Mik nodded silently. His face was a nightlit shadow, bisected by the dull glow from the axial light pump and the darkness of the doorway. “Move on out,” he said. “What went wrong was Boris. We all figured that if Anubis locked one of us down he'd tear them limb from limb; instead he started asking questions.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
He shook his head dismissively. “Need to know.”
Oshi blinked slowly, stared at him with heavy-lidded eyes. “Did you, now? Well, then.” She hefted her firearm. “Where to?”
“Meeting place near the old central Temple of Osiris. Like I said, Anubis doesn't use it: and it's defensible against the goons in the short term.” Mik headed off round the back of the accommodation block, pausing whenever Oshi got too far behind. “That's what we need.”
Buildings bulked like decaying teeth in the nightlight, dimly illuminated by the nocturnal radiance of the axial light pump. Shadowy doors clustered around the stumps of bulbous habitats and agorae, living places and social arenas. Stump-nosed rodents looked up suspiciously as they passed, then bent back to their diet of casual litter. A soft breeze blew. Oshi tugged her jacket tighter across her shoulders, glancing into quiet corners as she passed.
By the vision of her altered eyes, the townscape was a mass of intricate spiderwebs, violet pathways and floating designs that hung upon the air like mystic flags. Her wisdom cache kicked in, giving a meaning to the virtual overlay. “Is it always this busy around here?” she asked.
“Busy? You mean the –” Mik stopped again and peered at her in the gloom. “You can see the wisdom environment directly?”
“I'm no drone. I've just got an optic server. There's a lot of heavy traffic tonight. Way more than you'd expect for a normal ecology. I don't know much about oneils like this, but if Anubis knows –”
“Bad news.” Mik glanced around twitchily. “I really don't think we can afford for that to happen. Do you see any goons?”
Oshi scuffed at the ground, glanced round edgily. “The Goon Squad are a sick joke. If Anubis really knew what he was doing – he has control of the colony resources – he wouldn't piss around with macroforms and living weapons; I think he's lost it. I want to find out more. Don't you?”
“I'm not sure it matters. Look, lets go where we're going then talk about this some more. It's interesting but I'd rather not stick around here.”
They passed trees and carefully cultivated stellae of synthetic life, glittering patterns of engineered mist that fluttered along the ground with the delicate touch of insect life. Living stalactites arched overhead: the pebbles on the path hummed with warmth from below. Nightrunning voles twitched the garden corners clean. In the distance, a fountain sputtered softly upon stone. The path crossed a footbridge of wood above a trickling stream lined with green moss, turned black by the nightlight. Convergent sparks of silver pointed Oshi towards a major pipe junction. It's so beautiful: such a shame it's got to be terminated. She glanced sidelong at Mik. I hope the damage can be restricted ... she thought of Raisa, blinking back powerful emotions, fear and loathing and betrayal; a complex urge to ensure her own abandonement before it was too late. Before she had to feel something more than passing lust, transient narcissism.
“What's that?” Oshi squinted into the night, looking ahead. She pointed for Mik's benefit.
“Shit!” A corpse lay beside the path in front of them; despite being dead, it was gruesomely lively. Oshi walked towards it; Mik grabbed her arm. “Don't. If that's what I think it is –”
“Your people did that?” Oshi stared at the body, fascinated and revolted. Bizarre terratomae sprouted from it. Grey nodes of neuroectoderm protruded from the skin in irregular patches, whilst squirming reddish masses of myocardium pulsed in the orbits of the eye sockets. The protruding tongue blossomed into a bush of black hairs. A fine web of whitish, thread-like worms twisted and burrowed away from the body wherever it lay in contact with the ground. Mushrooming pillars of hyphae tunnelled away into the nearby bushes, connected indistinctly to the structures in the soil by a network of ganglia.
“Living weapon,” Mik said, staring at it warily. “The tapeworm. Looks like Raisa did her bit. It's very dangerous but it looks like it's still sessile, not capable of attacking. Don't, whatever you do, let it touch you.”
