Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)
Children of Ruin: Past 1 – Chapter 5

Siri Skai would be in charge of the orbiting module in Baltiel’s absence. She and four others would have relatively little to do except continue to round off the rough edges of the database the computer was assembling on the Nod biosphere (Senkovi’s joke name having gradually infiltrated the collective consciousness). Of course, technically Baltiel himself should be staying up top and delegating the ground party, but he was damned if he was going to. This was the day he had been waiting for, in and out of sleep over the years since their arrival here. He would not only be on the shuttle down, he would be the first damned human being to set foot on this world. Nobody was taking that from him.

Remotes had been down there for a long time now, setting things up. There was a habitat ready to receive them, filled with an atmosphere not vastly different to that outside—a little lower pressure, a little more oxygen. An Earth-ish atmosphere, though, and the gravity would be real, even if a little stronger than they were used to. He had been living in space, sometimes in rotational gravity, sometimes in none, for too long.

Of course, the plan was purely to run a research mission—the research mission he had invented to replace what they were actually supposed to be up to out on Nod. He shouldn’t be thinking about the place as “home.” It would be a poky little series of interconnected domes, barely more personal space than on the module they’d separated from the Aegean and left in orbit when the rest of the ship went off on the road to Damascus.

Senkovi and his damn fool names. But they always seemed to stick. No doubt the colonists would have their own sanitized monikers for both planets when they arrived. Or maybe not. That depended on just how badly things actually went back home. Senkovi said they’d get boatloads of desperate refugees turning up at every terraforming station, clamouring to be housed and fed. The great human diaspora, but not how anyone had envisaged it.

Baltiel had sat down to a meal with all his crew, not long ago—he’d tweaked the rotas especially so that everyone would be awake and ready for the historic launch. The mood had been cautiously optimistic. Earth was very far away, after all, and everyone was sure that things there would sort themselves out. The mysteries of Nod were far more immediate for them.

Skai had even wondered about harvesting something edible from the planet, because Senkovi was a long way from commercial fisheries over on Damascus. Skai was a geologist, though, and tended not to read the monograms of other specialities. Ninety per cent of Nod proteins were indigestible to humans—not immediately poisonous but just inert stuff that would clog up your gut and probably kill you eventually from the levels of arsenic and mercury the planet seemed to thrive on. The remaining ten per cent were not economical to separate out.

Baltiel had expected to be the great expert on the land of Nod by now. Instead he felt as though their accumulated knowledge of the planet was to the mind what the alien flesh would be to the stomach, almost impossible to assimilate. It wasn’t that the automated survey had turned up blank, quite the opposite. They had a vast wealth of information about the planet, and no way to readily put it together in any kind of order. He felt like a schoolchild taught history as a list of dates and names of kings, without context to let him draw meaning from the information.

Nodan organisms were organized into cells, just like Earth creatures, although the cells themselves were very different. They were smaller, for one thing, no bigger than an E. coli bacterium on average. There was no nucleus, but some manner of transmissible organization, incredibly dense, was implanted in the membrane. Lante, wearing her biochemist hat, was talking about atomic-level information storage, more compact than DNA but perhaps more energy-intensive to produce. Every cell seemed to react to light, even the ones buried deep in the bodies of creatures. Why? Nobody had a good theory. Plenty of the organisms they had looked at appeared to be metabolizing sunlight, some sessile-like plants, others highly mobile, suggesting that their mechanism (as yet unknown but there were some fascinating suggestions) was far more efficient than plant photosynthesis—and there appeared to be no hard plant/animal divide on Nod.

Almost every organism was radially symmetrical, top and bottom but no front or back, save where evolution had twisted them round to let them flap through the skies dorsal-side first. Oh, and many of them were only partially cellular, with large portions of their bodies composed of a plasticky tissue that seemed almost inanimate and which was manipulated and deformed by contracting fibres—the jellyfish, which comprised a significant phylum of Nodan life, were all sail and hardly any actual ship.

Baltiel wasn’t someone whose mind leapt instantly to thoughts of commercial exploitation, but Nod had already shown him forms of information storage, energy conversion and super-strong, super-light materials that Earth technology could not currently replicate. And yet, at the same time, the Nodan ecosystem felt… young. Aside from some truly colossal medusae-forms nothing on land seemed bigger than a medium-sized dog. There was nothing like a forest (nothing like wood), nothing much like an internal skeleton. Everything sprawled outwards rather than fighting for height. He wondered if this was what Earth would have felt like back in the Devonian era or some such, when life was just encroaching on land.

What might they become? But he would never know, and he had a bitter certainty that human presence in this solar system meant that nobody would, that the future of life on Nod was going to be brutally curtailed.

He had not sent anything home about their discoveries. As far as he knew, everyone had respected his orders on that front. But it wouldn’t matter as soon as the next wave of Earthlings arrived, ready to wash away all these fragile marks in the sand prior to building some prime beachfront property on any habitable planet they found. He had daydreamed about putting plague beacons in orbit all over the planet, warning off the future.

So instead he was indulging himself. He and his crew would do what they could to curate this riot of weirdly unambitious-seeming life while they were still able to. There would be a record for later generations, even if there would be nothing else.

