Children of Time

3.1 RUDE AWAKENING

He was hauled unwillingly into consciousness within the close confines of the suspension chamber, with the thought in his mind: Didn’t I do this before? The question came to him substantially before he recalled his own name.

Holsten Mason. Sounds familiar.

Fragmentary understanding returned to him, as though his brain was ticking off a checklist.

…with Lain…

…green planet…

…Imperial C…

…Would I like to speak to Eliza?…

…Doctor Avrana Kern…

…Moon colony…

Moon colony!

And he jolted into full comprehension with the absolute certainty that they were going to send him to the colony, to that freezing wasteland of frozen-solid atmosphere that Vrie Guyen had decided would be humanity’s first stab at a new home. Guyen had never liked him. Guyen had no more use for him. They were waking him now to transport him to the colony.

No…

Why would they wake him before dispatch? What could he contribute to the founding of a lunar colony? They had already taken him there, insensible in his chamber. He was waking in the eggshell confines of the base structure, to tend the myoculture vats forever and forever and forever.

He could not keep the conviction at bay, that they had already done this to him, and he tried to thrash and kick in the close interior of the suspension chamber, shouting loud in his own ears, battering at the cool plastic with shoulders and knees, because he could not get his arms up.

‘I don’t want to go!’ he was shouting, even though he knew he had already gone. ‘You can’t make me!’ Even though they could.

The lid opened suddenly – wrenched up as soon as the seal broke – and he nearly jackknifed out entirely to hit the floor face first. Arms caught him, and for a moment he just stared around him, unable to work out where he was.

No, no, no, it’s all right. It’s the Key Crew room. I’m still on the Gilgamesh. I’m not on the moon. They haven’t taken me—

The arms that had caught him were being none too gentle about setting him on his feet, and when his knees buckled, someone grabbed him and shook him, ramming his back against the chamber so that the lid slammed shut and trapped a fold of his sleep-suit.

Someone was shouting at him. They were shouting at him to shut up. Only then did he realize he was screaming at them – the same words over and over, that he didn’t want to go, that they couldn’t make him.

As if to give the lie to that, whoever was manhandling him slapped him across the face, and he heard his voice wind down to a puzzled whimper before he could get control over it.

Around then, Holsten realized that there were four people in the room and he didn’t know any of them. Three men and a woman: all strangers, total strangers. They wore ship-suits but they weren’t Key Crew. Or if they were, Guyen hadn’t woken them for the pass at the green planet.

Holsten blinked at them stupidly. The man who held him was tall, lean and long-boned, looking around Holsten’s own age, with little scars around his eyes that spoke of recent surgical correction – recent presumably meaning several thousand years ago, before they put him to sleep.

The classicist’s eyes passed over the others: a young-looking woman, heavily built; a small, thin man with a narrow face that was withered up on one side, perhaps a suspension chamber side-effect; a squat, heavy-jawed man standing by the hatch, who was constantly glancing outside. He was holding a gun.

Holding a gun.

Holsten stared at the weapon, which was some sort of pistol. He was still having difficulty interpreting what he was seeing. He could think of no reason whatsoever why there would be a gun involved in this scenario. Guns were on the manifest for the Gilgamesh, certainly. He was aware that, of all the trappings of old Earth carried on to the ark ship, guns had certainly not been left behind. On the other hand, they were surely not something to be carried about aboard a spaceship full of delicate systems, with the killing vacuum waiting just outside.

Unless the gun was there to force him to go down to the moon colony – but it would hardly take a gun. Karst or a couple of his security detail would surely suffice, and run less risk of damaging something vital aboard the Gilgamesh. Something more vital than Holsten Mason.

He tried to phrase an intelligent question, but managed just a vague mumble.

‘You hear that?’ the tall, lean man told the others. ‘He doesn’t want to go. How about that, eh?’

‘Scoles, let’s move,’ hissed the man at the door, the one with the gun. Holsten’s eyes kept straying to the weapon.

A moment later he found himself strung between Scoles and the woman, being awkwardly push-pulled through the hatch, the gunman leading, pointing his weapon along the corridor. In Holsten’s last glimpse through the hatch before withered-face closed it, he saw that the status panels for the other Key Crew chambers were all showing empty. He had been the only person left to sleep late.

‘Someone tell me what is going on,’ he demanded, although it came out sounding like babble.

‘We need you—’ the woman started.

‘Shut up,’ snapped Scoles, and she did.

By that time, Holsten reckoned he could have stumbled along under his own power, but they were hustling him along faster than he could get his feet under him. A moment later he heard some loud noises from back the way they had come, as if someone had dropped something heavy. It was only when the gunman turned back and began returning fire that he realized the sound had been shooting. The pistol made little tinny noises that were oddly unimpressive, like a big dog with a tiny bark. The answering sounds were thunderous booms that shook the air and rattled Holsten’s eardrums, as though the wrath of God was being unleashed in the next room. Disruptors, he recognized: crowd-control weapons relying on detonating packets of air. Theoretically non-lethal and certainly less dangerous to the ship.

‘Who’s shooting at us?’ he got out, and this time the words sounded clear enough.

‘Your friends,’ Scoles told him shortly, which ranked amongst the world’s least comforting answers, in the circumstances, leaving Holsten with the twin assurances that his current company did not consider him a friend, and that his actual friends – whoever they were – were ambivalent at best about hurting him.

‘Is the ship… is something wrong with the ship?’ he demanded, his tone telling him second-hand how frightened he must be. His emotions seemed to be buzzing about somewhere else in his mind, kept apart from his higher brain by the slowly thawing wall of the suspension chamber.

‘Shut up or I will hurt you,’ Scoles told him, in a tone suggesting that he would enjoy doing so. Holsten shut up.

The one with the withered face had been lagging behind them, and then suddenly he was down on the ground. Holsten thought the man had tripped – he even made an abortive, automatic motion to try and help before he himself was dragged away. Withered-face was not getting up, though, and the gunman knelt by his corpse, dragged a second pistol from the back of the dead man’s belt and then levelled both weapons at attackers Holsten had not even seen.

Shot. No disruptor burst for withered-face. Someone on the other side – Holsten’s friends purportedly – had apparently run short of patience, prudence or mercy.

Then there were two other people passing by to give the gunman assistance – a man and a woman, both armed – and the amount of gunfire from behind increased dramatically, but it was plain from Scoles’s slowing pace that he reckoned he was safer now. Whether that translated into any greater safety for Holsten himself seemed to remain a live question. His mouth instinctively thronged with all manner of protests, questions, pleas and even threats, but he bit them all back.

He was hauled on past another half-dozen armed people – all strangers, all in shipsuits – before being shoved through a hatch, and sent sprawling unceremoniously across the floor of a small systems room, which was just a narrow space between two consoles with a single screen taking up most of the back wall.

There was another gunman there, whose startled reaction to his appearance was probably the closest Holsten had yet come to actually being shot. There was also another prisoner, sitting with her back to one of the consoles, with hands secured behind her. The prisoner was Isa Lain, chief engineer.

They dumped him beside her, restraining his arms in the same way. Scoles then seemed to lose all interest in him, stepping outside to join a hushed but heated discussion with some of the others, of which Holsten could only catch the odd word. He heard no more gunfire.

The woman and the gunman who had brought him in were still in the room, meaning that there was barely space for anyone else. The air was stuffy and close, smelling strongly of sweat and faintly of urine.

For a moment Holsten caught himself wondering if he had simply dreamt all that he remembered since leaving Earth – if some defect of the suspension chamber had drawn him into some grand hallucination where he, the classicist, was suddenly considered a necessary and useful figure among the crew.

He glanced at Lain. She was regarding him miserably. It struck him that there were lines on her face that were foreign to him, and her hair had grown to something more than mere stubble. She is – she’s catching me up. Am I still the oldest human in the universe? Perhaps just.

