Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

To Portia, as always with her species, her conclusions are a matter of extrapolated logic based on her best comprehension of the principles the universe has revealed to her.

Days later, the ants have produced the first batch of her serum, a complex mixture of the immune spiderlings’ genetic fragment and the nanovirus: Messenger and Message circling and circling within that solution.

By this time, over half of Portia’s peer house are well into the second stage. Bianca and several others have entered the third, and are confined, each to a separate cell, where they will starve. What else is to be done with them?

Portia knows what else.

Fabian offers to go in her place, but she knows that the late-stage infected will kill a little male like him effortlessly. She rounds up a handful of desperate, determined females, and she takes up her artificial fang with which she will inject her serum at the point where the patient’s legs meet the body, close to the brain.

Bianca fights against them. She bites one of Portia’s orderlies and injects two full fangs of venom, paralysing her victim instantly. She kicks and staggers and rears up, challenging them all. They rope her and bind her un-gently, turning her on to her back even as her mouthparts flex furiously at them. All language is gone from her, and Portia acknowledges that she does not know if this stage of the plague can even be reversed.

Still, Bianca will be the proof or disproof of that. Portia drives her syringe in.

The influx of new material from the abandoned station had slowed dramatically, every database and store having been raided and transferred over to the Gilgamesh . Holsten’s cataloguing duties were mostly done, and now he was merely an on-call translator for when the engineers needed help in getting something working.

Most of his time he spent on Vrie Guyen’s private project, and if he didn’t, Guyen would soon be round wanting to know why.

The ark ship was crawling with unaccustomed life, given that several hundred of its cargo had found themselves prodded back into a waking state light years away from their last memories, given hasty, unsatisfactory explanations of where they were and what needed doing, and then set to work. The ship was noisy , and Holsten found himself constantly baffled by the din. Not only was there the shudder and bang of the actual works, but there was the unceasing murmur of people doing things like living and talking and, not to put too fine a point on it, having a good time in a variety of ways. It seemed that everywhere Holsten went he saw impromptu couples – could they be anything but impromptu, given their circumstances? – clinched in some manner of embrace.

They made him feel very old, sometimes. They were all so young, just like all the Gil ’s cargo, save for a few tired old specialists like himself.

They were refitting the ark ship – and if I feel like this, how old does the Gilgamesh feel, eh? – with all manner of toys ripped out of the station. Not least was a new fusion reactor, which Vitas reckoned would prove more than twice as efficient as the far more recently built original, and be able to sustain economic acceleration for far longer with the fuel available. Other technology was merely being extrapolated, the Gil ’s systems being fine-tuned after the ancient model.

In Holsten’s mind ran that same litany: Coat-tails, coat-tails . They were still clutching at the receding train of the Old Empire, still twisting themselves into knots to stay securely in its shadow. Even as his compatriots celebrated their newfound bounty, all he saw was a people condemning their descendants to evermore be less than they might have been.

Then the message came from Lain: she wanted him over on the satellite. ‘Some sort of dangerous translation or something’, to be precise.

Between Guyen’s constant pressure and the aggressively exclusive youth of the rest of the human race, Holsten was feeling quite sorry for himself by that time. He was not particularly looking forward to being made fun of, which was apparently what Engineering thought he was there for. He seriously considered ignoring Lain if she wasn’t even prepared to ask him properly. In the end it was Guyen that decided him, because a trip to the station would give Holsten some blessed relief from the commander’s vulture-like presence.

He signalled to her that he was coming, and found a shuttle and pilot were ready for him in the bay. On the journey over, he turned the external cameras towards the planet and stared moodily at the fungal grey orb, imagining it reaching upwards, vast building-sized towers of fruiting bodies bloating into the upper atmosphere to seize the tiny intruders that had dared to dispute its complete mastery of the world.

A pair of engineers – from Lain’s original Key Crew, he reckoned – were waiting for him at the station end, assuring him that he wouldn’t need to suit up.

‘All the parts we’re still bothered about are stable,’ they explained. When Holsten asked them what the problem actually was, they just shrugged, blithely unconcerned.

‘Chief’ll tell you herself,’ was all he got from them.

And finally he was almost unceremoniously shoved into a chamber in the second rotating ring segment, where Lain was waiting.

She was sitting at a table, apparently about to start on a meal, and for a moment he hovered in the hatchway, assuming that his timing was off as usual, before noticing that there were utensils for two.

She raised her eyebrows challengingly. ‘Come on in, old man. Got some tens-of-thousands-of-years-old food here. Come and do history to it.’

That actually got him into the room, staring at the unfamiliar food: thick soups or sauces, and greyish chunks that looked uncomfortably as if they might have been hacked from the planet below them. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Nope, food of the ancients, Holsten. Food of the gods.’

‘But that’s… surely it can’t still be edible.’ He sat himself across from her, staring down in fascination.

‘We’ve been living on it for almost a month now, over here,’ she told him. ‘Better than the pap the Gil churns out.’

A loaded pause came and went, and Holsten looked up sharply as she gave a bitter little laugh.

‘My starter gambit worked too well. You’re not supposed to actually be that interested in the food, old man.’

He blinked at her, studying her face, seeing in it the extra hours she had put in, both here on the station, and in sporadic waking days during the journey from Kern’s World, while making sure the ship didn’t consume more of its precious cargo by malfunction and error. We’re a good match now , Holsten realized. Look at the two of us.

‘So this is…’ He made a gesture at the assortment of bowls on the table and ended up getting some sort of orange goo on his finger.

‘What?’ Lain demanded. ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it? All the conveniences: light, heat, air and rotational gravity. This is the lap of luxury, believe me. Hold on, wait a moment.’ She fiddled with something at the table edge, and the wall to Holsten’s left began to fall away. For a heart-stopping moment he had no idea what was happening, save that the dissolution of the entire station appeared to be imminent. But there was a somewhat clouded transparency left behind after the outer shutters groaned open and, beyond it, the vastness of the rest of creation. And one more thing.

Holsten was staring out at the Gilgamesh . He had not seen it from the outside before, not properly. Even when being returned to it after the mutiny, he had passed from shuttle interior to ark ship interior without even thinking about the great outdoors. After all, in space the great outdoors existed mostly to kill you.