Children of Time

2.1 TWO THOUSAND YEARS FROM HOME

Holsten Mason started awake into a nightmare of claustrophobia, fighting it down almost as quickly as it hit him. Experience allowed him to recognize where he was and why that was no cause for alarm, but the old monkey instincts still had their moment of glory, shrieking Trapped! Trapped! in the halls of his mind.

Fucking monkeys. He was freezing cold and enclosed in a space that his body barely fit into, with what felt like a thousand needles withdrawing themselves from his grey and nerveless skin – and tubes being yanked from more intimate regions – none of it done with much sense of tender care.

Business as usual for the suspension chamber. He would like to think that he really hated suspension chambers, but that wasn’t exactly an option for any member of the human race right now.

For a moment he thought that this was it; he was being woken up but not released, to be trapped instead behind the frigid glass, unheard and unnoticed on a vast and empty ship of iced corpses heading forever into the nowhere of deep space.

The primal claustrophobia jumped him for a second time. He was already fighting to lift his hands, to beat at the transparent cover above him, when the seal hissed and the dim, undirected light was replaced by the steady glare of the ship’s lamps.

His eyes barely flinched. The suspension chamber would have been preparing his body for this awakening long before it deigned to spark his mind back to life. Belatedly he wondered if something had gone wrong. There were a limited number of circumstances in which he would have been revived, after all. He could hear no alarms, though, and the very limited status readout within the chamber had all been safe blue bars. Unless that’s what’s broken of course.

The ark ship Gilgamesh had been built to last a very long time indeed, using every piece of craft and science that Holsten’s civilization had been able to wrest from the cold, vacuum-withered hands of their forebears. Even so, had there been an option, nobody would have trusted it, for how could anyone have faith that a machine – any machine, any work of the hands of humanity – could last throughout the appalling periods of time that would be required for this journey?

‘Happy birthday! You’re now the oldest man in history!’ said a sharp voice. ‘Now get your feet under you, you lazy tosser. We need you.’

Holsten’s eyes focused on a face, nominally a woman’s. It was hard, lined, with a bony chin and cheekbones, and her hair the same close crop of stubble as his own. Suspension chambers were not kind to human hair.

Isa Lain: chief Key Crew engineer of the Gilgamesh.

He started trying to make some joke about never thinking she’d say she needed him, but he slurred the words and lost it. She understood enough to look at him contemptuously.

‘Need isn’t the same as want, old man. Get up. And button your suit; your arse is hanging out.’

Feeling like a hundred-year-old cripple, he hunched and clambered and swung his way out of the coffin-shaped tank that had been his resting place for…

Oldest man in what, now? Lain’s words came back to him with a jolt of realization. ‘Hey,’ he said thickly. ‘How long? How far out?’ Are we even clear of the solar system? We must be for her to say that… And, as if he could see through the close, confining walls, he had a sudden sense of the vast emptiness that must be out there beyond the hull, a void that no human had plumbed since before the ice age, since the millennia-ago days of the Old Empire.

The Key Crew suspension room was cramped, barely space for the two of them and the ranks of coffins: his own and two others open and empty, the rest still holding the not-quite-corpses of other vital crew, against the need for them to resume an active role aboard ship. Lain threaded her way over to the hatch and swung it open before answering, glancing back over her shoulder with all her mockery gone.

‘One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-seven years, Mason. Or that’s what the Gilgamesh says.’

Holsten sat back down on the lip of the suspension chamber, his legs abruptly insufficient to keep him standing up.

‘How’s the… how’s he holding up? Have you…?’ The sentences kept fragmenting in his head. ‘How long have you been up? Have you checked over… the cargo, the others…?’

‘I’ve been up for nine days now while you were being lovingly licked awake, Mason. I’ve gone over everything. It’s all satisfactory. They did a good, solid job when they built this boy.’

‘Satisfactory?’ He sensed the uncertainty in that word. ‘Then everyone’s…?’

‘Satisfactory in that we have a four per cent chamber failure rate amongst the cargo,’ she told him flatly. ‘For just short of two millennia, I think that counts as satisfactory. It could have been worse.’

‘Right. Yes, of course.’ He got to his feet again and made his way over to her, the floor chilly against his bare skin, trying now to work out if they were accelerating or decelerating or if the crew section was just spinning about its axis for gravity. Certainly something was keeping him on the floor. If there was some sense that could split hairs between different flavours of ersatz gravity, though, it was one his forebears had somehow failed to evolve.

He was trying not to think about what four per cent meant, or that the handily impersonal word ‘cargo’ referred to a very large fraction of the surviving human race.

‘And you need me for what, anyway?’ Because most of the others were still asleep, and what bizarre set of circumstances could possibly require his presence when most of Command, Science, Security and Engineering were still locked in a freezing, dreamless stasis?

‘There’s a signal,’ Lain told him, watching for his reaction carefully. ‘Yes, I thought that would get you moving.’

He was nothing but questions as they negotiated the passage that led through to comms, but Lain just set a punishing pace and ignored him, letting him weave and stumble as his legs tried to betray him with every few steps.

Vrie Guyen was the third early riser, as Holsten had anticipated. Whatever the emergency, it required the Gilgamesh’s commander, its chief engineer and its classicist. But what Lain had said accounted for that neatly. A signal. And, out here, what could that mean? Either something wholly alien, or a remnant of the Old Empire, Holsten’s area of expertise.

‘It’s faint and badly distorted. The Gilgamesh took too long, really, to even recognize it for what it was. I need you to see what you can make of it.’ Guyen was a thin, small-framed man, with a nose and mouth that both seemed to have been salvaged from a far broader face. Holsten recalled his command style as being a mixture of aggressive motivation and good delegating skills. It seemed like only a few days ago that Holsten had been under that stern gaze as he climbed into his suspension chamber, but when he probed his memories to determine just how many days, he uncovered an uncrossable grey area, a dim sensation that his sense of time was out of joint.

Two thousand years will do that to you, apparently. Every minute or so he was struck afresh by the revelation of how ludicrously lucky they all were just to be here. Satisfactory, as Lain had said.

‘Where’s it coming from, though?’ Holsten asked. ‘Is it where we thought it would be?’

Guyen just nodded, his face composed, but Holsten felt a thrill of excitement go through him. It’s there! It was real, all this time.

The Gilgamesh had not just cast itself randomly into the void to escape the end of all that they had left behind. They were one step short of being quite as suicidal as that. They had been following the maps and charts of the Old Empire, looted from failed satellites, from fragments of ship, from the broken shells of orbital stations containing the void-mummified corpses of Earth’s former masters. Vacuum and stable orbits had saved them while the ice was scouring the planet below.

And amongst the relics were the star maps, detailing where in the galaxy the ancients had walked.

They showed him the signal, as it was distantly received by the Gilgamesh’s instruments. It was a relatively short message, repeating interminably. No busy radio chatter of a bustling extra-solar colony: that would surely have been too much to hope for, given the time that had elapsed.

‘Maybe it’s a warning,’ Guyen suggested. ‘If so, and if there’s some danger, we need to know.’

‘And if there’s some danger, what precisely do we do about it?’ Holsten asked quietly. ‘Can we even change our heading enough now, without hitting the system?’

‘We can prepare,’ Lain said pragmatically. ‘If it’s some cosmic event that we somehow haven’t picked up, and that somehow hasn’t destroyed the transmitter, then we might have to try and alter course. If it’s… a plague, or hostile aliens or something, then… well, it’s been a long time, I’ll bet. Probably it’s not relevant any more.’

‘But we have the maps. Worst comes to worst, we can plot a course for the next world,’ Guyen pointed out. ‘We’ll just slingshot past their sun and be on our way.’

By then Holsten had stopped paying attention to him and just sat hunched, listening by earpiece to the Gilgamesh’s rendition of the signal, looking over visual depictions of its frequency and pattern, calling up reference works from their library.

He adjusted the Gilgamesh’s interpretation of the signal, parsing it through all the known decoding algorithms that long-dead civilization had used. He had done this before plenty of times. All too often the signal would be encoded beyond the ability of modern cryptography to unpick. At other times there would be plain speech, but in one of those problem languages that nobody had been able to decipher.

He listened and ran his encryptions, and words began to leap out at him, in that formal, antique tongue of a vanished age of wonder and plenty, and an appalling capacity for destruction.

‘Imperial C,’ he declared confidently. It was one of the more common of the known languages and, if he could just get his brain working properly, it should be child’s play to translate it now he’d cleaned it up. There was a message there, finally opening like a flower to him, spilling out its brief, succinct contents in a language that had died before the ice came.

‘What—?’ Guyen started angrily, but Holsten held up a hand for silence, letting the whole message play again and enjoying his moment of prominence.

‘It’s a distress beacon,’ he announced.

‘Distress as in “Go away”?’ Lain pressed.

‘Distress as in “Come and get me”,’ Holsten told them, meeting their eyes, seeing there the first spark of hope and wonder that he himself felt. ‘Even if there’s no one – and almost certainly there’s no one – there will be tech, functioning tech. Something waiting there for us for thousands of years. Just for us.’

For a moment this revelation was strong enough that their generalized low-level dislike of him almost vanished. They were three shepherds leading their human flock to a new, promised land. They were the founding parents of the future.

Then Guyen clapped his hands. ‘Fine. Good work. I’ll have the Gilgamesh wake key personnel in time to start deceleration. We’ve won our gamble.’ No words said for all those left behind, who had not even been given the chance to play, or to wonder about the handful of other ark ships that had taken different courses, the Earth spitting out the last gobbets of its inhabitants before the rising tide of poison overcame it. ‘Back to your slabs, both of you.’ There was still at least a century of silent, death-cold travel between them and the signal’s source.

‘Give me just half a watch awake,’ Holsten said automatically.

Guyen glared at him, remembering suddenly that he had not wanted Holsten among Key Crew – too old, too fond of himself, too proud of his precious education. ‘Why?’

Because it’s cold. Because it’s like being dead. Because I’m afraid I won’t wake up – or that you won’t wake me. Because I’m afraid. But Holsten shrugged easily. ‘Time enough to sleep later, isn’t there? Let me look at the stars, at least. Just half a watch and then I’ll turn in. Where’s the harm?’

Guyen grumbled his contempt at him but nodded reluctantly. ‘Let me know when you go back. Or if you’re last man up, then—’

‘Turn out the lights, yes. I know the drill.’ In truth the drill was a complex double check of ship’s systems, but the Gilgamesh itself did most of the hard stuff. All of Key Crew were taught how to do it. It was barely more taxing than reading down a list: monkey work.

Guyen stalked off, shaking his head, and Holsten cocked an eye towards Lain, but she was already going over the engineering readouts, a professional to the last.

Later, though, as he sat in the cupola and watched the alien starfield, two thousand years from any constellations that his ancestors might have known, she came to join him, and sat with him for a fidgety fifteen minutes without saying anything. Neither of them could quite voice the suggestion then, but, by raised eyebrow and abortive hand movement, they ended up out of their shipsuits and clasped together on the cool floor, whilst all of creation wheeled gently overhead.

2.2 EARTH’S OTHER CHILDREN

The name she answers to has both a simple and a complex form. The simple form comprises a series of telegraphed gestures, a precise motion of the palps conveying a limited amount of information. The longer form incorporates a backing of stamping and shivering to add a subtle vibrational subtext to that crude flag-waving, varying with mood and tense and whether she speaks to a dominant or submissive female, or to a male.

The nanovirus has been busy, doing what it can with unexpected material. She is the result of generations of directed mutation, her presence mute witness for all those failures who never bred. Call her Portia.

To travel the forest is to travel the high roads, branch to branch, each tree a world in miniature – crossing where the branches touch: now upside down, now right side up, scaling vertical trunks then leaping where the branches give out, trailing a lifeline and trusting to the eye and the mind to calculate distance and angle.

Portia creeps forwards, judging ranges: her branch juts out into the void, and she spends a careful minute considering whether she can make the jump to the next, before deciding that she cannot. Above her the canopy fades out into a network of twigs that can’t possibly bear her weight. Portia is far larger than her tiny ancestress, half a metre from fangs to spinnerets, an arachnophobe’s nightmare. The support of her exoskeleton is aided by internal cartilage once used for little more than muscle attachment. Her muscles are more efficient too, and some of them expand and contract her abdomen, drawing air actively over her book-lungs rather than just passively taking in oxygen. This permits a boosted metabolism, regulated body temperature and a life of swift and sustained action.

Below is the forest floor, no place to be crossed lightly. There are larger predators than Portia abroad and, although she is confident in her ability to out-think them, that would involve lost time and dusk is close.

She scans her surroundings and considers her options. She has the excellent eyesight of the tiny huntress she evolved from. The great dark orbs of her principal eyes are considerably larger than those of any human.

She turns her body to bring her companions into view, trusting to her peripheral eyes to warn her of danger. Bianca, the other female, is still behind at the trunk, watching Portia and willing to trust her judgement. Bianca is larger but Portia leads, because size and strength have not been their species’ most prized assets for a very long time.