He sent a call to Skai over the module’s network and she confirmed her readiness, highlighting the green system readouts. He checked to ensure that his ground team had reached the shuttle. Erma Lante (biologist and medic) and Gav Lortisse (geothermal engineer and general technician) were there, and Kalveen Rani (meteorologist and pilot) was just on her way. She had a message pending and he checked it anxiously, expecting something to have arisen to delay his destiny—faults, storms, something. Instead she was recommending he speak to Senkovi. He had some meteorological data for me to analyse but when it came through it was nonsense. He may be having problems.

Baltiel felt he had plenty of his own problems, to which he really didn’t want to add Senkovi. The man was supposed to be so damned self-sufficient, after all.

He set his feet on the brief path to the shuttle bay and a sudden rush of excitement seized him, like a child about to go on a much-dreamt-of holiday. He’d been living in this tin can for too long; subjectively for years, objectively (meaning by the ship’s clock) for decades. Like a child, again, but one who’d been staring at the presents under the tree for a generation, not forbidden to open them but exercising inhuman self-restraint.

Like a child. Nobody on his team would describe him so: he was the man who was always calm, who always had an answer, who could even—miracle of miracles—talk Senkovi up or down or sideways from wherever the man’s thought processes had led him. And yet, inside, Baltiel felt a bubbling, innocent glee. The timing of the mission, however well accounted for in the records, was more to do with him having finally exhausted his iron reserves of patience. Today was Christmas and he was about to tear off the wrapping paper.

Still, he was Overall Command, and Senkovi’s little fiefdom was still part of Overall, at least nominally, so he had the module signal its other-self, the Aegean.

“Hi, boss,” came the delayed response, by which time Baltiel was in the shuttle double-checking Lortisse and Rani as they double-checked each others’ pre-flight checks, belt and braces all the way down.

“Siri’s chasing up some met data from you,” Baltiel prodded.

“Oh, hum, yes. No, not a priority right now.” By which time everyone on the ground crew had checked everyone else’s sums and Siri Skai had confirmed their launch window and the excited child taking up space in Baltiel’s head was virtually blocking out everything else. And Senkovi sounded off balance, which should have been a huge worry given how the man kept his insides inside, but surely it couldn’t be now that things went catastrophically wrong. Not on the very edge of departure.

And yet… “Disra, what’s up?”

“We’re just having a few system glitches, boss, nothing to worry about.” Senkovi’s tone, when it finally came back, was transparent. He’s screwed up somehow and he doesn’t want me to check up. And Baltiel could check up, of course. He could query the Aegean with his command access and then, doubtless, cut through all the baffles and screens Senkovi had festooned the problem data with. Or he could just let Senkovi get on with it and deny the man the chance to rain on Baltiel’s greatest ever parade.

He made a command decision that, even then, he knew was on the wrong side of cautious. He’d been cautious for twenty years, though. Time for one glorious, reckless act. Cutting the connection, he decided to let Senkovi scoop his own crap without supervision, this one time, and hoped that the man didn’t end up finger-painting it all over the walls.

He refused to lose the launch window. He couldn’t know, at the time, just what was riding on the decision.

“Skai?”

“When you are.” Skai and the rest of the module crew were already settled in to continue the data gathering. Most of them would be back in cold sleep as soon as the shuttle was safely down. He was surprised there hadn’t been more jostling for a place on the ground, but going to live with the jellyfish didn’t appeal to everyone.

The shuttle bay was evacuated around them, the air jealously grabbed back before it could be wasted. The bay doors opened, the clamps released and the rotation of the module gently released the shuttle out into space along a perfectly plotted pitch.

Baltiel had chosen the salt marsh biome for his base because it was more hospitable than the searing inland deserts. Not that their suits didn’t have temperature control, but the less the technology had to work, the longer it would last without maintenance. Of the land biomes it seemed the most populous, too—where an anthropocentric eye could perhaps see evolution striving to produce something more. And that was an illusion, surely. Probably the great fonts of evolutionary activity were elsewhere, and left to their own devices there would have been some great new wave of development from the deep sea, or the floating creatures of the upper atmosphere. But moot, now. We can only observe the present, before we go on to destroy the future. The thought made Baltiel so angry, but unless the commander of the next ship along was also a radical conservationist, how could any of this life have long-term prospects? Oh, surely individual species would survive alongside humans, or be relegated to reserves and zoos, but the ecological history of Earth showed how pitiful such measures were. One of the terraforming programme’s great triumphs was being able to reconstruct whole Earth ecosystems—systems that didn’t exist as anything other than deathbed wounded back on their original planet. Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in. We wrecked it all, back home, Baltiel thought. And by the time we understand Nod we’ll have wrecked it here as well. For a moment he’d had a mad dream of an Earth-mimic Damascus and an alien Nod side by side, co-existing. The spiralling bad news from home had ground down that dream into a kind of bleak nihilism. We will learn what we can and record it. I will be able to say, “I walked there.” They can’t take that from me, no matter who comes. Even the thought of Earth, the political rants, the casualty figures, the spiralling insanity, made his gut clench, but he consciously banished the images and medicated the gut reaction, just like they all were doing these days. I will not let a little global war ruin my moment. And it’s all history anyway, by the time it reaches us.

The shuttle was falling into its pre-planned descent, Rani keeping a close eye in case she needed to intervene. Lortisse had a presence in the shuttle performance system, but it was more out of habit than genuine worry. Lante appeared to be dozing, even as they came into contact with the upper atmosphere. Baltiel himself was staring at the images—views of Nod from the module, from the shuttle: a world of brown, black and red, far from the green-blue jewel of a terraformed New Earth.