The thing jerked convulsively, two new shoots emerging from what had been its left thigh. They twitched, blindly seeking the cool soil in a trophic movement as ancient as plant life. Oshi gagged at the stench, a blocked drain aroma stuffed with essence of decaying cheese. Her stomach churned with a revolting hunger. She breathed out deeply; it seemed to work. “Let's go round. What's a safe distance?”
“There isn't one. Or at least there won't be, by morning. That's all on schedule, at least. Follow me ...” They circled it then hurried along the path, ignoring the neomort behind them even when the chittering of its neural interfaces threatened to swamp wisdom access.
“That's revolting. Is it part of your strategy? How many of them are there?”
“Just the one, I think. You can ask Lorma when she shows. It was her group that designed them.”
Oshi glanced over her shoulder, once. “I believe I will.”
They came upon a natural ampitheatre, a conical depression in a dusty hillside, open to one side. Stone tombs overlooked it on three sides, complex jokes laughing silently at imaginary ancient lives. The temple was fronted by a squat complex of stone blocks and glaçis-sloping rooftops, spurious and discordant in the controlled environment of the colony.
“Is this it?”
“Ack,” said Mik. “The Temple of Osiris. It's mostly empty. A hollow shell. I told you Anubis didn't like it; he never finished the interior. Part of it's a storage facility for old building materials: the rest is disused. We're due in it in fourteen minutes.”
“That's good.” Oshi glanced round, eyeing the front of the Temple. Her heart sank: too many windows, too many doors. All dark, all vacant. The building looked like a derelict shell. “Shit. Where do we meet? Where's our cover?”
“Inside that. Come on!” Mik hauled off towards the front entrance.
Oshi called after him: “where is everybody?”
“Appearences are deceptive.” Mik climbed the front step, shoved the door in: darkness beckoned, revealing a tangle of leaf-mold on the floor. “You think we'd hold a party and invite everyone? Goon Squad included, you bet!”
Oshi followed, holding her gun ready. Suspicion plagued her: not of Mik herself, but of Mik's perceptions of the environment. Too convenient, too shallow and friendly. A disused palace? Either Anubis's totally dumb, or ...
Despite the gloom she could see inside the disused building. The room fronting the door was a wide vestibule with a high ceiling: behind it corridors ran into the shadows around either side of a central core. She looked down. Beneath a thin layer of dust and rubbish, the floor was fine-polished marble. Witness my works, all ye who enter here. She shivered and listened. Wisdom caught nothing. “Better close the door,” she murmured. “You never know who might come calling.”
Mik shoved the heavy door to, dropped a surprisingly solid bolt through rough-looking hooks behind it. “This way.” He retreated into the darkness, following the leftmost corridor. It wound round the central core, through a door that scraped as it opened: then into a dim-lit room of indistinct proportions.
“So glad you could make the party,” said Boris, shuffling out from behind a partition. Stopped short before the barrel of Oshi's weapon: “I was going to thank you for rescuing me from Anubis's clutches,” he said. His voice was hoarse and slightly slow, pausing on the edge of phrases as if he was unsure whether or not to continue. “Were you followed?”
“Doubtful,” said Mik. Behind her, Oshi clicked on her safety catch, looked about silently. “Who else is about? Or coming? Is this all there is?”
“Parveen, Ishmael, Raisa, Johann, Lorma ... not Joshua.” His cheek twitched. “Joshua felt the need for a bit of exe
rcise. Very conveniently.”
“The worm ...” Mik asked: “that was Joshua? On the path?”
“What?” Boris blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“The worm,” Mik repeated, slowly and loudly. “We passed Joshua. Joshua, remember? We triggered the tapeworm. And you let him loose with that thing running inside him?”
Boris looked doubtful. “Nobody told me,” he remarked. “Are you sure –”
“Will somebody explain what's going on?” asked Oshi. Boris looked at her as if he'd only just seen her. “I know you're making a move on Anubis. Couldn't you be a bit less obscure?”
“Yes, certainly,” said Boris. “Hey, over here.” He turned and shuffled behind the head-high partition. Oshi followed him, eyes searching the dark corners of the room. There were more partitions, floor-mounted and thick, arranged in a maze of turnings and twists. Boris retreated to a small cubby, out of sight of the windows and the doorway; he'd furnished it with aluminium cargo pods and a night-light. Something that might have been a spider – if spiders stood three metres tall at the shoulder and had black ceramic carapaces – bestrode the highest pod; it stood still as a statue, save for an antenna that twitched occasionally in the twilight.