The third of her party, the male, is lower than Bianca, his legs spread out for balance as he hangs on the tree, looking downwards. Possibly he thinks he is keeping watch, but Portia feels he is probably just letting his mind wander. Too bad: she needs him. He is smaller than she; he can jump further and trust to more slender branches.

The three of them are out of their territory by fifty days. Theirs is a species given to curiosity. That same ability that allowed their tiny ancestors to create a mental map of their environs has become the ability to imagine, to ask what is beyond the forest. Portia’s people are born explorers.

She raises her palps, white side out, and signals: Come here! No need to give him his name. Females do not refer to males by name. He catches the motion in his lateral eyes and twitches. He is always twitching, afraid of his own shadow – wretched creature. She has distinct opinions on him, and more complimentary ones concerning Bianca. Her world consists of over a hundred individuals – mostly females – with whom she enjoys carefully maintained relationships. The nanovirus has been driving her species hard towards a communal existence. Although her brain is decidedly smaller than a human’s, just as the original Portia could use her miniscule knot of neurons to accomplish remarkable things, this distant daughter has an impressive ability to solve problems: physical, spatial, theoretical, social. Her species has proved fertile ground for the virus’s attentions.

Cautiously the male crosses beneath Bianca and springs up to her branch, safety line trailing in a white thread behind him.

Bridge across, she tells him when he is close enough to communicate with properly. Quick now. The basic content of her speech is visual, in a rapid semaphore of the palps. A wealth of context – mostly her general dissatisfaction with him – is provided in the vibrations of her flurrying feet.

He flashes his humble acquiescence briefly and heads out as far along the branch as he dares, settling and resettling his feet over and over as he considers the jump ahead. Portia flashes her exasperation back to Bianca, but her companion is watching something below. An apparition like a walking carpet is creeping along the forest floor, another spider but a species that the nanovirus has managed to gift with a greater size and little else. As bulky as half a dozen Portias, it would kill her in a moment if only it could catch her.

Bianca is hungry. She indicates the ground-crawler and idly suggests they break their journey now.

Portia considers and finds the suggestion has merit. She waits until the male has made his jump across – easily, despite all his trepidation – and leaves him hauling himself back along his own line to begin the bridgework. Then she flashes a message to Bianca and the two of them begin to descend.

The hairy hunter below is intent on its own hunger – the forest is not short of prey species of varying sizes, many of them abortive results of the nanovirus’s work. There are some surviving vertebrate species – mice, birds, dwarf deer, snakes – but the virus has tried and failed with them. Kern’s experiment called for monkeys, and she ensured that the green planet’s chosen would suffer no competition from close cousins. The vertebrates that the monkeys were intended to interact with were designed to reject the virus. They have changed hardly at all.

Nobody considered the invertebrates, the complex ecosystem of tiny creeping things intended to be nothing more than a scaffolding by which the absent monkeys would ascend.

In so many cases – as with the great tarantula-descendant below that Portia is considering – whilst the virus was able to provoke growth, the sought-for neural complexity never arose. Often the environmental pressure to select for such a facility was simply lacking. A sense of self and the ability to contemplate the universe are not necessarily survival traits in and of themselves. Portia is a rare exception – though not the only exception – where increased cognitive capacity granted an immediate and compelling advantage.

The carpet-like hunter stops, the faintest of vibrations reaching it. The forest floor is strewn with its thread, forming a messy but effective sense organ that alerts it to the movements of its prey. Against a creature as simple as this, Portia and her kin prefer hunting methods that have not changed in thousands of years.

Portia has discerned the pattern of threads below, running through the leaf litter, almost hidden save to eyes as keen as hers. She reaches down with a foreleg and plays them carefully, speaking eloquently the language of touch and motion, creating a phantom prey, and giving it the illusion of size, distance and weight entirely conjured by her skill. She places herself in the primitive mind of the ground-hunter, as surely as if she could actually implant her thoughts there.

It advances a handful of steps, testing out this sensation, not wholly convinced. She wonders if it has had some near-escapes with her kind before. The great shaggy abdomen is up, ready to shake out a cloud of barbed hairs that will choke Portia’s book-lungs and irritate her joints.

She reaches down gingerly again, prying and tugging, suggesting that the illusory prey is getting further away, soon to escape entirely. Her body is mottled and irregular as her ancestors’ were, and the ground-hunter’s simple eyes have not made her out.

It takes the bait suddenly, in a hairy rush across the forest floor towards nothing, and Bianca drops on its back, fangs first, driving them in where its legs meet its body, and then springing away a few body-lengths to be out of the way of any riposte. The hunter lunges after her, but stumbles even as it does so, abruptly unsteady. Moments later it is twitching and quivering as the venom takes effect, and the two females wait for it to grow motionless – though still alive – before closing in to feed. Bianca in particular remains taut for another leap to escape if need be, her abdomen heaving slightly in and out as she forces air past her book-lungs.

Up above, the male is looking down plaintively and, when Portia checks on him, he signals for permission to feed. She tells him to finish his work first.

A moment later he has dropped down practically on top of her, sending her leaping instinctively backwards, landing clumsily and flipping onto her back before righting herself angrily. Bianca has come within a whisker of killing the male, but he is stamping and signalling frantically: Danger coming! Danger! Spitters!

And he is right: here come her kind’s ancestral foes.

The spitting spiders, the Scytodes, have marched in step with Portia’s kin all the way from their miniscule beginnings. They are somewhere between her and the ground-hunter in size; but size was not the key to dominance even in the ancient days before the virus. Now she sees them creep warily forwards, a whole troop of them: six – no, eight – individuals, spread out but watching, come down off their web to hunt. They hunt in packs, these uplifted Spitters, and Portia has an understanding that they are not beasts, whilst not having achieved whatever she has become. They are the big, shambling killers constantly on the edge of Portia’s world; brutal lurking primitives whose unseen, implicit presence keeps hatchlings from straying too far from the nest.

If the numbers had been equal, then Portia and Bianca would have contested the kill – for they see that the Spitters have been following the path of the same prey. Eight is too many, though, even with the additional tricks the three travellers can utilize. The Scytodes will throw out their sprays of sticky, venomous webbing. Although their eyesight is weak, and Portia and her kind are smart enough to anticipate and agile enough to dodge, the sheer number of nets will make the odds of their escaping poor.

Conversely, the Spitters are well aware of the danger that Portia’s kind poses. The two species have clashed over untold generations, each time with more understanding of the enemy. Now both recognize that the other is something less than kin but something more than prey.

Portia and Bianca make automatic threats, lifting their forelimbs and displaying their fangs. Portia is considering whether her secret new weapon would even the odds. Her mind plays out likely scenarios, with and without the male’s assistance. The enemy numbers seem too great for her to be sure of victory, and her task comes first. In her mind is a meta-plan, just the sort of A-to-B route-finding that her distant antecedents performed, save that her goal is not just a spatial location but an intangible victory condition. A fight now with the Spitters would likely leave her in no position to achieve what she has set out to do.

She signals to the other two to fall back, making her gestures large and slow enough that the inferior eyes of the Spitters will read them. Can they understand her? She does not know. She could not even say whether they have some way of communicating amongst themselves that approximates to her own visual and vibrational language. Still, they hold off – no spitting and only a minimal threat display from them, as Portia and her cohorts retreat. Bianca’s feet pluck out a muttering refrain of frustration and annoyance. Being larger than Portia, she is quicker to seek physical confrontation. She is here because that has its uses, but for that same reason she knows to follow Portia’s lead.

They ascend once more, aware now that they must hunt again, and hope that the Scytodes clan will be satisfied with what was left here for them. Sometimes the Spitters follow, if they have the numbers, and then it would be a choice of fast flight or turn and ambush.

By dark, they have brought down an orb-web builder, and the male jumps on an unwary mouse, neither of which makes a hearty meal. Portia’s active lifestyle and altered anatomy mean that she needs considerably more food than her predecessors, pound for pound. If they were to be forced to live by hunting alone, then their journey would take far longer than it should. Amongst her baggage, however, Bianca has a quartet of live aphids. She lets the little creatures out to suck sap, fending the male off in case he forgets that they are not for eating – or not yet. After dusk, when Portia has spun a makeshift tent in the canopy, complete with warning lines in all directions, the aphids produce glutinous honeydew, which the spiders can drink as though it was the nourishing liquidized innards of their prey. The domesticated creatures meekly return to Bianca’s webbing afterwards, understanding only that they are safe with her, not realizing that, in extremis, they themselves will become the meal.

Portia is still hungry – honeydew is subsistence stuff, nourishing without the satisfaction of taking real prey. It is difficult for her to crouch there, knowing that there are aphids – and the male – within reach, but she can look ahead and see that her long-term plan will suffer if those are consumed now. Her lineage has always specialized in looking ahead.

And in looking beyond, too. Now she squats at the entrance to the makeshift tent forming their camp, Bianca and the male nestling beside her for warmth, and looks out through the gaps in the canopy at the lights populating the night sky. Her people know them and see paths and patterns in them and realize that they, too, move. Portia understands that their celestial journeys are predictable enough to use when navigating her own. One, though, is special. One light does not tread a slow and year-long course over the heavens, but hurries past, a genuine traveller just as she is. Portia looks up now and sees that tiny glint of reflected light passing overhead, a solitary motile speck in the vast dark, and she feels a kinship with it, lending to that orbiting pinpoint as much of an arachnomorphic personality as she can conceive of.

2.3 ENIGMA VARIATIONS

This time they had all of Key Crew out of the morgue – Holsten almost the last one to appear, stumbling on numb feet and shivering. He looked better than a lot of them, though. His little jaunt – mere moments of personal time and over a century ago – had loosened him up. Most of the people he was now looking at had last opened their eyes while the Gilgamesh shared a solar system with the failing husk of Earth.

They were crammed into the briefing room, all grey faces and shaven heads, some of them looking malnourished, others bloated. A few had pale mottling across their skins: some side-effect of the sleep process that Holsten couldn’t guess at.

He saw Guyen, looking more alert than anyone else there, and guessed the mission commander had ordered himself to be woken early, so that he could assert his bright, brisk dominance over this room full of zombies.

Holsten checked off the departments: Command, Engineering, Science, and what looked like the whole of Security too. He tried to catch Lain’s eye but she barely glanced at him, nothing in her manner admitting to any century-ago liaison.

‘Right.’ Guyen’s sharp tone drew all ears as a final few stumbled in. ‘We’re here. We’ve made it with five per cent loss of cargo, and around three per cent system deterioration according to the engineers. I consider that the greatest vindication of the human spirit and strength of will that history has ever known. You should all be proud of what we’ve achieved.’ His tone was adversarial, certainly not congratulatory, and sure enough he went on, ‘But the real work is yet to come. We have arrived and, as you all know, this was supposedly a system the Old Empire spacefleet frequented. We set our course for here because these were the closest extra-solar coordinates where we could hope to find a liveable habitat, and perhaps even salvageable tech. You all know the plan: we have their star maps, and there are other such locations within a relatively short journey of here – just a short hop compared to the distances we’ve already travelled without mishap.’

Or with just five per cent mishap, Holsten thought, but did not say. Guyen’s belief in the extent of the Imperial presence within this system was also highly speculative, from the classicist’s own perspective – and even ‘Old Empire’ was a maddeningly inaccurate term. Most of the others looked too groggy to really think beyond the words themselves, though. Again he glanced at Lain, but she seemed to be focused only on the commander.

‘What most of you do not know is that the Gilgamesh intercepted transmissions emanating from this system on our way in, which have been identified as an automatic distress beacon. We have functioning technology.’ He hurried on before anyone could get a question in. ‘The Gilgamesh has therefore plotted a flightpath solution that will brake us around the star, and on the way out we’ll come by slow enough for a meaningful pass close to the source of that signal – the planet there.’

Now his audience started waking up, and there was a rising babble of questions that Guyen waved down. ‘That’s right. A planet in the sweet spot, just like we were promised. It’s been thousands of years, but space doesn’t care. It’s there, and the Old Empire has left a present for us too. And that could be good or it could be bad. We’re going to have to be careful. Just so you know: the signal isn’t from the planet itself but from some sort of satellite – maybe just a beacon, maybe something more. We’re going to try and open communications with it, but no guarantees.’

‘And the planet?’ someone asked. Guyen indicated Renas Vitas, the head of the scientific team.

‘We’re loathe to commit so far,’ the slender woman began – another who’d obviously been up for a while, or perhaps by nature unflappable. ‘The analysis made by Gilgamesh on our way in suggests something only slightly smaller than Earth, at close to Earth’s distance from the star, and with all the right components: oxygen, carbon, water, minerals…’

‘So why not commit? Why not say it?’ Holsten identified the speaker: big Karst, who led the security detail. His chin and cheeks were raw, red and peeling horribly, and Holsten remembered suddenly how the man had refused to lose his beard for the suspension chamber, and was now apparently paying the price.