A transmission came in from the Aegean and he looked at it, despite everything. What now? But it was gibberish, just strings of alphanumeric characters chopped up to look like language but devoid of meaning.

A practical joke? Because that was something on Senkovi’s file, one of his ways of impressing on lesser people just how clever he was, although this didn’t seem up to his usual standard. He sent a query back.

They were going for a shallow descent to save wear and tear on the shuttle as much as possible, but also so Baltiel could use the ventral cameras to get a new fly-by view of his domain. Below them was the obsidian expanse of the ocean. The wine-dark sea. Too high right now to see anything more, but they would get a good skim over the waves before they crossed past the coast.

“Hey, boss, no, all fine.” 8jsgjg r jg81 ufwytmv-i9r f “All under control here. All fine. How’s the flight?” kksn hu9 d i99t k.

“Disra, what the hell?” Abruptly there was a very uneasy feeling in the pit of Baltiel’s stomach because he was getting a lot of ghosting nonsense from the Aegean around Senkovi’s signal, multiple separate transmissions from the ship that manifested as sudden intrusions of nonsense audio shutting out the man’s voice channel.

“It’s… Look, boss, don’t panic. I’m going to have to turn it off and on again.”

I made the wrong call. He was in the Nod orbital’s only shuttle and it was committed to the approach now. There was no way he could go and help Senkovi. Although even if we were still sitting back up there in orbit, it’d take the best part of a year with the positions the planets are in right now. “Explain,” he demanded curtly.

“I’m having some system infiltration issues,” came Senkovi’s voice, trying and failing to be casual about it. “I…” hhs i4 gk; gg 8lubj2 “I need to restart the ship’s systems from scratch, boss. I’m really sorry. It’s a bit” n83.ljsg.n hgikkkd “screwed up.”

Baltiel’s insides were screwing themselves up, partly in worry, partly furious that somehow Senkovi had managed to piss on his moment of glory. “Explain,” he repeated, and then, looking at an initial analysis of the nonsense transmissions, “Are you being hacked?”

“No. No, no. Yes.” Senkovi’s delayed response sounded as though it was somehow funny, whilst simultaneously being horribly serious. “Look, I’m sending the others off on the shuttle, just in case things,” 9wks rj i934mmgpppphhhhheeelllohellohellowhatwhat “uh, just in case things go really badly, which they won’t, but it’s all a bit,” whatwhat95mg; hooqueryquery “you know, kind of… I’ve said that if things go really badly they should skip over to Nod and throw themselves on your mercy. Not their fault. All mine, okay?”

“Disra, just tell me what the hell!” Baltiel had already shouted over the man’s babble. The increasingly organized nature of the other signals was prickling the hairs on his neck. Has he kickstarted the ship into full AI or something?

“Victim of my own success,” came Senkovi into a sudden silence as the other transmissions cut off. “I’ve clamped down on bandwidth but I can’t keep them bottled up. I’m taking it all offline. All you need to know. Normal service will resume shortly.”

“That is not all I need to know!” Baltiel was trying to interrogate the Aegean but, between Senkovi trying to cover himself and whatever chaos was actually going on over there, he wasn’t getting a coherent picture. On the screens in front of him, the Nodan seascape was lost in the shuttle’s rushing progress, and now there was red desert below. According to his diagnostics there were half a dozen net presences in the Aegean’s system, weird undirected processes lurching around trying to access ship systems.

He’d thought his demand must have come too late, but Senkovi obviously caught it before flipping the switch. “All right, boss, here’s the lowdown,” came the reply. “I may have failed to contain my experimental subjects properly.”

“Explain.”

“I’ve been training them up, teaching them basic communications so they could interact with the equipment on Damascus. They’ll be useful. We’ll need them. Only they’re curious, right? It’s inbuilt with them, and I’ve been using the Rus-Califi viral catalyst to select for that, only I didn’t realize how quickly they’d catch on.”

In the midst of all the man’s justifications, Baltiel suddenly understood what Senkovi meant. “Disra, are you talking about your damned octopodes?”

“Boss, I am.” He sounded partly embarrassed, but also impressed with himself, too, or at least with his pets. “I taught them to access the system, play games, basic teaching stuff, and now they’re past my security and just, you know, poking around. Curious, like I said, only I can’t stop them and they’re screwing everything up. It’s all innocent, but… I made a bit of a monster, boss. Look, I’m suited up and everyone else is getting the fuck out on the shuttle. I’ll fix this.”

“Why aren’t you on the shuttle, Disra?”

“Boss, it’s my bad. I can sort it better from in here. There’s always something you have to go do by hand.”

“Use a remote. Disra, do you hear me?” Baltiel’s own shuttle was beginning its landing approach now. They were over the black and grey mottling of the salt marsh and a flash of white in the distance was the habitat.

“I’m suited up. I have independent power. All set, boss. Got to go.” Senkovi’s voice cracked at the end and Baltiel suddenly understood. His pets. Shutting the ship down was a death sentence for his precious octopodes and he wanted to be there for them, or maybe even save some of them. And probably he’d get killed, and Han and the rest would have to finish the terraforming without either Senkovi’s brilliance or his goddamn molluscs.