“I've been tracing the goon squad command stream. Anubis doesn't seem to have clued in on where we are yet.” He glanced at his feet. “The plan is to release a post-lamarkian organism – a genetic bomb – that will render the colony utterly uninhabitable to most life forms in about, ah, three days. That wipes out the Goon squad and everything else down here – including us. Except in that time scale we go up top and hit Anubis very hard. We've set up some ... bombs. Lumps of thermite all over the high-gain antennae in the axial manufacturing zones. When they go off, they will temporarily sever the Dreamtime link to Pascal. Anubis looses contact with his mind, twelve light-seconds away; all we have to deal with afterwards is a jackal-headed freak. In that time frame we take the axial redoubt and hole up, then clean out the colony. Once we've done that, we're in a very strong negotiating position. It's a risk, but there's reason to believe we'll succeed. Plus, we've got to do it right now. The radiation levels are still rising; only the axial redoubt is shielded sufficiently well to protect us against a local supernova, if that's what we're seeing the wavefront from. Plus, if we don't do it now Anubis will figure out what's happening. So ...”
“Neutralize Anubis. Then what?” asked Oshi.
Boris paused before replying. “Find out what's really going on,” he said. “There are ships out there: about eighty high delta-vee freighters capable of going anywhere in the system, and several smaller craft. If we have control of the hub communications array we can take control of them and use them as probes. The ambient microwave background is up seven degrees. It's getting hot out there and we need to know why – urgently – but not as urgently as we need to get rid of Anubis.”
“You may not have much time,” said Oshi. “Did you get the equipment I asked for?”
Boris shrugged. “We may not have enough time, indeed. It's over there.”
Oshi followed his outstretched arm. A fat viewing tank squatted in the middle of a circle of ripped-open packing crates, trailing an umbilical of cables that terminated in one wall. “Shit. It's got wires. What kind of junk –”
“No junk,” said Mik. “That's shielding.”
“Huh.” She walked over to it, inspected the control panel critically. “You said there'd be other people here?”
“Any time now,” he said.
“Who's due?” Boris asked him.
“The climb team.” Mik sat down opposite the door and laid his gun across his knees. “It's going to be a long night.”
Oshi blinked. Her stored wisdom checked over the control layout, suggested some strategies for figuring it out, then admitted defeat. “Shit.” She poked at the bulky manual power toggle, waited for the tank to come to life. A microcosm dropped away into space where the plastic cube had perched a moment before: a synthetic hologram. At the centre of it floated a tiny, silver sausage capped at either end by an out-turned cup. Forty kilometres ... that scales to a five hundred klick proxmity zone, right? “Know how to operate one of these, anybody?”
“Ack.” Mik stood up, stretched, and walked over. “What do you want to know?”
“How to adjust the scale factor. Like this.” Oshi demonstrated what she wanted. “And I need viewport control with six full degrees of freedom. How about –”
“There.” Mik showed her. “It sucks, but it's clean. You've got a trusted channel to the phased array tracking grid. What are you looking for?”
“This,” said Oshi, and zoomed out the viewport until the entire solar system dwindled to fill the innermost volume of the hologram. “And that.”
“What is it?”
Oshi fiddled with some controls. Suddenly the tank flared with blue-white light from a point just outside the orbit of the gas giant Turing. “Gamma spectrum, point five three three megaelectron volts. That's a positronium reaction.” She glanced up at Mik, her face livid and deathly in the video overspill. “We've got a visitor. Better get Boris.”
“What kind of visitor?”
“I don't know. But it's burning antimatter bright enough to light up the entire system. Hot enough to screw the hell out of anything that isn't dug in behind a layer of rock. I'd say it's an Ultrabright artefact; some kind of attack craft. And if you follow it's course –” she pointed at the tank, plotted a red course vector on top of it “– guess who's coming to dinner?”
