by Alex Lamb
The pod started picking up speed – lots of it.
‘By now you’ve probably realised I’m not going to let you return to Earth,’ said Sam.
‘Fuck you!’ said Mark. He looked around for a manual brake. There wasn’t one.
‘It’s a shame you didn’t take me up on my offer, you self-indulgent little prick,’ said Sam. ‘I could have helped you. But then again, what should I have expected from a Monet-puppet? You’re just like your fake Dad. Too in love with your own misery to do anything useful. You’re a fucking waste of decent genes.’
Mark’s eyes blurred with fury. ‘I’m going to kill you!’
‘Mark, he’s baiting you. Shut down your interface,’ said Zoe. ‘Put it in secure mode right now.’
‘You’re not going to kill me,’ said Sam with a laugh. ‘You’re going to sit here on this dirtball while history happens without you. I’m sorry, but that godawful hovel-world you’re so in love with is going to die. And then all those sad-sack peasants in their shitty illegal domes will starve along with them. Boo-hoo.’
‘Never!’
‘I said shut it down!’ Zoe shouted. ‘Now!’
Mark gazed at her without understanding. Her eyes held enough urgency that he decided to simply obey.
‘Okay,’ he said. He shuddered as the electronic part of his mind fell silent. Suddenly the pod felt very small. ‘Done.’
Zoe abruptly crunched forwards as if in pain. A gasp of air escaped her lips.
A wail of crazy distortion squawked from the pod’s audio system. The lights went out and the emergency brakes kicked in, slamming Mark against the wall as the pod jerked to a halt.
‘What in hell’s name was that?’ said Venetia, rubbing a bruised elbow.
‘Personal EMP blast,’ said Zoe. ‘Vartian Institute implant in case of alien soft incursion. Felt like the right time to use it.’
Mark let out a single guffaw of startled laughter. ‘Holy shit! How much secret tech have you got?’
‘Need-to-know basis only,’ said Zoe. ‘Right now we have to get out of this pod.’
Mark yanked open the emergency hatch and a blast of cold air from the tunnel beyond swept in. A plastic ladder slid out from the base of the pod, straight into the icy water below.
‘You’re kidding me,’ he said, his teeth already chattering. ‘We have to swim through that? We’ll freeze to death.’
At least the transit tube had been properly pumped. The air was breathable, if stale. It carried a cold metallic tang.
‘There should be a raft-pack here somewhere,’ said Venetia. She pulled at the floor panelling and a section came away revealing a yellow capsule thirty centimetres long stored underneath. ‘There.’
Mark hauled the raft-pack out, yanked on the tab and dropped it into the water below. The raft unfolded on contact, giving them something flat and circular to float on.
Mark rebooted his interface as he climbed hurriedly down and his sensorium filled up with warning icons. Zoe had played merry hell with his systems, even in secure mode. It would take hours for him to get everything back up and running properly. He helped Venetia and Zoe into the raft and then pushed off towards the dry ledge at the edge of the water three metres away.
Manoeuvring to the far bank and getting everyone out of the raft was a clumsier process than it should have been. By the time Mark joined them up on the dry stone, one leg of his ship-suit was soaked with freezing water. His boot sloshed.
‘Now what?’ he said miserably. ‘Ash is dead, which means no support from the Gulliver. Sam is clearly out of his mind if he’s killing his own pilot. He must be relying on the colonists to get him out.’
‘Do they even have a starship?’ said Zoe. ‘I didn’t see one on the way in, just a bunch of sub-light shuttles and an evac-ark.’
‘I didn’t see anything, either,’ said Mark. ‘But maybe the bastard has something cloaked out there like that shit they pulled with the Chiyome.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Venetia. ‘Sam is clutching at straws. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
‘So we’re screwed,’ said Mark, slapping the cold stone wall. ‘They’ll have another pod down here in minutes. We’ve got to do something.’
‘There are miles of these tunnels,’ said Venetia. ‘Hiding will be a piece of cake. We passed at least two junction sites already on the way out here. It’s what we do after that which is the problem.’
