‘Alpash, stay at your post!’ Lain ordered him, hand trembling on her stick, but her authority – the leverage of her age and pedigree – was right now just smoke. Alpash had the hatch open and was gone.
‘There they are,’ came Karst’s triumphant shout over the comms, and then: ‘Where are the rest of them?’
Lain’s mouth opened, her eyes dragged irresistibly towards the screens. There was a handful of spiders about the shuttle-bay hatch, caught in the glare of the sun, long, angular shadows cast down the length of the hull. Less, though, than there had been, and perhaps that just meant that the others had gone for easier access points. The chaos over the comms showed that the creatures were establishing beachheads all over the ship.
‘Karst . . .’ from Lain, surely too quietly for him to respond.
Holsten saw one of the spiders abruptly shatter, torn open by a shot from Karst or one of his team. Then someone shouted, ‘Behind us,’ and the camera views were swinging around, giving wheeling views of the hull and the stars.
‘I’m caught!’ came from someone, and others of the security team were no longer moving. Holsten saw one man, pinned in the camera view of a comrade, fighting something unseen, slapping and pulling at his suit, the drifting net of threads that had ensnared him invisible yet too strong to break.
The spiders were emerging then, racing along the curve of the hull with a speed that laughed at Karst’s plodding progress. Others were steering down from above, where they had been drifting at the end of more thread, climbing up against the outwards force of the rotating section; climbing to where they could leap on Karst and his men.
Karst’s upraised gun/glove, at the corner of his camera, flashed and flared, trying to track the new targets, killing at least one. They saw one of Karst’s people being hit by friendly fire, boots torn off the hull by the impact, falling away from the ship to end up jerking on the end of an unseen line, as an eight-legged monster came inching up towards his helpless, flailing form. Men and women were shouting, shooting, screaming, trying to run away at their leaden, crippled pace.
Karst stumbled back two heavy paces, still shooting, seeing his helmet display record the remaining rounds in his helical magazine. More by luck than judgement, he picked one of the creatures off as it alighted on the woman next to him, spraying freezing pieces of carapace and viscera that rattled as they bounced off him. She was caught in the webbing the little bastards had seeded the hull with, just great loose clouds of the fine stuff that had half his people now completely ensnared.
His ears were full of people shouting: his team, others from inside the ship, even Lain. He tried to remember how to shut down the channels: it was all too loud; he couldn’t think. The thunder of his own hoarse breathing roared over it, like a hyperventilating giant bellowing at each ear.
He saw another of his people fly loose from the hull, cancelling the grip of his boots without anything else to secure him. He just flew away, ascending into the infinite. If his suit had thrusters, they weren’t working now. The luckless man just kept going, receding into the infinite, as though he just could not abide to share the ship with the busy monsters intent on getting inside it.
Another spider landed on the trapped woman beside Karst, just sailing in at the end of a colossal leap, its legs outstretched. He could hear her screaming, and he stumbled forwards, trying to aim at the thing as the woman flailed and bludgeoned at it with her gloved hands.
It was clinging to her, and Karst saw it carefully line up its mouthparts, or some mechanism attached to them, and then hunch forwards, lancing her between the plates of her suit with sudden, irresistible force.
The suit would seal around a puncture, of course, but that would not help against whatever she had been injected with. Karst tried to call up medical information from her suit, but he could not remember how. She had gone still, just swaying limply against the anchor point of her magnetic boots. Whatever it was, it was quick-acting.
He finally managed to turn off all the voices in his head, leaving only his own. There was a moment of blessed calm in which it seemed possible, somehow, that he could regain control of the situation. There would be some magic word, some infinitely efficacious command that a truly gifted leader could give, one that would restore the rightful arrow of evolution and allow humanity to triumph over these aberrations.
Something landed on his back.
7.8 THE WAR INSIDE
Like an ant colony, is Portia’s thought. It is not true, though, just something she tells herself to counter the vastly alien surroundings that weigh upon her.
She comes from a city that is a forest, filled with complex many-sided spaces, and yet the architects of her people have cut even that three-dimensional geography down to their own size, compartmentalizing the vast until it is manageable, controllable. Here, the giants have done the same, making chambers that for them are perhaps a little cramped and constricting, but to Portia the exaggerated scale of it all is frightening, a constant reminder of the sheer size and physical power of the godlike beings that created this place, and whose descendants dwell here still.
Worse is the relentless geometry of it. Portia is used to a city of a thousand angles, a chain of walls and floors and ceilings strung at every possible slant, a world of taut silk that can be taken down and put back up, divided and subdivided and endlessly tailored to suit. The giants must live their lives amongst these rigid, unvarying right angles, entombed between these massive, solid walls. Nothing makes any attempt to mimic nature. Instead, everything is held in the iron hand of that dominating alien aesthetic.
Her peer group is through the savaged shuttle-bay doors, the breach sealed up behind them to minimize pressure loss. She has just had a brief window of radio contact with other groups, a hurried catch-up before the giants change their own frequency and obliterate all the others with their invisible storm. There are six separate peer groups within the great ship now, several of them in a section that had no air of its own. Attempts to coordinate are hopeless. Every troop is on its own.
