Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  DEDICATION

  For Graham, who taught me how to see

  EXODUS

  ALEX LAMB

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1: Rising

  2: Alignment

  3: Motion

  4: Pursuit

  5: Reflection

  6: Discovery

  7: Investigation

  8: Complication

  9: Confliction

  10: Confrontation

  11: Faltering

  12: Inflection

  13: Inversion

  14: Adjustment

  15: Arrival

  16: Entrapment

  17: Compression

  18: Entanglement

  19: Fusion

  20: Fission

  21: Breakthrough

  22: Ultimatum

  23: Enlightenment

  24: Rebirth

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Alex Lamb from Gollancz:

  Copyright

  1: RISING

  1.1: WILL

  Will Kuno-Monet woke with a start to find himself half-buried in white soil. He struggled to his feet, blinking while his heart pounded. A meadow of black poppies stretched in either direction, lining the bottom of an enormous tunnel. Bluish light came from dangling chains of luminescent kelp suspended from the pale, arched ceiling fifty metres overhead. The strands wafted gently like a glowing field of wheat. A moist breeze brought scents of ozone and fresh coffee. Somewhere nearby, a stream trickled.

  His body felt wire-taut, flushed with fear for no reason he could remember. Will glanced quickly about, his breath coming in heaves. In the tube’s undulating distance, a dense thicket of short, black trees jutted out of the snow-white earth. In the other direction, a sideways kink in the tube blocked further sight. He looked down and found himself wearing a one piece ship-suit, but grown from some soft, grey, organic material. It had no obvious fastenings. He didn’t remember putting it on.

  What the hell was this place? And why did he feel so afraid? His memory was a terrifying blank. But as he stood there, anxiously scanning the tunnel, answers began to assemble themselves in his mind like shadows revealed by parting mist.

  Will was on Snakepit – a world covered with millions of kilometres of overlapping habitat tubes just like this one. It was the greatest extraterrestrial discovery the human race had ever made: an engineered biosphere capable of hosting billions of living beings. And it had been left empty and unused for the last five million years.

  He also remembered that he’d been lured here aboard his ship, the Ariel Two. Yes, he owned a starship. He was investigating some sort of threat, utterly unsuspecting of what lay ahead. Because Snakepit had been kept secret. And once he arrived, he’d been betrayed.

  He frowned as he tried to remember who’d cheated him and how. The answer wouldn’t come. Was it his friends or allies in government? He knew he worked in politics. There had been all those dull, difficult meetings with bright-robed men and women with frowning faces. He was part of something called IPSO – the Interstellar Pact Security Organisation. But he felt sure the betrayal ran deeper than that. He’d trusted someone with his life and his future, and it had killed him.

  Will frowned in confusion at that last memory. If he’d died, how come he was still here? Yet the image burned vividly in his mind. He’d watched helpless from a distance while his body melted into slime. Except that didn’t make any sense, either. How had he watched his own death from a distance?

  Then Will recalled another vital fact about himself. He was a roboteer – one of a tiny minority of people engineered before birth to interface with thinking machines. How could he possibly have forgotten that? It had defined his entire life. Any camera linked to a Self-Aware Program could serve as his eyes. Watching himself from outside his own body was as simple as thought, so long as a suitable network was available.

  Something about that explanation didn’t strike him as adequate, either, but it occurred to him to check for a local pervasivenet. With access to the digital realm, it would be a lot easier to figure out what had happened.

  He reached inwards, summoning the visual for his home node – the virtual environment that served as the access point for his internal systems. However, instead of the familiar image of his childhood home, a dark sensation swam up through him, vivid and overpowering. An ancient place that felt at once like a deserted museum and a crowded train station loomed in his mind’s eye, where crowds of ghostly figures flickered and darted. From grey stone walls hung immense rippling banners of orange and black, bearing alien runes too dense and twisted for human eyes to read. He knew this place. He dreaded it.

  Will fought to clear his head of the smothering vision and found himself kneeling, bent over on the pale clay and wheezing for air. He’d practically passed out. As his strength returned, a cold sense of certainty settled on him. He hadn’t just been cheated, he’d been changed.

  How or why he’d been rescued from death he had no idea, but one thing he knew for certain: he couldn’t stay in this tunnel. He needed to get off Snakepit while he still could. For reasons that escaped him, he knew this place was dangerous.

  Will struck out hurriedly in the direction of the black trees, the peculiar flowers crumpling beneath his feet as he strode through them. They bled ink when crushed, he noticed – a brilliant blue that soaked into the soil almost immediately. He remembered this world being strange, with a bewildering variety of life forms inhabiting the tunnels, all of them petite and too perfect to be natural. Now, though, they smelled wrong. There’d been no coffee odour last time. And something about its presence worried him deeply.

  At the edge of the miniature forest, Will stopped to stare. Pale, rubbery faces grown from parasitic fungus jutted from the trunks like masks. Each one bore the likeness of someone he knew. And with each face, a fresh memory bloomed in his head.

