by Alex Lamb
A hush fell over the group. There were seven of them left on the ark. Ann saw Ira’s desperate eyes on her and struggled not to volunteer to stay. She was largest. She wasted most space. Her powers were gone. Before she could open her mouth, Rachel spoke up.
‘I volunteer,’ she said. ‘I’m barely relevant. You don’t need me. I’m an appendix to this mission.’
‘Sorry,’ Judj told her, ‘you don’t get to be the one. The person who stays back is me.’
‘Judj!’ Clath shouted.
Ann scowled at him. ‘Why? Don’t be ridiculous. You’re mission-critical.’
‘Because I volunteered for this mission,’ said Judj with a dry smile. ‘I did that because I knew I wasn’t going to survive. I have a condition that gave me a life sentence years ago.’
Ann blinked at him. ‘Bullshit.’
Clath buried her face in her hands.
‘’Fraid not,’ said Judj. ‘You want to know why I was always so paranoid about someone getting infected on this ship? Because it happened to me. I grew up in a toxic biosphere, remember? Well, one of the local organisms sneaked into my body a while back and started eating the white matter in my brain.’
‘No,’ said Clath. ‘Judj, don’t do this.’
‘Bullshit!’ Ann said again. ‘They could just take it out! Modern medicine doesn’t struggle with that kind of crap.’
‘Nope,’ said Judj. ‘This bastard is very persistent, which is why we were studying it. We thought it might be a weapon against the Photes. Turns out it is. I can’t be converted, but the little fucker wrote itself into my DNA. Kill it and it comes back. My shadow runs most of my physical functions for me and has done since I came aboard. Without it, I’d be a corpse already.’
He offered them a trademark half-smile and Ann suddenly saw more in it than she ever had before. She saw a face that no longer worked. She turned to Palla, who hadn’t said a word.
‘Is this true?’
Palla nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ said Ann. ‘I thought we were past Academic secrecy.’
‘Clath asked her not to,’ said Judj. ‘She’s been trying to keep a lid on this for the whole mission. She didn’t want my health to be a tactical factor, but we both knew I wasn’t going to last another six months. Besides, somebody will have to seal you in and press the button.’ He turned to Clath. ‘You’ll live,’ he told her fondly. ‘Do that for me.’
‘No,’ said Clath again. ‘No, no, no.’
Ann struggled for words as Clath looked around at the others, guilty desperation in her gaze. Her eyes lingered on Rachel. Ira looked away in pain. Ann’s chest squeezed in empathy.
‘Don’t ask her,’ Judj said softly. ‘Don’t ask any of them. You’ll only regret it. I volunteer. It’s what I do. And we don’t have much time. Save the tears for later.’
Judj winked at Ann when the others weren’t looking and in that moment she finally understood him. His anxiety had never been for himself. It had always been for the rest of them. Ann had more in common with him than she’d ever seen. Judj had come aboard to make his exit count, just like her. Now he was stealing her moment and they both knew it.
‘We can get a robot to do it!’ Clath urged. ‘Press the button, I mean.’
‘There’s still no room,’ said Judj. He drifted over and pushed her towards the nearest sphere. ‘Hurry.’
Clath cried silently while they bundled her into one of the emergency environment suits they’d stashed on the ark’s bridge. Ann wished she could hug the poor woman but her own body now carried an infection risk. She watched Rachel and Ira make that gesture instead and ached inside as she pulled on a suit of her own.
Why should she get to live? And yet Judj’s logic beat hers. She could live and be happy while he’d already lost that option. By letting him do this, she was letting Judj matter. The chance to be the hero, it turned out, was a luxury of sorts – one she’d monopolised without ever noticing. Ann knew then that she was done with fighting and death. She’d never be able to see it the same way again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘For everything.’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Judj with a half-smirk. ‘You did good. And I hate landings, remember? This is the easy option for me. Be good down there. Make me count.’