They encounter the first defenders shortly afterwards: perhaps twenty giants arriving with violent intent before the spiders can set up their large-scale weapons. The vibrations of the enemy’s approach serves as forewarning of an almost absurd degree, and Portia’s band – a dozen of them now – are able to set an ambush. A hastily woven spring trap catches the front-running giants in a mess of poorly constructed webbing – not enough to hold them for long, but enough to drag them to a stop where their fellows will crash into them. They have weapons – not just the lethally swift projectiles of their compatriots outside, but also a kind of focused vibration that runs like mad screaming through every fibre of Portia’s body, shocking all the spiders into motionlessness, and killing one outright.
Then the spiders begin shooting back. The weapons slung beneath their bodies are far slower than bullets, closer to the ancient slingshots Portia’s ancestors used. Their ammunition is three-pronged glass darts, formed to spin in flight. Here, in gravity, their range is relatively short, but the interior of the Gilgamesh does not allow for much long-distance marksmanship anyway. Portia and her peers are, at the very least, extremely good shots, excellent judges of distance and relative motion. Some of the giants wear armour like those outside; most do not.
When the darts draw blood, they snap, tips shearing off and their contents being forced into the curiously elaborate circulatory systems the giants boast, to be hurried about their bodies by their own racing metabolisms. Only a tiny amount is needed for full effect, and the carefully measured concoction works very swiftly, going straight for the brain. Portia watches the giants drop, spasming and going rigid, one by one. The few armoured enemy are dealt with by the more risky approach of direct injection. Portia loses four of her squad and knows that, if the ambush had failed, they might all have died.
Still, their numbers within the ship are growing steadily. Whilst she would rather survive, she has always accepted the reasonable chance
that this mission would mean her death.
Her field-chemist is still alive and ready for orders. Portia does not stint. The Messenger said there will be vents to allow circulation of air about the vessel. The precise logistics of keeping the living quarters of an ark ship supplied with breathable air are somewhat beyond Portia’s understanding, but Avrana Kern’s information has been understood to the degree required.
Their hairy bodies sensitive to movement even through their vacuum coating, the spiders quickly track down the faint motion of air from the vents. Out there, Portia knows, there will be armies of giants mustering, no doubt expecting the spiders to come against them. But that is not the plan.
The field-chemist sets up her weapon swiftly, preparing the elegantly crafted mixture to discharge into the air ducts, where it will find its way around the ship.
Move on, Portia orders when she is done. They have plenty more such chemical weapons to put in place. There are a large number of giants on the ship, after all.
When they understood at last what Avrana Kern had been trying to communicate with them; when it became obvious that the path their species travelled would bring them inevitably into collision with a civilization of giant creator-gods, the spiders turned to the past for inspiration, seeking out learning buried since the early days of their history. But, for them, history could be remembered like yesterday. They had never suffered the problem with human records: that so much is lost forever as the grinding wheel of the years groans on. Their distant ancestors, in conjunction with the nanovirus, evolved the ability to pass on learning and experience genetically, direct to their offspring, a vital stepping stone in a species with next to no parental care. So it is that knowledge of far distant times is preserved in great detail, initially passed from parents to their brood, and later distilled and available for any spider to incorporate into mind and genes.
Globally, the spiders have assembled a vast library of experience to draw upon, a facility that has contributed to their swift rise from obscurity to orbit.
Hidden in this arachnid Alexandria are remarkable secrets. For example: generations ago, during the great war with the ants, there were giants that walked briefly upon the green world, crew from the self-same ark ship that Portia has now invaded.
One of those giants was captured and held for many long years. The Understandings of the time did not include the belief that it was sentient, and scientists now twitch and skitter in frustration at what might have been learned had their forebears only tried a little harder to communicate.
However, that is not to say that nothing was learned at all from the captive giant. During its lifetime, and especially after its eventual death, the scholars of the time did their best to examine the creature’s biochemistry and metabolism, comparing it to the small mammals they shared their world with. In their library of first-hand knowledge, the spiders uncovered a great deal of how human biochemistry works.
Armed with that knowledge, and a supply of mice and similar animals as test subjects – not ideal but the best they had – the spiders developed their great last-ditch weapon against the invaders. There was much argument between the chosen representatives of cities and great peer groups, and between them all and Avrana Kern as well. Other solutions and possibilities were pared away until the spiders’ nature and the extremity of the situation left only this one. Even now, Portia and the other assault squads are the first to find out that their solution works, at least for now.
The Gilgamesh’s sensors barely register the concoction as it passes into the ship’s circulation, creeping about the rotating crew section one chamber at a time. There are no overt toxins, no immediately harmful chemicals. Some readouts across the ship begin to record a slight change in the composition of the air, but by then the insidious weapon is already wreaking havoc.
The giant warriors Portia has just defeated have been injected with a concentrated form of the drug. Portia now examines them curiously. She sees their strange, weirdly mobile eyes twitch and jerk, dragged up and about and around by the sight of invisible terrors, as the substance attacks their brains. Everything is going according to plan.
