Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘How long for the scanner?’ Scoles demanded.

  ‘It’s working,’ Tevik said noncommittally. ‘High microbial count already. Some of it recognized, some not. Nothing definitely harmful.’

  ‘Gather the kit and be ready to get out as soon as we get the all-clear.’

  ‘. . . not seeing any sign of biohazard . . .’ from Bales.

  ‘Give it time, come on,’ Tevik’s answering, unheard complaint. ‘All sorts of crap out there. Still no yellow lights, but . . .’

  Bales screamed.

  They heard it: tinny and distant as though it was some tiny person locked away within the cabin’s workings. The camera view was suddenly wavering wildly, then Bales appeared to be fighting with her own suit.

  ‘Fuck me, look at that!’ Lain spat. Holsten had only a blurred view of something spiny, leggy, attached to the woman’s boot. The screaming continued, and now there were audible words, ‘Let me in! Please!’

  ‘Open the airlock!’ Scoles shouted.

  ‘Wait, no!’ from Tevik. ‘Look, we can’t flush the air out. Nothing’s working. The air out there is planet-air. If there’s shit in it, we get it the moment we open the inner door!’

  ‘Open the fucking thing!’

  And now Nessel was hauling on the lever, dragging the door open. Holsten had a mad moment of holding his breath against the anticipated plague before recognizing the stupidity of it.

  Well, we’ve all got it now.

  ‘Get the guns. Get the gear. We’re here now, and it’s survive outside or die inside,’ Scoles snapped. ‘Everybody out, and quick!’

  Nessel was already dragging at the outer door, tearing open their little illusion of security. Beyond was the real world.

  They could hear Bales screaming as soon as the outer door opened. The woman lay on the ground just outside, smashing both hands against her suit, kicking and flailing as though beset by an invisible attacker. Everyone except Holsten and Tevik piled out to help her, trying to get her under control. They were shouting her name now, but she was oblivious, thrashing out at them, then trying to force her helmet off as though she was suffocating. One foot was a red ruin – seeming half cut away – the leg of her suit slashed open with a weird precision.

  It was Nessel that released the catch and dragged Bales’s helmet off, but the screaming had already turned to a ghastly liquid sound before then, and what came out first, after the seal broke, was blood.

  Bales’s head flopped aside, eyes wide, mouth open and running with red. Something moved at her throat. Holsten got sight of it just as everyone else suddenly recoiled: a head rising from the ruin of the woman’s throat, twin blades brandished at them under a pair of crooked antennae that flicked drops of Bales left and right as they fidgeted and danced.

  Then Scoles shouted and kicked madly, flinging something away from him, and Holsten saw that the ground around them was crawling with ants, dozens of ants, each as large as his hand. Monkeys might be merely a memory of Old Empire, but spiders and ants had paced humanity to the ends of the Earth, and now here they were waiting on this distant world. In the leaping, dim light cast by the fires the insects had gone unnoticed, but now he saw them everywhere he looked. More of them were scissoring their way free of Bales’s suit, each emergent head accompanied by a slick of sluggish blood from the wounds the things had carved in her.

  Scoles began shooting.

  He was calm, ridiculously calm, as he levelled his pistol to pick out each target carefully, but he still hit only one out of two, unable to track the insects’ rapid, random movements. It was a forlorn hope. Everywhere Holsten looked on the ground there were ants, not a vast carpet of them but still dozens, and they were converging on their visitors.

  ‘Get in!’ Tevik shouted. ‘Inside, now, all of you!’ and he went down with a yell, rolling over, tearing at his thigh where an insect was clinging, its scissor jaws embedded in him, tail curling under itself to sting and sting. Nessel and Lain pushed past Holsten, almost knocking him out of the hatch in their hurry to get back in. Scoles was right behind them, shoving Tevik forwards and then frantically fumbling another clip into his gun. The remaining mutineer was trying to drag Bales after them.

  ‘Leave her!’ Scoles shouted at him, but the man didn’t seem to hear. The ants were already crawling over him, and yet he was still hauling at the ragged weight that was Bales, as blindly single-minded as the insects themselves.

