Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

I am weaving them a new structure , Bianca explains. They will follow the lead of our own ants now. I have given them new minds, and henceforth they are our allies. We have an army of soldiers. We have devised a weapon to defeat the ants, no matter how many of them there are, and make them our allies.

You are truly the greatest of us , Portia tells her. Bianca modestly accepts the compliment, and then listens as the warrior goes on: Was it you, then, that made the ground shake? That made the light and the smoke that distracted their scouts?

That was not my doing , Bianca admits hesitantly. I am still awaiting news of that, but perhaps, when you have shed that ungainly second skin, you may wish to investigate. I believe that something has fallen from the sky.

They were down.

The cabin section of the shuttle had still been passably aerodynamic, and the pilot had deployed braking jets and air scoops and chutes to slow them, yet still it seemed that the first human footprint on this new green world would be a colossal crater. Somehow, though, the mortally wounded craft had battled through the air, swinging with the turbulence and yet never quite spinning out of control. Holsten learned later that jettisoning the cargo hold was in fact something the vessel was supposed to be able to do. The pilot had dumped the last twisted stump of it just before they hit atmosphere, letting the mangled chunk of wreckage streak across the new world’s sky as though signifying a new messiah.

Not to say that the landing was gentle. They had come down hard enough, and at a sufficiently unwise angle, that one of the mutineers was ripped from his straps to smash bodily – fatally – into the comms panel, while Holsten himself felt something give in his chest as physics fought to free him from the restraints Lain had finally managed to get closed over him. He lost consciousness on impact. They all did.

When he woke, he realized they were down but blind, the interior of the cabin dark save for a cascade of warning lights telling them all just how bad it was, the viewscreens dead or smashed. Someone was sobbing and Holsten envied them, because he himself was having a hard time just drawing breath.

‘Mason?’ sounded in his ear – Lain speaking over the mask comms, and not for the first time from the sound of it.

‘H-hh…’ he managed.

‘Fuck.’ He heard her fumbling about next to him, and then she was muttering, ‘Come on, come on, we must have emergency power. I can see your fucking lights, you bitch. You don’t flash your fucking lights at me to tell me there’s no…’ and then a dim amber illumination seeped in from a strip that encircled the cabin near the ceiling, revealing a surprisingly tidy crash scene. Aside from the one luckless deceased, the rest of them were still strapped into their seats: Scoles, Nessel, the pilot and one other man and woman of the mutineers, plus Lain and Holsten. The fact that the landing had been survivable by mere fragile humans meant that most of the cabin interior was still intact, though almost nothing appeared to be functioning. Even the comms panel appeared to have been exorcized from Avrana Kern’s malign ghost.

‘Thank you, whoever that was,’ Scoles said, then saw it was Lain and scowled. ‘Everyone speak up. Who’s hurt? Tevik?’

Tevik turned out to be the pilot, Holsten somewhat belatedly discovered. He had done something to his hand, he said; perhaps broken something. Of the others, nobody had escaped bruises and broken blood vessels – every eye was red almost to the iris – but only Holsten appeared to be seriously injured, with what Lain reckoned was a cracked rib.

Scoles hobbled from his seat, fetched medical supplies and began handing out painkillers, with a double dose for Tevik and Holsten. ‘These are emergency grade,’ he warned. ‘Means you won’t feel pain much at all – including when you should. You can end up tearing your muscles really easily by overdoing it.’

‘I don’t feel like overdoing it,’ Holsten said weakly. Lain stripped his shipsuit down to the waist and strapped a pressure bandage about his chest. Tevik got a gel cast to keep his hand together.

‘What’s the plan?’ Lain was asking as she worked. ‘Seven of us to populate a new Earth, is that it?’ When she looked up, she found Scoles was training a gun on her. Holsten saw the thought occur to her to say something sarcastic, but she wisely fought it down.

‘We can do it with five,’ the mutineer chief said quietly. His people were watching him uncertainly. ‘And if I can’t count on you, we will. If we’re going to survive out there, it’ll be tough. We’ll all need to rely on one another. Either you’re part of the team now, or you’re a waste of resources that could be allotted to someone more deserving.’

Lain’s eyes flicked between his face and the gun. ‘I don’t see that I have a choice – and I don’t mean that because you’re about to shoot me. We’re here now. What else is there?’

‘Right.’ Scoles nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re the engineer. Help us salvage everything from this thing that’s going to be useful. Anything we can use for heat or light. Any supplies here in the cabin.’ A tacit acknowledgement that all the gear he had planned to use, to build his brave new world, had been cut from him along with the bulk of his followers, up at the atmosphere’s edge.

‘I’ve got readings from outside,’ Tevik reported, having jury-rigged something on his console one-handed. ‘Temperature’s six over ship standard, atmosphere is five per cent oxygen over ship standard. Nothing poisonous.’

‘Biohazard?’ Nessel asked him.

‘Who knows? What I can tell you, however, is that we have precisely one sealed suit between us, because the rest were back in the hold when it blew. And without the scrubbers working, my dial here says we’ve got about two hours breathable air max.’

Everyone was silent for a while after that, thinking about killer viruses, flesh-eating bacteria, fungal spores.

‘The airlock’ll work on manual,’ Lain said, at last. While everyone else had been thinking about impending doom, she had just been thinking . ‘The medical kit can run an analysis on the microbial content of the air. If it’s alien stuff we’re fucked, because it won’t know what to make of it, but this is a terraformed world, so any bugs out there should be Earth-style, let’s hope. Someone needs to go out and wave it around.’

‘You’re volunteering?’ Scoles asked acidly.

‘Sure I am.’

‘Not you. Bales, suit up.’ He prodded the other female mutineer, who nodded grimly, shooting an evil look at Lain.

‘You know how to work the medical analyst?’ Lain asked her.

‘I was a clinician’s assistant, so better than you do,’ the woman Bales replied tartly, and Holsten recalled that she had been the one to case up Tevik’s hand.

They got her into the suit, with difficulty – it wasn’t a hard suit like the security detail had been wearing, just a ribbed white one-piece that hung slack off her frame, given that they wouldn’t need to pressurize it. The helm had a selection of visors to guard against anything ranging from abrasive dust to the searing naked glare of the sun, and enough cameras and heads-up displays to let the wearer run around blindfold, if need be. Working patiently, Nessel connected the medical scanner to the suit systems, and Lain managed to use emergency power to resurrect one of the small view-screens in the cabin to receive Bales’s camera feed. Nobody said anything about the vast scope of unknown dangers that could be waiting out there for this woman, and which her suit could not possibly have been designed for.