by Barry Kirwan
He drew back, beaming, still holding her hand. “So, my love, what are you thinking? Social? Dining function? Both?”
She peered into one of the downward channels. “Let’s not forget defecation; they must have been quite intimate.” They laughed. It felt good. She thought she’d forgotten how.
In the rooms they decided were bedrooms, Jen and Dimitri saw an oval, Hohash-shaped recess in the wall, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between the spiders and their mirror-shaped vassals.
“Their lifestyle must have been simple yet graceful,” Dimitri said. “No artefacts, none of the paraphernalia to be found in any normal human’s home, and no decoration; almost Greek in a way.” He nudged her. She laughed with him, recalling their hot nights in his Spartan but airy apartment in Santorini, high above the waves.
They drifted through numerous open spaces, and found more of the stools or tables with funnels, forming concentric rings or intersecting hoops. The sun had dipped in the sky, and cast long shadows across the open plaza. She glanced at her wristcom; it had been an hour already. She knew she should really check in with Micah, but he hadn’t called, and she didn’t feel like making the first move.
This is all very fascinating, she thought, but not why we’re here.
A soft breeze triggered goose bumps on her neck. Instinctively, her guard rose again, the way it used to whenever an enemy drone had tried to sneak up on her team. She knew her period of respite was over. Her muscles flexed.
She turned the corner and stopped dead. Her hand slid into her pocket to draw out the nanosword.
Dimitri, taking one last backward glance at a particularly beautiful plaza with spiral ramps coiling up to a raised dais, bumped into her. As soon as he saw it, he jumped in front of her. Gallant, she thought, but unnecessary, and in any case she was the one with tempered combat skills. The nanosword was drawn, its barely visible electric blue blade humming softly. Muscles prepped, she glared through half-closed eyelids at the perfectly still Q’Roth warrior a few metres away.
“A statue!” Kostakis said, strolling up towards it, as if it was a bust of some long-forgotten Greek athlete. “Remarkably detailed.”
Her instincts went into overdrive as he placed a finger on the marble white warrior sculpture’s hipbone, level with Dimitri’s chest. She held herself back in a semi-crouch, ready to spring, in case – by whatever means – it came to life. She watched with that hyper-alert detached battle sense, born from witnessing too many friends and lovers slain at close hand, while Dimitri traced the statue’s contours with a finger. He’d never seen them in action, up close, as she had. When humanity had made its final retreat from Earth to Eden, she’d learned how quick and deadly they were, impervious to anything except the weapon she held in her hand. Or nukes. She’d detonated one in the last throes of battle on Earth, taking out at least a legion of the motherfuckers as they’d homed in on the human bio-signs.
Seeing it in alien white marble, rather than its blue-black metallic skin, made it only slightly less scary. Its trapezoidal head reminded her of a hammerhead, six gill-like slits that were sensors of some kind, a gash she knew to be its mouth, and six legs with downward-curving serrated thorns running along their spines. Most people described them as similar to a praying mantis, but she knew a better comparison: the mantis shrimp, a tropical armoured shellfish that shredded its prey with talons not unlike those she was staring at right now.
She’d witnessed a swathe of Q’Roth who’d raked through the last vestiges of humanity fleeing for her ship just before she quit Earth. They’d hacked men, women and children down, reaping their crop, their slit-like mouths opening wide before clamping down on their prey’s heads, extracting the bio-electricity they’d come to Earth to feed upon. Part of their maturation process. Remembering the gurgling sound as each human was drained made bile rise up in her throat.
Dimitri withdrew his hand suddenly with an intake of breath. “So sharp!” He sucked at the vermillion blood oozing from a fingertip that had grazed one of the hooked barbs on a middle leg.
Jen didn’t get it. “Why would the spiders build a statue of a mortal enemy, by all accounts a galactic predator?” It didn’t make sense. “Stand back, Dimitri.”
He turned towards her, the finger still in his mouth, accentuating the question mark framed by his eyebrows.