He eyed their guards, who seemed to be paying far more attention to what Scoles was saying outside than to their two charges. He essayed a whisper: ‘What’s going on? Who are these maniacs?’

Lain eyed him bleakly. ‘Colonists.’

He considered that one word, which opened a door on to a hidden past where someone – Guyen probably – had royally screwed up. ‘What do they want?’

‘Not to be colonists.’

‘Well, yes, I could have guessed that, but… they’ve got guns.’

Her expression should have curdled into contempt – stating the obvious when every word might count – but instead she just shrugged. ‘They got into the armoury before it kicked off. So much for Karst’s fucking security.’

‘They want to take over the ship?’

‘If they have to.’

He guessed that Karst and the security detail were trying to redeem themselves by doing their best to stop that happening, which had apparently now escalated to pitched gun battles in the fragile corridors of the ship. He had no idea of the numbers involved. The moon colony would house several hundred colonists at least, perhaps with more being kept in suspension there. Surely there weren’t half a thousand mutineers currently running loose on the Gilgamesh? And how many did Karst have? Was the man waking up secondary crew to use as foot-soldiers and shoving guns into their cold hands?

‘What happened?’ he demanded, the question aimed more at the universe than anyone in particular.

‘Glad you asked.’ Scoles pushed into the room, virtually elbowing the gunman out to give himself space. ‘What was it you said, when we hauled you out of bed? “I don’t want to go,” was it? Well, join the club. Nobody here signed on for this journey to end up freezing in some death-trap on a moon without an atmosphere.’

Holsten stared at him for a moment, noticing the lean man’s long hands clenching, seeing the skin round his eyes and mouth twitch involuntarily – he guessed it was the mark of some drug or other that had been keeping the man awake and going since who knew how long. Scoles himself held no gun, but here was a dangerous, volatile man who had been pushed about as far as he could go.

‘Ah, sir…’ Holsten began, as calmly as he could manage. ‘You probably know that I’m Holsten Mason, classicist. I’m not sure if you actually wanted me, or if you were just after whoever you could get for… for a hostage, or… I don’t really know what’s going on here. If there’s anything… any way that I—’

‘Can get out with your skin intact?’ Scoles interjected.

‘Well, yes…’

‘Not up to me,’ the man replied dismissively, seeming about to turn away, but then he refocused and looked at Holsten again as if with fresh eyes. ‘Fine, last time you were about, things were different. But, believe me, you do know things – very valuable things. And I appreciate you’re not to blame, old man, but there are lives at stake here, hundreds of lives. You’re in this, like it or not.’

Not, decided Holsten grimly, but what could he say?

‘Signal the comms room,’ Scoles ordered, and the woman twisted her way over to one of the consoles, virtually sitting on Holsten’s shoulder as she sent the commands.

A long moment later, Guyen’s louring face appeared on the wall screen, glaring thunderously at all and sundry. He, too, looked older to Holsten’s eyes, and even more lacking in human kindness.

‘I take it you’re not about to lay down your arms,’ the Gilgamesh’s commander snapped.

‘You take it right,’ Scoles replied levelly. ‘However, there’s a friend of yours here. Perhaps you want to renew your acquaintance.’ He prodded Holsten in the head to make his point.

Guyen remained impassive, narrow-eyed. ‘What of it?’ There was no real clue that he recognized Holsten at all.

‘I know you need him. I know where you’re intending to jaunt off to, once you’ve consigned us all to that wasteland,’ Scoles told him. ‘I know you’ll need your vaunted classicist when you find all that old tech you’re so sure of. And don’t bother searching the cargo manifests,’ this was said with bitter emphasis, by a man who until recently had been merely a part of that cargo, ‘because Nessel here is the next best thing – not an expert like your old man, but she knows more than anyone else.’ He clapped the woman beside him on the shoulder. ‘So let’s talk, Guyen. Or else I wouldn’t give much for your classicist and your chief engineer’s chances.’

Guyen regarded him – all of them – without expression. ‘Engineer Lain’s team is quite capable of covering for her, in her absence,’ he said, as though she had simply gone down with some transient infection. ‘As for the other, we have the codes now to activate the Empire installations. The science team can handle it. I will not negotiate with those who defy my authority.’

His face vanished, but Scoles stared at the empty screen for a long time afterwards, hands clenched into fists.

3.2 FIRE AND THE SWORD

Generations have passed this green world by, in hope, in discovery, in fear, in failure. A future long foreseen is coming to pass.

Another Portia from the Great Nest by the Western Ocean, but a warrior this time, in the manner of her kind.

Her surroundings right now are not Great Nest but a different metropolis of the spiders: one she thinks of as Seven Trees. Portia is here as an observer, and to lend what aid she might. All around her, the community is a hive of furious activity as the inhabitants scurry and leap and abseil about their frantic business, and she watches them, her scatter of eyes taking in the chaos on all sides, and compares the sight to a disturbed ant’s nest. She is capable of the bitter reflection that circumstances have now dragged her people down to the level of their enemy.

She feels fear, a building anxiety that makes her stamp her feet and twitch her palps. Her people are more suited to offence than defence, but they have been unable to retain the initiative in this conflict. She will have to improvise. There is no plan for what comes next.

She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life.

There are signals being flagged by messengers and lookouts posted high in the trees above, as high up as Seven Trees’ silk scaffolding extends. They signal regularly. The signal is time counting down: how long this place now has left before the enemy comes. The message wires that are strung between the trunks and their multitude of spun dwellings thrum with speech, as though the community is raging against the inevitability of its destruction.

Neither Portia’s death nor Seven Trees’ destruction is inevitable. The community has its own defenders – for in this time, in this age, every spider conurbation has dedicated fighters who spend their time training for nothing other than to fight – and Portia is here along with a dozen from Great Nest, in support of their kin. They wear armour of wood and silk, and they have their slingshots. They are the diminutive knights of their world, facing an enemy that outnumbers them by hundreds to one.

Portia knows she needs to calm herself, but the agitation within her is too great to be suppressed. She needs some external reassurance.

At the high point of the nest’s central tree she finds it. Here is an expansive tent of silk whose walls are woven with complex geometric patterns, the crossing threads drawn out according to an exacting plan. Another handful of her kind are already there, seeking the reassurance of the numinous, the certainty that there is something more to the world than their senses can readily grasp; that there is a greater Understanding. That, even when all is lost, all need not be lost.

Portia crouches down with them and begins to spin, forming knots of thread that make a language out of numbers, a holy text that is written anew whenever one of her people kneels in contemplation, and that is then consumed when they arise. She was born with this Understanding, but she has learned it anew as well, coming to Temple at an early age just as she has come here now. The innate, virus-hardwired Understanding of these mathematical transformations that she inherited did not inspire her in the same way as being guided through the sequences by her teachers, slowly coming to the revelation that what these apparently arbitrary strings of figures described was something beyond mere invention – was a self-evident and internally consistent universal truth.

Of course in Great Nest, her home, they have a crystal that speaks these truths in its own ineffable way – just as most of the greatest nests have now, that pilgrims from lesser communities often journey great distances to see. She has watched as the votive priestess touches the crystal with her metal probe, feeling the pulsing of the message from the heavens, dancing out that celestial arithmetic for the benefit of the congregation. At such times, Portia knows, the Messenger itself would be in the skies overhead, going about her constant journey – whether at night and visible, or hidden by the brightness of the daytime sky.

Here in Seven Trees there is no crystal, but to simply repeat that message, in all its wondrous but internally consistent complexity, to spin and consume and spin again, is a calming ritual that settles Portia’s mind, and allows her to face whatever must soon come, with equanimity.

