Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He heard shouts behind them. Solace turned and sent a handful of shot back that way and shoved him onwards.

  “Disappointed,” he panted over his shoulder, “with the Parthenon war machine. Aren’t you supposed to be as good as a hundred Colonials, or something?”

  He couldn’t see the expression behind her visor. “Low on ammo,” she said curtly. “All that chain shot. Don’t want to get down to fists.”

  A moment later and he thought he’d lost track of Kris and Trine entirely, but it was him going off course. Solace had to snag his arm and haul him back on track. Then Kris yelled out a warning and there was gunfire dead ahead, whickering through the crowded spaces between trunks and hacking out explosive splinters of not-quite-wood.

  Solace forged past and he saw two scars appear on her armour, the force of the impact sending her stumbling left. Just projectile shot, nothing that would cut through her protection, but worse could come next.

  “Go!” she ordered the three of them. “Go, keep going. I’ll catch up.”

  Kris looked rebellious but she had literally brought a knife to a gunfight and it wasn’t enough. Another yell from Solace sent them plunging deeper into the jungle, struggling up a rise using twisting roots as a ladder and startling a pack of metre-long hopping things. The air whined with tiny specks of life, swarming in glittering helices wherever the sunlight broke through the canopy. And all around them the locals were ramping it up, a cacophony of clattering and booming as various monsters registered their displeasure.

  “Idris, where are you going?” Kris shouted, and he realized he’d just gone off again. He’d veered to the top of a rise, stubbled with trees standing out like hairs on a fright wig. He slithered halfway back down, whacking his knee hard on a trunk he swore had lurched into his path. This damned planet. Kris and Trine were waiting for him. From somewhere behind he heard a scream and then sobbing: a man’s voice, not Solace.

  “My old acquaintance, my fellow veteran, would you just not?” Trine demanded testily. They had abandoned an upright posture entirely for the rough going, using all their arms to skitter about, legs arched high like a grasshopper’s. And then Idris’s lips moved and he said, “This way.” The words came from the part of him he wasn’t quite on speaking terms with, the same part that knew unspace and had touched the mind of a destructive god.

  “What?” Kris looked up the rise. “No way. We need to stay low.”

  His mind filled with attempts at explanation, but he didn’t have the words and they didn’t have the time. “Just… this way.” And then he was off, trusting that she’d follow him and Trine wouldn’t want to be left alone. Trusting that Solace would find them. Trusting… trusting himself, which was a hard thing to do at the best of times. Ints go mad, everyone knows that. And nobody knew it better than an Int.

  When Idris reached the top of the next rise he risked a look back and saw movement below. Solace had spotted them and was running their way—pausing for a moment to send a single shot back then picking up the pace again. Off to her right a sudden fit shook a couple of the trees as return fire lashed at them. Then he was scrabbling past the rise and running too, flat out running over the treacherous ground, Kris and Trine following behind him. Something had a hook in his mind and he battered through the clutching foliage, bounced off spiny trunks and fell headlong. He wrenched himself up from roots that tried to find out what he was made of and whether they could eat it. It’ll be real funny if there’s just a monster at the end of this with its mouth open, waiting for me.

  Hilarious.

  Then he saw a shadow through the trees: huge and grey. For a moment he thought it really was a monster, but he was pelting headlong, too fast to put the brakes on. He ended up slamming into a rough, overgrown wall and sitting down hard. Beside him, Trine scuttled to a halt, with Kris a dozen paces behind and gasping for breath.

  “What have you found?” Trine’s clipped voice issued from their torso. “Menheer Telemmier, you creature of remarkable surprises, what’s this?”

  “Defence,” he got out. “Walls.” And then Solace was coming, virtually scooping up Kris on her way.

  It was an Originator site, just a single structure—but it was tall, not just buried foundations. It reminded Idris of the abandoned shell of some marine mollusc. He could make out three concentric sets of walls with random holes in them, ending in jagged rock teeth about three metres up. The jungle had overcome its Originator squeamishness here, and trees had grown up close to the walls. Vines snaked over their pitted substance as though questing for meaning.