With that, Baltiel forced himself to let go. Senkovi had finally found a way to get out from Overall Command, and now neither Baltiel nor any other human agency could help him. It isn’t my problem, he decided. Not for want of trying, but he’s going to have to get out of it himself. He imagined the Aegean as if the ship was literally crawling with Senkovi’s rebellious progeny, monstrous cephalopods blobbering through the compartments waving angry tentacles. Of course, they would be in tanks somewhere, their intrusion purely virtual, and yet irresistible, circumventing everything Senkovi could throw up to keep them out. But then, when you’re designing an interface to let molluscs play computer games you probably don’t build in that much security.

Baltiel had a moment to consider how that was a sequence of words he’d never expected to be relevant in his life, and then they were landing, Rani hovering over the controls like a hawk in case the shuttle’s onboard got it wrong, and Baltiel already had a hand up to release his straps because, goddamn it, he was going to be first on the ground.

****

Amazing.

How quiet.

Almost worth it just for this.

But Senkovi didn’t really believe that. He couldn’t know about Baltiel’s inner child thoughts, but he himself was making a very similar comparison. Only, for him, his inner child had done a very bad thing indeed and, unlike all the other times, hadn’t been able to cover the evidence before being found out. Baltiel is going to have my hide as soon as he’s done playing Lewis and Clark.

Also like a child, some part of him was desperately casting about for some superior authority to blame. Someone should have told me not to. Except that he had worked very hard to abstract himself from any kind of oversight, even the distant watch that Baltiel could have kept over him. Senkovi had been absolutely convinced of the rightness of his own actions, and it had all been wholly amusing until it had become utterly fucked up. It struck him, in a moment of wry self-reflection, that he was the whole terraforming programme in miniature, Kern and Baltiel and all of them. We get them to throw money and resources at us so we can go and be gods somewhere else, because when you were thirty light years from Earth, who was going to tell you to stop?

And now he was standing in a vast silent tomb of a ship, wearing a cumbersome space suit and knowing he had a remarkably long time before the computer system cleansed itself and bootstrapped itself back into being. Han, Poullister and Maylem were kicking back in the shuttle, anxiously waiting to hear from him. If he had been playing it by the book—insofar as this particular book existed—he should have been with them, doing everything remotely. By hand was better, though, especially as Salome had somehow accessed the remote channels and begun to use the machines as bonus limbs in her spirited attempts to dismantle the Aegean to find out what it was and whether she could eat it. Paul had always been Senkovi’s favourite student, meaning he had entirely missed how destructively smart Salome was. And that was not to mention Saul, Ruth, Methuselah (renamed from Peter after he got to ten years without showing signs of ageing), Jezebel and… well, Senkovi had worked quite hard to ensure that casual scrutiny from a distracted Baltiel did not pick up that he now had forty-three octopi on the staff register, all of them of Biblical nomenclature because of the original Paul, and because once he had Damascus and Nod past the censors he might as well stick with a theme. And because it would have annoyed some of the irritating fundamentalists back home had they ever heard about it, and Senkovi loved nothing more than amusing himself.

Forty-three octopodes as Baltiel would say, but Senkovi preferred the feel of the even more incorrect “octopi” on the tongue, and he was used to pleasing himself first and foremost.

And now he was learning just precisely why he had been considered a good second but only when careful Baltiel was there to hold his leash, because he had royally screwed up.

He had known from long before, from his pets back home, that octopi responded very badly to rigid Pavlovian training. They weren’t like rats or pigeons or dogs, who would do the same thing over and over until they had more food than they could eat. Instead, they were curious in a way even dogs weren’t, because evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it. As I am bloody well now having cause to regret.

Senkovi had charged up every portable battery he could find, and now had a trolley of devices to get to the centre of the Aegean. The centre was where the gravity wasn’t, of course, and he had set up his labs there because the octopi got used to not caring much about up and down quickly enough. The Pacific striped octopus had always been his preferred test subject, just as it was his preferred pet. Unlike most of their relatives they were passably social and long-lived, the two major deficiencies that, in Senkovi’s opinion, octopus-kind had been cursed with. They were intellectually agile, too, but that was true across the octopus board. Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.

He had bred several generations, each one further mediated by limited intervention by the Rus-Califi virus. That had been hard, but mostly because he had needed to be ruthless, and Senkovi was soft at heart, especially when it came to the objects of his obsession. The later generations had been markedly better at interacting with abstract devices and operating machinery, and then his lax experimental procedures had borne unexpected fruit. Most of the previous generation had still been around and in contact with his new enfants terrible, and they had started picking up the same behaviours, less directed, but still determinedly exploring the virtual space he gave them access to. The major challenge had been developing cephalopod-friendly interface devices, and Senkovi was aware that his own imagination had been the primary constraint with that. For creatures that were a boneless, infinitely mutable hand with independently sensing and thinking fingers, his pitiful controls were wasting most of their potential. One day they’ll design their own. But that was taking things too far. Or rather, it was stable door after bolting horse because things had already gone too far.

