Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Scoles hauled open the airlock, and then shut it behind her. With no power to the doors, she would have to do the rest herself.

They were watching through her lenses as she got the external door open, whereupon the dark of the airlock was replaced by a dull, amber glare, the camera’s viewpoint swinging wildly as Bales stepped down from the hatch. When their vantage point stabilized, the scene revealed looked like some vision of hell: blackened, smoking, some of it still on fire, the external emergency lamps lighting up the choked air in an unhealthy yellowish fog.

‘It’s a wasteland,’ someone remarked, and then Bales stopped looking back down the charred furrow the shuttle cabin had raked in the soil, and turned her lens, and her eyes, on the forest instead.

Green , was Holsten’s first helpless thought. In fact it was mostly shadowed darkness, but he remembered what the planet had looked like from orbit, and this was it: this was that great verdant band that had clad most of the tropical and temperate regions. He examined his memories of Earth – distant, poisoned Earth. By his generation, there had been nothing left like this, no riot of trees towering high, stretching into a vaulted, many-pillared space, out from the splintered hole that the shuttle’s fist had broken into it. It was life , and only now did Holsten realize that he had never really seen Earth life, as it had been intended. The home he remembered was just a dying, browning stub, but this… Gently, almost imperceptibly, Holsten felt something breaking up inside him.

‘Looks better than the inside of the Gil ,’ Nessel suggested tentatively.

‘But is it safe?’ Lain pressed.

‘Safer than suffocating in here, you mean?’ Tevik asked derisively. ‘Anyway, the medical scanner is working. Sampling now, it says here.’

‘…hear me…?’ came a faint voice from his console, and he jumped.

‘Comms is fried,’ Lain said tersely. ‘There’s a lot of crap in here that can be repurposed as a receiver, though. Don’t think we can answer yet.’

‘…know if you’re getting this…’ Bales’s voice ghosted in and out of audibility. ‘I can’t believe we’re…’

‘How long for the scanner?’ Scoles demanded.

‘It’s working,’ Tevik said noncommittally. ‘High microbial count already. Some of it recognized, some not. Nothing definitely harmful.’

‘Gather the kit and be ready to get out as soon as we get the all-clear.’

‘…not seeing any sign of biohazard…’ from Bales.

‘Give it time , come on,’ Tevik’s answering, unheard complaint. ‘All sorts of crap out there. Still no yellow lights, but…’

Bales screamed.

They heard it: tinny and distant as though it was some tiny person locked away within the cabin’s workings. The camera view was suddenly wavering wildly, then Bales appeared to be fighting with her own suit.

‘Fuck me, look at that!’ Lain spat. Holsten had only a blurred view of something spiny, leggy, attached to the woman’s boot. The screaming continued, and now there were audible words, ‘Let me in! Please!’

‘Open the airlock!’ Scoles shouted.

‘Wait, no!’ from Tevik. ‘Look, we can’t flush the air out. Nothing’s working. The air out there is planet-air. If there’s shit in it, we get it the moment we open the inner door!’

‘Open the fucking thing!’

And now Nessel was hauling on the lever, dragging the door open. Holsten had a mad moment of holding his breath against the anticipated plague before recognizing the stupidity of it.

Well, we’ve all got it now.

‘Get the guns. Get the gear. We’re here now, and it’s survive outside or die inside,’ Scoles snapped. ‘Everybody out, and quick!’

Nessel was already dragging at the outer door, tearing open their little illusion of security. Beyond was the real world.

They could hear Bales screaming as soon as the outer door opened. The woman lay on the ground just outside, smashing both hands against her suit, kicking and flailing as though beset by an invisible attacker. Everyone except Holsten and Tevik piled out to help her, trying to get her under control. They were shouting her name now, but she was oblivious, thrashing out at them, then trying to force her helmet off as though she was suffocating. One foot was a red ruin – seeming half cut away – the leg of her suit slashed open with a weird precision.

It was Nessel that released the catch and dragged Bales’s helmet off, but the screaming had already turned to a ghastly liquid sound before then, and what came out first, after the seal broke, was blood.

Bales’s head flopped aside, eyes wide, mouth open and running with red. Something moved at her throat. Holsten got sight of it just as everyone else suddenly recoiled: a head rising from the ruin of the woman’s throat, twin blades brandished at them under a pair of crooked antennae that flicked drops of Bales left and right as they fidgeted and danced.

Then Scoles shouted and kicked madly, flinging something away from him, and Holsten saw that the ground around them was crawling with ants, dozens of ants, each as large as his hand. Monkeys might be merely a memory of Old Empire, but spiders and ants had paced humanity to the ends of the Earth, and now here they were waiting on this distant world. In the leaping, dim light cast by the fires the insects had gone unnoticed, but now he saw them everywhere he looked. More of them were scissoring their way free of Bales’s suit, each emergent head accompanied by a slick of sluggish blood from the wounds the things had carved in her.

Scoles began shooting.

He was calm, ridiculously calm, as he levelled his pistol to pick out each target carefully, but he still hit only one out of two, unable to track the insects’ rapid, random movements. It was a forlorn hope. Everywhere Holsten looked on the ground there were ants, not a vast carpet of them but still dozens, and they were converging on their visitors.

‘Get in!’ Tevik shouted. ‘Inside, now, all of you!’ and he went down with a yell, rolling over, tearing at his thigh where an insect was clinging, its scissor jaws embedded in him, tail curling under itself to sting and sting. Nessel and Lain pushed past Holsten, almost knocking him out of the hatch in their hurry to get back in. Scoles was right behind them, shoving Tevik forwards and then frantically fumbling another clip into his gun. The remaining mutineer was trying to drag Bales after them.

‘Leave her!’ Scoles shouted at him, but the man didn’t seem to hear. The ants were already crawling over him, and yet he was still hauling at the ragged weight that was Bales, as blindly single-minded as the insects themselves.

Lain had ripped the ant off Tevik, but the insect’s head was left behind, still holding its grip, and the man’s leg was visibly swelling where the sting had lanced through his shipsuit. He was screaming, and now the man outside was screaming too; Scoles was trying to force the airlock closed, but there were ants already inside with them, rushing about the enclosed confines of the cabin, seeking out fresh victims.

Holsten crouched by Tevik, trying to work the ant’s head free of his leg and aware that his ribs should be vociferously complaining right then. In the end he had to pry it out with pliers, whilst Tevik clutched at the floor, emergency painkillers unequal to the task.

Holding up the head, Holsten stared at it. The bloodied mandibles looked weirdly heavy, metallic.

Scoles now had the airlock shut and he, Nessel and Lain had been stamping on every insect they found, whilst the cabin slowly filled up with an acrid reek from their crushed bodies. Holsten looked over just as they spotted one more ant up on the consoles.