  “This’ll do,” Solace decided. “In.”

  “The scientist in me,” remarked Trine, “protests against using a once-in-a-lifetime discovery as a defence against gunfire. But not too much.” And they were hurrying themselves inside even as they said it.

  Solace found a breach in the wall at around the right height and was ready when the first of their pursuers could be glimpsed through the trees. She sent off three pellets one after another, the retorts hanging in the air.

  “How many of them left?” Kris asked.

  “At least seven.” Solace sighted, but didn’t shoot. “You hear a ship out there?”

  “Not yet. And even if Olli can get the Joan down here through the EM, she’d go for the dig site.”

  “We can find some way to signal her. We can set fire to the jungle?”

  “Jerichan substances don’t burn, my friend. They desiccate without even smoke,” Trine remarked.

  “This planet really is good for absolutely nothing,” Solace growled. She sent out one more shot and was rewarded by some alarmed shouting. “Well, they have us pinned here. The walls are good, but not a permanent solution.”

  “Wait, listen,” Kris was saying. To Idris, it seemed as though she was receding. Not physically, but along some other axis entirely… they all were. Which meant, of course, it was him not them. Something to do with the structure around them was screwing with his head, expanding his consciousness and he wasn’t comfortable with that at all. He sat down, back sliding down the abrasive structure of the wall, ripping up his tunic. None of the others noticed.

  “Is that the Joan now?” Kris was saying. “I wish all these fucking monsters would shut up for a second.”

  They shut up.

  Idris whimpered, because he’d done that. Not intentionally. But Kris’s demand had passed through his brain, into the building around them and then out—into the world. He’d somehow turned it into a shout, and every single bloody denizen of this monstrous jungle had stopped in mid-croak, mid-bellow, mid-shrill… because it wanted to know what he was and precisely how edible.

  “Um…” Kris started. But the Voyenni had taken the quiet as the cue for an attack. In response, they were now rushing through the last few metres of tree cover, shooting as they came. Solace drilled one through the head, then dropped Mr. Punch because a big Voyenni had surprised them. He’d ducked around the wall with a magnetic pistol raised before him. Solace went for the barrel, twisting it from his hand with servo-enhanced strength. He picked her up and slammed her against the wall; he was tall and broad enough that she looked like a toy in his grip. Then she rammed an armoured knee into his sternum and chopped at his neck with the blade of her hand. He dropped her but another man was behind him, then another. Idris stared down the barrel of a massive projectile gun and literally couldn’t move. His body was frozen with fear, his mind away with a multitude of horrible alien fairies.

  Kris knifed the gunman in the hand and the gun went off—bullet ricocheting back and forth within the walls before spanging off Trine’s body, its momentum almost spent. Then the knifed Voyenni had his own blade out, something closer to a machete, and hacked murderously down at Kris. She dodged in the limited space, feinting at his face to keep him back.

  Idris felt as though he was watching a mediotype of unlikely events, things that had happened to someone else. His mind was filled with a thousand living things, linked through the broken t
ower to the whole electromagnetic life of the jungle. The jungle was like a brain, he thought, but a brain at war with itself, fighting for dominance, neuron against neuron. Feels like my brain, then.

  This forested brain wouldn’t do what he wanted though. It had its own business, after all. Except this tower was something like a transmitter station. Not in any way the operator back at Anchortown would have recognized, but it had been raised to boost and send signals. And right now the only signal was him.

  Perhaps there were ways that his wishes and the drives of the biosphere outside might coincide.

