Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

He realized he could make nothing out of the majority of the messages. They were generally faint, and he guessed that they were being sent from the planet in all directions, just radiating out into space.

Rather, bounced off the planet. Not sent, of course not sent. He blinked, obscurely uncomfortable. Whatever their source, though, they were sufficiently far from anything he knew that he could not even be sure that they were messages, couched in any kind of code or language. Only a stubborn streak of structure to them convinced him that they were not some natural interference or just white noise.

The others, though, they were stronger, and recent analysis conducted by the Tribe suggested that they might actually be targeted towards the Gilgamesh ’s line of approach, as though Kern was using the planet as a sounding board to rant incomprehensibly at them. Or the planet itself was shouting at them.

Or the planet was shouting?

Holsten rubbed at his eyes. He had been working for too long. He was beginning to come adrift from rational speculation.

These transmissions, though – at first he had thought they were as much babble as the rest, but he had cross-referenced them with some old stored records of messages from the satellite, and tried to treat them in the same way, varying the encoding by trial and error until something like a message had abruptly sprung out from the white noise. There had been words, or at least he had fooled himself that he had decoded words there. Imperial C words, words out of history, the dead language given new and mutated life.

He thought again about Alpash’s accent. These transmissions seemed almost as if someone out there was speaking some barbarous version of that ancient language, encoded just as Kern encoded her transmissions; some degraded or evolved or simply corrupted attempt at the ancient tongue.

It was proper historian work, just poring over it. He could almost forget the trouble they were all in, and pretend he was on the brink of some great discovery that anyone would care about. What if this isn’t just the crazed gibberish of a dying computer? What if this means something? If it was Kern trying to talk to them, though, then she had obviously lost most of what she was – the woman/machine that Holsten remembered had no difficulty in making herself understood.

So what was she trying to say now?

The more he listened to the clearest of those decoded transmissions – those sent directly along the line of the Gilgamesh ’s approach – the more he felt that someone was trying to speak to him, across millions of kilometres and across a gap of comprehension that was far greater. He could even fool himself that little snippets of phrasing were coming together into something resembling a coherent message.

Stay away. We do not wish to fight. Go back.

Holsten stared at what he had. Am I just imagining this? None of it had been clear – the transmission was in poor shape, and nothing about it fitted in with Kern’s earlier behaviour. The more he looked, though, the more he became sure that this was a message, and that it was intended specifically for them. They were being warned off again, as though by dozens of different voices. Even in those sections he could not disentangle, he could pick out individual words. Leave. Peace. Alone. Death.

He wondered what he could possibly tell Karst.

He slept on it for a while, in the end, and then shambled off to find the acting commander in the comms room.

‘You’re cutting it fine,’ Karst told him. ‘I launched the drones hours back. I calculate about two hours before they do what they do, if it can be done at all.’

‘Burning Kern?’

‘Fucking right.’ Karst stared at the working screens surrounding him with haunted, desperate eyes that belied the easy grin he kept trying to keep pinned on his face. ‘Come on then, Holsten, out with it.’

‘Well, it’s a message and it’s intended for us – that much I’m reasonably certain about.’

‘“Reasonably certain”? Fucking academics,’ but it was almost good-natured, even so. ‘So Kern’s down to basically bombarding us with baby talk, wanting us to go away.’

‘I can’t translate most of it, but those pieces that make any sense at all seem to be consistently along that theme,’ Holsten confirmed. In fact he was feeling unhappy about his own efforts, as though in this, the last professional challenge of his career, he had made some student-level error and failed. The transmissions had been in front of him, a large body of material to cross-reference, and he had constantly felt on the edge of a breakthrough that would make it all crystal clear to him. It had never come, though, and now there was no time to go back to it. He felt that he had shackled himself too much to the way the Old Empire did things, just as everyone always had. If he had come to those transmissions with more of an open mind, rather than trying to recast them in the shape of Kern’s earlier work, what might he have found?

‘Well, fuck her,’ was Karst’s informed opinion. ‘We’re not going anywhere. We don’t have that option any more. It all comes down to this, just like it was always going to. Am I right?’

‘You are,’ Holsten replied hollowly. ‘Are we getting anything from the drones?’

‘I don’t want them transmitting anything until they’re close enough to actually get to work,’ Karst said. ‘Believe me, I remember what fucking Kern can do. You weren’t in that shuttle where she just took the whole thing over, remember? Just drifting in space with nothing but life-support, while she worked out what she wanted to do with us. That was no fun at all, believe me.’

‘And yet she let you come down and pick us up,’ Holsten recalled. He thought Karst might come back at him angrily for that, accuse him of going soft, but the security chief’s face took on a thoughtful air.

‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘And if I thought that there was any chance… but she’s not going to let us on to that planet, Holsten. We tried that one, over and over. She’s going to sit there and hoard the last chance for the human race, and let us all die out in space.’

Holsten nodded. His mind was full of that planet balefully whispering for them to go away. ‘Can I send from the ship? It might even take her attention from the drones… I don’t know.’

‘No. Complete silence from us. If she’s so crazy that she hasn’t seen us, I don’t want you clueing her in.’

Karst could not keep still. He checked with his seconds in Security; he checked with the senior members – chiefs? – of the Tribe. He paced and fretted, and tried to get some passive data on the drones’ progress, without running the risk of alerting Kern.

‘You really think she won’t see them coming?’ Holsten objected.

‘Who can know? She’s old, Holsten, really old – older than us by a long way. She was crazy before. Maybe she’s gone completely mad, now. I’m not giving her anything more than I have to. We get one shot at this before it’s down to the Gil itself. Literally one shot. Seriously, you know how much power a decent laser takes up? And believe me, those are our two best functioning drones – fucking patchwork jobs from all the working bits we could find.’ He clenched his fists, fighting against the weight of his responsibilities. ‘Everything’s falling apart , Holsten. We’ve got to get on to that planet. The ship’s dying. That stupid moon base thing of Guyen’s – that died. Earth…’

‘I know.’ Holsten hunted about for some sort of reassurance, but he honestly couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Chief,’ interrupted one of the Tribe, ‘transmissions from the drones, coming in. They’re coming up on the planet, ready to deploy.’