Amen, he thought, but he was looking for a weapon, any weapon. Rani’s head pivoted unnaturally on her neck to keep him in view. No cutting tools in here, and the sort of basic, brute tools his ancestors might have needed were for drones now, because who needed to lift a finger for that sort of work?
Except… after the first habitat had died, hadn’t they planned for a similar catastrophe, having had the fragility of their technological lives flagged up for them? And had they kept that…? Still watching for any movement from Rani, he ran the inventory of the lockers on the habitat system and came up trumps. He gave himself an inset camera view to guide his fumbling hand so he didn’t have to look away from the thing on the floor.
At last he found it: something they’d fabricated in panic, then stored in faint embarrassment for the primitive thinking it represented. Something primal. Something infinitely reassuring. An axe with a gleaming metal head, barely a scratch on it. The weight made him feel strong, invulnerable.
Rani’s smile spread further, a horribly misplaced attempt to be reassuring.
“Yusuf, we are still Kalveen Rani,” she said conversationally. “And more, and more. This is the best way. These-of-we are growing and learning. Those-of-we that were Lortisse did not understand. We have superseded their wildest dreams, Yusuf.”
“Stop using my name,” he said through gritted teeth.
“It’s me, Yusuf.” She spoke over him, through the grin. “It’s us, it’s me, it’s us me, Yusuf.”
He approached her, eyeing the spasmodic twitches of her limbs, which seemed closer and closer to meaningful, directed movement. The axe was a savage comfort at the end of his arm.
“Yusuf,” she said, head pivoting, the pupils of her eyes vacillating as she tried to focus on him.
Then Lante was in the doorway and no doubt wondering what the hell was going on. “It’s too late for her,” Baltiel said. “It’s got in her.”
Lante seemed to find that delightful.
“We’re going on an adventure,” she said, pronouncing each word with exaggerated care.
Yusuf made a wordless sound and stumbled back.
“It’s all right, Yusuf,” Lante told him. “We’re fine. We’re all fine. We’re liberated, really. It’s all so much, Yusuf. But you’ll understand. We’ll all understand everything. Why else are we here? Don’t you want to learn it all, at last?”
His faltering feet were taking him to the outer door. He had no suit on, of course, but right now the dangerous part of Nod was in the habitat with him. He had faced the outside before, years ago. He had breathed that impoverished air and lived, although only because he thought they were all going to die.
Lante was walking towards him carefully, as though trying to compensate for a sloping floor that wasn’t. “Yusuf,” she breathed. “It’s still us still me. I am Erma. Still. I we I know what you fear. She we I felt it, too, but it’s wonderful, Yusuf. We’re wonderful. We have discovered such strange vast things we never dreamt of.”
He brandished the axe and there was no human flinch in her, and he saw in his mind’s eye an image of him splitting that familiar face, and only dark fungal ooze issuing out. He had the inner airlock door open now, sawing through the habitat’s safety protocols to speed things up, throwing his Overall Command rank around.
“Yusuf,” Lante said, as he backed into the airlock. “Don’t you understand? This gives us purpose again. We’ve been without purpose for so long. There is no more Earth, Yusuf. No more humans. Of course we chose to study this place instead. And it they We studied us. We don’t have to be something old and tired and used up, Yusuf. We can be something new.”
And the horror of it was, he could believe there was something of Lante there, and that what was speaking to him was a kind of pithed and neutered version of his crewmate. She tells it as she sees it, and I can never know how it sees things, or what it wants. He did not believe in alien parasites that could instantly converse in the language of their hosts, but he did believe in parasites that screwed over brain chemistry or pulled neural strings so that their hosts believed whatever was convenient to the hidden passenger. And it’s learning, somehow. It’s getting better at manipulating them.
The outer door opened, and Nod’s chest-aching atmosphere flooded past him. For a moment he was going to throw the axe at Lante, but its value to him as a morale boost was greater than as a ranged weapon. Instead he turned and ran for the shuttle.