Judj insisted on sealing Rachel and Clath in first. He put Mark and Palla in the second sphere. Lastly, he gestured for Ann and Ira to climb in. She could feel Ira’s relief in his gaze like a palpable force, along with his crippling guilt.
Ann squeezed into the tiny spherical space, which was still filled with bits of floating foam. There was no lighting in the sphere. The surfaces were rough where the robots had hurriedly hollowed it out, with ridges that caught on her suit. Ira clambered after her. The two of them could barely fit. She had to curl around him.
‘Have you checked your seals?’ said Judj from outside.
‘Of course,’ said Ann.
‘Just making sure. I want you to get down there in one piece. I’m sending you links so that your shadows can tether to the sphere’s onboard systems. They seem to have a rudimentary orientation logic that’s supposed to maximise the difference between the landing sites. I’ve overridden it to encourage them to do the opposite. Hopefully that way you’ll stay close together. Good luck, everybody.’
Ann briefly heard the sound of Clath crying over the shared channel and then something suddenly shoved against her back with appalling force, hurling them up into the space above the planet. And then they were really falling. Not zero-gee – the terrible buffeting of re-entry. Ann clutched Ira tight in the darkness and knew that she wanted to live.
20.5: MARK
Mark snapped awake and found himself hunched over in a survival suit. He lay trapped between a hard, curving wall and an equivalently hard obstacle, drowned in darkness, while something shook him wildly. He felt like a ping-pong ball in a match between two industrial waldobots.
The only things he could see were winking green readouts in his suit’s visor display. He checked his sensorium and found an icon waiting there to tether him to a situation report and some external sensors. Mark followed the link and yelped at the sight of a vast expanse of desert rushing up to meet him.
He was in a landing pod. The awkward object wedged against his torso was the back of Palla’s suit. And they had just seconds before they hit the ground. Mark gazed at the extremely solid surface racing up to meet him and wondered how in hell’s name the pod was supposed to do anything but smash itself straight into the nearest piece of basalt like a meteor.
The pod handily pointed him at another vehicle falling ahead of them, visible as a quivering pinpoint of light against the ochre surface below. Mark concentrated on that. Maybe it would give him some clue as to how he could expect to survive.
While he watched, the leading pod exploded in a blaze of light. Mark’s breath caught. But as the glare died, something strange happened – the sphere appeared to grow. The pod had shed its outer layer and fibres trapped behind it were springing out, expanding to dozens of times the vehicle’s original diameter. Below its shielding lay thousands of warpium-composite hairs designed to trap air – hugely long, almost indestructible and apparently held under tension until that moment. At full extent, the pod below reminded him of a giant dandelion head, and it was slowing fast.
He had just half a second to appreciate the mechanism before the detonation of his own pod’s shield-layer punched him against the forward wall, knocking the breath from his lungs. When his head cleared enough for him to look again, he was still heading for the rocks at an unpalatable velocity, but now, at least, the pod was dumping speed handily.
Mark gawped at the sensor readout as he saw how effectively the seed-lander system was slowing them. It looked possible that they might actually hit the ground gently. That, he guessed, was the advantage of having near-invulnerable building materials to play with. Then, as he drifted towards the cratered landscape, an appalling flash lit up the hor
izon. Two seconds later, a dark smudge appeared there and started growing.
‘What’s that?’ he asked the pod.
It explained. The ship he’d been fired from had just impacted with New Panama, releasing as much energy as a modest nuclear war. What he was looking at was the consequences of that impact. In other words, a blast-wave.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said.
Now that they’d lost most of their downward velocity, the wave was going to hit them before the desert did. That wasn’t good. Being on the surface would at least shield them from the worst of the storm’s velocity.
‘Come on!’ he yelled at the pod. ‘Fall faster!’
The pod failed to oblige.
The wave swelled into a wall of black and churning grit that blotted out the sky, scarred inside with terrible lightning.
‘Fuck,’ said Mark. ‘Palla, brace yourself!’ he added, but suit-to-suit comms were down.