Mark blinked as an option occurred to him. ‘We head for the Flags,’ he said. ‘We already know they come raiding in these tunnels. Venetia, do you think you can get us down from here to somewhere we might find them?’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Zoe. ‘You want to rescue us by handing us over to a bunch of religious nutcases? We should be heading for the spaceport. It’s the only way out.’
‘They’re not nutcases,’ said Mark. ‘They’re just people who can’t afford starship tickets. You heard Sam. Do you imagine he’s going to let them in on what’s happening? They have a right to know they’re under a death sentence, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Sure,’ said Zoe. ‘Via audio tight-beam once we’re in orbit. Don’t be so stupid as to imagine they’ll help us. Kidnapping and ransom is a business for them. They’re not going to believe what we have to tell them and we don’t have time to explain.’
‘Why do you assume they won’t help?’ said Mark. ‘Because they’re poor? Because they’re from Earth? Not everyone from Earth is a halfwit or a religious criminal. I’ve met some of these people, Zoe, and the main difference between you and them is just opportunity.’
Zoe threw up her hands. ‘Christ, Mark! Don’t make this about your attitude problem. We’re not discussing your roots here. This is about us getting off this planet alive in time to stop it from burning.’
‘Will the two of you shut up?’ said Venetia. ‘We have no choice. These tunnels don’t go as far as the spaceport, so unless we find some way to hold our breath over sixty kilometres of open ground, that’s not an option.’
‘We hijack another pod,’ said Zoe. ‘Mark can use his interface to hack it open.’
Mark shook his head. ‘It’ll be hours before I get over that EMP blast, and by then they’ll be all over us.’
‘I don’t like it either, but we head down to the coast,’ said Venetia. ‘Sam will have the spaceport sealed up by now. Security will be everywhere. And we won’t find any help in New Luxor, I can tell you that much. This place is crawling with FPP supporters. Sam will have them eating out of his hand. The Flags, on the other hand, will have weapons and vehicles. Plus any attempt from the colonists to enter their turf will be soundly rebuffed. At least from there we might be able to set up a satellite relay to the Gulliver’s shuttle and get it to land out in the desert where we can reach it.’
Zoe looked fit to burst. She covered her face with her hands and sagged against the wall.
‘Think about it this way,’ said Venetia. ‘Be glad I can read Fecund braille, which is the only means of navigating in here. And you won’t find someone with a better knowledge of hydro-tunnel systems, either. I’ve even met a few of the Flag groups. At least with them we stand a chance.’ She pointed back the way they’d come. ‘Quickly now, follow me. Another pod could arrive at any minute.’
14.2: ASH
Ash found himself spinning slowly in the air on the Gulliver’s bridge, hunched in a foetal ball. The room smelled powerfully of vomit. His arm brushed a blob of the stuff floating near him and he realised it was his.
Sam’s voice sounded over the audio. ‘Are you there, fucker?’
Ash tried to pull himself together but found he couldn’t think straight. His mind felt fuzzy. His limbs didn’t work properly.
‘You shouldn’t have tried to bail on me,’ said Sam. ‘Have you any idea how hard it’s been to get this far?’
Ash started to remember w
ho and where he was. He’d been getting Mark and the others out of New Luxor. Sam had called. Something had happened.
‘It’s taken years to reach this point,’ said Sam, ‘and more shitty compromises than I can count. I’ve had years of schmoozing and squirrelling away Fleet money. Years of lying and scheming and letting that bitch Voss believe everything we did was her idea. Did you imagine I’d let you take this away from me now? You thought I wasn’t seeing how fast the Nems were changing. Of course I fucking saw it, you idiot. And I was glad. When they get to Earth, they’re going to smash it. I’ve made sure of that. That broadcast I sent from Tiwanaku after Yunus died? I coded data on Earth’s defences into the signal.’
As Ash’s mind started to reassemble, his panic built alongside his ability to think. What had they done?