I remember him arguing with Engineering over that, he thought. It should have seemed just days before, according to his personal waking history but, as he had noticed last time, there was clearly something imperfect about suspension. Certainly, Holsten could not feel the centuries that had passed since they abandoned Earth, but something in his mind acknowledged that lost time: the sense of a yawning, terrible wasteland, a purgatory of the imagination. He found himself reluctant to consider ever going back under.

‘Why, in all honesty?’ Vitas replied brightly. ‘It’s too good to be true. I want to overhaul our instruments. That planet is too Earth-like to be believed.’

Looking around at all the suddenly sour faces, Holsten raised his hand. ‘But of course it’s like Earth,’ he got out. The looks turned on him were not encouraging: some merely creased with dislike, but rather more with exasperation. What’s the bloody classicist want now? Desperate for some attention already?

‘It’s a terraforming project,’ he explained. ‘If it’s like Earth, that just shows it’s finished – or near finished.’

‘There’s no evidence the ancients ever actually practised terraforming,’ Vitas told him, her tone an obvious putdown.

Let me take you through the archives: it’s mentioned a hundred times in their writings. But instead, Holsten just shrugged, recognizing the showmanship of it all. ‘There is,’ he told them. ‘Out there. We’re heading straight towards it.’

‘Right!’ Guyen clapped his hands, perhaps annoyed that he had not been listening to his own voice for two minutes at a stretch. ‘You each have your tasks, so go and make ready. Vitas, run checks on our instrumentation, as you proposed. I want us to conduct a full inspection of the planet and satellite as we close. Lain, keep a close eye on ship’s systems as we approach the star’s gravity well – the Gil’s not done anything but go in a straight line for a long time. Karst, get your people reacquainted with their kit, just in case we need you. Mason, you’re working with my people on monitoring that signal. If there’s anything active there to respond to us, I want to know about it.’

Hours later, and Holsten was almost the last person left in the Communications suite, his dogged academic patience having outlasted most of Guyen’s people. In his ear, the signal – full of static – still pulsed its single simple message, clearer now than it had been out beyond the system, and yet saying no more. He had been sending responses regularly, seeking to spur something new, an elaborate academic’s game where he formulated queries in formal Imperial C in the hope of seeming like the sort of caller that the beacon was crying out for.

He started at a sudden movement beside him, as Lain slumped into the neighbouring seat.

‘How’s life in Engineering?’ He took out the earpiece.

‘Not supposed to be about people management,’ she grunted. ‘We’re having to thaw out about five hundred coffins from cargo to run repairs on them. Then we’re having to tell five hundred recently awoken colonists that they need to go right back into the freezer. Security have been called in. It’s ugly. So, have you even worked out what it says yet? Who’s in distress?’

Holsten shook his head. ‘It’s not like that. Well, yes, it is. It says it’s a distress beacon. It’s calling for help, but there are no specifics. It’s a standard signal the Old Empire used for that purpose, intended to be clear, urgent and unmistakable – always assuming you’re even a member of the culture that produced it. I only know what it is because our early space-farers were able to reactivate some of the stuff they found in Earth orbit and extrapolate function from context.’

‘So say “Hi” to it. Let it know we’ve heard it.’

He sucked in the breath of the annoyed academic, starting off with the same pedantic, ‘It’s not…’ before her frown made him reconsider. ‘It’s an automated system. It’s waiting for a response it recognizes. It’s not like those extra-solar listening-post things we used to have – searching for any kind of signal pattern at all. And even those… I was never convinced by them – by the idea that we could necessarily recognize an alien transmission for what it was. That’s too rooted in our assumption that aliens will be in any way like us. It’s… you understand the concept of cultural specificity?’

‘Don’t lecture me, old man.’

‘It’s – will you stop with that? I’m, what, seven years older than you? Eight?’

‘You’re still the oldest man in the universe.’

Hearing that, he was very aware that he honestly did not know how the pair of them stood, one to another. So maybe I was just the last man in the universe, right then. Or me and Guyen, at most. Apparently it doesn’t matter now, anyway.

‘Yeah, well, you’d been up for how long, before they woke me?’ he goaded her. ‘Keep pulling those long hours and you’ll catch up real soon, won’t you?’

She had no ready comeback, and when he glanced at her, her face was long and pensive. This is no way to run a civilization, he thought. But of course, that’s not what we are, not any more. We’re a civilization in transport, waiting to happen somewhere else. Maybe here. We’re the last cutting of old Earth.

The pause stretched out between them, and he found he had no way of breaking its hold, until Lain abruptly shook herself and said, ‘So, cultural specificity. Let’s talk about that.’

He was profoundly grateful for the lifeline. ‘So I know it’s a distress beacon, but that is literally only because we’ve had prior contact with Imperial tech, and in sufficient context that we can make assumptions – some of which may be wrong, even. And this isn’t an alien species – this is us, our ancestors. And, in turn, they won’t recognize our signals, necessarily. There’s this myth that advanced cultures will be so expansively cosmopolitan that they’ll be able to effortlessly talk down to the little people, right? But the Empire never intended its tech to be forward-compatible with primitives – meaning us. Why would it? Like everyone else, they only ever intended to talk to each other. So I’m telling this thing, “Hello, here we are,” but I don’t know what protocols and what codes their system is expecting to receive from whatever rescuer would have been planned for, however many thousand years ago. They can’t even hear us. We’re just background static to them.’

She shrugged. ‘So what? We get there and send Karst over with a cutting torch and open her up?’

He stared at her. ‘You forget how many people died, in the early space years, trying to get at Empire tech. Even with all the systems fried by their old electromagnetic pulse weapons, there were still plenty of ways for it to kill you.’

Another lift of the shoulders, indicating a tired woman at the edge of her reserves. ‘Maybe you forget how much I don’t like Karst.’

Did I forget? Did I ever know that? He had a vertiginous sense that maybe he had, but that any such knowledge had fallen unnoticed from his head during the long, cold age of his suspension. And it genuinely had been an age. There had been whole discrete periods of human history that had not lasted so long. He found himself holding on to the console as though, at any moment, the illusion of gravity gifted by the Gilgamesh’s deceleration would vanish, and he would simply slip away in some random direction, with all connection lost. These are all the people there are, with the image of that roomful of near-strangers he had never had a chance to get to know before they sealed him in the coffin. This is life and society and human contact, now and forever.

It seemed to be Lain’s turn to find the silence awkward, but she was a practical woman. She simply got up to go, drawing away sharply as he tried to put a hand on her arm.

‘Wait.’ It came out more as a plea than he had intended. ‘You’re here – and I need your help.’

‘On what?’

‘Help me with the signal – the beacon signal. There’s always been a lot of interference, but I think… it’s possible there’s actually a second signal clashing with it on a close frequency. Look.’ He passed a handful of analyses over to her screen. ‘Can you clean it up – compensate it out if it’s noise, or at least… something? I’m running out of things to try right now.’

She seemed relieved at actually getting a sensible request from him and resumed her seat. For the next hour the two of them worked wordlessly side by side, she with what was now her task, and he in sending increasingly desperate enquiries aimed at the satellite, none of which evinced any response. Eventually he felt that he might as well just be sending over gibberish, for all the difference it made.

Then: ‘Mason?’ from Lain, and there was something new in her tone.

‘Hmm?’

‘You’re right. It is another signal.’ A pause. ‘But we’re not getting it from the satellite.’

He waited, seeing her fingers move over the panels, checking and rechecking.

‘It’s from the planet.’

‘Shit! You’re serious?’ And then, with a hand to his mouth. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry. Not language befitting the dignity of etcetera, but…’

‘No, no, this is definitely a shit-worthy moment.’

‘It’s a distress call? It’s repeated?’

‘It’s not like your distress signal. Much more complex. It must be actual live talk. It’s not repeating…’

For a moment Holsten actually felt her hope peak, pulling the air between them taut with the untold potential of the future, and then she hissed. ‘Bollocks.’

‘What?’

‘No, it is repeating. It’s longer and more complicated than your distress call, but this is the same sequence again.’ Hands on the move once more. ‘And it’s… we’re…’ Her bony shoulders sagged. ‘It’s… I think it’s bounce.’

‘Come again?’

‘I think this other signal is bouncing from the planet. I… Well, most likely hypothesis: the satellite is sending a signal to the planet, and we’re catching bounce-back. Fuck, I’m sorry. I really thought…’

‘Lain, are you sure?’

She cocked an eyebrow at him, because he was not joining in her dejection. ‘What?’

‘The satellite is communicating with the planet,’ he prompted. ‘It’s not just a bounce-back of the distress call – it’s something longer. A different message sent to the planet than for the rest of the universe.’

‘But it’s just on a loop, same as…’ She slowed down. ‘You think there’s someone down there?’

‘Who knows?’

‘But they’re not broadcasting.’

‘Who knows? It’s a terraform world, whatever Vitas says. It was created to be lived on. And, even if the satellite is nothing but a call for help these days, if they seeded the world with people… So maybe they really are savages. Maybe they don’t have the tech to receive or transmit, but they could still be there… on a world specifically made for humans to live on.’

She stood up suddenly. ‘I’m off to fetch Guyen.’

For a moment he looked at her, thinking, Seriously, that was the first thing you thought of? But he nodded resignedly and she was off, leaving him to listen in on the newfound contact between satellite and planet, and try to work out what it signified.

To his great surprise it took him very little time to do so.

‘It’s what?’ Guyen demanded. The news had brought along not just the commander but most of the Key Crew as well.

‘A series of mathematics problems,’ Holsten explained to them all. ‘The only reason it took me as long as it did was that I was expecting something more… sophisticated, something informative, like the beacon. But it’s maths.’

‘Weird maths, too,’ Lain commented, looking over his transcription. ‘The sequences get quite complicated, but they’re set out step by step from first principles, basic sequences.’ She was frowning. ‘It’s like… Mason, you mentioned extra-solar listening posts before…?’

‘It’s a test, yes,’ Holsten agreed. ‘An intelligence test.’

‘But you said it was pointed at the planet?’ Karst stated.

‘Which raises all kinds of questions, yes.’ Holsten shrugged. ‘I mean, this is very old technology. This is the oldest working tech that anyone anywhere ever discovered. So what we’re seeing could just be the result of a break-down, an error. But, yes, makes you think.’

‘Or not,’ Lain put in drily. When the others just stared at her, she continued in her snide tone: ‘Come on, people, am I the only one thinking it? Come on, Mason, you’ve been trying to get the thing to notice you for how long now? We’ve rounded the star on our approach to the planet, and you’re still drawing blanks. So now you say it’s setting some sort of maths test for the planet?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘So send in the answers,’ she suggested.

Holsten stared at her for a long time, then glanced sideways at Guyen. ‘We don’t know what—’

‘Do it,’ Guyen ordered.

Carefully, Holsten called up the answers he had compiled, the early problems solved easily on his fingers, the later ones only with artificial help. He had been sending plaintive signals to the distant satellite for hours. It was simple enough to dispatch the string of numbers instead.

They waited, all of the Key Crew. It took seven minutes and some seconds for the message to reach its intended destination. There was some shuffling. Karst cracked his knuckles. One of the science team coughed.

A little over fourteen minutes after sending, the distress beacon ceased.

2.4 POOR RELATIONS

Portia’s people are natural explorers. As active carnivores with a considerably more demanding metabolism than their forebears, too many of them in one place will quickly over-hunt any home territory. Traditionally their family units fragment often; the females who are weakest, with the fewest allies, are the ones who venture further afield to establish new nests. Such diasporas happen regularly for, although they lay far fewer eggs than their ancestors, and although their standards of care are far below human so that infant mortality rates remain high, the species population is in colossal expansion. They are spreading across their world, one broken family at a time.

Portia’s own expedition is something different, though. She is not seeking a nesting ground, and there is a home that her present plans require her to return to. In her mind and her speech, it is the Great Nest by the Western Ocean, and several hundred of her kind – most but not all relatives of one degree or another – reside there. The basic domestication of the aphids and their husbandry by the spiders has allowed the Great Nest to grow to unprecedented size, without the shortages that would prompt migration or expulsion.

Over several generations the social structure of the Great Nest has grown exponentially more complex. Contact has been made with other nests, each of which has its own way of feeding the modest multitudes. There has been some halting trade, sometimes for food but more often for knowledge. Portia’s people are ever curious about the further reaches of their world.

That is why Portia is travelling now, following the paths of stories and rumours and third-hand accounts. She has been sent.

The three of them are entering already claimed territory. The signs are unmistakable – not merely regularly maintained web bridges and lines amid the trees, but patterns and designs stating by sight and scent that these hunting grounds are spoken for.

This is exactly what Portia has been looking for.

Ascending as high as they can go, the travellers can see that, to the north, the character of the formerly endless forest changes dramatically. The great canopy thins, fading away in patches to reveal startling stretches of cleared ground; beyond that there are still trees, but they are of a different species and regularly spaced, in a manner that looks jarringly artificial to their eyes. This is what they have come to see. They could simply avoid this little piece of family turf that they have come across and go look. Portia’s plan, however – the step-by-step route that she has plotted from the start of their trek to its successful conclusion – specifically calls for her to gather information. For her ancestors, this would mean painstaking visual reconnaissance. For her it means asking questions of the locals.