One of his pets had almost opened one of the airlocks before he had jumped in to stop it. Paul had been fighting him for control of the communications suite. Salome had flown wobbling drones through the compartments of the Aegean, opening and closing doors and attacking walls with the cutting torches. All just harmless fun, he assured himself, and yet they had reacted swiftly to his attempts to cut them off. He closed one virtual opening and they squeezed through another, multi-tasking in a way that he—and, eventually, the entire human crew—couldn’t match. In order for them to do the jobs he would need them for, he had been trying to get them to understand the idea of a virtual environment, somewhere that would be workspace, communications suite and interface if they could only perceive it as they did the physical space around them. He had watched generations simply fail, reacting to light and touch and changes of temperature, but stubbornly refusing to make the leap to that abstract level. And then, without him doing anything in particular, without any obvious prompt or warning, Salome was in the system, and the rest all followed, tank after tank of them teaching each other somehow. Abruptly they could all do the virtual exercises, but they weren’t content with that. They expanded their virtual presence as they would their physical one, reaching out to see where the space went, and there they encountered the ship’s systems. And the ship’s systems, of course, connected to the rest of the ship, the air-filled bit that he and the other humans lived in. He hadn’t considered that the bulk of the Aegean would be just a further extension of their online playground.

Senkovi and the others had worked for hours at damage control, finding that the invertebrate test subjects had grasped certain principles of the computer system with sufficient force that they could not be pried loose. A running battle between mammal and mollusc had raged, but the Aegean was a vast and complex beast and there were no convenient bottlenecks to stave off the invaders from inner space. The octopi had the same untethered access as the human crew, and they were playfully pulling everything apart.

He lowered his crate of toys towards the ship’s centre-line until it was just drifting, then he followed after it. The readouts from his HUD told him that the temperature here was dropping, but he had evacuated the space around the tanks so that their heat would take longer to diffuse outwards. This, of course, was the main reason he had stayed behind, out of contact with the human race. He was going to try and save his pets, and he didn’t want Han and the others to laugh at him, to recast him from eccentric to pathetic. But, just like the dog lover who goes back into the burning building to save little Floofums, he was going to try and keep some of his experimental subjects alive until the ship came back online.

Baltiel will want them all dead, he knew, but he could handle Baltiel. He would go against Baltiel if he had to, a full-on war in heaven of angry messages cast across the void.

The nearest tank had shattered, as had the next two. The denizens had, like Senkovi, been too clever for their own good and found some physical egress, and now he’d killed them by evacuating the chamber. He hardened his heart and pushed on until he found one that was intact. His suit lamps shone in, and he saw motion inside, not fleeing the light but approaching it, because the octopi had learned to associate light with entertainment, and the sudden dark and quiet must be profoundly disconcerting for them.

“Hi, Salome.” His voice was loud in his own ears. An alien eye stared at him from within the tank, the skin around it ruffled into angry spikes, awash with red and black pigment as Salome told him precisely what she felt about being denied net access. Senkovi manhandled a heating unit out of the crate and attached it to the tank side. With luck it would keep the water viable until the system was back up. Then he went to the water pump and fumblingly installed a battery unit to keep circulation going, independent of the ship’s own mechanisms. Again, it was a stopgap measure. He went on to the next tank.

He wished he could talk to Han, but he’d cut himself off entirely from their shuttle. He hadn’t wanted to be bothered by their constant enquiries after his safety. He was Disra Senkovi, the man who was an island. Right now he felt his shores eroding. He wanted them to ask, so that he could be aloof and not answer. Floating in the dark in the bowels of a dead ship, surrounded by the living and the dead of his mollusc pets, it was a terrible time for self-knowledge to kick in. There was nobody but the octopi, though, and he felt they were judging him. He was their higher power, after all, who should have ensured they didn’t steal so much fire from heaven that they ended up burning everything to the ground.

He went from tank to tank, restoring warmth and circulation wherever he found live contents. At least a third were already non-viable, either because of the fatal ingenuity of the occupants or because he was too slow. He had thought of the ship as a tomb before, and now it was.

And still the ship was restoring its system, the naive curiosity of the octopi purged from it, and he had hours yet before he could even get a progress report. His own suit was still toasty, but eventually the ship’s warmth would start to leach away and he would learn if he had enough batteries to overcome his own hubris. He settled down beside Paul’s tank, anchored himself there and turned off his lamps to conserve power.

****

Baltiel waited for the alienness to strike him, stepping from the shuttle’s airlock onto the surface of Nod. They could have jockeyed down close enough for the automatics to line up a tunnel between ship and habitat, and Baltiel had nixed the idea because of the slim chance that a slip might have damaged one or the other. In truth, though, he had wanted this: the first foot put down onto another living world, the feel of the atmosphere clenching about him, the gravity, the colour of the sunlight…

And he stood there at the foot of the ramp and there was nothing, almost nothing. So, it wasn’t Earth; neither had the artificial gravity of the Aegean been, or the orbiting module (which had never quite matched its parent ship, for no reason they could ever find). The orange-red of the sun was compensated for by the visor display of his helmet. He could look across the flat expanse of the great salt marsh, all its rivulets and pools and rocky ridges, out to the great darkness of the sea, and he might just be at a somewhat unattractive beach back home. The suit was insulating him from everything; not just a potentially hazardous atmosphere and the radiation of an alien star, but the smells, the sounds, the unalloyed sights that would make it all real. It might just be an underwhelming simulation.

But we’re here. And perhaps it will come yet, waking to a new rhythm, seeing the life first hand.