  Lain had ripped the ant off Tevik, but the insect’s head was left behind, still holding its grip, and the man’s leg was visibly swelling where the sting had lanced through his shipsuit. He was screaming, and now the man outside was screaming too; Scoles was trying to force the airlock closed, but there were ants already inside with them, rushing about the enclosed confines of the cabin, seeking out fresh victims.

  Holsten crouched by Tevik, trying to work the ant’s head free of his leg and aware that his ribs should be vociferously complaining right then. In the end he had to pry it out with pliers, whilst Tevik clutched at the floor, emergency painkillers unequal to the task.

  Holding up the head, Holsten stared at it. The bloodied mandibles looked weirdly heavy, metallic.

  Scoles now had the airlock shut and he, Nessel and Lain had been stamping on every insect they found, whilst the cabin slowly filled up with an acrid reek from their crushed bodies. Holsten looked over just as they spotted one more ant up on the consoles.

  ‘Don’t smash the electronics,’ Lain warned. ‘We may need . . . was that a flame?’

  There was a brief flash and flare at the ant’s abdomen, which it was directing aggressively towards them.

  Aiming was the word that came to Holsten’s mind.

  Then that end of the cabin was on fire.

  The crew reeled back from the sudden jet of flame that sprayed burning chemicals across the confined space. Nessel fell back over Holsten and Tevik, beating at her arm. Suddenly there was a line of fire between them and the airlock, leaping absurdly high, seeming to burn fiercer and faster than there was any reason for. And the ant was still spewing it out; now the plastics of the consoles were melting, filling the air with throat-catching fumes.

  Lain lurched to the rear, coughing, and slapped at one of the panels, hunting for an emergency release. Holsten realized that she was trying to open the shutters to the hold – or where the hold had been. A moment later the back wall of the cabin irised out into open space and Lain almost fell through.

  Scoles and Nessel went straight out with Tevik between them, and Lain hauled up Holsten under the armpits and helped him follow.

  ‘The ants . . .’ he managed.

  Scoles was already looking around, but somehow the great host of insects they had seen earlier appeared to have disintegrated in just the few moments they were inside. Instead of the purposeful coalescing of an insect horde there were now just little knots of fighting insects all about – turning on one another or just wandering blankly around. They seemed to have lost all interest in the shuttle. Many were heading back into the trees.

  ‘Did we poison them or something?’ Scoles asked, stamping on the closest just to be on the safe side.

  ‘No idea. Maybe we killed them with our germs.’ Lain collapsed next to Holsten. ‘What next, chief? Most of our kit’s on fire.’

  Scoles stared about him with the baffled, angry look of a man who has lost control of the last shreds of his own destiny. ‘We . . .’ he started, but no plan followed the word.

  ‘Look,’ said Nessel, in a hushed voice.

  There was something approaching from the treeline, something that was not an ant: bigger, and with more legs. It was watching them; there was no other way to put it. It had enormous great dark orbs, like the eyesockets of a skull, and it approached in sudden fits of movement, a rapid scuttle, then it was still and regarding them once more.

  It was a spider, a monster spider like a bristling, crooked hand. Holsten stared at its ragged, hairy body, its splayed legs, the hooked fangs curled beneath it
. When his gaze strayed to the two large eyes that made up so much of its front, he felt an unbearable shock of connection, as though it was trespassing on territory he had only ever shared with another human being before.

  Scoles levelled his pistol, hand shaking.

  ‘Like on the drone recording,’ Lain said slowly. ‘Fuck me, it’s as long as my arm.’

  ‘Why is it watching us?’ Nessel demanded.

  Scoles swore, and then the gun boomed in his hand, and Holsten saw the crouching monster spin away in a sudden flurry of convulsing limbs. The mutineer chief’s expression was slowly turning to one of despair – that of a man who, it seemed, would next turn the gun on himself.

  ‘What am I hearing?’ Nessel asked.

  Holsten had somehow just thought it was a rolling echo of the gunshot, but now he realized that there was something more, something like thunder. He looked up.