Her people have solved the mathematical riddles posed by the orbiting satellite – the Messenger, as they think of it – learning the proofs first by rote and then in true comprehension, as a civic and religious duty. The intrusion of this signal has seized the attention of much of the species in a relatively short period of time, because of their inherent curiosity. Here is something demonstrably from beyond, and it fascinates them; it tells them that there is more to the world than they can grasp; it guides their thinking in new ways. The beauty of the maths promises a universe of wonders if they can but stretch out their minds that bit further: a jump they can almost, but not quite, make.

Portia spins and unravels and spins, soothing away the trepidation consuming her, replacing it with the undeniable certainty that there is more. Whatever happens this day, even if she should fall beneath the iron-clad mandibles of her foes, there is a depth to life beyond the simple dimensions that she can perceive and calculate in, and so… who knows?

Then it is time, and she backs out of temple and goes to arm herself.

There is considerable variation in the settlements of Portia’s people, but to human eyes they would look messy, possibly nightmarish. Seven Trees now encompasses more than the original seven, the thicket of trunks interlinked by hundreds of lines, each part of a plan, each assigned a specific purpose, whether structural, as a thoroughfare, or for communication. The vibratory language of the spiders transmits well down silk threads over some distance, and they have developed nodes of tensioned coils that amplify the signal so that speech can pass for kilometres between cities in calm weather. The dwelling places of her kin are silk tents pulled taut by support lines into a variety of shapes, suitable to a species that lives its life in three dimensions and can hang from a vertical surface as easily as resting on a horizontal one. Meeting places are broad webs where a speaker’s words can be transmitted to a crowd of listeners along the dancing of the strands. In the high centre, shadowing much of the city, is the reservoir: a watertight net spread wide that catches rain and run-off from a grand area around Seven Trees, the water channelling to it through troughs and pipes from a multitude of smaller rain-catchers.

Around Seven Trees the forest has been cut back by the semi-domesticated local ants. Previously this has been a firebreak. Soon it will be a killing ground.

Portia crawls and leaps her way through Seven Trees, and sees that the sentries are signalling first contact with the enemy: the settlement’s automated defences have been triggered. All around her the evacuation is ongoing, those who are not dedicated fighters gathering what they can – supplies and those few possessions they cannot simply recreate – and abandoning Seven Trees. Some carry clutches of eggs glued to their abdomens. Many have spiderlings clinging to them. Those young that are not sensible enough to hitch a ride are likely to die.

Portia swiftly draws herself up to one of the lofty watch towers, looking out towards the treeline. Out there is an army of hundreds of thousands advancing towards Seven Trees. It is an independent arm of the same great ant colony her ancestress once scouted out; a centuries-old composite life form that is taking over this part of the world day by day.

The nearby forest is riddled with traps. There are webs to catch incautious ants. There are springlines, pulled taut between ground and canopy, that will stick to a passing insect, then detach and whip the luckless creature upwards, to trap it in the high branches. There are deadfalls and pits, but none of them will be enough. The advancing colony will meet these dangers as it meets all dangers, by sacrificing enough of itself to nullify them, with the main thrust of its attack barely slowing. There is a particular caste of expendable scout now ranging ahead of the ants’ main column, specifically to suicidally disarm these defensive measures.

Now there is movement in the trees. Portia focuses on it, seeing those scouts that survive washing forwards in a chaotic mass, obeying their programming. The ground between them and Seven Trees is only lightly trapped, but they have other difficulties to face. The local ants are on them instantly, sallying forth valiantly to bite and sting, so that within metres of the treeline the ground becomes messy with knots of fighting insects, insensately dismembering each other and being dismembered in turn. To human eyes, the ants of the two colonies would seem indistinguishable, but Portia can discern differences in colouration and pattern, extending into the ultraviolet. She is ready with her slingshot.

The arachnid defenders start their barrage with solid ammunition, simple stones gathered from the ground, chosen for their convenient size and heft. They target those scouts that break loose from the ant melee, picking them off with deadly accuracy, each shot plotted and calculated exactingly. The ants are incapable of dodging or reacting, unable to even perceive the defenders at their high vantage points. The death toll amongst the insects is ruinous, or it would be if this host was anything but the disposable vanguard of a much greater force.

Some of the scouts reach the foot of Seven Trees, despite the bombardment. But, after a metre or so of bare trunk, each tree boasts sheer web skirts that angle up and out, a surface that the ants cannot get purchase on. They climb and fall, climb and fall, initially mindless in their persistence. Then a sufficient concentration of messaging scent builds, and they change their tactics, climbing up over one another to form a living, reaching structure that extends blindly upwards.

Portia stamps out a call to arms and her sisters from Great Nest muster around her. The local defenders are less well armed, lacking both experience and innate understanding of ant-war. She and her fellows will lead the charge.

They drop swiftly from the heights on to the ant scouts, and begin their work. They are far larger than the attackers, both stronger and swifter. Their bite is venomous, but it is a venom best used against spiders, so they now concentrate on using their fangs at the intersections of the insects’ bodies, between head and thorax, between thorax and abdomen. Most of all, they are more intelligent than their enemies, better able to react and manoeuvre and evade. They tear apart the scouts and their bridge-building with furious haste, always moving, never letting the ants latch on to them.

Portia leaps back to the trunk, then scuttles over to cling effortlessly to the same silk underhang that the ants could not climb. Upside down, she sees fresh movement at the treeline. The main column has arrived.

These new ants are larger – though still smaller than herself. They are of many castes, each to its own speciality. At the head of the column, and already accelerating along the scouts’ scent trail towards Seven Trees, come the shock-troopers. Their formidable mandibles sport barbed, saw-edged metal blades, and they have head-shields that spread back to protect their thoraxes. Their purpose is to monopolize the defenders’ attention and sell their lives as dearly as possible, so as to allow more dangerous castes to close the distance.

More of the enemy are even now entering the tunnels of the local ants’ nest, spreading confounding chemicals that throw the defending insects into confusion, or even enlist them to the cause of the attacker. This is one way that the mega-colony grows, by co-opting rather than destroying other ant hives. For foreign species such as Portia, though, there is no purpose and no mercy.

Back in Seven Trees, the remaining local males are hard at work. Some have fled, but most of the evacuees are female. Males are replaceable, always underfoot, always too numerous. Many have been instructed to remain in the city until the last, on pain of death. Some have fled anyway, to take their chances, but there are still plenty to cut any remaining lines between the settlement and the ground, to deny the ants easy access. Others are hurrying from the reservoir with silk parcels bulging with water. Portia notes such industry with approval.

The front ranks of the column are nearing. The armoured ants suffer less from the slingshots, but now other ammunition is brought into play. Portia’s people are chemists of a sort. Living in a world where scent is so vital – a small part of their language but a very large part of the way the rest of the world perceives itself – they have developed numerous inherited Understandings with respect to the mixing and compounding of chemical substances, most especially pheromones. Now the slingers are sending over silk-wrapped globules of liquid to splash amongst the advancing ants. The scents thus released briefly cover up the attackers’ own constant scent language – denying them not only speech, but thought and identity. Until the chemicals dissipate, the affected sections of the attacking army are deprogrammed, falling back on base instincts and unable to react properly to the situation around them. They blunder and break formation, and some of them fight each other, unable to recognize their own kin. Portia and the other defenders attack swiftly, killing as many as they can while this confusion persists.

The defenders are taking losses now. Those metal jaws can sever legs or tear open bodies. Portia’s warriors wear coats of silk and plates of soft wood to snare the saw teeth, shedding this armour as they need to, repairing it when they can. The column is still advancing, despite everything the defenders can do.

The males are splashing water about the lower reaches of Seven Trees, proactive fire-fighting, for the ant colony is now deploying its real weapons.

Near to Portia there is a flash and gout of flame, and two of her comrades are instantly ablaze, like staggering torches kicking and shrivelling and dying. These new ants brew chemicals inside their abdomens, just like certain species of beetle. When they jut their stingers forwards and mix these substances there is a fierce exothermic reaction, a spray of heated fluid. The atmosphere of Portia’s world has an oxygen content a few per cent higher than Earth’s, enough for the searing mixture to spontaneously ignite.