They proceed with caution, and openly. There is a real possibility that the incumbents may chase them off; however, Portia can mentally put herself in their place, consider how she herself would look upon an intruder. She can think through the permutations enough to know that an aggressive or covert entrance will increase the chance of a hostile reception.

Sure enough, the locals are sharp enough to spot the newcomers quickly, and curious enough to make their presence known at a distance, signalling for Portia and her fellows to approach. There are seven of them, five females and two males, and they have a neat nest strung between two trees, liberally surrounded with trip lines to warn them of any over-bold visitors. Also present are a brood of at least two dozen spiderlings of various ages, hatched from a communal crèche. Fresh from the egg they are able to crawl and take live prey, and understand a variety of tasks and concepts without having to be taught. Probably no more than three or four of them will reach adulthood. Portia’s people lack a mammal’s helpless infant stage, and the maternal bond that accompanies it. Those that do survive will be the strongest, the most intelligent and the best able to interact with others of their kind.

The palp-semaphore language allows for communication over a mile away in clear conditions, but is not suitable for complex discussions. The more subtle step-vibration speech will not travel far across the ground or down a branch. In order to hold a free and frank exchange of views, one of the local females spins a web that stretches between several trees, large enough for everyone to rest a few feet on its many anchor points and follow the conversation as it progresses. One of the locals climbs onto the web and, at her invitation, Portia joins her.

We bring you greetings from the Great Nest on the Western Ocean, Portia begins, meaning: we are but three, but we have friends. We have travelled far and seen many things. For information is often a trade good in itself.

The locals remain suspicious. They are spoken for by their largest female, who shudders upon the web and shifts her feet, saying: What is your purpose? This is no place for you.

We do not seek to hunt, Portia states. We do not come to settle. We shall soon return to the Great Nest. Word has come to us – the concept is expressed very clearly, to their minds: vibrations twanging down a taut line. They are naturally equipped to think in terms of information transmitted at a distance. The land beyond your land is of interest.

Unrest amongst the locals. It is not to be travelled, their leader says.

If that is so, then that is what we have come to discover. Will you tell us what you know?

More disquiet, and Portia is aware that her mental map of what is going on must have a hole somewhere, because they are reacting in a way she cannot account for.

Their leader wishes to appear bold, however. Why should we?

We will tell you things in return. Or we have Understanding to exchange. For the spiders, mere telling and ‘Understanding’ are two distinctly different currencies.

The locals step back off the web at a signal from their leader and huddle close, keeping several eyes on the newcomers. There is a shuffling huddle of speech, softly stepped out so that it does not reach their visitors. Portia retreats as well, and her two companions join her.

Bianca has no particular ideas, save that she is anticipating having to go up against the lead female, who is noticeably bigger. The male, though, surprises Portia.

They’re afraid, he suggests. Whatever is ahead of us, they are afraid that we may stir it up and it will attack them.

It is natural for a male to think about fear, Portia decides. That she agrees with him makes finding out the truth about their destination all the more important.

At last the locals return to the web and negotiations resume. Show us your Understanding, their leader challenges.

Portia signals to Bianca, who unwraps one of the docile aphids from alongside her abdomen and displays it to the skittish surprise of the locals. The little beast is milked for honeydew, and Portia wraps up a sagging parcel of the sweet stuff and deposits it in the centre of the web, where the locals approach it.

Once they have tasted it, and once they understand Portia’s mastery over the animals, they are more than ready to make some manner of deal. The value of an independent food source is immediately evident to them, especially given their mysterious northern neighbours, who might soon threaten their hunting grounds.

What of these will you trade? the local leader asks, eagerness evident in her movements.

We have two of these beasts for those that give us a full account of what lies beyond your lands, Portia offers, knowing that this is not what the locals really wish to trade for. Also, we have eggs, but the raising and care of these creatures requires skill, or they will die young and you will have nothing.

There is now an urgent channel of talk running between the lead female and the others, and Portia catches fragments of it along the web. They are too agitated to be careful. You said you could trade? the big female demands.

Yes, we can trade this Understanding, but we will ask for more in return. Portia is not referring to teaching, but to something deeper – one of the secrets of her species’ continuing success.

The nanovirus itself is subject to variations in its transcription. It was designed that way in order to creatively accomplish its hardwired aim: to bring the host to a detected level of sophistication set by its creators and, once its victory conditions are met, to cease further assistance. Its creators included such safeguards so as to prevent their protégés continuing to develop into superhuman monkey-gods.

The virus was intended for a primate host, however, and so the end state that it has been programmed to seek is something that Portia labiata can never become. Instead the nanovirus has mutated and mutated in its inbuilt quest to reach an impossible goal, the end that justifies all conceivable means.

More successful variants lead to more successful hosts, who in turn pass on the superior mutated infection. From the microscopic point of view of the nanovirus, Portia and every other affected species on the planet are merely vectors for the onward transmission of the virus’s own evolving genes.

Long ago in Portia’s evolutionary history, her species’ social development was greatly accelerated by a series of mutations in the reigning infection. The virus began to transcribe learned behaviour into the genome of sperm and egg, transforming acquired memes into genetically inheritable behaviour. The economic, force-evolved brains of Portia’s kind share more structural logic with each other than chance-derived human minds do. Mental pathways can be transcribed, reduced to genetic information, unpacked in the offspring and written as instinctive understanding – sometimes concrete skills and muscle memory, but more often whole tranches of knowledge, ragged-edged with loss of context, that the new-born will slowly come to terms with throughout its early life.

The process was piecemeal at first, imperfect, sometimes fatal but more reliable with each generation as the more efficient strains of virus prospered. Portia has learned a great deal in her life, but some things she was either born with, or came to her as she developed. Just as all new-hatched spider-lings can hunt and creep and jump and spin, so Portia’s early moultings brought with them an innate understanding of language and access to fragments of her forebears’ lives.

That is now ancient history, a facility that Portia’s people have possessed from back before their histories began. More recently, however, they have learned to exploit the nanovirus’s enhanced capabilities, just as the virus in turn is exploiting them.

He has the Understanding, Portia confirms, a flick of one palp indicating her male follower. But we will trade like for like. You have Understanding of how to live here and the precautions you take. That is what we seek.

The next moment, she realizes she has overplayed her hand, because the big female goes very still on the web – a particular hunting stillness that signals raw aggression.

So your Great Nest will come to our lands after all. You are not here to hunt, and yet tomorrow your kin intend to hunt here. Because such traded Understanding would not benefit Portia herself, but only generations to come, those whose genomes are as yet unwritten.

We seek Understanding of all places, Portia protests, but the language of motion and vibration is a hard one to dissemble in. Enough unintended body language leaks into it to confirm the suspicions of the big female.

Abruptly the local leader has reared up, two pairs of legs raised high and her fangs exposed. It is a brute language unchanged for millions of years: See how strong I am. Her rear legs are bunched ready to spring.

Reconsider. Back off, Portia warns her. She herself is tensed up, but she is not showing submission nor retreating, nor measuring her legs against the other’s.

Go now, or fight, the angry female demands. Portia notes that she does not necessarily have the wholehearted support of her fellows, who are anxiously flagging up concern or sending cautioning words along the strands of the web.

Portia creeps sideways, and feels a new dancing from behind her: a charging advance from Bianca that also serves as a kind of battle hymn. The local leader is obviously thrown by the fact that her opponents’ speaker is not also their fighter, and she backs off a little, warily. Moreover, Bianca has armour.

There is a functional limit to how much Understanding any individual can inherit from the virus. New information rewrites the old, though perhaps each generation’s ability to store such innate knowledge is a little greater than the last. This band of backwoods locals will have a handful of tricks all their own, carefully preserved down the years. Their individuals can learn – and teach – but their inbuilt knowledge base is limited.

A larger community like Great Nest has a great many Understandings to draw upon, different lineages passing on their mysteries and trading with others. Different discoveries, tricks and knacks can be combined and experimented with. Great Nest is more than the sum of its parts. Bianca is no artisan – not by learning nor by inherent Understanding – but she wears the fruits of others’ labours; curved wooden shields she has glued to her palps, dyed in aggressive, clashing colours. She rears high, measuring legs against the big female, but then hunches down, her shields raised.

They fight in the manner of their kind: they display, threaten, bare their fangs. They dance across the web, each step sounding like a goading word. The local female is larger, and she knows how this goes. Her greater size will convince the smaller intruder to back down, because otherwise the newcomer will die.

Portia’s kin share something with tool-using man: they are very able to harm each other. They were spider-killers from the first, and their venom will immobilize an enemy of their own species as easily as it would a Spitter. If matters come to that, usually the victor will give in to instinct, and feed. For this reason, they have a culture that shies away from actual violence because of the risks inherent in any clash. The danger they pose to one another has been a great civilizing influence, just as much as has that sense of kinship their shared viral heritage gifted them with.

But Bianca is not backing down, however clearly her opponent outmatches her. The threat displays become more and more aggressive, the big female leaping and darting about the web, whilst Bianca sidles sideways and keeps her shields up against the eventual pouncing strike that must be coming.

Portia, for her part, spins her thread, and readies herself to use another Great Nest innovation – this one new enough that she has had to learn it, though perhaps she may be able to virally gift it to her offspring.

The big female springs just as Portia is ready. Bianca takes the fang-strike on her shields, the impact knocking her over onto her back. The female rears up for another strike, infuriated.

The stone that strikes her knocks her clean off the web, tumbling down to hang by her safety line, twitching and convulsing. Her abdomen is cracked open on one side where the missile tore through, and the loss of fluid to her body is already causing her remaining limbs to curl in upon themselves involuntarily. Portia has already reloaded, the slingshot of silk strung in a taut ‘V’ between her wide-placed front feet and her powerful hind legs.

The locals stare at her. A couple have crept partway towards their injured leader, but Bianca is ahead of them, dropping to drive her fangs into her victim’s cracked carapace.

Portia assesses the locals. They have adopted a submissive posture, thoroughly cowed. One of the other females – not the largest but perhaps the boldest – steps deferentially on to the web. What do you want? she dances out.

Good. Let us trade, Portia states, as Bianca rejoins her. Tell us about your neighbours.

After they are done, each side weighing what it is willing to share against the relative bargaining power of the other party, Portia’s male scuttles onto the web and distils his Understanding of aphid husbandry into a neatly silk-wrapped packet of sperm. One of the local males performs a similar service with his own day-to-day knowledge of his family’s territory and its aggressive neighbours. This active use of the viral transcription is not behaviour prompted by the virus itself, but a cultural tradition amongst Portia’s people: information as currency, by means of a transfer that incidentally assists the virus in propagating its genetic code. At the same time, the next generation of spiderlings will share kinship, a bridge between Portia’s Great Nest and this little family, part of a great web of such interrelations whose connections can be traced, community to community, across much of the planet.

What the locals now say about the north is alarming, a potential threat that Portia’s Great Nest seems likely to encounter quite soon. At the same time it is intriguing, and Portia decides that the plan requires a closer personal look.

2.5 ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS

The reply that came back from the satellite was not intentionally encoded, but Holsten still sweated over what seemed to him an age, trying to turn the radio signal into something comprehensible. In the end, it gave up its secrets under the combined might of Lain, the Gilgamesh and himself, presenting him with a curt, brief message in classical Imperial C that he could at least make a stab at translating.

Finally, he leant back in his seat, aware that all eyes were fixed on him. ‘It’s a warning,’ he told them. ‘It’s saying that we’re transmitting from incorrect coordinates, or something like that. It says we’re forbidden here.’

‘It looks as though it’s warming up,’ observed one of the science team, who had been taking readings from the distant object. ‘I see a swift increase in energy usage. Its reactor is increasing output.’

‘It’s awake, then,’ Guyen declared, somewhat vacuously in Holsten’s opinion.

‘I reckon it’s still just automatic signals,’ Lain guessed.

‘Tell it we’re responding to its distress call.’

Holsten had already phrased a reply in scholar’s language which read as formally as an academy exercise, then had Lain and the Gilgamesh transcribe the message into the same electronic format the satellite was using.

The waiting, as the signals danced across those millions of kilometres of void, was soon stretching everybody’s nerves.

‘It’s calling itself the Second Brin Sentry Habitat,’ Holsten translated eventually. ‘It’s basically telling us to alter our course to avoid the planet.’ Before Guyen could ask, he added, ‘and it’s not mentioning the distress call now. I think, because we’ve gone in with an answer to whatever it was signalling to the planet, it’s that system we’re interacting with.’

‘Well, tell it who we are and tell them we’re coming to help them,’ Guyen instructed him.

‘Seriously, I’m not sure—’

‘Just do it, Mason.’

‘Why would it be signalling elementary maths to the planet?’ Vitas complained to nobody in particular.

‘I can see all sorts of systems coming online, I think,’ added her underling at the sensor suite. ‘This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘I’m launching some drones, both for the sat and for the planet,’ Karst announced.