He was sending ahead, linking with its systems. The ground shook as its engines began to warm. The old craft had sat there on the rocks for a long time without being used. He had no idea whether the mist or the rain or some other local nastiness had got into it, but right now he didn’t have the time for a proper inspection. It would work or it wouldn’t.
He reached the door, which he had ordered open moments before. It was closed. He connected to the shuttle systems again and recoiled, finding them a mess of contradictory commands. Lante was trying to connect, and so was Rani. He should have been able to override them both, but they were flooding the shuttle with chaotic attempts to interface with it, like a drunk fumbling with a front door key. The result was an inadvertent denial-of-service that was keeping him out as well, as the shuttle tried to process far too many queries at once.
There was a hoarse, mad voice bellowing, the sound of it torn at by the wind that moaned in across the salt marsh. Belatedly he realized it was his own, shouting at the insensate machines that wouldn’t do his bidding. Lante and Rani’s glitched words sounded sane by comparison. There were tears stinging the corners of his eyes. Everything had come to an end.
They were coming, of course. Baltiel turned to see them: Lante strode, bow-legged, smiling pleasantly, her face tilted away from the red-orange sun. Rani followed, lurching, occasionally going down on one knee amongst the rock-pools, ripping her clothes, gashing her skin, feeling none of it. Her smile was painfully wide, eyes likewise. They were calling his name.
We had such plans. But it wasn’t true, not in the end, not after that savage disconnection from all their pasts. They had been marking time ever since, writing reports for nobody, inventing pastimes to cover up the hollow emptiness inside. And now something had come to fill it. Perhaps Lante—this new puppet Lante—was right after all.
But something within him bucked at that. He was Yusuf Baltiel. He was his own man, singular, aloof. He was the leader. He was not led by the nose by some alien parasite.
He hefted the axe and waited for them to come closer.
9.
“Disra? Disra, speak to me, please. I need to hear your voice.”
Disra Senkovi stared blankly at the interior of the Aegean’s crew quarters, wondering why he was there. He linked to the ship’s internal cameras and replayed his weaving progress, realizing he’d been drifting aimlessly from room to room for quite a while now. Probably he’d had some intent at the start, but that had fallen by the wayside long ago. In a sudden panic he called up a display of the key terraforming objectives, but everything was on target or even ahead of schedule. He knew that if he probed into the details of how those targets had been met, the details would be an impenetrable tangle of weird solutions, unintuitive, even contradictory on the surface, and yet all working together to make Damascus that much more habitable for Earth-based life. The last ice had gone from the poles, he’d seen—the big orbital mirrors had been yanked way out of position to focus the sun on the final gleam of it. One hundred per cent of the surface water was sufficiently oxygenated, and penetration went far enough that half the deep sea floor was liveable, too. The Aegean’s factories had been cracking asteroids brought in by its deteriorating fleet of remotes, and the debris had been shipped down the gravity well to where the Pauls and Salomes and the rest were busy building colonies, expanding their network of holes and tunnels around the various terraforming installations, creating cities. He hadn’t told them to do any of that, but nor had he stepped in to stop them. He had watched and watched, and at last he re
alized he was waiting for them to need him, for them to screw it up. And they hadn’t. And that meant they didn’t need him.
They still spoke to him, but he had a sense of the pre-occupied now. He was just one point in their complex social calendars. When he called, at least some of them listened, but he characterized their manner as a sort of fond nostalgia for some childhood imaginary friend.
I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, he thought. Beyond Baltiel’s wishes, certainly. And he remembered that he’d been getting a battery of messages in the last minute or so, which had brought him back to himself. Am I in trouble, then?
“Yusuf,” he said, connecting and letting Baltiel’s image appear on the nearest screen. He hadn’t been down in the crew quarters for a long, long time. It was rattlingly empty there.
“Disra, listen to me!” Baltiel looked terrible: grey and haggard.
“Are you… well?” Senkovi asked leerily. Baltiel was crammed into the pilot seat of a shuttle, unshaven, wild-eyed, looking like he hadn’t washed in a month. “Is it Gav, has he—?”