  Hold them off, he tried to say to it, but knew that no words had escaped his clamped-tight jaws. Solace had sent her opponent into Kris’s Voyenni, then swept the pair of them out of the entryway. They were coming right back in with reinforcements, but she was keeping them out. Idris could only wonder at the economy of her movements. The Voyenni were trained thugs, the products of expensive schools in brutality and intimidation. Solace had been engineered as a soldier, mind and body. She was also encased in top-flight Partheni armour and trained from childhood to fight. There were too many of them for her to go on the offensive, but she was holding, holding.

  Someone howled outside, a human voice in mortal terror. Idris felt vomit rise in his throat, because in some way he was outside too, breeding that terror. It was his fault. Someone else howled, and then it stopped, because a mouth that was half tentacles and half hooked teeth had closed and ripped its target in half—grinding the remains down a gullet lined with backwards-curving blades. Now there were more shouts and shooting—not aimed at the tower this time. Idris was carried along helplessly, linked to the monster he’d found. He moved from victim to victim as his champion took one horrifyingly long stride after another, hunting this intriguing new prey. He didn’t even know the nature of this beast. His connection was from the inside to inside. He just caught flashes of the various horrifying parts of it, without grasping its doubtless equally horrifying whole.

  Solace had her back to the wall, waiting for the next opponent, but they’d spotted something else to worry about. Kris caught sight of it first and recoiled from the opening. Later she’d tell Idris about something with a sack of a body suspended on too many tall skeletal legs, stilting along as though jerked with strings. It was high up in the canopy, its leg-span stretching between the trees. And it was plucking up human shapes and shearing them apart, then picking over what was left as though trying to read a future in the entrails.

  “The Joan!” Solace shouted suddenly. And Idris, sightless within the ruin, was nonetheless aware of the new intruder in the sky. He felt the biosphere bend towards it, a great roaring chorus of EM wash out, only to meet the ship’s gravitic shielding. Olli was flying the vessel without instruments, without anything. She had the hatch open, he realized in horror. Their would-be saviour was sitting in her Scorpion frame at the hatch, looking out, wired into the pilot’s station, flying the whole circus by wire and guesswork. And she couldn’t see them, buried as they were in the jungle.

  But she would have a comms channel open, he knew. He’d heard her signalling the dig site, hoping to cut through to reach them. Perhaps she even received brief moments of Robellin swearing at her, telling her that her crew wasn’t at the dig, that they’d…

  “I don’t know what’s going on out there, but the mercs won’t hold off forever,” Solace said. “We need to signal the Joan and simply hope she can get low enough for us to get aboard.”

  We need to signal. That’s why we came to a signalling station. At this point the thoughts were just sliding about his head like unsecured junk on a ship’s deck. He had no idea what he’d known before coming here, or what he knew now. Communion with the outside world, with the jungle, was eating up all his mental capacity.

  A broken, millions-of-years-old signalling station, the bulk of it buried beneath him. Its intricate, shell-like structure extended into the earth for half a kilometre. And it wasn’t dead, because Originator tech couldn’t die. Every part of it cast a shadow outside the real, even the little trinkets and rods the Hegemony carted about and used to claim whole planets. The very construction and substance of this ancient tech pointed to its function and meaning. There was a world locked away inside this stuff that nobody had ever guessed at.

  This is a signalling station. So signal. It was such a trivial use of what he’d found, but it was the only thing he actually needed from it. And like any unknowable demon power, it was best not to ask for too much. Be careful what you wish for.

  He signalled Olli, flagging their location in the clearest way he possible could. That was all he did. The forest exalted in that moment for a hundred metres in every direction, every monster, tree and buzzing thing shrieking, howling and trumpeting, but that was incidental. The whole EM babble around them became one single message, for just that second: a means to an end, burning their location into the Joan’s flight computer.

  The last remaining Voyenni took potshots at the Joan when she came lurching down, veering and hovering clear of the trees while Olli lowered a chain-link ladder. Solace returned fire, burning the last of Mr. Punch’s ammo. She stayed groundside until Kris and Trine had scrambled up the ladder. Then she threw Idris over her shoulder and put a foot on the ladder so Olli could retract it. Idris sure as hell wasn’t in any position to climb up on his own.

