by Alex Lamb
‘So what happened then?’ Rachel urged.
Mark felt boxed in. It wasn’t a story he wanted to have to tell. But ironically, the history lesson appeared to be doing Rachel more good than anything else he’d said. It gave her something to focus on other than her own plight, so he forced himself to keep going.
‘It didn’t work. The Photes – the infected, I mean – they cut off transport. Each human colony was on its own. And for a while it looked like that was all the bastards were interested in doing – separating us. They were incredibly hard to fight but they weren’t actually attacking our worlds. So we left them alone. But within the first five years, two-thirds of our colonies underwent some kind of revolution. There were Earthers on every world, you see. We had to spread them out because there were so many. In most cases, they put some version of the Truist Church back in power.’
‘Shit,’ said Rachel.
‘Shit is right. The theocracies and the neo-feudal societies were the first to go. Infiltration was easy. The Photes infected their leaders. Uninformed populations were easy to manipulate. Whole planets were converted to the enemy cause without a shot being fired. They called that the First Surge.’
Now Rachel was silent and simply listening. Her vitals had stabilised.
‘Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. The rest of humanity tried harder. We installed democracies everywhere and adopted careful health laws. It didn’t help. The optimistic societies that pushed for peaceful reconciliation with the Photes went next, along with those that were ruled by committee. The Photes harried them, swapping from promises of peace to vicious attacks until the governments fell into fights among themselves. After that they were easy pickings – informed dissent was used against them. Charismatic leaders were targeted for conversion every time. That was the Second Surge. Then things got ugly. Most of those colonies had signed suicide pacts …’
His mouth went dry. He took a moment.
‘Go on,’ said Rachel.
‘They didn’t want to give extra hosts to the Photes, you see? They knew it’d make things worse. They … they didn’t want to hand an advantage to the enemy. So those colonies were … bosered.’
Mark could still see the light behind his eyes and hear the desperate pleas from those worlds, insisting they were still human despite all the evidence. Begging to be allowed to live. Screaming as they were burned by people like himself and Ann and Ira. He could still remember exactly how he’d felt about himself. Numbness uncoiled in his core.
‘Mark, I’m so sorry,’ said Rachel.
She could tell he’d been a part of it. The midnight shadow of regret passed its vast wing over him. He moved swiftly onwards.
‘So humankind was presented with a dilemma,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘We couldn’t have authoritarian rule. That didn’t work. Nor did open democracy. So what was the solution?’
‘You tell me,’ said Rachel, her expression stunned to blankness.
‘Well, people looked to Galatea. Emergency-centric capitalism looked like it might be the way to go, so long as there were huge checks on centralised power.’
‘Nobody liked that government,’ said Rachel quietly. ‘It was a kludge. We were supposed to have had a Scandinavian democracy.’
‘Yes,’ said Palla. ‘But the kludge worked. And after the Suicide War, the engineered societies proposed by Venetia Sharp started being taken seriously at last.’
‘Sharp?’ said Rachel, sounding lost. ‘I knew her.’
‘Play-centric societies are more robust,’ said Palla. ‘And when we moved to distributed non-blocking military leadership, things got better still. Nobody was comfortable with huge figures like Ira Baron staying in charge. Not after what they’d seen. They were obvious targets. These days, leadership is a public service carried out by the young, crowdsourced and transparently aggregated. We make clinical, unlovely decisions that work. Nobody likes it. Everybody lives.’
Rachel gazed at Palla’s face. Mark felt sure that Palla was coming off as rude and weird. Which, on reflection, wasn’t a bad assessment.
‘Are you in charge, then?’ said Rachel softly.
‘Got it in one,’ said Palla. ‘Normally Mark runs his own ship but this trip is a little different. In effect, we all chip in,’ she said with a chilly smile. ‘Speaking of which, we’d like to put an interface in your skull.’
Rachel’s eyes widened. ‘Is that strictly necessary?’