The technology of Portia’s kind is built on silk and wood, potential energy stored in tensioned lines and primitive springs. What little metal they use is stolen from the ants. They have no use for fire.

Portia gains height and reverts to her sling. The flamethrower ants are lethal at short range but vulnerable to her missile fire. However, the ants now control all the ground around Seven Trees and they are bringing forward more far-reaching weapons.

She sees the first projectile as it is launched, her eyes tracking the motion automatically: a gleaming sphere of a hard, transparent, fragile material – for the ants have stumbled upon glass in the intervening generations – now arcs overhead and shatters behind her. Her lateral eyes catch the flare as the chemicals within it mix and then explode.

Below, behind the shielded shock-troopers, the artillery is at work: ants with heads encased in a metal mask that includes a back-facing tongue – a length of springy metal that their mouthparts can depress and then release, flicking their incendiary grenades some distance. Their aim is poor, blindly following the scent clues of their comrades, but there are many of them. Although the males of Seven Trees are rushing with water to douse the flames, the fires spread swiftly, shrivelling silk and blackening wood.

Seven Trees starts to burn.

It is the end. The defenders who can do so must leave, or roast. For those that leap blindly, though, the metal jaws of the ants await.

Portia scales higher and higher, racing against the flames. The upper reaches of the settlement are cluttered with desperately reaching bodies: warriors, civilians, females, males. Some shudder and drop as the smoke overcomes them. Others cannot outstrip the hungry fire.

She fights her way to the top, jettisoning the wooden plates of her armour while spinning frantically. Always it has been thus, and at least she has one use for the inferno that is stoking itself below her: the thermals will give her height so that she can use her self-made parachute to glide beyond the reach of the rapacious ant colony.

For now. Only for now. This army is closing on Great Nest, and after that there will only be the ocean. If Portia’s kind cannot defeat the mindless march of the ants, then nobody will be around to write the histories of future generations.

3.3 ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

There was an awkward silence for some time after Scoles left. The unnamed gunman and the woman, Nessel, went about their duties without speaking to one another; she bent over the computer displays, he scowling at the prisoners. Having confirmed to his own satisfaction that furtive squirming resulted only in the restraints cutting deeper into his wrists, Holsten became more and more oppressed by the silence. Yes, there was a gun pointing his way. Yes, the Gilgamesh was obviously playing host to a conflict that could plainly get him killed at any moment, but he was bored. Just out of suspension, freshly woken from decades of involuntary hibernation, and his body wanted to do something. He found he had to bite his tongue to stop himself speaking his thoughts aloud, just to vary the tedium.

Then someone varied it for him. There were some distant bangs that he identified, after the fact, as gunshots, and someone passed by the hatch with some muttered instruction he missed hearing. The gunman caught it, though, and was out on the instant, running off down the corridor and taking his gun with him. The small room seemed remarkably more spacious without it.

He glanced at Lain, but she stared at her feet, avoiding his gaze. The only other person there was Nessel.

‘Hey,’ he tried.

‘Shut up,’ Lain hissed at him, but still looking away.

‘Hey,’ Holsten repeated. ‘Nessel, is it? Listen…’ He thought she would just ignore him, but she glanced over sullenly.

‘Brenjit Nessel,’ she informed him. ‘And you’re Doctor Holsten Mason. I remember reading your papers back when… Back when.’

‘Back when,’ Holsten agreed weakly. ‘Well, that’s… flattering, I suppose. Scoles was right, then. You’re a classicist yourself.’

‘Student,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t follow it up. Who knows, if I had, maybe we’d be in each other’s places right now.’ Her voice sounded ragged with emotion and fatigue.

‘Just a student.’ He remembered his last classes – back before the end. The study of the Old Empire had once been the lifeblood of the world. Everyone had been desperate to cut a slice off the secrets of the ancients. In Holsten’s time it had fallen out of favour. They had seen the end coming by then, and known that there would not be enough broken potsherds of lore from the old days to stave it off; known that it was those same ancients, with their weapons and their waste, that had brought that long-delayed end upon them. To study and laud those antique psychopaths during the Earth’s last toxic days had seemed bad taste. Nobody liked a classicist.

Nessel had turned away, and so he spoke her name again, urgently. ‘Look, what’s going to happen to us? Can you tell us that, at least?’

The woman’s eyes flicked towards Lain with obvious distaste, but they looked kinder when they returned to Holsten. ‘It’s like Scoles says, it’s not up to us. Maybe Guyen will end up storming this place, and you’ll get shot. Maybe they’ll break through our firewalls and cut off the air or the heat or something. Or maybe we win. If we win, you get to go free. You do, anyway.’

Another sidelong glance at Lain, who now had her eyes closed, either resigned to her situation or trying to unmake it all, to just blot out her surroundings.

‘Look,’ Holsten tried, ‘I understand you’re fighting Guyen. Maybe I’m even sympathetic about that. But, she and I, we’re not responsible. We’re not a part of this. I mean, nobody consults me about these things, do they? I didn’t even know this thing was… that any of this was going on until you slapped me awake back there.’

‘You? Maybe,’ Nessel said, abruptly angry. ‘Her? She knew. Who’d the commander have overseeing the technical details, then? Who was arranging to ship us down there? Who had her fingers in every little piece of the work? Only the chief engineer. If we shot her right now, it’d be justice.’

Holsten swallowed. Lain continued to be no help, but maybe he could now see why. ‘Look,’ he said again, more gently, ‘surely you must see that this is crazy?’

‘Do you know what I think is crazy?’ Nessel returned hotly. ‘It’s setting up some fucking icebox of a base on a moon we’ve no use for, just so Guyen can run a flag up his dick and say he’s claimed this system for Earth. What I think is crazy is expecting us to go there peaceably, willingly, and just live there in that artificial hell, while the rest of you just fuck off on some wonder-trip that’ll take you how many human lifetimes to get there and return? If you ever do.’

‘We’re all a lot of human lifetimes from home,’ Holsten reminded her.

‘But we slept!’ Nessel shouted at him. ‘And we were all together, all the human race together, and so it didn’t count, and it didn’t matter. We brought our own time with us, and we stopped the clock while we slept, and started it when we woke. Why should we care how many thousands of years went by on dead old Earth? But when the Gil heads off for wherever the fuck it’s going, us poor bastards won’t get to sleep. We’re supposed to make a life down there, on the ice, inside those stupid little boxes the automatics have made. A life, Doctor Mason! A whole life inside those boxes. And what? And children? Can you imagine? Generations of ice-dwellers, forgetting and forgetting who we ever were, wasting away and never seeing the sun except as just another star. Tending the vats and eating mulch and putting out more doomed generations who could never amount to anything, while you – all you glorious star-travellers – get to sleep wrapped in your no-time, and wake up two hundred years later as if it’s just the next day?’ She was shouting now, almost shrieking, and he saw that she must have been awake for far too long; that he had cracked the dam, let it all pour out after his thoughtless words. ‘And when you woke up, all of you chosen who weren’t condemned to the ice, we’d be dead. We’d be generations dead, all of us. And why? Because Guyen wants a presence on a dead moon.’

‘Guyen wants to preserve the human race,’ Lain said sharply. ‘And whatever we encounter at the next terraforming project could obliterate the Gilgamesh, for all we know. Guyen simply wants to spread our chances as a species. You know this.’

‘Then let him fucking stay. And you can stay too. How about that? When we win control, when we take the ship, the two of you can go keep the species going in that icebox, on your own. That’s what we’ll do, believe me. If you live that long, that’s just what we’ll do with you.’

Lain did her best to shrug it off, but Holsten could see her jaw clench against the thought.

Then Scoles came ducking back in, snagging Nessel’s arm and dragging her aside for a muttered conversation in the doorway.