“Listen to me!” Baltiel fairly shrieked. “He’s dead. Lante’s dead. Rani’s dead. Disra, it got them. It…” Senkovi watched him visibly get a hold of himself. “Listen, don’t speak, just listen. The stuff that got into Lortisse, it infected him somehow. It got into his mind. It was controlling him, Disra. He wasn’t himself.” A shudder and a sob wracked the Overall Commander, and that more than anything else kept Disra from interjecting. Baltiel had always been the iceman, harsh and distant and lacking in sentiment. This was not the same man. Broken, Disra thought numbly.
“He attacked us. He got it into Lante and Rani, Disra. He infected them. And it was faster with them. The stuff was learning, I swear. It had worked out how to get at our biology, our neurology! I know how mad that sounds, but it’s true, you have to listen. It got to them. It took them all. They weren’t themselves. I swear they weren’t themselves in the end, Disra. Even though they sounded the same, even though they…” Muscles twitched at the corners of Baltiel’s mouth as though he was forcing back vomit. “I had to kill them, Disra. I had to do it.”
Senkovi stared at the stains bespattering Baltiel’s filthy clothing. He had been about to ask why Baltiel had waited so long to pass on vital news, but the words fell away at this last revelation. Is that blood? Lortisse’s? Rani’s?
“I’m sending you all the imagery from the habitat,” Baltiel whispered. “Judge for yourself. I stand by what I did, even though I… though I did… what I did, what I… had to… Disra, this stuff is deadly. Keep away from Nod. There can’t be any more contact between us.”
“I…” And then Senkovi’s words dried up as he stuttered through the recording, now speeding up, now slowing down, now hearing familiar voices say abominable things. “Impossible,” he got out, staring at the evidence that proved him a liar. And “Dead…?” even though, was there any doubt of it? Was it something Baltiel would confess to as a joke?
“I had to, Disra, we… there was no choice.”
It’s just you and me, thought Disra. The idea came to him, absurdly selfish, that Baltiel wouldn’t be fighting him over what happened to Damascus now. He shook it off, trying to feel the proper measure of grief and horror. It eluded him, though. He remembered how he had been hit by the other deaths—Skai and Han and the rest, and of course all of humanity as they knew it. That had struck home, but somehow this new tragedy was too big to deal with. Lante, Rani, Lortisse… couldn’t be dead, surely. Couldn’t be taken over by some alien infection and then dead, in quick succession. He hadn’t seen any footage from outside the habitat. He hadn’t seen Baltiel swing the axe. They weren’t dead.
Something had been nagging at him, something left over from his childish thought about Baltiel’s plans for Damascus, and something about the rapid exchange of their conversation. He picked at it, because that was easier than actually dealing with what he’d been told.
“Yusuf,” he said slowly. “You said there can’t be any more contact, because of the, because of the thing, the thing that happened.”
“Yes,” Baltiel agreed immediately. “This stuff, this parasite, Disra, it’s—”
“Then why are you in a shuttle most of the way over here?”
“I…” There was a moment, then, when an absolute despair gripped Baltiel’s features, a realization that the most dreadful of fates had come to pass, irrevocable and forever, without him even knowing. And then it was gone, drowned in the bland stare that rose to consume it. “Because we’re going on an adventure.”
Senkovi stared at him, feeling cold. “What?”
“I had to get away, Disra,” Baltiel said, the moment of estrangement passing as though it had never been. “We… just needed to move on, move out. I we couldn’t stay there, not after we’d… done what we’d done.”
“Yusuf, is some of that blood yours?”
“Trivial, very small, almost no amount.” Baltiel stared at him and Senkovi tried to find the man he knew in those eyes, that face.
“Yusuf.” He swallowed. “I’m going to ask you to turn the shuttle back around. Back to Nod. Go on back to the planet.” Am I really going to do this? “I can’t let you come to the Aegean. I can’t let you come to Damascus. Just…”
“I’m coming, Disra. I want to see those spaces and extents that we remember. We can see the pictures and the maps but not the real thing not yet. It’s all right, Disra.”