‘Agreed,’ said Guyen.

‘It doesn’t recognize us,’ Holsten reported, frantically translating the latest message from the satellite, stumbling over its antique grammar. ‘It says we’re not authorized here. It says… something about biological hazard.’ And, at the shudder that went through the crew, ‘No, wait, it’s calling us an unauthorized biohazard. It’s… I think it’s threatening us.’

‘How big is this thing, again?’ Karst demanded.

‘A little under twenty metres on its longest axis,’ was the reply from the science team.

‘Well, then, bring it on.’

‘Karst, this is Old Empire tech,’ Holsten snapped.

‘We’ll see what that’s worth when the drones get there.’ As the Gilgamesh was still fighting to slow down, the drones outstripped it rapidly, their own thrust hurrying them towards the planet and its lone sentinel at an acceleration that a manned craft could not have managed without pulping its occupants.

‘I have another warning to divert,’ Holsten reported. ‘Look, I think we’re in the same position as with the distress call. Whatever we’re sending it just isn’t being recognized by the system. Probably if we were supposed to be here we’d have the right codes or something.’

‘You’re the classicist, so work them out,’ Guyen snapped.

‘It’s not like that. It’s not like the Old Empire had a single… what, password or something.’

‘We have archives of Imperial transmissions, don’t we? So just strip some protocols from those.’

Holsten sent a glance of mute appeal towards Lain, but she was avoiding his gaze. Without entertaining any hope whatsoever, he began paring ID and greetings codes from those fragments of Old Empire recordings that had survived, and throwing them at random towards the satellite.

‘I’ve got signal from the drones on screen,’ Karst reported, and a moment later they were looking at the planet itself. It was still just a glint, barely distinct from the surrounding starfield, even with the best magnification of the drones’ electronic eyes, but they could see it growing. A minute later and Vitas pointed out the tiny pinprick shadow of its moon passing across the planet’s surface.

‘Where’s the satellite?’ Guyen demanded.

‘Not that you’d see it at this distance, but it’s coming round from the far side, using the planet’s atmosphere and the moon to bounce its signal to us.’

‘Drone parties splitting off now,’ Karst reported. ‘Let’s take a proper look at this Brin thing.’

‘More warnings. Nothing’s getting through to it,’ Holsten slipped in, aware that by now nobody was really listening to him.

‘Karst, remember, no damage to the satellite once you contact,’ Guyen was saying. ‘Whatever tech’s there, we want it in one piece.’

‘No problems. And there she is. Starting our run right now.’

‘Karst—’

‘Relax, Commander. They know what they’re doing.’

Holsten glanced up to see the drones fixing their aim at a point on the growing green orb’s circumference.

‘Look at that colour,’ Vitas breathed.

‘Unhealthy,’ Lain agreed.

‘No, that’s… that’s old Earth colour. Green.’

‘This is it,’ one of the engineers whispered. ‘We’re here. We made it.’

‘Visual on the satellite,’ Karst announced, highlighting a tiny glint on the screen.

‘“This is the Second Brin Sentry Habitat,”’ Holsten read out insistently. ‘“This planet is claimed by the…” The, what? Something… “Exaltation Program, and any interference is forbidden.”’

‘Exaltation what?’ Lain asked sharply.

‘I don’t know. I…’ Holsten was racking his brains for references, hunting through the ship’s archives. ‘There was something about… the Old Empire fell because it descended into sinful ways. You know the myth cycle?’

A few grunts of confirmation.

‘The exaltation of beasts – that was one of the sins of the ancients.’

Karst let out a yelp of surprise and moments later the transmissions from his satellite-bound drones exploded into static.

‘Ah, shit! Everything heading for the satellite just died!’ he bellowed.

‘Lain—’ Guyen started.

‘Already on it. Last moments of…’ A busy silence as she worked. ‘Here, this is the last one to go, by about a second. There – brief power surges – and the other drones are gone. Then this one goes right after. It just blew your drones, Karst.’

‘What with? Why would it need a—?’

‘Look, that thing could be serious military hardware, for all we know,’ Lain snapped.

‘Or it would need to be ready to track and deal with deep-space object impact,’ suggested Vitas. ‘Anti-asteroid lasers, maybe?’

‘I’m…’ Lain was frowning at the readouts. ‘I’m not sure it did shoot… Karst, how open are the drone systems?’

The security chief swore.

‘We are still heading towards it,’ Holsten pointed out. Even as he said this, some of the other drone screens were dying – the machines Karst had been sending planetside. The satellite was snuffing them out the moment it rounded the world enough to obtain line of sight.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Karst demanded, fighting for control, sending his last pair of machines zigzagging towards the planet. A moment later there was a sudden energy spike, a colossal expenditure of power from the satellite, and one of the two surviving machines was gone.

‘Now that was a shot,’ Lain confirmed grimly. ‘That atomized the bastard.’

Karst swore foully as he coded instructions for the last machine, sending it spiralling towards the planet, trying to keep the curve of the horizon between the drone and the satellite.

‘Are those weapons a danger to the Gilgamesh?’ Guyen asked, and the room fell silent.

‘Probably, yes.’ Vitas sounded unnaturally calm. ‘However, given how much energy we’ve just seen, its ability to use them may be limited.’

‘It won’t need a second shot at us,’ Lain said grimly. ‘We’re not going to be able to deviate from this course – not significantly. We’re already decelerating as much as is safe – we have too much momentum. We’re plotted to come into orbit.’

‘It’s telling us to leave or it will destroy us,’ Holsten said tonelessly. As the Gilgamesh’s computers adapted, they became quicker at bringing him a comprehensible record of the signal, and he found that he was now reading the reproduction of an ancient script almost fluently. Even before any demands from Guyen, he was already phrasing his reply: Travellers in distress. Do not initiate hostile action. Civilian transport ship requires assistance. Lain was looking over his shoulder critically as he sent it.

‘It is adjusting its positioning,’ from the science team.

‘Pointing at us,’ Guyen concluded.

‘It’s an inexact comparison, but…’ But yes, in the minds of everyone there.

Holsten could feel his heart hammering madly. Travellers in distress. Do not initiate hostile action. Civilian transport ship requires assistance. But the message wasn’t getting through.

Guyen opened his mouth to issue some desperate order, but Lain burst out, ‘Send it back its own distress call, for fuck’s sake!’

Holsten goggled at her for a moment, then let out a cry of some nameless emotion – triumph inextricably mixed with annoyance at not having thought of it himself. Moments later it was done.

There were some hard minutes, then, waiting to see how the satellite would react, to see if they had been in time. Even as Holsten returned the satellite’s own distress signal to it, the attack could already have been sent leaping across space towards them, fast enough that they would not even know until it struck.

Finally, Holsten sagged back in his seat with relief. The others were crowding round, staring at his screen, but none of them had the classical education to translate it, until he put them out of their suspense.

‘“Please hold for further communication”,’ he told them, ‘or something like that. I think – I hope – it’s gone to wake up something more sophisticated.’

There was a murmur of conversation behind him, but he was counting the minutes until the next transmission arrived. When the screen filled instantly with code, he was elated for a fraction of a second before letting out a hiss of exasperation. ‘It’s gibberish. It’s just a wall of nonsense. Why is it—?’

‘Wait, wait,’ Lain interrupted him. ‘It’s a different sort of signal, that’s all. Gilgamesh has matched the encoding with some stuff in your archives, old man. It’s… hah, it’s audio. It’s speech.’

Everyone was silent once more. Holsten glanced around at a cramped room full of bald men and women, all looking in less than good health, still shivering from the aftereffects of their unthinkably long suspension, and all unable to keep up with the revelations and emotional trauma of their current situation. I’m honestly not sure who’s even still following this. ‘Probably it’s still an automated…’ he started, but tailed off, not sure if he even had the energy for the argument.

‘Right. Gilgamesh has done his best to decode, based on the fragments in archive,’ Lain reported. ‘Everyone want to hear this?’

‘Yes,’ Guyen decided.

What came to them from the ship’s speakers was hideous: a corroded, static-spiked mess in which a female voice could just be discerned, nothing but isolated words breaking in and out of the interference – words in a language that nobody but Holsten could comprehend. Holsten had been watching the commander’s face, because it had been obvious to him what they would get, and he saw a spasm of rage spike there briefly before being fought down. Oh, that’s not good.

‘Mason, translate.’

‘Give me time. And if you can clean it up any, Lain…?’

‘Already on it,’ she muttered.

Behind them, the others began speculating cautiously. What had been speaking? Was it merely an automatic message or… Vitas was speculating on the Old Empire’s supposed intelligent machines – not just a sophisticated autonomous engine like the Gilgamesh but devices that could think and interact as if they were human. Or more than human.

Holsten hunched over his console, phones to his ears, listening to the incrementally clearer versions that Lain was scrubbing for him. At first he couldn’t understand more than a few words, having to slow the transmission down and focus on small slices of it, while trying to wrestle with a thoroughly unexpected intonation and pattern of speech. There was a lot of interference, too: a weird, irregular rise and fall of static that kept interfering with the actual message.

‘I’ve got the drone into the atmosphere,’ Karst announced abruptly. Everyone had almost forgotten him, as he sent instructions to his one surviving remote, with no idea of whether each refinement to its course would arrive in time to prevent its destruction. When he had the attention of the majority, he added, ‘Who wants to see our new home?’

The drone’s images were grainy and distorted, a high-altitude scan of a world so green that one of the scientists asked if the picture had been recoloured.

‘You’re seeing exactly what the drone’s seeing,’ Karst assured them.

‘It’s beautiful,’ someone put in. Most others simply stared. It was beyond their experience and their imagination. The Earth that they remembered had not looked like this. Any such verdant explosion had been locked away in the years before the ice, and it never returned after the toxic thaw. They came from a planet immeasurably poorer than this one.

‘All right.’ The conversation behind Holsten had grown into a hubbub of speculation, then died away into ennui in the time it had taken him to adjust to the new transmission. ‘Translation, here.’

He sent it to their screens: The Second Brin Sentry Habitation acknowledges your request for assistance. You are currently on a heading that will bring you to a quarantine planet, and no interference with this planet will be countenanced. Please provide full details of your emergency situation so that habitat systems may analyse and advise. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in any way.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Karst declared, and, ‘Doesn’t know about the last drone, then. I’ve set it so as to try and keep to the far side of the planet from that thing.’

Mason was still playing back the message, trying to work out what that continuing interference was. Like the distress call, it sounded as though there was some other message hitching a ride along with the satellite’s signal.

‘Is it still sending down to the planet?’ he asked Lain.

‘It is, but I’ve compensated for that. You shouldn’t be getting…’

‘Kern’s World?’ Vitas noted. ‘Is that a name?’

‘“Kern” and “Brin” are phonetic,’ Holsten admitted. ‘If they’re words, then they’re not in my vocabulary files. What response?’

‘Will it understand if we speak to it?’ Guyen pressed.

‘I’ll send an encoded message, like before,’ Holsten told him. ‘I… whatever it is, it’s not speaking Imperial C the way the textbooks think it should be spoken. Different accent, different culture maybe. I don’t think I could speak to it well enough to be properly understood.’

‘Send this.’ Guyen shunted over a block of text for Holsten to translate and encode. We are the ark ship Gilgamesh, carrying five hundred thousand humans in suspension. It is of utmost priority that we are able to establish a presence on your planet. This is a matter of the survival of the human species. We require your assistance in preserving our cargo.

‘It’s not going to work.’ Holsten wondered whether Guyen had somehow heard some other message from the satellite, because that wasn’t an appropriate response as far as he was concerned. He sent it off, though, and returned to listening to the previous transmission, recruiting Lain to try and parse out the rider signal, to separate out something comprehensible. And then abruptly he began to hear it, listening between the words, stock-still and gripping his console as the meaning came through to him.

‘Uh…’ Mason had kicked his seat back from his position, but the voice still droned and grated in his earphones – absolutely the same voice as the main message’s formal efficiency, but twisted by a terrible despair. ‘We may have a problem…’

‘New transmission coming through,’ from Lain, even whilst others were demanding to know what Holsten meant.

‘What should I do with the drone?’ Karst put in.

‘Just sit on it for now. Tell it to keep itself blocked from communications with the habitat,’ Guyen told him. ‘Mason—’

But Holsten was already working through the new transmission. It was a far shorter, punchier message than the first, but the word stuck in his mind. ‘Habitat’: that was my translation. Did the ancients mean that? They couldn’t really have meant something for someone to live in. Twenty metres across, for however many millennia? No, that can’t possibly…

‘It says, do we want to speak to Eliza,’ he choked out.

Inevitably, someone had to ask, ‘Who’s Eliza?’ as though anybody there could have answered the question.

‘We do,’ Guyen decided, which was just as well as Holsten had already sent the response.

Minutes later – the delay shorter each time, as they neared the planet – something new spoke to them.

Holsten recognized the same voice as before, though considerably clearer, and still with that horrible stream-of-consciousness backing constantly trying to break through. His translation for the others came swiftly. By now he reckoned he must be as fluent in Imperial C as anyone had ever been in post-glacial history.