‘Lain—’ Holsten started.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said flatly, wrong-footing him. He was not sure what she was apologizing for.

‘How far does this go?’ Holsten murmured. ‘How many of them?’

‘At least two dozen.’ He could barely make out Lain’s whispered words. ‘They were supposed to be the pioneers – that was Guyen’s plan. They’d go down awake, to start everything off. The rest would be shipped down as freight, to be awoken as and when.’

‘I see that all worked out beautifully, then,’ Holsten remarked.

Again her expected caustic response did not come. Some barbed edge seemed to have been filed off Lain since he had last seen her, all those decades before.

‘How many’s Karst got?’ he pressed her.

She shrugged. ‘The security detail’s about a dozen, but there’s military he could wake up. He’ll do it, too. He’ll have an army.’

‘Not if he’s got any sense.’ Holsten had been pondering this. ‘Why would they take orders from him, to start with?’

‘Who else is there?’

‘Not good enough. Have you actually thought about what we’re doing, Lain? I don’t even mean this business,’ a jerk of the head towards Scoles, ‘but the whole show. We don’t have a culture. We don’t have a hierarchy. We simply have a crew, for life’s sake. Guyen, who someone once considered fit to command a large spaceship, is now titular head of the human race.’

‘It’s the way it’s got to be,’ Lain replied stubbornly.

‘Scoles disagrees. I reckon the army will disagree too, if Karst is stupid enough to start waking people up and putting guns in their hands. You know what’s a good lesson of history? You’re screwed if you can’t pay the army. And we don’t even have an economy. What could we give them, as soon as they realize what’s going on. Where’s the chain of command? What authority does anyone have? And once they’ve got guns, and a clear indication of where they might wake up next, why should we ever expect them to go back to the chambers and sleep? The only currency we have is freedom, and it’s plain that Guyen’s not going to be handing that out.’

‘Oh, fuck off, historian.’ At last he got a rise out of her, though he wasn’t looking for it by then.

‘And although I don’t want to think about what happens if Scoles wins, what happens if he loses?’

‘When he loses.’

‘Whatever – but what then?’ Holsten insisted. ‘We end up shipping all those people down to a – what – a penal colony for life? And what happens when we return? What do we hope to find down there, with that for a beginning?’

‘There won’t be any down there, not for us.’ It was Scoles again, pulling that trick of suddenly being in front of them, now squatting on his haunches, hands resting on his knees. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we still have a plan B. Thanks to you there, anyway, Doctor Mason.’

‘Right.’ Looking the man in the face, Holsten didn’t know what to make of that. ‘Maybe you’d like to explain?’

‘Nothing would please me more.’ Scoles smiled thinly. ‘We have control of a shuttle bay. If all else fails, we’re getting ourselves off the Gil, Doctor Mason, and you’re coming with us.’

Holsten, still thinking slowly after the suspension, just goggled at him. ‘I thought the point was not to go somewhere.’

‘Not to go to the ice,’ Nessel said from behind Scoles. ‘But we know there’s somewhere else in this very system, somewhere made for us.’

‘Oh.’ Holsten stared at them. ‘You’re completely mad. It’s… there are monsters there.’

‘Monsters can be fought,’ Scoles declared implacably.

‘But it’s not just that – there’s a satellite. It came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the whole of the Gilgamesh. It sent us away. There’s no way a shuttle can… possibly get…’ He stammered to a halt, because Scoles was smiling at him.

‘We know all this. She told us,’ a companionable nod towards Lain. ‘She told us we’d never make the green planet. That the ancient tech would get us first. But that’s why we have you, Doctor Mason. Maybe Nessel’s grasp of the ancient languages would be enough, but I’ll not take that chance. Why should I, when you’re right here and desperate to help us?’ The chief mutineer stood up easily, still with that razor grin on his face.

Holsten looked at Lain, and this time she met his gaze and he read the emotion there at last: guilt. No wonder she’d been easy on him. She was cringing inside, knowing that she had brought him here.

‘You told them I could get them past Kern?’ he demanded.

‘No!’ she protested. ‘I told them it couldn’t be done. I said that, even with you, we barely made it. But I…’

‘But you managed to get them thinking of me,’ Holsten finished.

‘How was I to know these fuckwits would just—’ Lain started, before Scoles stamped on her ankle.

‘Just a reminder,’ he growled, ‘of who you are and why you deserve all you get. And don’t worry, if we have to take the shuttle, you’ll be right there with us, Chief Engineer Lain. Perhaps then you might feel like using your expertise to prolong your own life, for once, rather than just to ruin other people’s.’

3.4 BY THE WESTERN OCEAN

The Great Nest. The greatest metropolis of Portia’s kind. Home.

Returning like this, at the head of a band of defeated stragglers – those lucky enough to escape the flames of Seven Trees – Portia feels something analogous to shame. She has not stopped the enemy, or even slowed it down. Each day, the ant colony will march closer to Great Nest. Looking across the expanse of her beloved birthplace, she finds herself picturing it in the throes of evacuation. In her mind’s eye – a faculty already present in some form even for her tiniest ancestress – she sees her home burning. The ants do not know where Great Nest is, of course – their spread across the world is methodical but mindless – but they will reach the coast soon. The days are counting down to when they will arrive at the gates.

Great Nest is vast, home to several thousand spiders. The natural forest is still thick here, but great effort and artifice has gone into erecting artificial trees to provide more living room. Great pillars made from felled trunks, sheathed and strengthened with silk, spread out from the living copse at the city’s centre – and even out into the sea itself, allowing the webwork of the city to reach out across the waters. Space is at a premium and, over the last century, Great Nest has grown exponentially in all directions, including up.

Beyond the city proper, there lies a patchwork of farms: aphids for honeydew, mice for meat, and stands of the blister-trunked trees cultivated by the ants, another secret stolen from the enemy. The seas throng with fish ready for the netting, and offshore there is a sister-settlement on the sea-bed; relations with the marine stomatopod culture are cordial and mutually profitable, in a minimal sort of way. A generation ago there was friction as the spiders began to expand their city seawards. The sunken bases of the pillars, however, have enriched the marine environment, providing an artificial reef that sealife has quickly taken advantage of. In retrospect, the sea-dwellers concede that they have gained from this situation, however inadvertently.

Portia and her band get aloft quickly, clambering up towards the city on lines strung over the outlying farmland. She has brought back some warriors, and a reasonable number of males, though few will thank her for returning with the latter. The smaller males are better able to parachute to safety: they survived when many of their sisters did not. And they fought, Portia concedes. The idea of a male warrior is absurd, but they are still stronger and faster and more intelligent than ants. For a moment she has a mad idea: arm and train the males, thus vastly increasing the number of fighters available to Great Nest. But she shies away from the idea instantly – that way anarchy lies, the reversal of the natural order of things. Moreover, even that way their numbers would not be enough. Arm every male in the city and the spiders would still be only a drop against the ant colony’s ocean.

She reaches a high vantage point, looking down at the great elegant sweep of her home, the myriad threads that link it all together, Down in the bay she sees a great balloon of silk half-submerged in the water, sagging and rippling as it is filled with air. An embassy to the stomatopods, she knows: a diving bell allowing inquiring minds amongst her people to visit their underwater counterparts. There can be no exchange of Understandings with the sea-dwellers, of course, but they can still teach and learn via the simple language of gestures that the two cultures have worked out between them.

Seek out your peers, she instructs her fellows, the returning warriors. Await the call. The males she leaves to their own devices. If they possess any initiative, they will find work and get fed. In a vast city like Great Nest there is a constant need for maintenance – lines and sheets of silk needing repairs. An industrious male can make himself useful enough to be rewarded. The alternative for him is to make a living through courtship and flattery, which involves less effort but considerably more danger.

Portia sets off through the city, creeping and jumping from line to line, seeking out her peer house.