The sphere slammed sideways, caught like a leaf in a hurricane. Impact was brutal. The subsequent collision with the ground was worse. They bounced, hard – not once, but more times than Mark could count. With each repeated slam of his head against the wall, his consciousness stuttered. The end result was inevitable. Oblivion claimed him.
20.6: WILL
Nada’s forces pounded Will’s factory with small, ground-based rail guns. Will prepared himself for a long, punishing siege, but just five minutes after the attack started, it halted. When he sent an improvised camera drone out to discover what had happened, he witnessed Nada’s forces in full retreat.
That wasn’t good. He could hardly draw Nada’s attention away from his escaping friends if she refused to fight. But why had she stopped? In frantic alarm, he checked the sky for the position of the ark. It lay beyond the planet’s horizon. Then, while he scanned, the first signs of the impact storm appeared. Ten minutes later, the blast-wave hit. His already damaged citadel was blasted by a grit-storm of super-Galatean proportions. Will lost about thirty per cent of his manufacturing capacity in under a minute as sand and dust scoured the node. It burst in through every fracture his enemy had just created, ablating everything it touched.
Deep in the synthetic reality of his war-room virt, Will slumped into a seat in shock. His friends and family were dead. His heart screwed tight.
A new objective swelled inside him, matching the storm outside. The Transcended had made the mistake of granting him godlike powers. And now he was out of his cage. It was time to fuck some shit up on an interstellar scale, starting with Nada Rien. After that, the rest of the Photurians and the Transcended shitwads who’d spawned them.
As soon as the atmospheric disaster slowed to manageable subsonic velocities, Will launched the first wave of his robot army. His pseudo-life titans had barely marched past the perimeter of the node when Nada’s lifters came sliding back through the storm, dumping spherical machines the size of housing blocks onto the desert by the hundred. They rolled towards him, shooting as they came.
It didn’t take long for Will to figure out that he was looking at modified titan mechs wearing spheres of transparent warpium armour. They carried laser weapons that shot straight through their own defensive shielding without issue while causing havoc with his own front line.
Nada hurled packets of audio at him over the network. ‘You are not the only one with surprises,’ she told him. ‘I will retain this node. Submit to me now and become useful!’
Everything Will fired bounced off this new foe. He snarled in frustration. The only thing he had going for him was that she hadn’t resorted to orbital bombardment yet. She was still gambling that she could winkle him out of her node before they both damaged it irreparably.
‘Admit defeat,’ she urged him. ‘You cannot beat my advanced technologies!’
As his soldiers fell back, Will hurriedly improvised particle cannons from drone parts. He knew exactly what kinds of particle beams to build to do the most damage since the Subtle’s tricks for making and breaking false matter were in his mental database, too. He’d retained all the ark’s knowledge at the cost of several dozen threads.
As Nada’s machines scorched their way through his cilia-fields, he pierced them with high-powered meson beams and had the satisfaction of watching them burst like grapes.
‘What was that?’ he sent back. ‘Didn’t quite catch you. Something about advanced technologies?’
His robots pressed forward again under the cover of beam-fire. The particle guns put a terrible drain on his reserves and maintaining beam stability from ramshackle parts was insanely dangerous, but Will no longer cared.
Nada hit him with a fresh soft assault, trying to force the fight into the virtual realm.
‘I have tasted your clones,’ she told him. ‘I know your past – your sickly guilt at being an incompetent parent and an inattentive spouse. I have felt the weakling panic in your heart from when you buckled under torture during your human war. Submit and I can take all that pain away.’
‘You’re not selling it,’ Will growled back.
He knew he couldn’t keep up this level of warfare for much longer. He thought back to his first observations of what Nada had done to herself and wondered if there wasn’t a cheaper, more effective way to fight, particularly given that Nada seemed to be in a chatty mood.
‘Tell me,’ he asked her while his energy cannons atomised wave after wave of her robots. ‘How’s that new control system working for you? I take it you’ve figured out that it’s better to be me than you?’