“I don’t think it’s a statue.” She ramped up the power on the hilt of the nanosword and approached the monstrous effigy. She raised the sword kendo style, and with a kiai shout not far from a scream – pure bloodlust rising from the pit of her stomach – she leapt into the air and used her falling weight to drive the blade diagonally from the warrior’s right shoulder, carving through all the way to its left hip. Stinging sparks needle-showered her as the Q’Roth soldier split asunder. In the heat of her bloodlust she mistimed it, and the upper half toppled toward her, its petrified claws spearing towards her head. Dimitri’s arm swung around her waist and yanked her aside. She had the presence of mind to retract the nano-blade into its hilt with a flick of her thumb as the warrior’s torso and upper legs thudded into the dust.
She lay panting on the ground, cradled by Dimitri, a serrated claw centimetres from her face. “Thanks,” she coughed. “It would have been stupid to have been killed by a dead one.” She felt Gabriel’s presence, which seemed reasonable, given how close to death she’d just come. Sorry big brother, got carried away, won’t happen again.
She felt the storm of anger inside her ebb, though she knew it would reclaim her soon.
“Good God,” Dimitri said, as they got to their feet and inspected the sliced mannequin. Jen saw what she had expected. Where she had cut, there was a neat cross-section of Q’Roth anatomy: solidified intestines, vessels, and assorted organs.
Dimitri knelt down to study the creature’s ceramic insides.
Jen stayed back. She noticed three cubic devices embedded in the ground, spaced equidistant around the Q’Roth warrior. A smile edged across her face. Finally … a weapon.
* * *
Micah had to sit down. The high levels of oxygen made him dizzy. Sandy’s lips were cherry red, and he knew his must be too. The buildings, the broken spires – everything was brighter, sharper, due to the combination of a higher partial pressure of oxygen and a lower overall atmospheric pressure. He wondered how long it would take to adapt to the sickly sweet Ourshiwann cocktail of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and a few other gaseous compounds they hadn’t yet identified. The smell reminded him of cloves, but an environmental scientist back on his ship had said it was an effect of the adaptation process – there was no real smell in the arid air. At least the rad-levels were exceptionally low, suggesting the spider race had developed more subtle energy sources.
His heart sank again. After their near-complete demise at the hands of the Q’Roth, he’d had plenty of time to ponder mankind’s fragile destiny during his journey to Ourshiwann. By all accounts, based on what Kat had learned from her sessions with the Hohash, humanity was hopelessly beneath the high standards of galactic civilisation and technology, and – the bit he hated and feared most – the intelligence of the rest of the galaxy. Humanity was Level Three, and the scale apparently went all the way up to nineteen. The upper echelons in the galaxy would no doubt consider humans the way Micah considered insects back on Earth. Mankind had only escaped attention so far because the galaxy was so vast, and Earth was in a backwater, off the beaten track.
Humanity had escaped, but it was, so to speak, out of the thermo-cook and into the fusion-stove. Being an analyst, he’d run a hundred mental simulations, using a technique called cascading event tree analysis. He started from their flight from Eden to Ourshiwann – and considered potential events which could yet happen, with probabilities based on a range of mathematical distributions. At each ‘node’ in the tree, when an event happened, the result could either be success or failure. The trouble was, even when he postulated unlikely successes – miracles almost, like finding a friendly race who co
uld communicate with them – the failures soon followed in multitudes. All his scenarios ended up with humanity either being enslaved, or becoming some alien race’s tasty meal. A third typical endgame involved everyone starving to death while killing each other in an anarchic civil war. They were like toddlers stumbling along the San Francisco jetway in the dark: no handy guide-palms, no star charts, no idea how to communicate – that was it, he thought, no idea – no idea what was out here: we’re naked, defenceless, and dumb.
What made it worse was that few others seemed to dwell on it. Cognitive dissonance. They lived in the immediate present, thinking about water, washing, and food. They were uncomfortable, sure, but as Carlson had put it, in deep denial. He imagined humanity as a fly caught in a spider’s web, preening itself and wondering where its next meal would come from, even as its devourer approached.
He shuddered. The air temperature was lower than on over-heated Earth. Though he knew he’d acclimatise, he adjusted the temperature control on the cuff of his all-terrain jumpsuit. Immediately the incipient chill was chased away, and with it some of his morose state.
