Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘At last !’ Karst practically shouted, and stared about him. ‘Which screen’s best? Which is working?’

Four screens flared with the new images, one flickering and dying but the other three holding steady. They saw that familiar green orb: a thing of dreams, the promised land. The drones were following their path towards the satellite’s orbital track, darting in to intercept it and bring an end to it. They didn’t care about what they were seeing, unlike the human eyes now watching vicariously through their lenses.

Karst’s mouth hung open. At this moment, even the ability to curse seemed to have deserted him. He fumbled backwards for a seat, and then sat down heavily. Everyone in comms had stopped work, instead staring at the screen, at what had been done to their paradise.

Kern’s satellite was not alone in its vigil.

Around the circumference of the planet, girdling its equator in a broad ring, was a vast band of tangled lines and strands and nodes: not satellites, but a whole orbiting network, interconnected and continuous around the entire world. It flared bright in the sunlight, opening green petals towards the system’s star. There were a thousand irregular nodes pulled into taut, angular shapes by their connecting conduits. There was a bustle to it, of constant activity.

It was a web. It was as though some unthinkable horror had begun the job of cocooning the planet before it fed on it. It was a single vast web in geostationary orbit about the planet, and Kern’s metal home was just one pinpoint within its myriad complexity.

Holsten thought about those thousand, thousand transmissions from Kern’s World, but not from Kern herself. He thought about those hateful whispers telling the Gilgamesh , impossibly, to turn around and go away. Abandon hope, all ye who enter…

The drones were arrowing in now, still seeking out Kern’s satellite, because their programming had somehow not prepared them for this.

‘Spiders…’ said Karst slowly. His eyes were roving around, seeking desperately for inspiration. ‘It’s not possible.’ There was a pleading edge to his voice.

Holsten just stared at that vast snare laid around the planet, seeing more detail every second as the drones closed with it. He saw things moving across it, shuttling back and forth. He saw long strands reaching out into space from it, as though hungry for more prey. He thought he saw other lines reaching down towards the planet itself. His skin was crawling, and he remembered his brief stay on the planet, the deaths of the mutineers.

‘No,’ said Karst flatly, and, ‘No,’ again. ‘It’s ours. It’s ours . We need it. I don’t care what the fuck the bastards have done with it. We’ve nowhere else to go.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Holsten asked faintly.

‘ We are going to fight,’ Karst stated, and his sense of purpose returned with those words. ‘We are going to fight Kern, and we are going to fight… that . We are coming home, you hear me? That’s home now. It’s all the home we’ll ever have. And we will mass-driver the fucking place from orbit if we have to, to make it ours. We’ll burn them out. We’ll burn them all out. What else have we got?’

He rubbed at his face. When he took his hands away, he seemed composed. ‘Right, I need more minds on this. Alpash, it’s time.’

The engineer nodded.

‘Time for what?’ Holsten demanded.

‘Time to wake up Lain,’ Karst replied.

Far beyond the physical tendrils with which they have ringed their planet, the spiders have extended a wider web. Biotechnological receptors in the cold of space hear radio messages, await the return of soundless calls into the void, and reach out for disturbances in gravity and the electromagnetic spectrum – the tremors on the strands that will let them know when a guest has arrived in their parlour.

They have been preparing for this day for many generations. The entire planet has, ever since they finally bridged that gap with God, fingertip to leg-tip. Their entire civilization has come together with a purpose, and that purpose is survival .

The Messenger had forever been trying to prepare them, to mould them into Her image and give them the weapons She thought they needed, in order to fight back. Only when She stopped treating them like children – like monkeys – was She able to do what perhaps She should have done from the start: communicate the problem to them; let them find a solution that was within the reach of their minds and their technology.

One advantage of God ceasing to move in mysterious ways is that the entire planet has found a hitherto unknown unity. Little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction. The Messenger was unstinting in Her assurances that the spiders would have nothing else to look forward to if the Gilgamesh was allowed to return unopposed. She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species’ history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection.

For generations, then, a political unity of the spider cities has worked towards creating this vast orbital presence, using all the tools available. The spiders have entered the space age with desperate vigour.

And Bianca looks up at the darkening sky, at the unseen filigree of Great Star Nest, the orbital city, and knows that she would rather this had not come about in her lifetime.

The enemy is coming.

She has never seen this enemy, but she knows what it looks like. She has sought out ancient Understandings, preserved across the centuries, that reach back to a time when her kind faced extinction at the jaws of a much more comprehensible foe. For, during their conquest of the ant super-colony, Bianca’s species encountered what she now knows as humanity. There were giants in the world, back in those days.

She now sees, through the long-gone eyes of a distant ancestor, the captive monster that had fallen from the sky – not from the Messenger, as had been believed, but from this approaching menace. Little did they know it was a herald of the end.

It seems so hard to believe that such a huge, ponderous thing could have been sentient, but apparently it was. More than sentient. Things like that – just as the Messenger had once been a thing like that – are the ur -race, the ancient astronauts responsible for all life that has evolved on Bianca’s world. And now they are returning to undo that mistake.

Bianca’s musings have taken her out of the vast reach of the Seven Trees conurbation and on to the closest anchor point, travelling swiftly by wire in a capsule powered by artificial, photosynthetic, self-sufficient muscle. Now she disembarks, feeling the great open space around her. Most of her world’s tropical and temperate land area is still forested, either for agricultural purposes, as wild reserves, or serving as the scaffolding that her species use to build their cities. The areas around the elevator anchor points are all kept clear, though, and she sees a great tent of silken walls a hundred feet high, culminating in a single point that stretches ever away into the high distance, beyond the ability of her eyes to follow it. She knows where it goes, though: heading up, up out of the planet’s atmosphere, then up further and further, as a slender thread that reaches halfway to the arc of the moon. The equator is studded with them.

That long-ago balloonist was right: there was an easier way to claw one’s way up and out of the planet’s gravity well and into orbit, and all it took was spinning a strong enough thread.