Using communal crèches and lacking any maternal instincts, Portia’s people have no strict family units. The youngest spiderlings, still confined to the crèche, are provided with food by the city, but this period of free bounty does not last long. The fast-maturing young are expected to become independent within their first year. Like the males, they must make themselves useful.

Because a spider alone is vulnerable, always at the mercy of bullying from her larger kin, these maturing spiderlings tend to band together into peer groups formed from those who hatched from the same crèche at around the same time. The bonds made between juveniles, who aid and rely upon one another, persist into adulthood. Unions of such peers form the base social unit in most spider settlements, and these peers then tend to found a crèche between them, looking after one another’s eggs, and so inadvertently perpetuating a continuity of heredity down the female line. The social bonds within such peer groups are strong, even after the individuals have gone their separate ways and taken up their particular trades and specialities. All the larger peer groups maintain peer houses within the city – ‘house’ here meaning a complex of silk-walled chambers.

Males do not form such groups – for who would have any use for a large group of males? Instead, juvenile males do their best to attach themselves to the periphery of a female peer group, playing at flirting, running errands, paying in utility and amusement value for the scraps of food that might get thrown their way. Portia is vaguely aware that males fight each other, and that the lower – less desirable – reaches of the city play host to countless little dramas between males struggling over food or status. She has very little interest in the subject.

She is bitterly exhausted when she crawls through the entrance of her peer house, located at the lowest point of the series of bubble chambers in which her fellows dwell and meet. Another couple of rooms have been added since she was last here – re-structuring is no major chore for her kind – and for a moment she feels proud and happy that her peers are doing well, before her treacherous memory goads her with the thought of the ants’ inexorable advance. Building more just means more to lose.

Those of her peers who are currently in residence greet her warmly. Several of her closer friends are holding court there at the centre of a worshipful knot of younger females and fluttering, dancing males. Their dances are courtship rituals that they constantly almost, but not quite, consummate. Other than menial labour, this is the place of a male in Portia’s society: adornment, decoration, simply to add value to the lives of females. The larger, more notable or more important a female is, the more males will dance attendance on her. Hence, having a crowd of uselessly elegant males around one is a status symbol. If Portia – the great warrior – were to stay still long enough, then she would attract her own entourage of hopeful parasites; indeed, if she cast them off and refused their attentions she would be diminishing herself in the eyes of her peers and her culture.

And sometimes the courtship will proceed as far as mating, if the female feels sufficiently safe and prosperous to start work on a clutch of eggs. The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.

It is a mark of how far her species has come, that this is the only openly acceptable time when killing a male is considered appropriate. It is, however, quite true that packs of females – especially younger ones, perhaps newly formed peer groups seeking to strengthen their bonds – will descend to the lower reaches of the city and engage in hunting males. The practice is covertly overlooked – girls will be girls, after all – but overtly frowned upon. Killing a male, sanctioned or not, is a world apart from killing a beast. Even as the fang strikes, the killer and the slain know themselves to be part of a grander whole. The nanovirus speaks, each to each. Portia’s culture is strung between base spider nature and the new empathy the nanovirus has inflicted upon them.

There are more of her peers here than Portia had expected to see. One of her seniors is entering her time and therefore must retire from society for a month or so, and her sisters are rallying round her to make the ordeal as painless as possible. Portia ascends to one of the inner chambers to witness the rite, because it will at least give the illusion that life here is proceeding according to age-old patterns, and so might continue in the same way for generations to come. She arrives just in time to see her ailing sister retreat into her cocoon. In ancient, primitive times she would have been left alone in some high, safe spot, spinning her own retreat before retiring in lonely secrecy. Now she has sisters to create her haven for her, and then keep her company while she moults.

Portia’s kind must shed their skins in order to grow. When it is time for a large female to cast off her skin – when she feels it too tight at each joint and with each breath of her abdomen – she retires to her peer house, to the company of those she trusts, and they spin her a cocoon that will support her expanded frame until her expanded skin has hardened again.

As Portia watches, the retiring female begins the difficult, painful task of ridding herself of her skin, first flexing her abdomen until the shell cracks there, and then peeling herself from back to front. The process will take hours, and her sisters stroke the cocoon with messages of solidarity and support. They have all been through this.

It must be difficult for males, who presumably undergo the ordeal alone, but then males are smaller, and less sensitive, and Portia is honestly not sure how capable they are of finer levels of thought and feeling.

A handful of her sisters notice Portia there and scurry over to talk. They listen with agitation to her news of Seven Trees – news that will be all over Great Nest by now, because males can never keep their feet still when they have something to say. Her fellows touch palps and try to tell her that what happened to Seven Trees cannot happen here, but nothing they say can remove those images from Portia’s memory – the flames, the whole structure of a thriving settlement just withering in the heat; the reservoir fraying and splitting, its waters cascading down amid a rising curtain of steam; those who could not jump or glide far enough being overwhelmed by the roiling tide of ants, to be dismembered while still alive.

She performs a careful calculation based on her count of days and the elevation of the sun outside, and tells them that she is going to the temple. She badly needs peace of mind, and the Messenger will be passing soon.

Go quickly. There will be many others seeking the same, one of her sisters advises her. Even without Portia’s personal experience, the population of Great Nest is fast becoming aware that they face a threat seemingly without limit. All their centuries of culture and sophistication may become nothing but a fading memory in the minds of the stomatopod sea-dwellers.

The temple at Great Nest is the city’s highest point, a space without walls, strung between the extremity of the canopy above with an inward-sloping floor below. At its centre, on the apex of one of the city’s original trees, is the crystal that Portia’s own ancestress wrested from the ants, a deed that has since become legend. If Portia reaches inside herself, she can even touch that other Portia’s Understandings, a private retelling of the well-known story through the lens of first-hand experience.

She arrives ahead of the Messenger’s appearance, but there is already barely room for her amongst the crouching multitude, thronged all the way up to the central trunk. Many have the look of refugees – those who escaped Seven Trees and other places. They are come here to find hope because the material world outside seems to hold little of it.

How Portia’s people regard the Messenger and its message is hard to say: theirs is an alien mindset, trying to unravel the threads of a phenomenon they are equipped to analyse and yet not understand. They gaze up at the Messenger in its fleet passage across the sky, and they see an entity that speaks to them in mathematical riddles that are aesthetically appealing to a species that has inherited geometry as the cornerstone of its civilization. They do not conceive of it as some celestial spider-god that will reach down into their green world and save them from the ant tide. However, the message is. The Messenger is. These are facts, and those facts are the doorway to an invisible, intangible world of the unknown. The true meaning of the message is that there is more than spider eyes can see or spider feet can feel. That is where hope lies, for there may yet be salvation hidden within that more. It inspires them to keep looking.

The priestess has emerged to dance, her stylus hunting out the connection points on the crystal as, invisibly, the Messenger crosses the blue vault of the sky while broadcasting its constant message. Portia spins and knots, reciting the mantras of numbers to herself, watching the votary begin her elegant visual proofs, each step, and every sweep of her palps speaking of the beauty of universal order, the reassurance that there is a logic to the world, extending beyond the mere chaos of the physical.

But, even here, there is a sense of change and threat. As Portia watches the dance, it seems to her that the priestess halts sometimes, just for a second, or even stumbles. Ripples of unease pass through the close-packed congregation, who spin all the harder, as if to cover over that slip. An inexperienced priestess, Portia reassures herself, but she feels dreadfully afraid deep within herself. Is the doom that threatens her people in the material world now being reflected in the heavens? Is there a variation in the eternal message?

After the service finishes, and feeling more shaken than reassured, she finds a male in her way, frantically signalling his good intentions and that he bears a message for her.

You are needed, the little creature tells her, coming close enough to brave her fangs in his insistence. Bianca asks for you.