‘You might ask why,’ said Sam. ‘Because I hate Earth. Earthers ruin everything. Not content with butchering millions in the war – including both my parents, by the way – now they’re ruining all the colonies. They’re filthing up the frontier with their poverty and their shit.’
Ash knew he needed to act. Sam had done something to his interface. Mark and the others were in grave danger. He reached for his sensorium but found only a kind of flickering blankness in his mind where it should have been. He started grasping with weak and trembling hands for the nearest manual console.
‘Do you know what I think?’ said Sam. ‘I think all the decent people got off Earth a long time ago. And if not all of them, enough of them. We’ve gone way past the point of diminishing returns for keeping that nest of fucking savages around. It’s a genetic cesspool that should have been scrubbed out years ago.’
‘You’re crazy,’ said Ash.
‘No, not crazy. Racist, perhaps, but sadly not crazy.’
Ash frowned in confusion. Sam might as well have told Ash he believed in a flat Earth. There wasn’t a single human being in the human worlds who couldn’t trace their roots back to half a dozen different ethnicities. The migrations before the Martian Renaissance had seen to that. Bigotry was still alive and well, of course. It just had new names.
‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ said Sam. ‘Before the war, there were no “genetic racists”. It was something the Truists made up. But out of their poison, it became real. I say that because I hate the non-modded. I hate how mediocre they are. How ordinary. How pointless. Modded people have a point. They’re for something. Earthers just take up room, sucking down air that decent people should be breathing.’
Sam chuckled. ‘You wonder why I’m bothering to tell you all this, I bet. Two reasons. First, because it’s lonely doing something like this. I have to wade through all the shit and darkness to manifest a vision of peace and harmony for everyone else, and they’ll never even know what I did for them. And second, because you’re not going to remember any of it. And that amuses me. That funny feeling you’re having right now is the start of a memory purge.’
Ash reached around to the back of his head in panic. His interface had grown uncommonly warm and a sickening buzz started inside his skull. Flashes of pain lit up his mind like sunbursts.
‘I had you fitted out when you joined the League,’ said Sam. ‘Just in case. It’s a new twist on the old shock-key system they used to put in all roboteers. Ugly technology, really, but then I never thought I’d have to use it. You’re a fucking disappointment to me, Corrigan. I told you there was shit on that ship you didn’t want to know about. Well, now you know what it is. For a little while, at least. But don’t worry – when your mind is nice and blank, I’ll help you get your ideas straight. You’ll thank me. I guarantee it.’
Ash scrabbled at the manual terminal, looking for some way to shut down his interface. At the same time, black fingers of nothingness crept into the corners of his vision, as if leaking through the walls. A roar of static filled his ears. And then, softly at first, Ash’s mind came apart, rotting inside him like a piece of overripe fruit.
14.3: WILL
After his meeting with Pari, Will let a pair of Spatials armed with bio-pellet smart-guns take him to an area which had been secured for him in advance. Of course the League used Spatials. Will wouldn’t have thought twice about subverting or destroying robotic guards. Both men kept well away from him as they led him through the station, as if that would make a difference if Will decided to attack. Will couldn’t decide if it was funny or naively charming. In any case, he didn’t feel much like laughing. Parisa’s speech had left him feeling too hollow for that.
While he still didn’t agree with the League’s agenda, at least he understood it now. He’d never given up hope for peace, but apparently those around him had. Perhaps because the course Will had set them on had been his, not theirs. He’d assumed his idealism would infect others because of the alien authority that backed it. He should have known better. His unwavering determination to do good had made him blind rather than wise.
Not for the first time, the words of the Prophet Sanchez came to mind. He’d told them as the Ariel Two hovered over Bogota with weapons primed that the Earth wouldn’t change – that people would keep hating. He’d been right. Despite his bitterness and his fury, that old bastard had understood Earth more deeply than anyone who’d come along since.