‘Depends how you are with confined spaces,’ said Palla. ‘This room you see isn’t real. It’s virtual, like all the space we have access to onboard. The amount of physical room in the habitat core where your body is now stored is about the size of a closet. If you think you’d prefer that for the next few months, you’re welcome to it. Or you can stay paralysed, like you are now. Or, if you like, we can dump you back in storage.’
‘All right,’ said Mark stiffly. ‘However we treat Rachel, it’s going to be with respect. She doesn’t need to have a shadow put in unless she wants one.’
‘So you’re all roboteers,’ said Rachel. ‘Will was right. It was the future, after all.’
‘Nearly,’ said Palla. ‘But what we have is nowhere near as invasive as the shit you did to Mark.’
Rachel winced.
‘Fuck you, Palla,’ Mark said out loud. ‘Leave her alone.’
‘Thank you, Mark,’ said Rachel, ‘but I don’t need protecting. If you think I should undergo this procedure, Palla, that’s what I’ll do. I’d rather be able to participate. I want to help.’
‘It won’t be fast,’ said Palla. ‘We have to scan your brain first to make sure you’re not some kind of Phote spy.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Rachel. ‘Go ahead. If you’re captain, I’m putting myself at your disposal. And if this mission is at risk, let me know what I can do. Scan me all you like.’
Mark noticed that Rachel was now giving Palla her undivided attention. She seemed utterly unfazed by all the bad news. He suddenly felt irrelevant and was reminded for the first time in decades what Rachel had actually been like – not a saint, but no-nonsense, calm and self-directed. She wanted to rise to the challenge. That was where she got her strength. Furthermore, he had never been her top priority. If he had, she never would have left.
8.3: ANN
Ann walked away from the shuttle churning with discomfort. Why did she even need to explain herself to Judj? He was in security, wasn’t he? He knew that nobody else possessed her skills, and therefore she had to try. Nothing else would be good enough. She shouldn’t have to apologise for it.
And besides, if they really wanted answers about how the planet had died, this was surely how to get them. The biosphere on Bock Two had come apart, dissolving into something less sophisticated than terrestrial algae, so any information they gleaned would have to be stored in some other form that didn’t degrade.
Wetware always decayed. And while you could build habitats out of living cells and deposited ceramics, constructing spacecraft required a different set of tools, ones that were often poisonous or radioactive. Hence the separation of function between the defensive nodes on Phote worlds and everything else.
Ann even knew a little about how the Photes pulled off their industrial miracles. Living cells cooperated to extrude non-living material as if they were tiny molecular printers. That material formed the matrix for an inert pseudo-biology that could survive toxic conditions real life found intolerable. This gave the Photes programmable robots the size of cell clusters that could build larger machinery for them. Then they fed instructions to their golems on tailored polymer chains.
The Photes, therefore, could make nano-machines of the sort that humanity had never managed. Those robots weren’t smart or able to reproduce, but they were robust and capable of self-powering off nothing more than a thermal gradient. It was one of the cooler Photurian tricks. Her smart-cells could do something a little like it, but with nowhere near as much subtlety.
Ann also knew from personal experienc
e that even if she found nothing better in the defensive node, drones always contained solid-state backup brains. The Photes tended to fry them on capture so that humans couldn’t study them, but Galatean scientists had still learned plenty. The brains were so well rad-proofed that even after a gentle nuking, information could still be teased out of the remains. Were she to find such a thing intact, there was no telling what secrets it might reveal. With luck, at least one of them would be left.
Ann walked up to the fissure and looked inside. On the other side of the shell-wall stood a dense forest of four-metre-high structures sitting in a shallow soup of viscous crud. The structures were gunmetal grey and shaped like enormous jointed toilet brushes. They were all bent over and leaning on each other like dead grass at the end of summer. The light inside was so bad that Ann could barely see anything, even with her infrared ramped up. Deeper in, the shielding would only make it worse.
‘You’ll be blind in there,’ Judj observed tartly.