Over the next three hours people began to arrive by ones and twos, ghosting in furtively and talking in hushed voices. They all told the same story: checkpoints elluded, tracker programs spoofed, the mechanical priesthood of a mad god deceived by a combination of determination and desperation. “We need out,” said Lorma, the tall, distinguished-looking developmental engineer who headed the bioweapons group: “it's been too long. We've been falling apart for years. If we don't make one final push, then –”
Oshi watched from the cover of her preoccupation with the sensor tank. Raisa arrived in company. She didn't acknowledge Oshi: instead she deferred to Lorma, who began asking pointed questions. Raisa looked shaken, as if she'd witnessed a terrible accident from the sidelines. Lorma, in contrast, was matter-of-fact, reassuring, and coldly precise. “You passed it to Joshua? Who suggested him – Mik? How predictable. When was that? Ah. Yesterday. I see. It's a good thing he didn't ask my advice first.” Lorma turned round: “has anyone seen Mikhail?” she demanded.
“He went that-a-ways,” grunted Ish, a dark soldierly presence hunched over a crate of half-unpacked climbing equipment. “With Boris, to the primal mound. 'Bout an hour ago”
“I see. Well if you can reach him –” Ish didn't look up. “– When you reach him, tell him he's been an idiot. Letting off a teleological weapon is bad enough but not getting us all into bioisolation beforehand is just stupid unless he wants to see zombies –”
“Teleological weapon?” Oshi asked, looking up.
“Later.” To Ish: “get your master back here at once. We'll have to act fast to stop this turning into a meltdown.” To Oshi: “deploying the tapeworm without proper restrictions was a bad idea. Raisa should have known better than to go along with it. We'll lose everything in the environment that isn't backed up –”
“We'll do that anyway. Did Mik tell you about the radiation problem?”
“No.” Lorma stared at Oshi. “What radiation problem? You're the new arrival? What's going on? Why did Mik leave?”
“He went off an hour back with Boris,” said Ish, slowly picking up a spool of rope. “Nobody's telling me anything so I can't exactly fill you in on things, can I?”
Raisa, Oshi noted, had not said a word during the whole conversation. She was busy unpacking another crate full of what might be first-aid supplies or bioweapon cultures. For her to be so subdued was probably a sign of something bad. “There's a radiation weapon entering the system. It's g
etting hot slowly: pretty soon it'll get hot fast. Whatever it is is on a hyperbolic orbit past Turing and we're going to get scorched sometime in about forty-eight hours, if we don't get some additional shielding up fast. Mik says the only suitable redoubt is already occupied. Does that answer your question?”
“And Mik's gone to the primal mound?” Lorma looked worried. “Yes, I suppose it does; he's lost it, blowing the tapeworm too early. That leaves me in charge here then. Alright –”
“No it doesn't,” said Oshi, standing up. She glanced round: funny the way a grenade launcher draws all eyes even when you're not pointing it at anyone. “He left some very precise instructions. And I suggest you listen to them before you do anything else.”
“You.” Lorma walked towards her slowly. “Tell me. For the last time, what is going on?”
“What's going on is this entire system is coming under attack by something we don't understand. If we don't get Anubis out of the axial redoubt and take it for ourselves we're going to fry, regardless of whatever's in that gadget you cooked up. So as soon as Boris and Mikhail get back we're going to go for a little night climbing –”
“Oh shit.” Raisa was shaking her head. “If that's what he thinks then he is an idiot.”
“What do you mean?” asked Oshi.
“She means he doesn't understand the tapeworm,” Lorma explained condescendingly. “It's not just a random bioweapon capable of taking out things like the Goon Squad; it's a teleological device, something from the dark anthropic zone – a universe in which life forms like it could evolve naturally is not one in which humanity would ever appear. I suppose you could call it an artificial demon: a Lovecraft device. It works by systematically evolving into a dissipative system. It becomes more complex as it eats things; it preserves their informational content rather than randomizing them. It starts with the genome of a tapeworm, but rapidly gets more sophisticated. As it grows it can acquire conscious metaprocesses: it takes over the bodies of the organisms it's absorbed and makes them perform useful tasks. The whole idea was to get into the redoubt first, then release the tapeworm. He set it off too early. Which wouldn't be a problem in its own right except –”
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