He passed it around the others’ screens: Good evening, travellers. I am Eliza Kerns, composite expert system of the Second Brin Sentry Habitat. I’m sorry, but I may have missed the import of some communications that you have already sent to me. Would you please summarize what was said?

There was an interesting split in the listeners then. Command and Security remained mostly unmoved whilst Science and Engineering were thrown into sudden debate: what did the voice mean by ‘expert system’? Was Holsten sure that was the proper translation? Was it actually an intelligent machine, or just something pretending to be one?

Holsten himself was busy piecing together that background message, although he felt less and less happy about it. The words, the very tone of horror and desperation in his ears, were making him feel ill.

Holsten re-sent the Gilgamesh’s last substantive transmission: We are the ark ship Gilgamesh, carrying five hundred thousand humans in suspension. It is of utmost priority that we are able to establish a presence on your planet. This is a matter of the survival of the human species. We require your assistance in preserving our cargo.

And the reply:

‘Same words from a different computer,’ Guyen spat angrily.

Lain was looking over Holsten’s shoulder, staring at his translation of the second, hidden voice. He saw her mouth the words, The fuck…?

‘Mason, I don’t care how you phrase it – dress it up as fancy as you like. It needs to understand that we are human and that we need its help,’ Guyen said. ‘If there’s some old-world way of overriding its programming, of getting through to whatever that is, we need you to find it.’

No pressure, then; but Holsten was already planning out his response. It was not a linguistics problem, no matter what Guyen might think. It was a technological problem, but one that even Lain was surely little better equipped to deal with than he was. They were speaking to a functioning, autonomous Imperial system. The EMP-blasted hulks in orbit around Earth had contained nothing like it.

Eliza, he sent back, we are in desperate need. We have travelled far from Earth to find a new home for that part of the human race we are responsible for. If we cannot locate such a home, then hundreds of thousands of human beings will die. Does your system of priorities allow you take responsibility for such a result? The Gilgamesh archives did not contain them, but Holsten had an idea that he had read somewhere of some philanthropic rules imposed on the fabled old artificial intelligences.

So much for that. ‘It really is just the same line as before. We’ve got nowhere, except…’

‘What?’ Guyen demanded.

‘I want to try something a bit lateral,’ Holsten explained.

‘Is it likely to get us blown up ahead of schedule?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then you try whatever you’ve got, Mason.’

Holsten steeled himself and transmitted a simple, surreal question: Is there anybody else there we could talk to?

‘You’re taking the piss,’ Lain said in his ear.

‘Better ideas?’

‘I’m Engineering. We don’t do ideas.’

He managed a weak smile at that one. Everyone else was on tenterhooks, awaiting the response, save for Guyen who was glowering at Holsten as though his fierce regard could somehow inspire the classicist to greater efforts of antiquarianism.

Lain swore again, and Guyen stared down at his own screen. Another murmur of baffled speculation was rising around them.

‘Right, look, I have a theory,’ Holsten explained. ‘We’re talking to some sort of automated system still, obviously, even if it’s programmed to respond in a human-like manner. But there’s something else there. It’s… different. It seems less rational. So we could see if it will let us do things that the main expert system won’t. Worst comes to worst, we could even turn it against the main system, somehow, I don’t know.’

‘But what is “it”?’ Vitas asked him. ‘Why would they have two systems?’

‘Failsafe?’ Holsten suggested, because he was keeping his worst suspicions very much to himself.

‘Try it,’ Guyen said. ‘Karst, I want some solutions if this turns ugly. Our current course will bring us into the planet’s attraction at the right speed to make orbit. The only alternative is to stop decelerating now and just fly past, and then… and then what?’ The question was plainly rhetorical, the hard-pressed commander showing the working of his sums. ‘Then we set course for the next point on the star maps, and somehow hope there’s something different there? We’ve seen this planet now. This is going to be our home. Mason, tell it.’

Why, yes, Eliza, please let us talk to your sister. Holsten tried to match the expert system’s polite and formal manner of speech.

He was not sure what they would get back, and he was ready to shut down the comms if it was just that anguished mad babbling, because there could be no dialogue with that – no possibility of negotiating with that internalized storm of insanity.

‘We’re being told to stand by,’ he reported, when the instruction came. After that there was nothing else for a long time; the Gilgamesh continued to fall inexorably towards the green planet’s gravity well. The satellite was still silent when Lain and her team began their anxious watch over ship’s systems, as the ancient ark ship began to creak and strain at the unnatural imposition of an external source of mass, large and close enough to claw at the vessel’s structure. Everyone there felt a subtle shifting: for the whole waking portion of the journey, their perception of gravity had come from the ship’s gradual deceleration. Now an alien force was reaching for them, subtly tugging with insubstantial ghost fingers, the first touch of the world below.

‘All signs suggest stable orbit for now,’ Lain reported tensely. There followed a slow-motion comedy as deceleration ceased and then rotation began, gravity creeping across the floor to make a new home against the wall, and the Gilgamesh’s consoles and fittings shudderingly adjusting. For a minute there was no point of reference; a room full of weightless people trying to remember their long-ago training, hauling on each other to get to the right surface before they could be slammed into it. In the commotion, awkwardness, and a series of minor medical calls, the whole business of their imminent destruction was almost forgotten.

‘New transmission,’ Holsten alerted them, as the signal came in. In his ear those same female tones sounded, but the intonation, the rhythm of the speech was quite different, and stripped free of that tortured backing.

I am Doctor Avrana Kern, chief scientist and administrator of the Second Brin Exaltation Project, was his translation. Even through the filter of archaic Imperial C, the voice was stern and proud. What are you? What is your provenance?

‘That doesn’t sound like a computer,’ Lain murmured.

‘Of course it’s a computer,’ Vitas snapped. ‘It’s simply a more sophisticated approximation of—’

‘Enough.’ Guyen cut through the argument. ‘Mason?’

We are an ark ship from Earth, Holsten sent, seeking permission to establish a colony on Kern’s World. If the thing he was talking to was in any way human, he guessed that a little flattery couldn’t harm.

Whose Earth, though? Sering’s Earth or my Earth? came the swift reply. Now that they were in orbit, there was barely any delay: it was almost like a real conversation.

Real conversation with a faceless machine mind, Holsten reminded himself. He sent his translation round the room, looking for help, but nobody had any suggestion as to what the satellite meant. Before he could give any kind of answer, a new transmission came in.

I do not recognize you. You are not human. You are not from Earth. You have no business here. Eliza shows me all that she sees of you and there is nothing of Earth in you but why can I not see you for myself why can I not open my eyes where are my eyes where are my eyes where are my eyes. And then an abrupt cessation of the message, leaving Holsten shaken because that was it: a segue straight into the voice of madness, without a moment’s warning.

‘I don’t think it’s a computer,’ he said, but soft enough that only Lain heard him. She was reading over his shoulder still, and nodded soberly.

Our vessel is the ark ship Gilgamesh from Earth. This ship was built after your time, he prepared and sent, with a bitter awareness of the sheer understatement implicit in that. He was dreading what they might receive back.

‘It’s completely deranged,’ Karst stated flatly, and that with the benefit of only half of what was being said. ‘Can we keep the planet between us, or something?’

‘Not and retain stable orbit,’ one of Guyen’s team reported. ‘Seriously, remember how big the Gil is. We can’t just flit him about like your drones.’

Holsten was already sending, because Guyen had stopped dictating and it now seemed to be down to him. Return to Earth is not possible. Please may we speak to your sister again, Eliza?, pleading for the life of humanity in a dead language – having to make the call between artificial intransigence and what he was increasingly sure was real human crazy.

That other voice again, delivering a rant that he got down as: Why can’t you just go back where you came from? Are you Sering’s people? Did we win? Did we throw you out? Are you here to finish what he started?

‘What happened here?’ demanded Vitas incredulously. ‘What’s Sering? A warship?’

Earth is no longer habitable, Holsten sent, even as Lain warned, ‘That’s going to push her over the edge for sure, Mason.’

He had dispatched the message even as she said it, the hollow feeling in his stomach arriving a moment later. She’s right, at that.

But there was a measure more sanity in Doctor Avrana Kern’s voice when it replied. Nonsense. Explain.

The Gilgamesh archives had histories, but whoever would have thought they would need translating into a language only historians were now interested in? Instead, Holsten did his best: History 101 for the lost time traveller, based on best guesses as to what had actually happened beyond the dawn of his recorded time, back when the Old Empire had held sway. There was so little he could actually say. The gap between the last thing Kern must know and the earliest definite fact that Holsten could rely on was insuperable.

There was a civil war between factions of the Empire, he explained. Both sides unleashed weapons the nature of which I do not understand, but which were effective in devastating higher civilization on Earth and completely destroying the colonies. He remembered seeing the eggshell ruins on Europa. The in-system colonies had all predated any apparent later expertise in terraforming that the Empire had come to possess. They had been hothouse flowers on planets and moons haphazardly altered to better support life, reliant on biospheres that must have required constant adjustment. On Earth people had lapsed back into barbarism. Elsewhere, when the power had failed, when the electromagnetic weapons had destroyed the vital engines, or the electronic viruses murdered the artificial minds, they had died. They had died in alien cold, in reverting atmospheres, under corrosive skies. Often, they had died still fighting each other. So little had been left intact.

He typed it all out. As though writing an abstract to a history text, he noted with dry precision that a post-war industrial society may have persisted for almost a century, and may even have been regaining some of the sophistication of its predecessors, when the ice came. The choked atmosphere that had smothered the planet in gloom had shouldered out the sun, resulting in a midnight glacial cold that had left very little of that abortive rebirth. Looking back down the well of time, Holsten could make no definite statements about those who were left, nor about the frozen age that followed. Some scientists had speculated that, when the ice was at its height, the entire remnant human population of Earth had been no more than ten thousand all told, huddling in caves and holes around the equator and staring out at a horizon rigid with cold.

He went on into more certain waters, the earliest unearthed records of what he could truly think of as his people. The ice had been retreating. Humanity had sprung back swiftly, expanded, fought its small wars, re-industrialized, tripping constantly over reminders of what the species had previously achieved. Human eyes had looked to the skies again, which were crossed by so many moving points of light.

And he told Kern why they could not go back: because of the war, the Empire’s war from thousands of years before. For so long, scholars had taught that the further the ice receded, the better for the world, and yet nobody had guessed what poisons and sicknesses had been caught up in that ice, like insects in amber, the encroaching cold protecting the shivering biosphere from the last excesses of Empire.

There is no returning to Earth, he sent to the pensively silent satellite. In the end, we could not counterbalance the increasing toxicity of the environment. So we built the ark ships. In the end all we had was old star maps to guide us. We are the human race. And we’ve had no transmissions from any other arks to say that they’ve found anywhere to stay. Doctor Avrana Kern, this is all we have. Please may we settle on your planet?

Because he was thinking in human terms, he expected a decent pause then for his opposite number to digest all that potted history. Instead, one of the science crew shouted out, ‘New energy readings! It’s activating something!’

‘A weapon?’ Guyen demanded, and all the screens briefly went blank, then flared to life again with nonsense scattering across them: fragments of code and text and simple static.

‘It’s got into the Gilgamesh control system!’ Lain spat. ‘It’s attacking our security – no, it’s through. Fuck, we’re open. It’s got full control. This is what it did to your drones, Karst, the ones it didn’t just vaporize. We’re fucked!’

‘Do what you can!’ Guyen urged her.

‘What the fuck do you think I can do? I’m locked out! Balls to your “cultural specificity”, Mason. It’s all over our fucking system like a disease.’

‘How’s our orbit?’ someone asked.

‘I have no feedback, no instrumentation at all.’ Vitas sounded very slightly tense. ‘However, I’ve not felt any change in thrust, and mere loss of power or control should not affect our position relative to the planet.’

Like all those hulks orbiting Earth, Holsten thought helplessly. Those fried, dead ships, with the vacuum-dried bodies of their crew still in place after thousands of years.

Abruptly the lights jumped and flickered, and then a face appeared on every screen.

It was a bony, long-jawed face; that it was a woman’s was not immediately obvious. Details kept filling in: dark hair drawn back, skin shaded and textured, harsh lines about the mouth and eyes; unflattering by modern criteria but who could name the ancient aesthetics that this face acknowledged? It was a face from an era and a society and an ethnicity that time had otherwise erased. The kinship between it and the crew of the Gilgamesh seemed tenuous, coincidental.

The voice that rang out through the speakers was unmistakably the same, but this time it was speaking the crew’s own common language, although the lips did not sync.

‘I am Doctor Avrana Kern. This is my world. I will brook no interference with my experiment. I have seen what you are. You are not from my Earth. You are not my humanity. You are monkeys, nothing but monkeys. You are not even my monkeys. My monkeys are undergoing uplift, the great experiment. They are pure. They will not be corrupted by you mere humans. You are nothing but monkeys of a lesser order. You mean nothing to me.’

‘Can she hear us?’ Guyen asked quietly.