The others were backing up behind him so he set off, a proud stride no matter how he was feeling about it. Or as proud a stride as the cumbersome suit would allow. Even with its servos smoothing his movements he felt he was lumbering like some antique movie monster. Lante, Lortisse and Rani followed him, a little shambling convoy over the rocks. The going was slippery and uneven; their boots were constantly locking in place, soles moulding to fit the terrain. It was an undignified first parade for humanity, but at least the onlooking aliens were unlikely to take much notice. Baltiel stopped short of the habitat, waving Lante to enter and check that internal conditions matched up to the installation’s readouts. He would be last in, he decided. He would stand out here and take in the landscape, and hope for that feeling to hit him.

Nothing between him and the sea rose past his waist. There were slimy, muddy humps and there were rocks worn down by the constant patience of the tides. Between them was a vast network of hollows and channels, a single body of water at high tide, a thousand, thousand separate ponds at low. It was a complex environment, transformed from moment to moment, the ambassador between the ecologies of the depths and those of the dry interior. If there was anywhere Nodan life might have become complex, then surely it was here.

There were fliers overhead, like gulls. Perhaps they would be the seeds of intelligence. They were active predators; he’d seen footage of them swooping down on luckless marsh-dwellers. They had a hydrostatic skeleton like most life on Nod and flew by rapid inflation and deflation of their broad vanes, a process that looked like stop-motion photography, and like they shouldn’t have any business in the air. They were the most aggressively active things on the planet, the airborne lords of Nod.

On the ground there were plenty of things for them to eat, which would likely be the main subject of Baltiel’s studies for the years to come. Hundreds of different lineages of radially-organized creeping and swimming things called the marsh home, from the microscopic to the tortoises that could reach three feet high. Not actual tortoises, of course, or even much like them, but they secreted stony shells and lumbered about on tubular feet, placidly grazing, and the name had stuck. The fliers obviously liked the taste of them, when they could winkle parts of them from their mobile fortresses. Baltiel watched one now, mindlessly plodding over the path he’d taken from the shuttle. It had six legs, exuded and retracted in turn, and six tentacle limbs it used to scrape and gather its harvest of sessile plant-like creatures. As he watched, the thing slowly let out an arm to touch the very ground Baltiel had trodden. Was some part of its limited sensorium encountering an alien chemical, the residue of his boot soles perhaps? The tortoise seemed to spend a lot of time considering the possibility, but then it set off again, sloping down into the next pool in search of sustenance it could understand.

He turned and followed the others into the habitat.

They didn’t seem to feel the same sense of anticlimax. The air was full of their chatter as they checked in with Skai. Baltiel called up the latest on the Aegean and Senkovi’s idiot games. The ship was still dark, Senkovi’s crew were exchanging anxious communiques with Skai’s people about what happened if it didn’t light back up on schedule. We go in and salvage what’s left, was the obvious answer to that. We find Disra’s body. Nobody was saying it; everyone was thinking it.

Lante gave him a grin. She was a heavyset woman, her hair cropped almost to her skull, her skin ashen in the artificial light. Rani was shorter and darker, always slightly dishevelled; even standing there in her suit it showed in the cant of her helmet. Lortisse was a tall man, half a head over his commander, with a dark beard held back by a net to stop it fritzing with his HUD controls. These were Baltiel’s people, his disciples. Their names would appear in the history books, under his own.

Then Rani was frowning. The expression made it look as though she’d just remembered something she meant to pack. Too late to go back for it now.

He sent her a query over their local net and she linked him in to a transmission from Skai.

“Repeat,” he instructed, rather than having to replay and catch up.

“I said we’ve been getting the strangest signal from Earth. It was only on the news channels first, but now it’s on all of them, every frequency.” Skai’s voice was glitchy with static. “One moment it was the usual war stuff, then it’s just this—”

Her image in their HUD froze, the expression of mild puzzlement on her face drawn out and out until it became unsettling.

“Skai?” Baltiel pinged her, sending a request to connect, and received a scatter of contradictory responses from the network. The others were casting sidelong glances, trying their own diagnostics and getting nowhere.

For a moment Skai’s image was alive again, skipping straight from mild puzzlement to mid-panic. “—od, the system, it…”—stutter, freeze—“contact with the shuttle. Han, Han, do you…” A staccato pattern of flashes that hurt the eye, as though some message was being beamed through their pupils to scratch madly at their retinas. “—coming down… ife support, someone… ease.” They had no visuals now, just that one woman’s voice, torn up by static, far away and getting further. In the background was interference and feedback and, if Baltiel stretched his imagination, terrified screaming. “Anyone?” Skai shouted. “Anyone?” But there was no-one, and a moment later not even her.

Baltiel and his crew stared at each other, not quite processing what had happened. Each of them kept trying to connect to the module, receiving nothing but static, white noise they couldn’t parse.

“The hell…?” Lante’s was the first human voice to break the quiet. Everything they had heard, they heard via their comms implants, which should have kept them all one happy family even at this distance.

“Is this one of Senkovi’s jokes or something?” Lortisse added. He didn’t like Senkovi much.

Rani was tweaking the parameters of their instruments to try and get past whatever was blocking transmissions. Right then, nobody really thought anything had gone wrong, not with anything save communications.

Baltiel took a deep breath, knowing he had to make a command decision but too short of information to know what it should be.

The lights died, first the lambent illumination around them, then the dull red emergency lamps, and then, last of all, the purple glow of the screen Rani was looking into. They were left with a residual amber radiance from everywhere and nowhere; the sunlight from outside leaking a little through the fabric of the habitat.