Ann modified her eyes, finding a wavelength that could pick out details in the homogenous gloom. Judj said nothing as the video feed she was sending him improved. He’d kept the link open, she noticed. He wasn’t so angry or worried yet that he didn’t want to know what she’d find.
As Ann stepped in, she made out shapes hanging over the forest like ribbon stalactites. There were waves and waves of the stuff, forming a surface like an inverted coral reef. Some of the ridges had curious swellings on their sides – bulbs that had once been growing there. And in a few places, these fruit-like extrusions had descended on stretching cables to touch the floor.
Ann passed a cable that had snapped and dropped its cargo, leaving a sizeable crater in the brush-forest. The fruit at the centre was a crumbling, broken thing about the size of a domestic transit pod. Where the eggshell exterior had fallen away, Ann saw hundreds of curling loops of fibre inside, held in place by delicate strands of translucent silicate with a bulbous cluster suspended in the centre. It reminded her of the stalk in the middle of a dandelion head.
Ann realised what she was looking at – the stillborn foetus of a Photurian drone. Those looping structures were tiny particle-accelerator tracks, as yet ungrown.
‘I’m astonished there’s so much structure left,’ said Judj.
‘Why?’ said Ann. ‘Like you said, this is a factory for weapons that can tolerate space battles. It wasn’t going to decay overnight.’
She passed through an area where several half-formed drones dangled above her like malevolent chandeliers the size of lifter trucks.
‘I know what this place is,’ said Judj. ‘This forest must have been a field of giant cilia at some point. You’re walking through the skeletal remains of a transport system. And that stuff overhead was a birthing area.’
Ann found herself smiling. He was right. The secrets of the Photes were being laid open before them, just as she’d hoped.
A little further on, the ground sloped away, yielding a break in the forest. Ann found herself at the edge of a rise, looking out across a hidden world of gloomy, back-handed beauty. The sky of this place was the node’s mottled ceiling soaring high overhead and held up by implausibly elegant columns of grown ceramic. That ceiling had caved in many places, admitting shafts of dusty sunlight. Before her, the forest of dead cilia swept down to the edge of a field of drones. There were thousands of them in various states of decay, all in shades of grey and brown. They looked like an immense clutch of once-treasured eggs.
These drones, though, were much closer to full size than the foetuses she’d seen earlier. A fully grown drone was about the size of a tower block. It was hard to build anything warp-enabled any smaller. Here, though, almost finished drones were lined up like toys and gummed over with the spidery remains of support lattices and nutrient transport arteries. Ann had always wondered where Photurian drones came from. Now she knew. They hatched from the ceiling like fruit and were nurtured to full size like baby birds. The scale of the bioengineering was humbling.
And then, dozens of kilometres away at the centre of the node, behind the sea of eggs, stood something that resembled a cross between the Tower of Babel and a rail gun. The vast, coiling, conical structure rose up to join with the ceiling. Around its base, great openings yawned like a hundred hungry mouths. That would be the accelerator tower.
Ann breathed in the sight with a growing sense of vindication and started down the slope through the brush-forest towards the ranks of dead drones at the bottom. This place was a treasure trove, just as she’d surmised. With enough understanding of it, they might be able to shut down Phote drone production for good.
The closest craft were malformed, crumpled and half-rotted. As she got closer to them, an acrid smell arose like a paint factory after a bad fire. The ships sat in dents in a curiously tiled polygonal floor and curved up above her like the sides of mutant cruise liners, massive and grey. Their surfaces were covered with the cracked remains of albedo-management scales no larger than fingernails.
Ann touched an exohull. The structure felt firm, but when she pressed hard, it crumbled under her hand, showering her face with dust. The strength of the space-ready ceramics had all leached away. Or, more likely, their molecular matrix had never been finalised. The more complete drones would no doubt be situated closest to the tower. Ann took note of the important lesson: even this place was not immune to the ravages of time. She had to be careful.
‘I don’t know if you’re bothering to watch the environmental data in your biofeed,’ said Judj testily, ‘but you should know that the background rads tripled as you came down that slope. Plus our comms bandwidth is less than half of what it was when you walked in.’