Bianca – this particular Bianca – is one of Portia’s peer group, but not one that she has spoken with in a long time. No warrior but instead one of the foremost scholars of Portia’s people.

Lead me, Portia directs.

3.5 BEARING A FLAMING SWORD

Holsten and Lain had been left to their own limited devices for some time, constantly overseen by one or other of Scoles’s people. Holsten had been hoping to have more words with Nessel, on the basis that he might just be able to trade enough on his doctorate to gain some sort of cooperation from her, but she had been redeployed by her leader, perhaps for that exact reason. Instead there had been a succession of taciturn men and women with guns, one of whom had bloodied Holsten’s lip just for opening his mouth.

They had heard distant shots on occasion, but the anticipated crescendo never seemed to arrive, nor did the fighting recede entirely out of earshot. It seemed that neither Scoles nor Karst was willing to force the matter to any sort of conclusion.

‘It’s times like these…’ Holsten started, speaking softly for Lain’s benefit only.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Times like what, Mason? Being held hostage by lunatic mutineers who might kill us at any second? How many times like those have you had, exactly? Or is the world of academia more interesting than I thought?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, on the basis that we were all under a death sentence on Earth, and then, the last time we were working together, a mad computer-person hybrid thing wanted to kill us for disturbing its monkeys, I think it’s been times like these all the way, to be honest.’

Her smile was faint, but it was there. ‘I’m sorry I got you into this.’

‘Not half as sorry as I am.’

At that point Scoles burst in with a half-dozen followers crowding the hatch behind him. He shoved something into the hands of the guard that the man quickly donned.

A mask: they were all putting on oxygen masks.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Lain spat. ‘Karst’s got control of the air vents.’ From her tone it was something that she had been anticipating for some time.

‘Cut him loose.’ From behind the mask, Scoles’s voice emerged with the tinny precision of his radio transmitter. Immediately someone was bending over Holsten, severing his restraints, hauling him to his feet.

‘He’s coming with us,’ Scoles snapped, and now Holsten could hear gunfire again, and more of it than before.

‘What about her?’ A nod towards Lain.

‘Shoot the bitch.’

‘Wait! Hold on!’ Holsten got out, flinching as the gun swung back towards him. ‘You need me? Then you need her. She’s the chief engineer, for life’s sake! If you’re going anywhere on a shuttle… If you’re serious about going up against Kern – against that killer satellite – then you need her. Come on, she’s Key Crew. That means she’s the best engineer on this ship.’ And, despite his words, when the gun swung back towards Lain: ‘No, seriously, wait. I… I know you can force me to do whatever you want, but if you kill her, I’ll fucking fight you to my last breath. I’ll sabotage the shuttle. I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do but I’ll find something. Keep her alive and I’ll do everything you need, and everything I can think of, to keep you alive. To keep us all alive. Come on, it makes sense. Surely you can see it makes sense!’

He could not see Scoles’s expression, and for a moment the chief mutineer just stood there, statue-still, but then he nodded once, and exceedingly grudgingly. ‘Get them both masks,’ he snapped. ‘Get them up. Re-secure their arms and bring them along. We’re getting off this ship right now.’

Outside in the corridor waited a dozen or so of Scoles’s people, most of them also wearing masks. Holsten looked from one set of visor-framed eyes to the next until he picked out Nessel – not quite a familiar face but better than nothing at all. The rest of them, men and women both, were strangers.

‘Shuttle bay, now,’ was Scoles’s order, and then they set off, shoving Lain and Holsten ahead of them.

Holsten had no idea about much of the Gilgamesh’s layout, but Scoles and his party seemed to be taking a decidedly circuitous route to wherever they were going. The chief mutineer was constantly muttering, obviously in radio contact with his subordinates. Presumably there was some serious offensive by Security going on, and certainly the pace quickened, and quickened again – First to the shuttle bay wins?

Then one of the mutineers stumbled and fell, leaving Holsten wondering if he’d missed the sound of a shot. Nessel dropped to one knee beside him and began fiddling with his mask, and a moment later the man was stirring drunkenly, staggering to his feet with Scoles roundly cursing him.

‘Since when did we have poison gas on the ship?’ the classicist demanded wildly. Again, the whole episode was assuming a dreamlike quality.

Lain’s voice sounded right in his ear. ‘Idiot, just fucking with the air mix would do it. I’d guess these monkeys have been fighting for control of the air-conditioning since they made their stupid stand, and now they’ve lost. This is a spaceship, remember. The atmosphere is whatever the machines say it should be.’

‘All right, all right,’ Holsten managed to reply, as someone shoved him hard in the back to get him to pick up speed.

‘What?’ the man beside him demanded, shooting him a suspicious look. Holsten realized that Lain’s voice had not broadcast to the rest of them, only to him.

‘I despair of you, old man,’ came her murmur. ‘These masks do have tongue controls, you realize? Of course you don’t, and neither do these clowns. You have four tabs by your tongue. Second one selects comms menu. Then third for private channel. Select 9. It’ll show in your display.’

It took him the best part of ten minutes to get through that, slobbering over the controls and terrified that one false drool would turn his air supply off. In the end it was only when their escorts halted abruptly for a furious discussion that he was able to work it out.

‘How’s this?’

‘Clear enough,’ came Lain’s dry response. ‘So how fucked are we, eh?’

‘Was that seriously what you wanted to say?’

‘Look, Mason, they hate my guts. What I really want to say is that you should talk them into letting you go. Tell them you’re a crap hostage, or that they don’t need you, or something.’

He blinked, seeking out her eyes but finding only the lamps reflecting in the plastic of her visor. ‘And you?’

‘I am more fucked than you by an entire order of magnitude, old man.’

‘They are all f… they’re all in big trouble,’ he came back. ‘Nobody’s getting on to that planet.’

‘Who knows? I wasn’t exactly planning anything like this, but I have been thinking around the problem.’

‘Get moving!’ Scoles suddenly snapped, then people were shooting at them from ahead.

Holsten had a glimpse of a pair of figures in some sort of armoured suit, dark plastic plates over shiny grey fabric, presumably the full security-detail uniform. They were lumbering forwards, holding rifles awkwardly, and Scoles hauled Lain in front of him.

‘Back, or she goes first!’ he yelled.

‘This is your one and only chance to give yourselves up!’ came what might have been Karst’s voice, from one of the suits. ‘Guns down, you turds!’

One of the mutineers shot at him, and then they were all at it. Holsten saw both figures stagger; one was knocked flat over on to its back. It was only the frustrated momentum of the bullets, though. There was no sign of penetration, and the fallen security man was already sitting up again, levelling his gun.

‘Faceplates! Aim for the face!’ Scoles shouted.

‘Still bulletproof, you moron,’ Lain’s taut voice in Holsten’s ear.

‘Wait!’ the classicist yelled. ‘Hold it, hold it!’ and Lain convulsed in Scoles’s grip with a howl that was abominably loud in Holsten’s ear.

‘You twat! I’m half-deaf!’ she snapped. The man next to Holsten grabbed at his arm to try and rope him in as a second human shield and the classicist pulled away instinctively. A moment later the mutineer was on the ground, three dark patches spread across his shipsuit. It was too quick for Holsten to feel any reaction.

Another mutineer, a woman, had managed to close with Security, and Holsten saw a knife flash out. He was in the middle of thinking what a feeble threat that must be when she got the blade into one of them, and ripped a gash down the man’s arm, the grey material parting stubbornly, armour plate peeling back. The injured security man flailed, and his companion – Karst? – turned and shot at her, bullets scattering and ricocheting from his companion’s armour.

‘Go!’ Scoles was already moving on, hauling Lain behind him. ‘Get a door closed between us and them. Get us time. Have that shuttle warmed up and ready!’ The last words presumably directed to some other follower already sitting in the bay.