“No skeletons, no cadavers, no remains whatsoever,” Sandy said.
It had been bugging him too, since the Q’Roth only fed on bioelectric energy, not flesh. Either the spiders had decayed completely, or… He had no inkling what the ‘or’ could be. He recalled how elephants, before they’d been extinguished during the third world war, used to scatter and crush the bones of fallen comrades, so that for centuries there had been myths of secret elephant graveyards. But there was no life here except maybe some insects and a few tiny rodents; no one to remove the skeletons or carcasses of the fallen spiders. It would have been useful to know more about them, he was sure.
“Maybe there are siroccos here, and the ruins have been scoured clean,” he ventured.
“Almost no dust, no sand even in the city. Doesn’t that mean wind and storms are unlikely?”
He shrugged. “We need to get underground. Up here seems to be just dwellings. The food and waste systems, maybe their entire industry, might be down below.”
“Why not somewhere else, in another city?”
“Doesn’t fit. Everything here speaks of simplicity and efficiency. And there’s no obvious transport infrastructure. No, the answers are beneath our feet.”
“Silly me, I forgot my bucket and spade.” Sandy plonked herself down, next to him, and lay her head on his shoulder. He managed a smile, but she was right, they were getting nowhere. “You okay?” he asked.
“Just light-headed. Wondering what this new air is doing for Junior.”
“You should tell one of the doctors, you know.”
“Already did.”
“Oh.” He stared towards the other side of the plaza. “You and Vince getting on okay?” Her head shifted on his shoulder, then re-settled.
“Blake’s a good man, don’t you think? I mean a real leader.”
Micah glossed over the change of subject. “Yes. This council idea, though. Not sure about Shakirvasta and Josefsson. They’re a bit too…” He couldn’t find the right word.
“Raptors,” she said. “I’ve worked for enough in my time. Josefsson’s blunt, but resilient and persuasive; born into power, a Dynastic politician. However, our Indistani mogul is so sharp you could cut yourself on him.”
“He supported Blake.”
She snorted. “He’s biding his time, playing the long game. Bastard will probably dance on our graves.” She nudged his shoulder. “Don’t get on his wrong side, Micah.”
Graves. What did the spiders do with their dead? He stared into the distance, through one of the glossy cylindrical tunnels. “Hey, we’ve never been into one of those.”
Sandy lifted her head. “They’re empty, just conduits. We can see straight through them.”
But Micah was on his feet, marching towards the nearest channel. He stood at the entrance. It was like looking down the polished barrel of a rifle. He stepped inside, crouching, and walked a few paces. “I guess you’re right. It’s just a –” He didn’t finish his sentence. He fell straight through the floor.
“Micah? Micah! Are you alright?”
He groaned, flat on his back. Getting up seemed like an idea that needed maturing before enacting. “Yes. Hurt my foot, but otherwise…” He got into a seated position without too much pain and rubbed his right ankle. It wasn’t a big drop, but it wouldn’t be easy getting back up. He fished the radio out from his knapsack. No signal. “Sandy,” he shouted, “I’m going to toss the VHF radio up to you. It doesn’t work down here. Call one of the mil crew on channel sixteen, tell them to bring some rope. Don’t come any closer, or we’ll both be trapped and no one will find us.” He hobbled on his good foot, then lobbed the radio in an arc towards the smooth ceiling two metres above him. He sighed with relief when it passed straight through what must have been a hologram, or maybe just a clever passive optical illusion.
“Okay, got it. It’s still working. I’ll get out of the tunnel and radio for help.”
Micah scanned the area around him. He was in a wide chamber, three metres high, with evenly-spaced femur-shaped pillars rising up from a dirty brown screed floor to a ceiling that stretched away in all directions, gloomy sepia lighting yielding to obsidian darkness within ten metres in any direction. Clusters of vine-green pipes hung like hospital drips from the ceiling, funnelling into rust-coloured boxes the size of a hover-car. He limped over to the nearest. It had two portholes, so he peered through one. It contained a mustardy liquid. Shifting around to the other porthole he saw a darker, oily liquid. Micah did the math: food and waste, most likely recycling. Ourshiwann plumbing and nourishment. The question would be whether the food component was edible and nutritional for humans.
