds – and Holsten’s too, as an afterthought.

‘You sit there,’ he told the classicist. ‘Nothing for you to do yet. Once she’s done her work, you’ll get your chance with the satellite.’ Apparently he didn’t feel that making overt death threats was necessary to keep Holsten in line.

Lain – clumsy in the lack of gravity – flailed over to the comms console and belted herself down in the seat next to Nessel. ‘Right, what we’re after here…’ she started, and then the language between them got sufficiently technical that Holsten failed to follow. It was obvious that the work would take some time, though, both reprogramming and physically cutting connections between comms and the rest of the shuttle’s systems.

Holsten gradually fell asleep. Even as he was dropping off, he felt this was a ridiculous thing to do, considering the constant threat to life and limb, combined with the fact that he had been out of the world for a century or so not so long ago. Suspension and sleep were not quite the same, however, and as the adrenaline now ebbed from his system, it left him feeling hollowed out and bone-weary.

A hand on his shoulder woke him up. For a moment, stirred from dreams he could barely recall, he spoke a name from the old world, one a decade dead even before he embarked on the Gilgamesh , millennia dead now.

Then: ‘Lain?’ because he heard a woman’s voice, but instead it was Nessel the mutineer.

‘Doctor Mason,’ she said, with that curious respect she seemed to hold for him, ‘they’re ready for you.’

He undid his seatbelt, and allowed them to pass him unceremoniously hand over hand across the ceiling, until Lain could reach out and snag him, and drag him into the comms chair.

‘How far out are we?’ he asked her.

‘It’s taken me longer than I’d thought to make sure I cut every single connection to comms. And because our friends here don’t trust me, and kept getting me to stop in case I was doing something nefarious. We’ve shielded all the shuttle’s systems from any outside transmission, though. Nothing is accepting any connection that isn’t hardwired into the ship itself, except the comms – and the comms don’t interact with the rest of what we’ve got in here. The most Doctor Avrana Kern can manage now is to take over the comms panel and shout at us.’