  He didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. There was a shape in the sky. It grew larger as he watched, slowly descending towards them. A moment later a bright wash of light seared down from it, illuminating the entire crash site in its pale radiance.

  ‘Karst’s shuttle,’ Lain breathed. ‘Never thought I’d be glad to see him.’

  Holsten looked over to Scoles. The man was staring up at the descending vehicle, and who could guess at what bitter, desperate thoughts were passing through his head?

  The approaching shuttle got to about ten feet off the ground, jockeyed a little, and then picked a landing site some way back down the devastated scar that the crash-landing cabin had created. Even as it came down, the side-hatch was opening, and Holsten saw a trio of figures in security detail armour, two of them with rifles already levelled.

  ‘Drop the weapon!’ boomed Karst’s amplified voice. ‘Surrender and drop the weapon! Prepare to be evacuated.’

  Scoles’s hand was shaking, and there were tears at the corners of his eyes, but Nessel put a hand on his arm.

  ‘It’s over,’ she told him. ‘We’re done here. There’s nothing left for us. I’m sorry, Scoles.’

  The mutineer chief gave a final glance around at the looming forest that no longer seemed so wonderfully vibrant and green and Earth-like. The shadows seemed to throng with unseen eyes, with chitinous motion.

  He dropped the pistol disgustedly, a man whose dreams had been shattered.

  ‘Okay, Lain, Mason, you come right over here first. I want to check you’re unharmed.’

  Lain did not hesitate, and Holsten shambled after her, feeling only the faintest deadened sense of pain, yet still having to labour at both breathing and walking, weirdly disconnected from his own body.

  ‘Get in,’ Karst told them.

  Lain paused in the hatch. ‘Thank you,’ she said, without so much of her usual mockery.

  ‘You think I’d leave you here?’ Karst asked her, visor still looking outwards.

  ‘I thought Guyen might.’

  ‘That’s what he wanted them to think.’

  Lain didn’t look convinced, but she helped Holsten up after her. ‘Come on, get your prisoners and let’s get out of here.’

  ‘No prisoners,’ Karst stated.

  ‘What?’ Holsten asked, and then Karst’s men started shooting.

  Both of them had taken Scoles as their first target, and the mutineer leader went down instantly with barely a yell. Then they were turning their guns on the other two – Holsten barrelled into them, shouting, demanding that they stop. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Orders.’ Karst shoved him back. Holsten had a wheeling glimpse of Tevik and Nessel trying to put the crashed cabin between themselves and the rifles. The mutineer pilot fell, struggled to his feet clutching at his injured leg, and then jerked as one of the security men picked him off.

  Nessel made it to the treeline and vanished into the deeper darkness there. Holsten stared after her, feeling a crawling horror.

  Would I rather be shot? Surely I would. But it wasn’t a choice anyone was asking of him.

  ‘We have to get her back, alive,’ he insisted. ‘She’s . . . valuable. She’s a scholar, she’s got—’

  ‘No prisoners. No ringleaders for a future mutiny,’ Karst told him with a shrug. ‘And your woman up there doesn’t care so long as there’s no interference to her precious planet.’

  Holsten blinked. ‘Kern?’

  ‘We’re here to clear up the mess for her,’ Karst confirmed. ‘She’s listening right now. She’s got her finger on the switch of all our systems. So it’s straight in, straight out.’

  ‘You bargained with Kern to come and get us?’ Lain clarified.

  Karst shrugged. ‘She wanted you out of the picture down here. We wanted you back. We cut a deal. But we need to get going now.’

  ‘You can’t . . .’ Holsten stared out from the hatch at the deep forest beyond. Call Nessel back just to have her executed? He subsided, realizing only that, at heart, he was just glad to be safe.

  ‘So, Kern,’ Karst called out, ‘what now? I don’t much fancy going into that to get her, and I reckon that would just involve more of that interference you don’t want.’

  The clipped, hostile tones of Avrana Kern issued from the comms panel. ‘Your inefficiency is remarkable.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Karst grunted. ‘We’re coming back to orbit, right? Is that okay?’