Baltiel pinged Rani or tried to. He had no sense of signal sent, certainly no confirmation it had been received. He queried his suit. Nothing. He moved, feeling the full weight of all that cumbersome protection. The servos ground at the joints, refusing to assist him.

A white beam flicked on: Rani had an emergency torch and was flashing it around. Baltiel saw her mouth moving and lurched closer.

“Suit’s dead!” He read her lips as much as anything, in the shaking light.

“How much air?” Lortisse must be half deafening himself. His voice sounded like someone in another room with the door closed.

“Can’t tell!” Rani yelled distantly back. “All dead.”

Baltiel went to signal that they should have at least eight hours each, but of course there were no comms. In-suit exposure to the outside had only been planned for the few steps between shuttle and habitat, but he was diligent, as were they all. The suits had been topped up, that much he remembered. Except he was feeling dreadfully short of breath already, which was impossible. The pumps should have their own power, should be independent of any failure of the suit’s systems.

Unless they had been explicitly told to shut down. It was theoretically possible, as part of a maintenance cycle. Everything’s shut down. An attack. Nothing’s working except us.

“Shuttle!” Lortisse shouted, lurching for the habitat airlock, which stayed resolutely closed. He fumbled for the manual release, winching the near door open, shuddering and gasping until he fell to his knees. Grimly, Baltiel took a leaden step over and found the emergency release on the man’s helmet, cracking it open so that Lortisse exchanged the dying air in his helmet for the slowly dying air of the habitat. He followed by removing his own, gasping at the rubber-smelling pocket of atmosphere he suddenly had access to, and soon enough they’d all done the same.

“The hell?” Lante repeated, clearly audible now they’d all decided to do the dumb thing together. The other two looked as though they’d already got it, Baltiel decided—Rani definitely, Lortisse just piecing it together now.

“We were shut down.” Because it needed to be said and he was in charge. “An attack, from home. An attack from thirty years ago. The war…”

“We need to get comms back,” Rani said. “The module…”

“We need to survive.” Baltiel was already taking inventory. They had food here. They had water, though they couldn’t reprocess waste until they were able to restart that part of the system. They had limited air. Could they get the scrubbers and the pumps online? Could they get access to the suit tanks? Again, he tried to link to the others, to throw the problem to them and have their minds work on it in that virtual space between them. Denied, again denied.

“Air first, comms second,” he decided. “Perhaps the shuttle comms survived, if they weren’t being used.” Except the sanest, grimmest part of his mind was pointing out that the comms on the shuttle were open all the time; of course they were, why wouldn’t they be? What’s the worst that could happen?

“Why us?” Lante moaned.

Maybe it wasn’t just us. But there was time for that kind of speculation later.

In the end they were able to jury rig the suits to get the tanks pumping again, which was fine except they could barely communicate unless they touched faceplates. The habitat’s pumps remained stubbornly silent. Rani reckoned she could get them working, circumvent all the parts of the system that had clenched and died at Earth’s faraway command, but perhaps not in a time frame that would be useful.

Baltiel had volunteered to go out and try the shuttle. They lost a roomful of atmosphere letting him out and he was wondering whether he would ask to be let back in. The shuttle was as dead as everything else, he discovered with no surprise. The airlock was locked down, even the manual release wouldn’t shift it. He hammered on the metal of the door, indulging his fury on the inanimate so he could go back and be reasonable for his fellow human beings. When he was done ranting for the sole audience of his own ears, he looked round to see several of the tortoises watching this spectacle, this doomed alien invader come to their world to die. They had simple eyes at the lower edge of their shells, his memory reminded him, but complex stalked eyes that emerged from the blowhole in the apex of their shell, because they needed to watch out for the fliers. Now those eyes were goggling at him, making him feel that he was letting the side down. Just moved in and what would the neighbours say?

So, he marched laboriously back to the habitat and banged on the airlock until they let him in. By then, Rani had performed miracles with her suit battery and an antenna array and had what she claimed was a working transmitter/receiver. Except nobody out there was transmitting or acknowledging receipt of anything they were sending. The module was silent; the Aegean was silent; the shuttle Senkovi had sent his colleagues off in was silent.

The non-functional habitat was a ticking clock on their lives, but they were on a planet, within atmospheric pressure. If the module’s systems had shut down, how long would Skai have? Baltiel was acutely aware that every single part of their life in space was mediated by computers.

“Keep trying,” he told Rani. “The rest of us, let’s get the habitat air up.”

How much later was it, then? No clocks, an alien world (the day-night cycle ran to just short of thirty-four hours and seventeen minutes, Baltiel recalled). No suit gauges, either, and so he made the command decision that they’d run out of air soon, as though it was a choice, a thing he could mandate. They hadn’t managed to unfreeze the air system. One emergency tank had been hauled inside, tapped, used up. Lortisse’s frustrated brute-force efforts had resulted in another tank venting its contents into the heedless alien atmosphere beyond. Without the scrubbers and recyclers online, none of it would matter. It wasn’t as though the habitat just had huge reserves of air; it was supposed to keep churning through it, turning CO₂ into O₂ with a side of C. As they hadn’t managed to—Lante’s desperate pun—breathe life into that system, none of the rest of it really mattered.

And so Baltiel had made his command decision. He would take the plunge, be the guinea pig. Partly he was responsible: his ship, he’d go down with it. Partly, though, he would be first. His penance but also his privilege.

