Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

Once the ship was secured, the chamber was pressurised with argon at two atmospheres. All but a fine layer of ice was removed from the ship by delicate ablation, with the final layer melted away over a period of six days. A flock of sensors hovered around the ship like gulls, sniffing the argon for any traces of foreign matter. But apart from chips of hull material nothing unusual was detected.

Skade bided her time, taking every possible precaution. She did not touch the ship until it was absolutely necessary. A hoop-shaped imaging gravitometer whirred along the ship, probing its internal structure, hinting at fuzzy interior details. Much of what Skade saw matched what she expected to see from the blueprints, but there were strange things that should not have been there: elongated black masses which corkscrewed and bifurcated through the ship’s interior. They reminded her of bullet trails in forensic images, or the patterns sub-atomic particles made when they passed through cloud chambers. Where the black masses reached the outer hull, Skade always found one of the half-buried cubic structures.

But there was still room in the ship for humans to have survived, even though all the indications were that none still lived. Neutrino radar and gamma-ray scans elucidated more of the structure, but still Skade could not see the crucial details. Reluctantly, she moved to the next phase of her investigation: physical contact. She attached dozens of mechanical jackhammers around the hull, along with hundreds of paste-on microphones. The hammers started up, thudding against the hull. She heard the din in her spacesuit, transmitted through the argon. It sounded like an army of metalsmiths working overtime in a distant foundry. The microphones listened for the metallic echoes as the acoustic waves propagated through the ship. One of Skade’s older neural routines unravelled the information buried in the arrival times of the echoes, assembling a tomographic density profile of the ship.

Skade saw it all in ghostly grey-greens. It did not contradict anything that she had already learned, and improved her knowledge in several areas. But she could glean nothing further without going inside, and that would not be easy. All the airlocks had been sealed from inside with plugs of molten metal. She cut through them, slowly and nervously, with lasers and hyperdiamond-tipped drills, feeling the crew’s fear and desperation. When she had the first lock open she sent in an exploratory detachment of hardened servitors, ceramic-shelled crabs equipped with just enough intelligence to get the job done. They fed images back into her skull.

What they found horrified Skade.

The crew had been butchered. Some had been ripped apart, squashed, dismembered, pulped, sliced, fragmented. Others had been burned or suffocated or frozen. The carnage had evidently not happened quickly. As Skade absorbed the details, she began to picture how it must have happened: a series of pitched battles and last stands in various parts of the ship, with the crew raising makeshift barricades against the invaders. The ship itself had done its desperate best to protect its human charges, rearranging interior partitions to keep the enemy at bay. It had tried to flood certain areas with coolant or high-pressure atmosphere, and in those cells Skade found the corpses of strange, ungainly machines—conglomerations of thousands of black geometric shapes.

She formed a hypothesis. It was not difficult. The cubes had glued themselves on to the outside of Galiana’s ship. They had multiplied, growing as they absorbed and reprocessed the ship’s integument. In that respect it was indeed a little plaguelike. But the plague was microscopic; one never saw the individual elements of the spore with the naked eye. This was more brutal and mechanistic, almost fascistic, in the way it replicated. The plague at least imbued transformed matter with something of its earlier characteristics, yielding chimeric phantasms of machine and flesh.

No, Skade told herself. She was certainly not dealing with the Melding Plague, as comforting as that might now have been.

The cubes had wormed into the ship and then formed attacking units—soldier conglomerations. These soldiers had done the killing, advancing slowly away from each infection point. Judging by the remains they were lumpy and asymmetric, more like dense swarms of hornets than individual entities. They must have been able to squirm through the tiniest opening, reassembling on the other side. Nonetheless, the battle had taken time. By Skade’s estimate, it might have taken many days for the whole ship to fall. Many weeks, even.

She shivered at the thought of it.

A day after they had first entered, her servitors found some human bodies that were nearly intact, except that their heads had been swallowed by black helmets of surrounding cubes. The alien machinery appeared inert. The servitors removed parts of the helmets and found that prongs of machine-growth reached into the corpses’ skulls, through the eye sockets or the ears or the nasal cavity. Further study showed that the prongs had bifurcated many times, until they reached microscopic scale. They extended deep into the brains of the dead, establishing connections with their native Conjoiner implants.

But the machines, and their hosts, were now very much dead.

Skade tried to work out what had happened; the ship’s records were thoroughly scrambled. It was obvious that Galiana had encountered something hostile, but why hadn’t the cubes simply destroyed her ship in one go? The infiltration had been slow and painstaking, and it only made sense if the cubes wanted to keep the ship intact for as long as possible.

There had been another ship: two had gone on—what had happened to that one?

[Ideas, Skade?]

Yes. But nothing I like.

[You think the cubes wanted to learn as much as possible, don’t you?]

I can’t think of any other reason. They put taps into their minds, reading their neural machinery. They were intelligence-gathering .

[Yes. We agree. The cubes must have learned a great deal about us. We have to consider them a threat, even if we don’t yet know where Galiana was when they found her. But there is a glimmer of hope, wouldn’t you say?]

Skade failed to see what that glimmer could possibly be. Humanity had been searching for an unambiguous alien intelligence for centuries. All they had found so far had been tantalising leads—the Pattern Jugglers, the Shrouders, the archaeological remains of another eight or nine dead cultures. They had never encountered another extant machine-using intelligence, nothing to measure themselves against.

Until now.

And what this machine-using intelligence did, so it seemed, was stalk, infiltrate and slaughter, and then invade skulls.

It was not, Skade conceded, the most fruitful of first encounters.

Hope? Are you serious?

[Yes, Skade, because we don’t know that the cubes were ever able to transmit that knowledge back to whatever it was that sent them. Galiana’s ship made it back home, after all. She must have steered it here, and she would not have done that if she thought there was any danger of leading the enemy back to us. Clavain would be proud, I think. She was still thinking of us; still thinking of the Mother Nest.]

But she ran the risk . . .

The voice of the Night Council cut her off sharply. [The ship is a warning, Skade. That is what Galiana intended and that is how we must read it.]

A warning?

[That we must be ready. They are still out there, and one way or another we will meet them again.]

You almost sound as if you were expecting them to arrive.

But the Night Council said nothing.

By then the servitors had done about all they were able. They had secured large volumes of the ship, spraying diamond-fibred epoxy over the ruins of the alien machines, and they had DNA-sampled most of the corpses in the explored zones. Every individual sample of genetic material had been identified against the crew manifests in the Mother Nest, preserved since the departure of the exploratory fleet, but there were many names on the list that had yet to be matched to DNA samples.