  Kris

  “So,” Olli yelled as her frame fought with the closing hatch. “Idris good to take over for me?”

  Kris risked a look at the pilot and saw that his skin was waxy, his face wild-eyed as if he was on a really bad trip. “I don’t think Idris is going to be doing anything useful for a while.”

  “Okay, fine.” Olli shouldered past her and Solace and set her frame to crouch in the centre of the passenger compartment. It took up most of the available space. “I’ll just keep doing his job as well as mine, shall I?”

  “That’s not fair,” Solace objected.

  “Didn’t ask your opinion.” Olli looked wiped-out herself. Her Scorpion was physically wired to the pilot’s console with heavily insulated cables, and the inside of the Dark Joan fairly crackled with electromagnetic fields. Kris guessed that she’d jury-rigged the packet runner’s gravitic engine to run interference with Jericho’s natural EM field, but she’d still had to somehow keep basic ship operations going. It obviously wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs keeping on top of it.

  “Bloody Patho tech doesn’t help. You don’t make it to be monkeyed with,” Olli added, sending Solace another filthy look. The Partheni didn’t rise to it. “This your Hiver friend, are they?”

  “And hello to you too,” Trine said. They were looking woefully at their damaged leg, which was bent at an awkward-looking angle. “May I at least assume your vessel has an adequate workshop?”

  “Medvig’s tools’ll be good enough for you,” Olli said curtly. Then the Joan had cut free from Jericho’s atmosphere and they were heading for the beacon of the Vulture God. “Kit’ll be panicking,” the specialist predicted. “Been out of all contact for way too long. Vulture, this is Joan. We’re coming in.”

  The last faint vestiges of the upper atmosphere burned about them as Olli accelerated the packet runner to a respectable speed, clipping around the planet’s curvature. Kris glanced at the nav console and decoded the readouts there.

  “We’re not going to the elevator hub?”

  “Look, we were getting some attention there,” Olli told her. “And then there was the stuff Kit scavved from the Raptorid’s comms. We could have sat tight and hoped the Jenny Kite ID would cover us. But who knows whether that Magdan turd hired someone with two good eyes and half a brain? So we reckoned we wouldn’t want to fuck about with permits when time came to scoot. Didn’t know who might be beating on the hatch, see right?”

  “Right,” Kris agreed.

  “Vulture, this is Joan. Kit, tell me something useful.” Olli let herself sag back in the frame, flying the ship with her eyes closed now her sensors
and instruments were clear of interference.

  “If he’s dodged round the planet, the EM will mess with our signal,” Solace suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe.” The specialist sounded unconvinced. “Kit, you crab bastard, speak to me.”

  “You can’t say that,” Kris told her, knee-jerk.

  “He doesn’t care.”

  “You don’t know that, and just don’t. And knock off the ‘Patho’ stuff while you’re at it.”

  Olli stared at her, obviously working up to an acidic comment, then just as visibly she backed down. “Fine. Can I just call him a Hanni bastard then… oh god damn.”

  They’d picked up the Vulture. Hunched over it like a predatory bat was the sleek double-pronged shape of the Raptorid. They could see that it was clamped to the salvage vessel and there was an umbilical connecting the two.

  “We have comms contact,” Olli noted tonelessly. “Turdwagon’s hailing us.”

  “Open it up,” Kris suggested. “Give it to me. I’ll talk.”

  “Give it nothing until we’ve heard from Kit.”

  “I know.” She stepped over the part-folded limbs of the Scorpion and dropped into the pilot’s seat. After the chase and fight through that carnivorous forest, she didn’t need any of this.

  “Good day to you, crew of the Vulture God. I assume we don’t need to bother with your false alias?”

  “It’s a real alias,” Kris said, “just a false name.” Pedantry wasn’t going to win her any diplomacy awards but she wasn’t in the mood for niceties. “Identify yourself.”