‘If your own systems can hear you, then I can hear you,’ Kern’s voice spat out.

‘Are we to understand that you are condemning the last survivors of your own species to death?’ It was a remarkably mannered, patient display from Guyen. ‘Because it seems that is what you are saying.’

‘You are not my responsibility,’ Kern pronounced. ‘This planet is my responsibility.’

‘Please,’ Lain said, ignoring Guyen when he gestured at her to shut up. ‘I don’t know what you are, if you’re human or machine or whatever, but we need your help.’

The face froze, nothing but a still image for a handful of heartbeats.

‘Lain, if you’ve—’ Guyen started, and then abruptly Kern’s image began to break up, distorting and corrupting on screen, features bloating or atrophying and then flickering into nothing.

The voice spoke again, a plaintive whisper in its native tongue, and only Holsten could know what it was saying. I am human. I must be human. Am I the system? Am I the upload? Is there anything of me left? Why can I not feel my body? Why can I not open my eyes?

‘The other thing, the Eliza thing, it was mentioning some other help,’ Lain murmured, although surely even a whisper would be overheard. ‘Can we just ask it—?’

‘I will help you,’ Kern said, speaking their language again, sounding calmer now. ‘I will help you leave. You have all the universe except this world of mine. You can go anywhere.’

‘But we can’t—’ Guyen started.

Then Lain broke in. ‘I’m back in. Checking all systems.’ A tense minute to ensure that, at the very least, the ship’s computer was telling her that everything was still working. ‘We’ve got new data flagged up. It’s just dumped a whole load of stuff on us. It’s… the Gilgamesh recognizes star maps. Mason, I’ve received some stuff in that jabber of yours.’

Holsten scanned over the jumble of data. ‘I, ah… not sure, but it’s linked to the star maps. It’s… I think it’s…’ His mouth was dry. ‘Other terraforming projects? I think the… I think we’ve been given the keys to the next system. It’s giving us destinations.’ It’s selling out its neighbours, was what he did not say, given that it was listening, it’s bribing us to go away. ‘I think… something here might even be access codes.’

‘How far?’ Guyen demanded.

‘Just under two light years,’ Vitas reported briskly. ‘Just a step, really.’

Through a long, stressed silence, they waited for Guyen’s decision. The face of Avrana Kern was back on some of the screens, glowering at them; twitching, distorting, reforming.

2.6 METROPOLIS

Negotiations with the locals have gone sufficiently well – now that Portia and her party have established their superiority – and the incumbents have lent the three travellers a male to serve as a guide in the lands to the north. The creature is slightly smaller than Portia’s own male companion, but of a quite different character, bold to the point of impudence by Portia’s standards. He has a name: call him Fabian. Portia, whilst aware that males give themselves names, has very seldom needed to know any, even with the concentration of that gender to be found at Great Nest. She guesses that in a small family unit such as these locals, males are likely to be more self-reliant, therefore both more capable and more independently minded. Still, she finds his brashness off-putting. Bianca appears to find him less objectionable and, on their trip north, Portia catches Fabian displaying for her, a tentative offer to gift her his sperm. Bianca has not yet shown herself receptive, but Portia notes that she has not chased him off either.

Portia herself has put several clutches of eggs behind her – females seldom depart Great Nest without having passed on their lineage – and she feels this current behaviour is distracting from their mission. On the other hand, Bianca has fought for her and probably considers playing with this new male her reward. Portia only hopes she can keep her desires in check. It would be more diplomatically advantageous if Fabian was not killed and eaten during the throes of passion.

They do not have to travel far to the north to see just what has been growing here at the edge of the Great Nest’s web of awareness. Soon they begin coming across felled trees – their trunks showing a combination of blackening, chewing and surprisingly clean cuts, often painstakingly scissored into sections. Frequently the entire root system has been unearthed as well, ensuring that nothing will regrow. The forest is under wide-scale attack, its fringes being gnawed away. Fabian can remember when there were more trees, he communicates. The clearing of land continues year to year, and Fabian’s inherited Understanding suggests that it is happening faster now than in his mother’s time.

Beyond that ragged edge, the other trees – the foreign trees – are set out in discrete stands. They are small and squat and bulbous, with fleshy leaves and trunks that are warty with protrusions. The exaggerated space between each copse is a firebreak – something the spiders are very familiar with. Their planet’s oxygen levels are higher than Earth’s – lightning-sparked fires are a constant threat.

What they are seeing is no work of nature. This is a plantation on a grand scale, and the labourers tending it are plainly visible. Everywhere Portia turns her eyes there are more of them and, if she looks beyond the chequerboard of groves, she can make out a steep-sided mound that must be the upper reaches of the plantation-owners’ colony, the bulk of it being hidden underground. A pall of smoke hangs over it like bad weather.

Portia’s kin are well aware that they are not the sole inheritors of their world. Whilst they cannot know how the nanovirus has been reshaping life here for millennia, there are certain species she shares the planet with, that her people recognize as something more than animals. The Spitters are a low-end example, barely removed from a state of brute nature, but to look into their small, weak eyes is nonetheless to recognize that here is a thing of intellect – and hence, danger.

The western oceans that Portia’s Great Nest looks over are home to a type of stomatopod with which her people have cautious, ritualized relations. Their ancestors were fierce, inventive hunters, equipped with unparalleled eyesight and deadly natural weapons, and used to living in colonies where negotiations over living space were common. They, too, proved fertile ground for the virus, and have developed on parallel lines with Portia’s own kin. Perhaps because of their aquatic environment, perhaps because they are by nature prone to wait for prey, their society is simple and primitive by Portia’s standards, but the two species have nothing to compete over, and in the littoral zone they sometimes swap gifts, the fruits of the land in exchange for the fruits of the sea.

Of more pressing concern are the ants.

Portia understands the nature of ants. There are colonies near the Great Nest, and she has both personal and genetically encoded dealings with them to draw upon. It is the Great Nest’s collective experience that ant colonies are complicated neighbours. They must be dealt with decisively – left to themselves they will always expand in a manner detrimental to any species that the ants themselves have no use for, which would naturally include Portia’s own. They can be destroyed – her inherited Understandings include chronicles of such conflicts – but war with even a small colony is costly and wasteful. Alternatively, preferably, they can be accommodated and limited by careful manipulation of their decisions.

Portia knows that ants are not like her people, nor like the Spitters or the stomatopods of the western shallows. She knows that individual ants themselves cannot be treated with, communicated with or even threatened. Her comprehension is coarse, of a necessity, but approximates to the truth. Each ant does not think. It has a complex set of responses based on a wide range of stimuli, many of which are themselves chemical messages produced by other ants in response to still more eventualities. There is no intelligence within a colony, but there is such a hierarchy of interacting and co-dependent instinct that it seems to Portia that some manner of entity is behind a colony’s actions and reactions.

With ants, the nanovirus has simultaneously failed and succeeded. Amongst the ants’ network of reactive decision making it has inculcated a strategy of experimentation and investigation that approaches rigorous scientific method, but it has not led to intellect such as any human or spider would recognize. Ant colonies evolve and adapt, throw up new castes, investigate and make use of resources, devise new technologies, refine them and interrelate them, and all this without anything approaching a consciousness to direct it. There is no hive mind, but there is a vast and flexible biological difference engine, a self-perfecting machine dedicated to the continuance of itself. It does not understand how what it does functions, but it constantly expands its behavioural repertoire and builds upon those trial-and-error paths that prove fruitful.

Portia’s understanding of all this is very limited, but she has a grasp of how ants do and do not work. She knows that individual ants cannot innovate, but that the colony can – in a strange way – make what appear to be informed decisions. Application of force and reward, a narrowing of the colony’s viable options so that the most advantageous is the one the spiders intend it to choose, can lead to a colony accepting boundaries on its territory and its place in the world, and even to become a productive partner. The colonies are perfect exponents of game theory: they will cooperate where that course is less costly and more beneficial than other strategies, such as all-out genocidal war.

The colonies that she is already familiar with, near Great Nest, are surely less than a tenth the size of what she is now looking at. Fabian explains that there were once several warring colonies here, but one has become dominant. Instead of driving its lesser neighbours to extinction, the ruling colony has incorporated them into its own survival strategy, permitting their continuance in return for making them into extensions of itself, utilizing food that they gather and technologies they have developed. It is this world’s first superstate.

Portia and the others have a brief, agitated conversation. This super-colony is far enough from Great Nest not to threaten it now, but they can look ahead and envisage that its very existence here endangers their people’s future. A solution must be found but, to think through a plan like that, Portia’s kin at home will need all the information she can bring back to them.

They are going to have to continue their journey into the land of the ants.

Fabian is surprisingly useful. He has travelled further than this himself; in fact his family makes a habit of it. It is dangerous, but they have developed ways of minimizing the risk of raising the alarm, and when hunting has been lean, the ants’ larders are a last resort.

A new column of ants has arrived, and they are here for timber. The spiders retreat further into the trees and watch as the insects set to work breaking up the already fallen trunks into manageable sections, using acid and the strength of their jaws. Portia is swift to spot something new: a caste that she has never seen before. Smaller branches are severed and carried off by unexceptional-seeming workers, but the large trunks are dealt with by ants with long, curved mandibles equipped with jagged inner edges. These they fix to the circumference of a trunk, and move their mouthparts in incremental opposition, scoring around and around so as to cut a circular section away. Those mandibles did not emerge from the cocoon with the rest of the ant, however. They gleam in the sunlight in a way quite unlike anything Portia has seen before: rigid, toothed sleeves that make remarkably quick work of biting and sawing the wood into pieces.

With Fabian taking the lead, the spiders ambush an ant logging party, trapping and killing them quickly and efficiently, then decapitating them and dissecting them for their scent glands. The ants are smaller than Portia – between fifteen and thirty centimetres long – and the spiders are stronger, swifter and far more efficient fighters, one on one. What they must avoid is a general alarm, where large sections of the colonies are mobilized against them.

The ants communicate principally by pheromones – to Portia’s keen chemical senses the air is thick with them. They use the ants’ scent to disguise their own, and they carry the severed heads with them, secured to their abdomens. In extremis they can try to divert ant attention by a morbid form of puppetry, manipulating the dead antennae of their victims in a pretence of communication.

They travel swiftly. Their victims will be missed, but the initial response will target where they were, not where they are now. Their road is the high one. They travel through the upper reaches of the ants’ plantations, and whenever they reach a firebreak, one of them scuttles across the intervening ground with a thread that then forms the spine of a temporary bridge. With their own scent disguised, they travel over the ants’ heads and beneath their notice.

Fabian demonstrates that the protrusions on the trunks of the ant-tended trees can be lanced with a fang to release a sweet, nourishing liquid not unlike the honeydew of aphids, a taste they know the ants relish. This plantation agriculture is obviously a useful secret, and Portia adds it to the list of observations to include in her report when she returns home.

For now, they press on towards the main colony mound, avoiding the ants where they can, killing them swiftly where they cannot. Each small alarm will contribute to a generally raised awareness across the nest, until significant insect resources are devoted to locating intruders whose presence has been deduced by the colony’s ineluctable internal logic.

Portia’s goal is to investigate the central colony mound, which promises more secrets. During the day the air shimmers over parts of it, and there are plumes of smoke venting from stubby chimneys. At night, some of the ants’ entrances glow dimly.

In the darkness of their home, the ants start fires in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, ignited by exothermic reactions from chemicals that certain of their castes can produce. Complex arrangements of internal passageways use the temperature differentials to stimulate airflow: heating, cooling and oxygenating their nests. The ants also use fire for land clearance, and as a weapon.

Portia’s world – the underlying geology that existed before the terraforming – is rich in shallow deposits of metals, and the ants dig deep to build their nests. In this colony, centuries of burning has led to charcoal production, and occasional inadvertent smelting has been systematized into the forging of tools. The blind watchmaker has been busy.

Entering the mound itself is more than Portia dares, and she is tempted to leave with all the information she has gathered. Curiosity urges her on, though. Atop the mound, beneath the hanging shroud of smoke, is a spire that gleams in the sun brightly enough to draw the eye. Like all of her kind, she is driven to investigate anything new. This reflective beacon is the highest point on the mound, and Portia wants to know what it is.

Portia finds her band of infiltrators a vantage point in the nearest plantation to the mound and considers the paths taken by the chains of ant workers. Inside the brain that bulks out the underside of her body, she has fallen into a way of thinking that her diminutive ancestress would recognize: constructing an internal map of the world, and then deconstructing that to find the best course to where she needs to go next.

I will go alone, she instructs Bianca. If I do not return, then you must go home and report.

Bianca understands.

Portia descends by line from the tree that provided her watchtower, and begins her journey, following the itinerary that she spent so long plotting. The ants follow particular paths that their constant travel has packed down into flat, smooth roads representing the most efficient routes. Portia navigates a delicate, cautious path between these thoroughfares. She moves haltingly, pausing, quivering, then drifting on, gauging the lightly gusting wind and letting her onward progress follow its patterns, as if she herself was nothing but some overlarge piece of wind-blown debris. The vibrations of her movement are swallowed up in the entropy of the world at large. With her scent disguised, she can ghost past the near-blind ants as though she is invisible.