The guards deposited Will at a well-appointed suite equipped with a full-sized bed, an entertainment centre and numerous other luxuries he couldn’t have cared less about. They sealed the door behind him. Will didn’t mind. Until he understood more about Snakepit’s artificial life, he didn’t intend to go anywhere.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at nothing. At that moment what he wanted most was access to the League’s bio-lab research database, but he strongly suspected they wouldn’t be granting it any time soon. He reached out via his sensorium to the local network and found a message from Pari waiting.
‘Hi, Will,’ she said. ‘For the obvious reasons, we’re limiting your network access to entertainment and some material on the League project that we’ve prepared for you. I recommend our geographic survey of Snakepit, or Ann’s models of the war. Should you try to stray any further, you’ll find that security here has been designed with you in mind. Our protocols use a stack of SAP models of your identity built around the years of data we’ve collected. They’re programmed to anticipate your likely hacks and employ your own defences against you. I don’t recommend testing them. We have fifteen years of curated material on your soft-incursion techniques. I’m hoping that’s enough encouragement for you to wait and think about all of this a little more before you decide to do something.’
Will shook his head. He’d shared his knowledge freely with the Fleet and now they were using it against him. Idiots. He tried a few idle hacks anyway and found them efficiently, even zealously, repulsed, just as Pari said they would be.
Fine, so they’d proofed their systems against attacks by Will Monet. In that case, he’d just think like someone else instead. He’d seen a very convincing example of hacking in action aboard the Chiyome – one he’d wanted to study further when he had time. Right now, all he had was time. He walked as far as the data port on the wall. He assumed it had been coated with the League’s co-opted bioweapon and a quick check with a cautiously extended filament revealed that it had. Perfect. They’d even left him samples to work with.
Will paused to concentrate while he manufactured a set of biologically inert tools inside his body, then coughed them up in a capsule, like an old-fashioned escapologist regurgitating a swallowed key. Using the needle from the kit he’d built, he took a pinhead-sized sample of the Snakepit organism and dropped it onto a slide. He laid the slide on the suite’s bathroom floor and cupped a hand over it, manipulating the tissue of his palm into a small, sealed lab of his own. With a pair of hair-sized tweezers, Will started physically teasing the sample apart. At the end of the day, nothing beat a biological system like overwhelming physical force.
Handling such a da
ngerous organism necessarily made Will’s techniques crude. He knew there’d only be a certain amount he could learn looking at the cells this way, but he had to start somewhere. The ribosome analogues he found were utterly cryptic, as were the coding-compounds in the nuclei, so he didn’t bother with those. He concentrated on the basic cellular machinery and the production-line Golgi body mechanism he’d spotted, which gave him enough data to start reverse-engineering the cell’s elegant mechanics.
The first thing he noticed was that parts of the life form in front of him were clearly missing. Signalling molecules were binding to specialised vesicles with nothing in them and just sitting there like trucks backing up to a disused warehouse. Someone in the League had hacked this organism already, either to prevent Will from learning too much, or to reduce the risk of contagion. No wonder they’d been so absurdly confident sitting in the same room as the stuff.
So far as Will could tell, the cells used a kind of biochemical search to synthesise new attacks. Multi-walled protein engines locked in a supracritical state churned out a constant supply of molecular novelty. Those products that managed to make it out of their gated enclosures were passed to a duplication area before being parcelled up and relayed to the edges of the cells in the sub-cellular equivalent of tagged bags, ready for deployment.
As Will figured out the mechanics of the cells’ attack mechanism, he copied it to a software model and used that as the framework for a new soft-incursion program. The process required a little creative license, but he let himself be guided by the example before him rather than giving in to the temptation to build code the way he normally would. Then, once assembled, he allowed the new program to access his complete range of intrusion tools, all broken down into swappable modules as if they were amino acids to be deployed in combination.
His experiment complete, Will destroyed his tiny lab, lay back on the couch and put his new tool to work against the station’s security. He interlaced the new program’s requests with some simple hacks of his own to make the intrusions look like persistent nuisance attempts to probe their limits. The new code fumbled at first, no doubt prompting low-level alerts in Pari’s data display, so Will bred a small population of his bio-programs and had them compete. Maybe a little selection pressure would help.