  Here, for instance, was the elegant, sculpted visage of Parisa Voss. A friend and a traitor – the woman who’d derailed his life. She’d brought him here. He felt a rush of loathing. And there was Ann Ludik, another traitor. Except, in the end, she’d been a friend. She’d saved his life and he’d died trying to save hers. Beside her lay the hard, compact features of Mark Ruiz, Will’s half-son. Mark was someone Will had aspired to protect, though he’d fallen far short of that goal.

  Will regarded the masks with crawling unease. Had these faces been carved? Had they grown like that? He glanced about, anticipating a trap. Somebody with both time and knowledge of his life had put these things here, ready for him to see when he awoke. That must have taken hours. How long had he been out of the picture?

  The fourth face he saw made him freeze. It belonged to Rachel, his wife – the woman he’d loved all his life. Yet her face conjured an unexpected emotion – a sense of deep, boiling hatred that made Will break out in a spontaneous sweat. He could remember nothing Rachel had ever done to justify such a reaction. In fact, so far as he recalled, she’d been gone from his life for years. His own obsession with trying to fix the politics of IPSO had finally driven her away. She’d boarded a ship to explore the edge of human space – a ship lost beyond reach before he had a chance to apologise. He fumbled to master his rage. Understanding eluded him like a handful of smoke.

  Will stalked between the trees, keeping his eyes open and his guard up in anticipation of a punchline for this sickening joke. A few dozen metres further on he came to a clearing. There, beside the swirling brook, a tiny diorama of his childhood home had been rendered in purple moss. It depicted the exact location of his home node – the very place he’d reached for inside himself just minutes earlier. Grey bulbs of mushroom took the place of furniture,
each item rendered in unlikely detail.

  Will glared at the weird scene. Whoever had tinkered with this place didn’t just have knowledge of his life. They’d seen inside his mind. He walked warily around the unnatural growth, giving it a wide berth only to find it repeated dozens of times along the banks of the river on a variety of scales.

  Will waded downstream, trying to stay away from the moss without knowing why. Panic clotted his thoughts. Somebody was playing with him, trying to frighten him – but to what end? Were they the same people who’d brought him back to life? Will’s mouth curled in a bitter snarl. If he’d been resurrected as a plaything simply to be teased and tortured, his tormentors would need their wits about them. Will had experienced treatment of that sort during the Interstellar War. His captors had not died pleasantly.

  He froze as voices carried to him on the moist air. A man spoke somewhere beyond a line of trees up ahead. A woman answered. They sounded powerfully familiar, though Will struggled to place either of them. He heard laughter.

  Will searched the stream’s banks for a weapon – a rock or a bone, perhaps – but found nothing in the artificial landscape that would serve. He strode across to the nearest tree to rip free a branch, only to have the wood bend like rubber in his hands.

  No matter. He’d fight unarmed if need be. He edged closer to the last line of trees, keeping to the shadows, and peered out.

  Beyond the wood lay a small café. A line of bar stools faced away from him, arranged before a covered counter with a large yellow espresso machine and racks of brightly coloured cups. A woman in a dirndl with blonde, braided hair worked there with her back turned, pulling a fresh shot while two patrons chatted on the stools. One customer had vivid green skin. The other had small antlers and legs that ended in hooves. Both wore embroidered tuxedos with high, padded shoulders like characters from a Martian Renaissance drama.

  Will regarded them with blank astonishment. Now he knew where the smell had come from, though the explanation offered little comfort. When last he’d walked these tunnels, Snakepit had been a new discovery fraught with microbial dangers. There was no human population, and it certainly hadn’t featured coffee stands. The woman turned to place espresso cups before her guests. Will blinked at the sight of her face. It was, without doubt, his own. Her features were smaller than his, more prettily proportioned, but she might have been his twin sister.

  She looked up and caught him staring dumbly from the edge of the trees.

  ‘Are you here for coffee?’ she asked, then saw his confusion. ‘Dabbling in shyness, perhaps? We don’t bite, honest.’ She gestured for him to approach.

  Will, rather uncertainly, stepped out from the cover of the forest. His hands flexed, ready for a fight.

  ‘Do you have scrip?’ she said, and then waved the comment away when he didn’t answer. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m in it for the conversation, not the acumen. What can I get you? It’s on the house.’

  The two patrons swivelled on their stools to face him. Will saw his own face on both of them. He struggled to speak as he realised why their voices had sounded so oddly familiar – he’d heard himself.

  ‘I …’ he started.

  ‘You look like you could use something calming,’ said the woman. ‘How about a nice cup of tea? I’m going to hazard a guess that you like Assam.’

  ‘Good guess,’ said Will uncertainly. ‘My favourite.’

  ‘No shit,’ said the antler clone, chuckling into his coffee.

  ‘What size?’ said the woman.

  ‘Come on, he wants a large,’ said the green clone. ‘You can tell by his face.’

  ‘Why don’t you bring that baseline palette of yours over here and have a seat, Will,’ said the antler clone. ‘And tell us – whatever brings you out to a lonely spot like this one?’

  1.2: ANN

  From the helm of the Ariel Two, Ann Ludik watched shuttles lift from the surface of the Earth, bringing up the last of the population. They appeared in her display as a hundred bright sparks rising over the arc of the world, a planet still stubbornly blue despite all the abuse it had taken. One by one, the sparks left Earth behind, streaming out into the velvet night.