Here he was then, another airlock-full of stale, used-up air vented by the crude manual levers. His suit, smelling of sour Baltiel even to him now, smelling of sweat and even more of the urine it no longer recycled. The interior of the habitat smelled a whole lot worse. They’d all used the facilities but whatever psychotic electronic weapon had been unleashed hadn’t spared the plumbing. His suit was hot and cumbersome, the servos fighting his every movement, designed to protect him but now just a tomb in waiting.

He looked towards the orange sun as it sank towards the mountains in what had just been another direction once but, now humans were here, would forever be west.

Or maybe not forever. Just as long as we’re here. So not that long, most likely.

The others were watching him, not through screens and cameras with complex readouts of his health, but through the darkened glass of a porthole they’d wrestled the cover from.

He took a deep breath, regretted it, reached up and unlatched his helmet. The lack of warning alarms was a curious relief. One dead system he wouldn’t miss.

He lifted the helmet off and placed it, with groaning effort, on the ground. That done, he stared up at the dimming orange sky and took a deep breath.

Salt; ammonia; ozone; but beyond all of these a melange of smells he had no names for. Things decaying by unfamiliar biological pathways, sharp living perfumes, hot smells, red and black smells. He wished more than anything in the world to be synaesthetic right then, so he would have some extra way to process the information his senses were giving him. He had expected the alien air to be pungent, ghastly. Instead it was heady with odours his body could do nothing with. They smelled like something, like nothing. They were cocktails of molecules his nose had never needed to identify before.

He heard peeping like miniscule baby birds from around his feet. A flier flailed overhead, clacking angrily at him. Something keened shrilly from far off. The tortoises gurgled as they moved, as though their innards were churning wet rocks together. He had not known. The drones and remotes had never heard these songs, smelled these weird odours. The atmosphere was heavy, dense and humid and hot like the tropics, save when the wind gusted from seawards and the acrid salt reek enveloped him and cooled him and stung his eyes.

His breathing was speeding up; he felt the panic point of hyperventilation at his shoulder and forced himself to slow. There was less oxygen, but there should be enough, according to the numbers on the dead computers. A human from Earth could breathe unaided. Long exposure would result in a build-up of various chemicals the human body couldn’t process, but better than suffocating, eh? And he could detox later when he got back to the… back to the… Well, there was nowhere to get back to, was there?

He fought his lungs again, as they grasped for more sustenance than the Nodan atmosphere had to offer. His muscles were aching, too, working with that just-too-strong gravity. But he lived. He breathed in alien air, the same air that all these myriad little monsters depended on for their own incompatible metabolisms.

He turned back to the others, or to the porthole behind which he must trust they still were. It was hard even to make a thumbs up signal in the suit but he did it. They must have been able to see his grin. He was going to die, but he’d done it now. He was Nod’s first citizen castaway. He felt a crazy streak of hilarity rush through him, and then panic because what if that was the atmosphere getting to him? Yusuf Baltiel was not a man given to sudden attacks of irrational joy! And yet he owned it, claimed it as his own. He had found the aliens; he had saved them from the depredations of his own mission, and now he would die amongst them, now or later or in a hundred years, a mad hermit at the end of the human universe, talking to the tortoises and the little peeping things that lived in the black sand.

He lumbered back and entered the airlock, which he’d left open because, well, why not, exactly? He’d left his helmet outside. Perhaps some alien crab would creep out and claim it as a home. He wished the hypothetical creature well.

The others looked in through the airlock hatch with no expression he could name. They would watch him like a hawk now, to see if something poisoned him, or if there was a planetwide plague that could somehow jump not just species but entire evolutionary trees. Working slowly, feeling the gravity twisting his joints, he stripped off his suit entire, letting the dead weight of the thing fold to the ground as though he was shedding a cocoon and entering a new stage of his life cycle.

He was going to try to sleep, there in the airlock and open to the elements, but then Lortisse was banging on the window, miming a winch. They wanted him to close the outer door. He couldn’t see why but, apparently, they were going to let him in early and that was a clear breach of his orders. Something else had obviously gone wrong.

Baltiel didn’t want to be commander, just then. He wanted to be a castaway without any hopes or cares at all, and just enjoy the alienness of the air. A spark lit in his mind at the banging, though. He was responsible, after all. It was his mission, even in defeat. He signalled his understanding and laboured away at the little winch until the outer door was shut and sealed, then stood there as they pumped Earth air in and Nod air out. The Earth air smelled worse, filled with bad odours his body was all too ready to identify.

“What?” he demanded. The others all had their helmets off, suit tanks empty, the last of the emergency supply slowly going stale between them.

He didn’t need to ask any more. He heard it. Rani’s makeshift radio had a signal. It was tinny and crimped by static, but there was a human voice out there.

“Hello? Someone say something, won’t you? I know I screwed up, but come on!” A tiny, far-off Disra Senkovi, coming to them from one planet away on a ship he had only now brought back to life. “Hey, boss, what the hell? Han, you can come back now. Hello?”

There were other shuttles on the Aegean. Not close enough that the Earth air would last, but Baltiel had taken his life in his hands to prove that wasn’t the end of the world. He held on a moment longer, trying to do the maths, but eventually he just smiled and shunted Rani out of her seat so he could speak to the expedition’s prodigal son.

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