‘Noted,’ she said. She refused to tell him she’d be careful. She had no such intention.
There wasn’t much obvious processor machinery inside the node, at least not of any sort that she could discern, and it’d take her hours to hike as far as the accelerator tower through the maze of dead drones. Fortunately, her fallback plan remained viable: to find a drone brain. All she needed was a relatively mature and undamaged example that might have still been accumulating data around the time the world died.
She walked down an aisle like a grand boulevard between the curving masses of dead ships. The way was clotted with frail nets of material halfway between spiderweb and limescale. They broke as she passed, leaving an Ann-shaped tunnel behind her.
Finally, she found a drone that appeared to be in good condition. She tested the hull with her fist. The exohull was still strong, but not so strong that she couldn’t smash her way through it. She broke a hole in the shell of the dead baby drone and jumped back quickly as a stream of black ooze poured out. The painty, smoky smell grew a lot stronger and added a few sickly treacle notes.
‘Christ!’ said Judj. ‘What is that stuff?’
‘Decomposed pseudo-life, almost certainly,’ said Ann.
When the gunk had drained from the interior, Ann ripped a hole wide enough to admit her and climbed inside.
‘Okay, Ann,’ said Judj, his voice crackling with static. ‘We’ve taken another rad boost and a bandwidth hit. I think you should come back now. You’ve made your point and we’ve learned plenty.’
‘Sorry, Judj,’ she said. ‘I can’t do that.’
He sighed at her. ‘Do you honestly believe I was always this careful?’ he said.
‘Yep.’
‘Wrong. This unflinching capacity for worry I have is a learned skill born out of painful experience.’
‘I’ll start back in a minute,’ said Ann. She wasn’t leaving until she got what she’d come for.
The interior of the drone was filthy, dark and full of fibrous crap that made it hard to see. If her smart-cells had been worried about things like asbestos, she suspected she’d be in serious trouble already. However, she could make out the drone’s mesoskeleton arcing above her, with its attendant looping accelerator tracks. All the important stuff was situated in a large, shadowy clump about ten storeys
up.
Ann grabbed one of the mesoskeletal struts and tested it to see if it’d bear her weight. It did. Hopefully her invasion wouldn’t be the one kick the structure needed to come apart. Ann was strong, but the idea of a couple of dozen storeys of alloy and ceramic crashing down on her head didn’t appeal. It was unclear whether her augmented skeleton could take that kind of pressure.
She clambered up gingerly through the bones of the ship. It was alarming at times, when parts of it broke off in her hand, or where the surfaces were so slick and greasy with degraded pseudo-life that she couldn’t get a grip. And she was definitely going to need a shower at the end. However, for the most part, she made good progress.
Finally, she reached the nucleus in the centre. It resembled a walnut the size of a house and was connected to the mesoskeleton by several dozen converging struts. Ann jumped down on top of it, grabbed a piece of the walnut cladding and ripped it off. It felt like tree bark. Underneath lay petite magnetic bottles for antimatter storage, along with baby stelarators, processor bundles and goodness knows what else. Ann fought her way through them all to find what she was looking for: a suitcase-sized sphere of corrugated silver covered in forked cooling prongs.
Her hands actually bled as she ripped the thing out. It took all her strength to dislodge it. And it weighed a ton. There had to be some novel metals in there. But now it lay within her grasp. All she had to do was figure out a way to get it to the shuttle.
Ann leaned against the pit of ruined machinery she’d created and grinned at how ridiculous that idea was. She laughed out loud. This was the most satisfying thing she’d done in years and it didn’t even involve killing.
[Why?] said her shadow. [Think about it. Why does this make you glad?]
Because it felt like progress. It wasn’t something she’d seen or done before. And besides, she had her prize.
‘Are you happy now?’ came Judj’s crackling, disapproving voice.
‘Yes,’ said Ann. ‘Very.’