The going gets more complex and more dangerous as she reaches the mound itself. Her careful plan knows constant amendment, and she comes close to discovery several times. Once she uses the detached head of one of her victims, in a brief moment of feigned contact, to put off a wandering cleaner who is paying too close attention to her.

Her painstaking progress has taken hours, and the sun has set. This leads to outdoor ant activity dropping off, and makes her progress easier; only then does she reach the summit.

The ants have built a stumpy spire here, as already observed, and atop it is something new: a pale crystal that gleams translucently in the moonlight. She has no idea what this is for, and so she waits in the hope that the ants themselves will show her.

After the moon begins to dip towards the far horizon, they do. All of a sudden there are ants issuing out on to the mound’s summit in considerable numbers, so that Portia must move rapidly, and keep moving until she has found somewhere that they do not intend to occupy, which means some way further back down the shallow gradient. The insects are forming a carpet, a net of their bodies, touching antennae and limbs. Portia is baffled.

They seem to be awaiting something – or that is how she interprets their behaviour. It is un-antlike. It concerns her.

Then another of the insects emerges from a small hole at the base of the spire and climbs up it. It flicks one antennae towards the crystal, with the other directed downwards to make contact with the general host gathered below it. Portia’s wide, round eyes gather as much of the moonlight as they can, and focus on this newcomer: this small, unprepossessing ant. It has a prosthesis on its antenna, like the tree-cutters, but this is a fine cap of the same material – metal, though Portia does not know that – that tapers to invisibility, so that the ant is now touching the crystal with a tiny, delicate, hair-like wire.

And, as Portia watches, the ants begin to dance.

She has never seen anything like it. Shivers go through the entire mat of them, apparently originating in that contact between metal feeler and crystal, and spreading through the assembled host. They are sent into constant waves of motion, each transmitting to its neighbours some rhythmic message that holds the entire congregation rapt.

Portia watches in quiet bewilderment.

She is no mathematician. She does not quite grasp the series of arithmetical progressions, series and transformations that are represented in the waves of motion passing through the ants – no more than the ants themselves do – but she can grasp that there is some pattern there, some significance to what she is seeing.

She does her best to interpret what she sees in light of her experiences, and those experiences she has inherited, but there is nothing comparable in the whole history of her own world. The ants feel the same. Their constant exploration of possibilities has resulted in this solitary contact with something vast and intangible, and the colony processes the information it receives and attempts to find a purpose for it, more and more of its biological processing power being applied to the task, more and more ants quivering under the pulsed rhythms of a distant radio signal.

Intent on trying to find pattern and plan in the scene before her, Portia’s hungry eyes note one more element, and she wonders, Is that important?

Like humans, Portia’s people are quick to see patterns, sometimes when there are none. Hence she makes the association quickly, seeing the timing as too close to be coincidental. When the gathering of ants breaks up and hurries inside, without warning and all at once, it is just as the traveller, the swift-moving star that she has often watched coursing across the sky, is passing beneath the horizon.

She makes a plan then, swiftly and without much forethought. She is intrigued, and her species is driven to investigate anything new, just as the ants are, though in very different ways.

Once most of the ants are gone she approaches the spire carefully, wary of triggering some alarm. Lifting her palps she lets the wind ruffle them, feeling its strength and direction, and matching her movements to it.

She ascends carefully, foot over foot, until she finds the crystal before her. It does not seem so large, not to her.

She sets to spinning a complex package of silk that she holds with her rear legs. She is keenly aware of being at the very centre of the great colony. A mistake at this point would go very badly.

She has left matters almost too late. Her presence – through the vibrations of her work – has been detected. From its hole at the spire’s base, the small ant that led the congregation abruptly emerges and touches one of her feet with its uncovered antenna.

Immediately it lets out an alarm, a chemical sharp with outrage and fury at finding an alien, an intruder, in this place. As the scent passes outwards it is picked up by tunnel guards and other castes that have remained close to the exterior. The message is passed on and multiplied.

Portia drops on the ant beneath her and kills it with one bite, removing its head as she did with the others, although she knows she cannot bluff her way out of this one. Instead she scuttles up the spire again, seeking as much height as it will give, and seizes the crystal from the top.

She secures her two trophies to her abdomen with webbing, even as the ants begin to swarm out over the exterior of their colony. She sees plenty there with tools and modifications that she is suddenly no longer sufficiently curious to investigate.

She jumps. An unassisted leap from the spire would land her in their very midst, to be savagely held and stung and dismembered alive. At the apex of her upward spring, though, her hind legs kick out their burden of carefully folded silk, forming a fine-spun net spread between them that catches the wind Portia was so carefully measuring earlier.

It is not taking her quite back towards Bianca and the others, but she has no control over that. At this moment her chief priority is to get away, gliding over the heads of the enraged insects as they lift their metal-sheathed mandibles and try to work out where she could have gone.

Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.

2.7 EXODUS

Guyen took his time over his decision, as the Gilgamesh followed its long curving path around this solitary island of life in the vast desert of space, its trajectory constantly balanced between the momentum that would fling it away and the gravity that would draw it in.

The face of Doctor Avrana Kern – whoever and whatever she truly was – flickered and ghosted on their screens, sometimes inhuman in its stoic patience, at other times twisted by waves of nameless, involuntary emotions, the mad goddess of the green planet.

Knowing that Kern was listening, and could not be shut out, Guyen had no way to receive the counsel of his crew, but Holsten felt that the man would not have listened anyway: he was in command, the responsibility his alone to bear.

And of course there was only one answer, for all the agonized pondering that Guyen might give to the question. Even if the Sentry Habitat had not possessed weapons capable of destroying the Gilgamesh, the ark ship’s systems were at Kern’s mercy. The airlocks, the reactor, all the many tools they relied on to keep this bubble of life from the claws of the void; Kern could just switch it all off.

‘We’ll go,’ Guyen agreed at last, and Holsten reckoned he wasn’t the only one who was relieved to hear it. ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor Avrana Kern. We will seek out these other systems, and attempt to establish ourselves there. We will leave this planet in your care.’

Kern’s face sprang into animation on the screens, though still moving almost randomly, and completely divorced from the words. ‘Of course you will. Go take your barrel of monkeys elsewhere.’

Lain was murmuring, ‘What is this business about monkeys?’ in his ear, and Holsten had been wondering the same thing.

‘Monkeys are a sort of animal. We have records regarding them – the Empire used them in scientific experiments. They looked something like people. Here, I’ve got images…’

‘Gilgamesh has got a course plotted,’ Vitas stated.

Guyen looked it over. ‘Re-plot. I want us to swing by this planet here, the gas giant.’

‘We won’t be able to gain anything useful by slingshot-ting—’

‘Just do it,’ the commander growled. ‘Here… get me an orbit.’

Vitas pursed her lips primly. ‘I don’t see what would be served by an orbit—’

‘Make it happen,’ Guyen told her, glowering at one of Kern’s images as though waiting for it to challenge him.

They felt the change of forces as the Gilgamesh’s fusion reactor brought the engines back online, ready to coax the vast mass of the ark ship off its comfortable orbit and hurl it out into space once more.

Without warning, Kern’s face was gone from the screens, and Lain quickly ran a check of all systems, finding no trace of the intruder’s presence there.

‘Which is no guarantee of anything,’ she pointed out. ‘We could be riddled with spy routines and security back doors and who knows what.’ She did not add, Kern could have set us to explode somewhere in deep space, which Holsten reckoned was generous of her. He saw the same thought on everyone’s face, but they had no leverage, no options. Just hope.

Pinning the whole future of the human race on hope, he considered. But, then, hadn’t the whole ark ship project been just that?

‘Mason, tell us about the monkeys,’ Lain suggested.

He shrugged. ‘Just speculation, but the thing was talking about an “exaltation program”. Exaltation of beasts, the old stories say.’

‘How do you exalt a monkey?’ Lain was studying the archive images. ‘Funny-looking little critters, aren’t they?’

‘The signal to the planet, and the mathematics,’ Vitas mused. ‘Are they expecting the monkeys to respond?’

Nobody had any answers.

‘You’ve set our course?’ Guyen demanded.

‘Naturally,’ came Vitas’s immediate reply.

‘Fine. So the whole universe is ours except the one planet worth living on,’ the commander stated. ‘So we don’t stake it all on whatever’s at this next project we’re being sent to. We’d be fools to – it could be as hostile as here. It could be worse. There might not be anything there. I want us – I want humanity to have a foothold here, just in case.’

‘A foothold where?’ Holsten demanded. ‘You said yourself that was the only planet—’

‘Here.’ Guyen brought up a representation of one of the system’s other planets: a streaky, bloated-looking gas giant like some of the outer planets of Earth’s system, then narrowing in on a pallid, bluish moon. ‘The Empire colonized several moons back in Earth’s system. We have automated base units that can carve us out a home there: power, heat, hydroponics, enough to survive.’

‘Are you proposing this as the future of the human race?’ Vitas asked flatly.

‘The future, no. A future, yes,’ Guyen told them all. ‘We will head off first to see if this Kern has sold us something of worth or not – after all, whatever’s there isn’t going anywhere. But we’re not betting all we have on that. We’ll leave a functioning colony behind us – just in case. Engineering, I want a base unit ready to deploy once we arrive.’

‘Hm, right.’ Lain was running calculations, looking at what the Gilgamesh’s sensors could say about the moon. ‘I see frozen oxygen, frozen water, even tidal heating from the gas giant’s pull, but… it’s still a long way short of cosy. The automated systems are going to take… well, a long time – decades – to get everything set up so that someone can be left there.’

‘I know. Detail a roster of Science and Engineering to be woken at regular intervals to check progress. Wake me when it’s near completion.’ At the general groan, Guyen glared around at them. ‘What? Yes, it’s back to the chambers. Of course it is. What did you think? Only difference is, we’ve one more wake-up call before we set off out of the system. We maximise our chances as a species. We establish ourselves here.’ He was looking at the screens, where the gradually receding green disc of Kern’s World was still showing. The unspoken intent to return was plain in both his face and his tone.

Vitas had meanwhile been running her own simulations. ‘Commander, I appreciate your aims, but there was limited testing of the automatic base systems, and the environment they will be deployed into does seem extreme…’

‘The Old Empire had its colonies,’ Guyen stated.

Which died, Holsten thought. Which all died. True, they had died in the war, but they had primarily died because they were not stable or self-sufficient, and when the normal business of civilization was interrupted, they had not been able to save themselves. You won’t get me living there, if I have any choice in the matter.

‘All doable,’ Lain reported. ‘I’ve a base module ready for jettison. Give it long enough and who knows what we might cook up down there? A regular palace, probably. Hot and cold running methane in every room.’

‘Just shut up and do it,’ Guyen told her. ‘The rest of you, get ready to go back to suspension.’

‘First off,’ Karst interrupted, ‘who wants to see a monkey?’

They all looked at him blankly and he grinned. ‘I’m still getting signals from the last drone, remember? So let’s look around.’

‘Are you sure that’s safe?’ Holsten put in, but Karst was already sending the images to their screens.

The drone was moving over an unbroken canopy of green, that unthinkable wealth of foliage that had been denied to them.

Then the viewpoint dipped, and Karst was sending the drone down, corkscrewing it through a gap in the trees, zigzagging its way delicately around a lattice of branches. The world now revealed was awe-inspiring, a vaulted cathedral of forest overshadowed by the interlocking boughs above, like a green sky held up by the pillars of tree trunks. The drone glided on through this vast and cavernous space, keeping ground and canopy equally distant.

The expressions of the Gilgamesh crew were hungry and bitter, staring at this forbidden birthright, an Eden not made for human touch.

‘What’s that ahead?’ Lain asked.

‘Detecting nothing. Just a visual glitch,’ Karst replied, and then abruptly their viewpoint was swinging wildly, wheeling in mid-air with frustrated forward momentum.

Karst swore, fingers flying as he tried to send new instructions, but the drone seemed to be caught on something invisible – or near-invisible. Holsten could only see brief glints in the air as the drone’s viewpoint spun and danced.

It happened very swiftly. One moment they were staring out into the clear space ahead that the drone was being inexplicably denied, and then a vast hand-like shadow eclipsed their view. They had a moment’s glimpse of many bristling legs spread wide, two fangs like curved hooks striking savagely towards the camera with ferocious speed and savagery. On the second impact, the picture shattered into static.

For a long while nobody said anything. Some, like Holsten, just stared at the dead screens. Vitas had gone rigid, a muscle ticking frantically at the corner of her mouth. Lain was replaying the last seconds of that image, analysing.

‘Extrapolating from the drone and its camera settings, that thing was the best part of a metre long,’ she remarked at last, shakily.

‘That was no fucking monkey,’ Karst spat.

Behind the Gilgamesh itself, the green world and its orbiting sentinel fell away into obscurity, leaving the ark ship’s crew with, at best, mixed feelings about it.