Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Well, I…’ Holsten made a vague gesture towards the console before him but, in truth, the work had lost much of its interest for him over the last few days. It was repetitive, it was gruelling, and in a curiously personal way it was depressing. The chance to get a break from it, even in Guyen’s company, was inexpressibly attractive. ‘What do you need, chief?’

Guyen motioned for him to follow and, after a few turns along the Gilgamesh ’s corridors, Holsten could guess that they were heading for the shuttle bays. This was not exactly a path that he remembered fondly. Here and there he even saw the odd bullet scar that the maintenance crews had yet to get around to dealing with.

He almost resurrected those long ago/recent days then, almost made the mistake of talking about old times with Guyen. He restrained himself just in time. Odds on, Guyen would just have stared at him blankly, but there was an outside chance that he actually would want to talk about the failed mutiny, and where would that leave Holsten? With that one question that had obsessed his thoughts for those long days after he and Lain were brought back to the Gil . As he sat in solitary decontamination – just like Lain and all of Karst’s crew – he had turned those events over and over, trying to work out which of Guyen’s words and deeds had been bluff, and what had been cold-heartedly meant. He had wanted to talk to Karst about it at the time, but had not been given the chance. How much of the way that desperate rescue mission had gone was Guyen’s plan; how much was Karst’s improvisation? He had always thought the security chief was a thug and yet, in the end, the man had gone to ridiculous lengths to get the hostages back alive.

I owe you, Karst , Holsten acknowledged, but he did not know whether he owed Guyen.

‘Are we…?’ he asked the commander’s back.

‘We are going to the station,’ Guyen confirmed. ‘I need you to look at something.’

‘Some text there, or…?’ He envisaged spending the day translating warning notices and labels for an increasingly opaque Guyen.

‘You’re a classicist. You do more than translations, don’t you?’ Guyen rounded on him. ‘Artefacts, yes?’

‘Well, yes, but surely Engineering…’ Holsten was aware that Guyen had wrong-footed him often enough that he hadn’t really finished voicing a properly articulated thought since the man arrived.

‘Engineering want a second opinion. I want a second opinion.’ They came out into a shuttle bay to find a craft ready and waiting, with open hatch and a pilot kicking her heels beside it, reading something on a pad. Holsten guessed it was one of those approved works that Guyen had released from the Gil ’s capacious library, although there was also a brisk trade in covert copies of unauthorized books – writing and footage supposedly locked down in the system. Guyen would get angry over it, but never seemed able to stem it, and Holsten privately suspected that was because the censorship he had ordered Lain to put in place was never going to be able to keep out the chief culprit – to wit, Lain herself.

‘You must be grateful for a chance to actually walk the satellite yourself,’ Guyen suggested, as the two of them took their seats and strapped in. ‘Footsteps of the ancients and all. A classicist’s dream, I’d have thought.’

In Holsten’s experience, a classicist’s dream was far more about letting someone else do the dangerous work, and then sitting back to write erudite analyses of the works of the ancients or, increasingly as his career had progressed, of other academics’ writings. Beyond that, and far beyond anything he might tell Guyen, he had come to a depressing realization: he did not like the ancients any more.

The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters. Yes, they had developed a technology that was still beyond anything Holsten’s people had achieved, but it was just as he had already known: the shining example of the Old Empire had tricked Holsten’s entire civilization into the error of mimicry. In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate – neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy.

Their flight to the station was brief, moving from acceleration to deceleration almost immediately, the pilot jockeying with physics as she liaised with the Gil and whatever impromptu docking control had been set up on the station.

The station was a series of rings about a gravity-less central cylinder that still housed the most complete Old Empire fusion reactor that anyone had ever seen. Lain’s team had managed to restore power to the station with remarkably little difficulty, finding the ancient machines still ready to resume functioning after their millennia-long sleep. It was this seamless and elegant technology that had, by imitation and iteration, spawned the systems of the Gilgamesh which had got them this far into space at the cost of only a few per cent of their human cargo.

With some ring sections rotating again, there was something approaching normal gravity within parts of the station, for which Holsten was profoundly grateful. He had not been sure what he would find on stepping out of the shuttle, but this first ring of the station had been thoroughly explored and catalogued, and subsequently colonized by Lain’s greatly expanded team of engineers. He and Guyen came out into a wave of energy, bustle and noise, to see the corridors and rooms crowded with off-duty engineers. There was an impromptu canteen serving food, rec rooms where screens had been rigged up to show footage from the Gil ’s archives. Holsten saw games being played, intimate embraces, and even what might have been some sort of dramatic rendition that was cut very short when Guyen was sighted. Under Lain’s custodianship the engineers had become a hard-working but irreverent bunch, and Holsten suspected that their Great Leader was not universally respected.

‘So where’s this thing of yours?’ Holsten asked. He was increasingly curious about Guyen’s motivations, because it seemed that there was surely nothing a classicist could advise upon that could not have been dealt with just as easily over a remote link. So why has Guyen hauled me all the way over here? There were some possible answers, but none he liked. Chief amongst them was the idea that no communications between the station and the Gilgamesh were particularly secure. Anyone with a little savvy could theoretically be listening in. Of course, nobody was likely to have anything to say that was of a sensitive nature, were they?

Perhaps they were.

A shiver ran through Holsten as he dogged Guyen’s heels through that first ring section, until they arrived at a hatch linking to the next.

Has he found something? He imagined the commander piecing through reports with an eye for who-knew-what. Something had caught his eye, though, surely – something that perhaps nobody else had perceived in quite the same way. And now it was evident that Guyen was keen on keeping it this way.

Which makes me his confidant? It was not a comfortable thought.

They progressed further through the station, from ring to ring, airlock to airlock, the bustle of relaxing engineers giving place to a different, more focused flurry of activity. They were now stepping carefully through those areas of the station that were still being thoroughly investigated. The first sections were reckoned safe now, therefore left to the most junior of Lain’s people – often recent awakenees of limited experience – to restore a few final systems or finish the last of the cataloguing. After that, Guyen directed Holsten to get himself into an environment suit, and to keep his helmet on at all times. They would be entering parts of the station where air and gravity were not necessarily guaranteed commodities.