  ‘It would seem the least undesirable option at this point,’ Kern agreed, still sounding disgusted. ‘Leave now, and I will destroy the crashed vessel.’

  ‘The . . . ? She can do that?’ Lain hissed. ‘You mean she could have . . .’

  ‘It’s kind of a one-shot. She’s got our drone up there under her control,’ Karst explained. She’s going to stick it into the crash there and then do some kind of controlled detonation of its reactor – burn up the wreck without flattening the entire area. Doesn’t want her precious monkeys playing with grown-up toys or something.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we didn’t see any fucking monkeys,’ Lain muttered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  3.10 GIANTS IN THE EARTH

  Portia examines the creature as it sleeps.

  She was not in time to see any of the momentous, inexplicable events that left a great, burning scar across the face of her world – the fires that are still burning despite the ants’ best efforts to contain them. From others of her kind she has heard a garbled version of events, crippled by the tellers’ inability to understand what it is they have witnessed.

  It will all be remembered though, through the generations to come. This Understanding, this contact with the unknowable, will be one of the most analysed and reinterpreted events of all her species’ histories.

  Something fell from the sky. It was not the Messenger, which clearly retains its regular circuit of the heavens, but in the mind of Portia and her kin it seems linked to that orbiting mote. It is a promise that the skies are host to more than one mobile star, and that even stars may fall. Some hypothesize that it was a herald or forerunner, a message from the Messenger, and that if its meaning can only be interpreted, then the Messenger will have new lessons to teach. Over the generations, this view – that a test has been set beyond the simple, pure manipulation of numbers – will gain in popularity, whilst simultaneously being viewed as a kind of heresy.

  The events themselves seem inarguable, however. Something fell, and now it is a blackened shell of metals and other unknown materials that defy analysis. Something else came to earth, and then returned to the sky. Most crucially, there were living things. There were giants that came from the sky.

  They were fighting off scouts from the ant colony when Portia’s people first saw them. Then, when the scouts had been killed or converted, the giants killed one of Portia’s own people – one of Bianca’s assistants. After they departed, they left some bodies of their own kind, some killed by the ants, others just dead from mysterious wounds. Swift work by Bianca’s team removed these remains from the scene, with fortunate timing given the explosion that occurred soon after, ending any
useful enquiry, and killing a further handful of Bianca’s males.

  At the time, nobody realized that one of the star-creatures had remained alive and entered the forest.

  Now Portia examines the thing, as it appears to sleep. The shape of a human being sparks no ancestral recollection in her. Even had her distant antecedents any memories to pass on, their tiny keyhole’s span of vision would have been unable to appreciate the scale of anything so large. Portia herself is having difficulties: the sheer size and bulk of this alien monster give her pause for thought.

  The creature has already killed two of her kind, when it encountered them. They had tried to approach, and the thing had attacked them on sight. Biting it had little or no effect – being designed for use against spiders, Portia’s venom has limited effect against vertebrates.

  If it was just some monstrous, oversized beast, then to trap and kill it would be relatively simple, Portia decides. If the worst came to the worst, they could simply set the ants on it, as they are obviously more than equal to the task. The mystical significance of this creature is a different consideration, however. It has come from the sky: from the Messenger, ergo. It is not a threat to be confronted, but a mystery to be unravelled.

  Portia feels the thrumming of destiny beneath her feet. She has a sense that everything that is past and everything that is to come are balanced at this point in time, the fulcrum resting within herself. This moment is one of divinely mandated significance. Here, in its monstrous living form, is some part of the Messenger’s message.

  They will trap it. They will capture it and bring it back to Great Nest, using all the artifice and guile at their command. They will find some way to unravel its secret.

  Portia glances upwards – the canopy of the forest keeps the stars from her view, but she is keenly aware of them: both the fixed constellations that wheel slowly across the arch of the year and the Messenger’s swift spark in the darkness. She thinks of them as her people’s birthright, if her people can only understand what they are being told.