  Despite the irretrievable mess their ancestral home had become, it was impossible not to feel the poignancy of that moment. And, deep down beneath her layers of emotional scar tissue, Ann felt a weak stirring of sadness. However, besides the anticipation that had been twisting her insides for the last nine hours, it barely registered. There would be time for wistfulness later, if they survived.

  Someone in the cabin let out a short, tense sob at the sight. Ann declined to open her human eyes to find out who’d made it. Her crew knew how to do their jobs. And they’d all seen moments more tragic than this. After all, they weren’t being forced off a planet this time. Unlike most of humanity’s retreats in its long war with the self-styled Photurian Utopia, this one had been their own choice.

  Forty-one years had passed since the Photes’ first attack. During the decades that followed, the Photurians had evolved from near-mindless machines into a sophisticated and dangerous civilisation. Meanwhile, the human race had fallen from its peak of twenty-seven occupied star systems to a less-than-majestic five. The rest of mankind’s colonies had been claimed or destroyed. After today, they’d be down to four. Temporarily, they hoped.

  In all that time, Sol was the first star system to be deliberately conceded. Mars and the other home system colonies had shut up shop years before as effectively indefensible. And for a while after that, it looked like the consolidation of forces on Earth had worked. Then, just weeks ago, they’d received word of another attempted takeover.

  The planet’s surface had been seeded with a fresh wave of Phote spores and some of them had made it down into the Pacific Warrens. The number of spontaneous bacterial conversions was rising and the infected were gathering to form terrorist cells faster than the local death squads could root them out. So Earth’s government had called for immediate evacuation.

  Ann’s team had sent a diplomat down to liaise with the government heads, to calm the authorities and try for a new approach. The Earthers, though, were already too deep into panic. Something had changed in Phote strategy, they insisted. Transport lines were being choked off again. The frequency of raids kept climbing. Everyone was talking about a Third Surge.

  After what they’d all seen during the Suicide War a decade ago, Earth’s leaders weren’t about to take any chances. So, with great reluctance and no small amount of bitterness, the Galatean military had coordinated an extraction.

  ‘I have the signal from shuttle command,’ said Cy, Ann’s communications officer. His voice cracked as he spoke. ‘Earth is cleared. Ready to commence Phase Three.’

  ‘Initiate,’ said Ann. ‘Let’s get it done.’

  Moving thirty million people out of the gravity well in nine hours had not been easy. To facilitate the operation, the population of Earth had been issued with personal coma-kits and packed into bunker-boxes the size of sports stadia. Then they’d been foamed in situ with a fast-setting hyper-elastic matrix almost as light as a modern aerogel.

  There’d been panic, of course, and some resistance. But the warrens were due to be gassed to ensure that no human hosts remained for the Photes to exploit. The threat of imminent death had served as an effective incentive to cooperate.

  During Phase One, the massive container stacks had been brought out of habitats on macrotracks and handed off to superlifters originally designed to relocate whole arcotowers without disassembly. The process had run surprisingly close to schedule. Nevertheless, Ann had hated every gruelling minute of the wait.

  In Phase Two, fleets of industrial scoop-shuttles on strat-scraping dives had coupled and seized the superlifter loads. The lifters’ LTA envelopes had been trashed in the process, of course, but with nobody going home, cost wasn’t an issue. The operation would be one of the most expensive the human race had ever conducted.

  ‘What’s our a
ttrition rate?’ said Ann.

  ‘We’re running at less than sixty parts per mil,’ said Phlox grimly. ‘Better than the model mean. About as good as we could hope for.’

  In other words, the impact-foam approach had worked. About eighteen hundred deaths had resulted from almost drowning everyone in aerated smart-polymer, followed by the bone-smashing speed of shuttle intercept. Only eighteen hundred human lives snuffed out before even leaving their home. Probably only a few hundred orphaned children. A great result by any rational measurement.

  In Phase Three, the scoop-shuttles handed off their precious cargos to vast, purpose-built evac-arks so that they could be ferried to the out-system for carrier pickup. And that was where it got difficult.

  Human worlds never faced direct attack. It was too easy to trash them and the Photes needed their converts alive. Consequently, the Utopia subverted colonies instead, or absorbed them wholesale once support lines were cut off and defences knocked out.

  A population on the move, though, invited a very different kind of fighting. Arks made easy targets for direct, violent absorption. Hence, Phase Three was when the Photes were most likely to strike.

  Unfortunately, evac-arks weren’t fast. They lacked warp, which meant that even with tap-torch engines and constant acceleration as high as their human cargo could handle, exit would take days. And there were so many spies embedded within Earth’s population already that the likelihood of word of their timing having leaked was high.

  The Photes might intercept at any moment. For all Ann’s team knew, the out-system they were headed for might already be crawling with stealthed enemy drones. So at some point over the next seventy hours or so, the pace of events would likely go from interminably dull to horrifyingly fast. Human minds didn’t operate well under those conditions. Without artificial support, her team were likely to burn themselves out worrying before any trouble hit.