“It’s really not.” Senkovi’s hands were shaking. “Go back, Yu—go back, whatever you are. You can obviously understand me, or half understand me. The Aegean has anti-collision lasers. I am going to use them if you come near me or Damascus, so help me. I am building something here. I am not going to let it get… infected.”
“Disra, don’t treat us like this.”
“I swear I’ll do it.”
“You won’t.” Baltiel’s smile was beatific. “We can reach out and touch you even from here. Even as we speak we are with you in all your spaces. We know the overrides and the commands to prevent you from harming us. Disra, we only want to explore. We’re on an adventure.”
In a sudden panic Senkovi dived into the Aegean’s systems, seeking control of the lasers, the engines. He was locked out. Baltiel had used his command codes.
“I can get round these,” he said. “I was always a better hacker than you.”
“You just thought you were,” Baltiel said serenely. “I always knew. We always knew.”
“Eventually,” replied Senkovi, through gritted teeth now.
“We’re coming, Disra. We are Yusuf still, your friend. We will do no harm. You will never be alone again. Isn’t that a good? Yusuf, this vessel and These-of-we, we understand now that all the limits of your world are needless. We are greater and greater. You expand our world. We cure your singularity. Isn’t that a good?”
Senkovi was fighting the barriers Baltiel had so effortlessly raised in the system, but he was uncomfortably aware that “We always knew” must have had its roots in the human original’s knowledge because he’d never been fenced off like this. The bastard never said anything. Senkovi knew he could break this down eventually. In his own humble estimation he was now the cleverest human being in the universe. Time, though. He checked the speed of the shuttle’s approach. Measured in hours, now. Did he have hours? He had set a dozen algorithms spinning their wheels to crack the codes, but now he returned to them to find them dismantled and in pieces, Baltiel striding down the beach kicking over his sandcastles one by one. In desperation he widened his comms to include the planet below, because the least he could do was warn his creation that Armageddon was coming to it. He flagged the shuttle for them, labelling it with as many symbols for danger as he could. Do not approach, predator, monster, hazard, avoid, flee. But surely what was coming was something that could not be avoided, not for long. Everything he had worked so hard to bring about, the entire future he had been constructing, it was all going to perish.
“I don�
��t know who I’m speaking to,” he sent to the shuttle. “If Yusuf is there in any way, please don’t do this. Take Nod, it’s your world. Build there, grow there, please. But don’t come and ruin what I have here.” He discovered a curious purity in himself, at this late stage. His thoughts, his fears, were all for the budding culture in the seas of Damascus, not for himself. “Or take me, take the damn ship, take it away, just leave the planet alone. And if I’m talking to… if it’s not Yusuf, or if there’s something else that can understand me through Yusuf’s brain, then… what do you want? What can I give you, to leave us alone?”
“What is to ruin?” Baltiel’s quiet, reasonable voice came back. “We have discovered such vast expanses in these vessels, but within them, a greater vastness.”
“Wh-what?” Senkovi actually stopped working on the codes to get his head around what he was being told. “A greater vastness within the…” He felt a lurch, as though the fake gravity of the ship’s rotation had suddenly shifted to the wall. An infection had got into the crew of the habitat, that had previously been parasitic on Nodan life like the poor bloody tortoises. It had found a way to adapt to its new, alien environment. It had found the brain—he remembered that much from Lante’s notes on Lortisse. And somehow it had inveigled its way into the human cognitive process, able to influence and change it, but also perhaps able to receive from it. What would it have understood? Space, interstellar travel, the history of human civilization; a greater vastness.
“We cannot be limited now we know what vastness means,” Baltiel said. “We know you understand this. Why else did you cross from your own native vessel to inhabit these far spaces?” His inflection kept shifting and jumping, now Yusuf Baltiel’s clipped precision, now shuddering with weird stresses and phlegmy catches as his governing occupant forged new concepts into human words.
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