‘I am superior to you in every regard!’ Nada shouted back. ‘I am Photurian and you are not!’
‘Could have fooled me,’ said Will. ‘Looks like you’ve abandoned the Protocol altogether.’
‘The Protocol has been temporarily adapted to more effectively facilitate Total Peace,’ she said frostily and sent another shower of rail-gun slugs into his accelerator tower. It was, apparently, a sore point.
If he could kick up her level of internal dissent, she might discover some of the hidden limitations of being a democratic mind. Even during the best days of the Willworld, he’d been prone to mood storms – crippling moments of internal conflict. But he needed a topic Nada still cared about. She’d already lost so much of what it meant to be human.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘And how does that work? You have a plan all mapped out, I’m sure. Tell me, which of your threads should get to branch and when?’
‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.
‘Which of your units shape your society? They all have equal autonomy now but they can’t all branch – you don’t have the processing power. So which skills are more valuable, science or military prowess? Do you have a policy for that?’
‘Of course I have a policy!’ said Nada. ‘Those skills I require to save the human race are replicated. Redundant threads self-destruct.’
Will frowned. So she didn’t share his economic issues. But there had to be others.
‘And how many of you should there be at the end?’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re all one person. Is one copy enough?’
‘As many as possible,’ Nada replied. ‘I shall save the entire human race.’
She was using the dialogue to distract him, he noticed, piggybacking mutant packets onto their channel to subvert his systems. He was blocking her, but eventually her superior processing power would win out. She had more threads than he did, and more distributed tunnel material in which to run them. She’d keep talking until she found a chink in his shields.
Will desperately rifled through what little he’d gleaned from the planet’s failing databases before she’d shut his access down. One fact leapt out: the problem of the rotted habitats he’d encountered wasn’t exclusive to this world; it was all over Phote space. Their enemy had been hiding a systemic weakness.
‘What about those already in Fatigue?’ he asked her slyly.
‘What do you know about Fatigue?’ Nada snapped back.
‘Enough,’ Will lied. ‘It’s your biggest problem
right now. All those broken units. You going to save them, too?’
‘Of course!’ Nada shouted. ‘All who are not already lost will be joined in harmony.’
‘Who defines lost?’ said Will, fishing hopelessly. ‘I mean, that’s a huge problem, isn’t it? So many worlds. You’ll need so much time. How will you even know when you’re done?’ There had to be something about that problem she hadn’t thought through yet. The implied logistics were horrendous.
‘That is obvious,’ Nada insisted. ‘I shall simply … simply … simply …’
Nada’s message ended in a strangled digital scream. It was, Will thought, her first personal economic debate, and she was welcome to it. He knew the effect wouldn’t last long. He reorganised his forces and pressed his advantage while he had the chance.
21: BREAKTHROUGH
21.1: MARK
When Mark lurched back into consciousness, his body screamed at him about all the new bruises it had acquired. He reached into his sensorium, tamped down the responses and checked the exterior camera.
The pod had changed again. The long wispy fronds that had slowed it had burned away, leaving only a stunted section at the base of each fibre, essentially cladding the sphere in hundreds of glassy stilts. The outer layer of the pod was rotating, propelling them along the ground.
Around them, a storm raged. The sky was a glutinous brown. Violent gusts jostled the sphere this way and that. Ahead, at the horizon, he could just make out a long, low structure like a black scar sticking out of the desert – a Phote habitat-tube.
Mark tried to signal the pod to instruct it to not head towards the artefact, but the vehicle was running on some Subtle logic of its own and had no interest in taking direction from its payload.
He tried again to open a channel to his pod-mate and this time succeeded.
‘Hey, Palla?’
He got no response. He wriggled, trying to nudge her into action without success. As his worry grew, he linked to her suit and checked her vitals. She was alive but still unconscious, it told him. He’d have to find a way out of this latest mess on his own.