He limped back to the place where he had fallen through. He wondered how the spiders got in and out. Then a thought struck him – they could have hidden down here, when they were attacked. He whirled around, spooked, imagining one of the spiders lurking in the shadows. His logical mind tried to dismiss this as irrational, but he felt sure he was being watched.
“Sandy!” he shouted. “Sandy?” No answer. He heard a shuffling to his left. He fumbled for his pulse pistol but couldn’t find it – it must have fallen out of his holster when he fell. He couldn’t see it anywhere. “Who’s there?” he said, immediately feeling like a soon-to-be dead schmuck in a cheap retro-slasher vid. Anyway, he thought, the spider race wouldn’t know English or possibly any spoken language, since from all accounts their communication was entirely visual.
But he did get an answer, a lilting human voice. “Micah, is that you?”
Micah stared, open-mouthed. Rashid walked hesitantly towards him into the light, and almost tripped over a pipe. Micah realised that he couldn’t see. Then, as Rashid’s face came into view under one of the light sources, Micah saw why.
“Micah,” Sandy yelled from above, “are you okay? They’re on their way. And Jennifer and Dimitri called, they’ve found something... Micah, are you okay? Is everything alright?”
No, he thought, staring into Rashid’s haunted, scorched face. We’re a long way from alright. “Call Blake,” he shouted. “Tell him…” Tell him what? Here’s Rashid, alone, blind, without his ship, without two thousand people including Pierre and Kat. Vince had been right all along.
“Tell him to send a sling-jet. I’ve found Rashid.”
Sandy didn’t answer. He wasn’t surprised. Despite himself, the analyst part of his brain kicked in with this fresh piece of data, another possible event in his mental simulation confirmed. Micah didn’t need to run the calcs to know their outlook had just gotten a whole lot worse.
Chapter 7
Subterfuge
Louise paced like a caged lion at the Holoseum sensing an approaching kill. But a nagging doubt kept rearing its ugly head. Since being shot in the back of the head back on Earth by her former partner and lover Vince, she’d been consumed by thoughts of revenge. However, the Q’Roth re
-generation procedure had changed her. She could feel it, like quicksilver running in her veins. She’d gained a reputation as a ruthless killer long ago, but there had always been some warmth buried deep inside, embers somewhere of the fresh young teacher she’d been before the War and its endless killing. Now it was as if those embers had been snuffed out, leaving only burnt charcoal.
Each day it bothered her a little less. She had a suspicion Sister Esma may have asked the Q’Roth psychosurgeons to do some special ‘rework’ on her, to keep her on track so she finished the job. Alternatively, they’d had to use too much Q’Roth DNA to replace parts of her cortex blown out by Vince’s pulse bullet. Either way, she didn’t like it. She’d always been her own boss, in charge of herself. Louise had no qualms about following dark pathways, as long as it was her choice.
She watched her two fellow Alicians, staring rapt at their consoles – possibly more in order that they didn’t have to face her, rather than because they were busy. Fine, let them sweat. She stared first at the Norwegian male, Jarvik, the original blond Aryan poster-soldier, muscles semi-flexed, proud cheekbones and a wide brow – she would have him again tonight, with or without Hannah this time. Her eyes flicked in the willowy Brit’s direction. Unlike Jarvik’s glacier-cool stability, Hannah was jittery as a sparrow, her straggly ginger hair swishing from side to side as she worked at her console. Louise decided she’d have them both tonight: she’d begun to doubt Hannah’s loyalty, and had learned long ago how to unmask deception and betrayal during sex.
“Update,” she barked, knowing Hannah would react first.
“We’ve isolated two trails, but haven’t been able to find the third, even though we’re scanning vast sectors of space. They appear to be using random jumps. We don’t even know if they mean to converge somewhere. Their pattern is erratic. Maybe they’re desperate, running blind.”
Nothing new, she thought, Hannah was the least incisive of the two. She waited.
