Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Portia has listened carefully as Bianca sets out her plan. The scheme seems somewhere in between dangerous and suicidal. It calls for her and her cohorts to seek out the ant column and ambush it, to walk straight into it past the multitude of sentries as though they were not there. Portia is already considering the possibilities: an attack from above, dropping from the branches or from a scaffolding of webbing, plunging into that advancing torrent of insect bodies. Bianca, of course, has already thought this part through. They will find the column when it is halted for the night in a vast fortress made of the bodies of its soldiers.

I have developed something new , Bianca explains. Armour for you. But you will only be able to don it when you are about to make your attack.

Armour strong enough to ward off the ants? Portia is justifiably doubtful. There are too many weak points on a spider’s body; there are too many joints that the ants can seize upon.

Nothing so crude. Bianca always did like keeping her secrets. These Paussids, these beetles, they can walk through the ant colonies like the wind. So will you.

Portia’s uncertainty communicates itself through the anxious twitching of her palps. And I will kill them, then? As many as I can? Will that be enough?

Bianca’s stance says otherwise. I had considered it, but even you, sister, could not stop them in such a way, I fear. There are just too many. Even if my protection kept you safe for that long, you could kill ants all day and all night, and still there would be more. You would not keep their army away from Great Nest.

Then what? Portia demands.

There is a new weapon. If it works… Bianca stamps out her annoyance. There is no way of testing it but to use it. It works on these little colonies here, but the invaders are different, more complex, less vulnerable. You will simply have to hope that I am correct. You understand what I am asking of you – for our sisterhood, for our home?

Portia considers the fall of Seven Trees: the flames, the ravenous horde of insects, the shrivelling bodies of those who were too slow or too conscientious to escape. Fear is a universal emotion, and she feels it keenly, desperately wanting to flee that image, never to have to face the ants again. Stronger than fear are the bonds of community, of kinship, of loyalty to her peer group and her people. All those generations of reinforcement, through the success of those ancestors most inspired by the virus to cooperate with their own kind, now come to the fore. There comes a time when someone must do what must be done. Portia is a warrior trained and indoctrinated from an early age so that now, in this time of need, she will be willing to give up her life for the survival of the greater entity.

When? she asks Bianca.

Sooner is better. Gather your chosen; be ready to leave Great Nest in the morning. For tonight the city is yours. You have laid eggs?

Portia answers in the affirmative. She has no clutch within her ready for a male’s attentions, but she has laid several in the past. Her heritage, genetic and learned, will be preserved if Great Nest itself is. In the grander scheme of things, that means that she will have won.

That night, Portia seeks out other warriors, veteran females she knows she can rely on. Many are from her own peer group, but not all. There are others she has fought alongside – whom she has sometimes fought against, in displays of dominance – whom she respects, and who respect her. Each one she approaches cautiously, feeling her way, telegraphing her intent, paying out Bianca’s plan length by length until she is sure of them. Some refuse – either they are not persuaded by the plan, or they lack the requisite degree of courage, which is, after all, near-total fearlessness; a devotion to duty almost as blind as that of the ants themselves.

Soon enough Portia has her followers, though, each one then taking to the high roads of Great Nest to make the most of this night, before the morning calls upon them to muster. Some will resort to the company of their peer groups, others seek out entertainment – the dances of males, the glittering art of weavers. Those who are ready will let themselves be wooed, then deposit a clutch of eggs in their peer house, so as to preserve as much of themselves as they can. Portia herself has learned many things since her last laying, and feels some remorse that those Understandings, those discrete packets of knowledge, will be lost when she is lost.

She goes to temple again, seeking that fugitive calm that her devotions bring, but now she remembers what Bianca has said: that the voice of the Messenger is not alone, that there are faint whisperings in the crystal that worry the priestesses. Just as she has always believed that the mathematical perfection of the message must have some greater, transcendent significance beyond the mere numbers that compose it, so this new development surely has some wider meaning too vast to be grasped by a poor spider knotting and spinning that familiar tally of equations and solutions. What, then, does it mean? Nothing good, she feels. Nothing good.

Late that night, she sits in the highest reaches of Great Nest, staring at the stars and wondering which point of light up there is whispering incomprehensible secrets to the crystals now.

Kern had severed all contact, leaving the mutineers’ shuttle to glide on towards the green planet, eroding the vast intervening distances a second at a time. Holsten did his best to sleep, crouching awkwardly on a chair that was ideally designed to cushion the stresses of deceleration but very little else.

He drifted in and out of slumber, because Kern’s absence had not shut down radio communications. He had no idea who fired the first linguistic shot, but he was constantly being woken by a running argument between Karst – on the pursuing shuttle – and whoever was manning the mutineers’ comms at the time.

Karst was his usual dogmatic self, the voice of the Gilgamesh with the authority of the whole human race behind him (via its unelected representative, Vrie Guyen). He demanded unconditional surrender, threatened them with a space-borne destruction even Holsten knew the shuttles were not capable of, vicariously invoked the dormant satellite’s wrath and, when all else failed, descended to personal abuse. Holsten developed the idea that Guyen was holding Karst personally responsible for the mutineers’ escape.

There was mention made of him and Lain, however – that was the only positive. Apparently Karst’s orders did include recovery of the hostages at some level, though possibly not top priority. He demanded to speak to them, to be sure they were still alive. Lain shared a few acid words with him that both satisfied him on that issue and dissuaded him from asking any more. He continued to include their return unharmed in his list of monomaniac demands, which was almost touching.

The mutineers, for their part, bombarded Karst with their own demands and dogma, going into considerable detail about the difficulties the moon colony would face, and asserting the lack of need for it. Karst countered with the same reasons Lain had already given, albeit less coherently, sounding very much like a man parroting someone else’s words.

‘Why did they even give chase?’ Holsten asked Lain wearily, after this slanging match over the comms had finally defeated any possible chance of further sleep. ‘Why not just let us go, if they know how doomed this whole venture is? It’s not just for us two, surely?’

‘It’s not for you , anyway,’ she riposted. Then she relented, ‘I… Guyen takes things personally.’ She said it with an odd twist, so that he wondered just what her experience of this might be. ‘But it’s more than that. I accessed the Key Crew Aptitudes, once, in the Gilgamesh ’s records.’