She wants to stay and bind them, but they do not have the time, and she does not know if mere silk could restrain such gigantic monsters. She must hope that the initial incapacity – seen in the mammal test subjects as well – has the intended permanent consequences. It would be inconvenient if the giants somehow recovered.
Portia’s people move on, swift and determined. The substance is harmless to their own physiology, passing over their book-lungs without effect.
Shortly after, they come to a room filled with giants. These are not armed, and they are in several sizes which Portia surmises to be adult and juveniles of various moultings. They are already succumbing to the invisible gas, staggering drunkenly about, collapsing on suddenly fluid legs, or just lying there, staring at sights that exist only in their own minds. There is a strong organic scent in the air, though Portia does realize that many of her victims have soiled themselves.
They check that there is nobody left to fight them, then they move on. There are plenty more giants to conquer.
7.9 LAST STAND
They could hear Karst shouting and screaming for an appallingly long time, his microphone fixed on an open channel. His suit camera gave them blurred glimpses of hull, stars, other struggling figures. Lain was shouting at him in a cracked voice, urging him to get inside the ship, but Karst was past hearing her, instead fighting furiously with something they could not see. From the fumbling of his gloves, glimpsed briefly in the periphery of the image, it looked as though he was trying to pry his own helmet off.
Then abruptly he cut off, and for a moment they thought he had simply ceased transmitting, but his channel remained open, and now they heard a gurgling sound, a wet choking. The wild movement of the camera had ceased, and the star-field drifted past Karst’s view almost peacefully.
‘Oh, no, no, no . . .’ Lain got out, before a segmented leg arched up from beyond the camera’s view to plant itself on Karst’s faceplate. They only saw a piece of the thing as it crouched on his shoulder, bunching itself for better purchase. A hairy arachnid with a shimmering exoskeleton, and a suggestion of curved fangs within some kind of mask: man’s oldest fear waiting for him here at the outer reach of human expansion, already equipped for space.
There were reports coming in from all across the ship, by then. Teams of engineers were suiting up – lightweight work suits without any of the armour or systems that had done Karst so little good – and heading into the hostile, contested territory of the cargo holds. Others were trying to repel boarders wherever the scuttling creatures had entered. The problem was that, with the hull sensors torn up in so many places, the Gilgamesh could only make a poor guess at precisely where they had broken in.
For bitter minutes Lain tried to coordinate the various groups, some of them out there on Command orders, others just vigilantes from the Tribe, or woken cargo who had been awaiting a replacement suspension chamber.
Then something changed around them. Holsten and Lain exchanged glances, both knowing instantly that something was wrong, but neither able to quite say what. Something ubiquitous, never consciously noted and always taken for granted, had gone away.
And at the last Lain said, ‘Life-support.’
Holsten felt his chest freeze at the very thought. ‘What?’
‘I think . . .’ She looked at her screens. ‘Air circulation has ceased. The vents have shut off.’
‘Which means—?’
‘Which means don’t do any more breathing than you have to, because we’re suddenly short on oxygen. What the fuck is . . . ?’
‘Lain?’
The old engineer screwed her face up. ‘Vitas? What’s going on?’
‘I’ve shut the air off, Lain.’ There was a curious tone to the scientist’s voice, somewhere between determined and frightened.
Lain’s eyes were fixed on Holsten, trying to take s
trength from him. ‘Would you care to explain why?’
‘The spiders have released some sort of chemical or biological weapon. I’m segmenting the ship, cutting off areas that haven’t been infected yet.’
‘Cutting off areas that haven’t been infected?’
‘I’m afraid it’s quite widespread,’ Vitas’s voice confirmed almost briskly, like a doctor trying to cover bad news with a smile. ‘I think I can work around those areas and restore a limited air circulation that’s uncontaminated, but for now . . .’
‘How do you know all this?’ Lain demanded.
‘My assistants in the lab here have all collapsed. They’re suffering some sort of fit. They’re completely oblivious.’ A tiny, swiftly quashed tremor lay behind the words. ‘I myself am in a sealed test chamber. I was working on a biological weapon of my own to win the war, annihilate the species without having to fire a shot. How could we know they’d beat us to it?’
‘I don’t suppose that’s near completion?’ Lain asked, without much hope.
‘I’m close, I think. The Gilgamesh’s records on old Earth zoology are rather incomplete. Lain, we’re going to have to—’
‘Route uncontaminated air,’ the engineer finished. She was hunched over a console, trembling hands stabbing at it in desperate, jagged flurries. She looked older, as though the last hour had loaded another decade on to her shoulders. ‘I’m on it. Holsten, you need to warn our people, get them to put on masks, or fall back to . . . to . . . to wherever I’ll tell you in . . .’
Holsten was already doing his best, fighting the Gilgamesh’s intermittently unreliable interface, calling up each group he could locate on the system. Some did not answer. The spiders’ weapon was spreading invisibly from compartment to compartment even as Vitas and Lain fought to seal it off.
He raised Alpash with a surge of relief. ‘They’re using gas or something—’
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