Shots followed them, and at least one other mutineer simply dropped, sprawling, as they fled. But then Nessel had a heavy door sliding down behind them, hunching over the controls presumably to try and jam them in some jury-rigged way to delay Security that little bit more. Scoles left her to it, but she caught up with the main pack soon after, showing a surprising turn of speed.

No waiting for stragglers once we’re at the shuttle, then. Holsten was seeing his opportunity to make a stand diminishing. He lunged at the mask tongue controls until he was on general broadcast again.

‘Listen to me Scoles, all of you,’ he started. One of the mutineers cuffed him across the head but he bore it. ‘I know you think there’s some chance if you can get off the ship and head for the terraform project. Probably you’ve seen the pictures of that spider thing that lives there, and yes, you’ve got guns. You’ll have all the tech from the shuttle. Spiders no problem, sure. Seriously, though, that satellite will not listen to anything we’ve got to say. You think we’d be anywhere but that damn planet otherwise? It was within a hair of carving up the whole Gilgamesh, and it blew up a whole load of spy-drones that tried to get near. Now, your shuttle’s way smaller than the Gil, and it’s way clumsier than drones. And, I swear, I do not have anything I can say that will work on the insane whatever that’s in that satellite.’

‘Then think of something,’ was Scoles’s cold response.

‘I am telling you—’ Holsten began, and then they spilled out into the shuttle bay. It was smaller than he had thought, just a single craft there, and he realized he knew nothing about this side of the ship’s operations. Was this some special yacht for the commander to gad about in, or were all the shuttles in their own separate bays, or what? It was an utter blank to him – not his area, nothing he had needed to know.

‘Please listen,’ he tried.

‘They made the mistake of showing us what our new home was going to be like,’ came Nessel’s voice. ‘I swear the commander never imagined that anyone might defy his almighty wisdom. You can say what you like, Doctor Mason, but you didn’t see it. You didn’t see what it was like.’

‘We’ll take our chances with the spiders and the AI,’ Scoles agreed.

‘It’s not an AI…’ But he was already being bundled into the shuttle, with Lain right alongside him. He could hear more shooting, but certainly not close enough to change things now.

‘Get the bay doors open. Override the safeties,’ Scoles ordered. ‘If they’re after us, let’s see if those suits of theirs can handle vacuum,’ and, even as Lain was muttering, ‘They can’ for Holsten’s ears only, he felt the shuttle’s reactor begin to shift them forwards. He was about to leave the Gilgamesh for the first time in two thousand years.

The shuttle cabin was cramped. Half the mutineers had decamped to the hold, where Holsten hoped there were belts and straps to secure them. Acceleration was currently telling every loose object – or person – that down was the rear of the ship, and when they reached whatever speed fuel economy dictated was their safe maximum, there would be no effective ‘down’ at all.

Holsten and Lain occupied the rearmost two seats of the cabin, where people could keep an eye on them. Scoles himself had the seat next to the pilot, with Nessel and two others sitting behind him at the consoles.

Holsten’s gut lurched under the pressure of the acceleration, as they made their getaway. For a moment he thought he was about to lose his stomach contents through the hatch into the hold behind him, but the feeling passed. His bloodstream was still swimming with suspension-chamber drugs that fought hard to stabilize his sudden feelings of instability.

The first thing Lain said to him once the shuttle got clear was, ‘Keep the mask. We need a secure channel.’ Her tightly controlled tones came through the receiver beside Holsten’s ear. Sure enough, the mutineers were removing their breathing masks now they were in an environment they had full control of. One of them reached back for Lain’s, and she bucked her head upwards sharply as he grabbed it, so that she ended up wearing the thing as a sort of high-tech bandanna covering her mouth. Holsten tried the same trick but just ended up in an awkward pulling match with the man, without achieving anything.

‘Sod you, then,’ he was told. ‘Suffocate if you like.’ Then the mutineer turned away. Lain leant over quickly, teeth digging into the rubber seal so she could yank his mask down like hers. For a moment she was cheek to cheek with him, eye to eye, and he had a weird feeling of horribly inappropriate intimacy, as though she might kiss him.

Then she regained her balance, and the two of them sat there with masks in identical, awkward positions, Holsten thinking, How much more like conspirators could we look?

The mutineers had other priorities, though. One of the men sat at a console apparently fighting the Gilgamesh’s attempts to override control of the shuttle, whilst Nessel and another woman were giving reports on the systems powering up. After listening awhile, Holsten realized that they were waiting to see if the ark ship had any weapons it could bring to bear. They don’t even know.

Are they wondering if Lain and I will save them by being here? Because, if so, they weren’t listening to Guyen closely enough before.

At last, Lain piped up for all to hear, although her voice echoed hollowly over Holsten’s mask speaker as well: ‘The Gilgamesh only has its anti-asteroid array, and that’s forwards-facing. Unless you decide to moon the front cameras there’s nothing able to come your way.’

They regarded her distrustfully, but Nessel’s reports seemed to confirm the same.

‘What would happen if an asteroid was going to hit us in the side?’ Holsten asked.

Lain gave him a look that said eloquently, And that’s what’s important right now? ‘The odds are vanishingly unlikely. It wasn’t resource-effective.’

‘To protect the entire human race?’ Nessel demanded, more as a jab at Lain than anything else.

‘The Gil was designed by engineers, not philosophers.’ Isa Lain shrugged – or as much as she could with her hands still secured. ‘Let me free. I need to work.’

‘You stay right there,’ Scoles told her. ‘We’re clear now. It’s not like they can just turn the Gil around and come after us. We’d be halfway across the system before they could build up any speed.’

‘And how far is this tin box going to get you exactly?’ Lain challenged him. ‘What supplies do you have? How much fuel?’

‘Enough. And we always knew this was a one-way trip,’ the chief mutineer said grimly.

‘You won’t even get one way,’ Lain told him. Immediately Scoles had his seat belt undone and fell the short distance towards them, gripping hand over hand along the seat backs. The movement was fish-like, effortless enough that the man had plainly put in some training time back home.

‘If the Gil isn’t shooting, I’m feeling less and less certain why we need you,’ he remarked.

‘Because it’s not the ship you need to worry about. That satellite out there is a killer. It’s got a defence laser that will just carve this boat into tiny pieces. The Gilgamesh’s array is nothing to that.’

‘That’s why we have the esteemed Doctor Mason,’ Scoles told her, hovering over her like a cloud.

‘You need to let me loose on your systems. You need to give me full access and let me rip the fuck out of your comms panel.’ Lain smiled brightly. ‘Or we’re all dead, anyway, even if it doesn’t shoot. Mason, you tell them. Tell them about how Doctor Avrana Kern said hello.’

Their acceleration was levelling out, weightlessness replacing the heavy hand that had been pressing Holsten back into his seat. After a blank moment, then catching Lain’s eye, the classicist nodded animatedly. ‘It took over our systems completely. We had absolutely no control. It went through the Gilgamesh’s computers in seconds, locked us out. It could have opened all the airlocks, poisoned the air, purged all the suspension chambers…’ His voice trailed off. At the time he had not quite appreciated just what might have happened.

‘Who is “Doctor Avrana Kern”?’ one of the mutineers asked.

Holsten exchanged looks with Lain. ‘It… she is what’s in the satellite. She’s one of the things in the satellite, rather. There are the basic computers, and then there’s something called Eliza which I… maybe it’s an AI, a proper AI, or maybe it’s just a very well-made computer. And then there’s Doctor Avrana Kern, who might also be an AI.’

‘Or might be what?’ Nessel prompted him.

‘Or might just be a stark raving mad psychotic human being left over from the Old Empire, who’s taken it into her head that keeping us off the planet is the single most important objective in the universe,’ he managed, looking from face to face.

‘Fuck,’ said someone, almost reverently. Evidently something in Holsten’s testimony had sounded convincing.

‘Or maybe she’ll be having a good day and she’ll just take over the shuttle’s systems and fly you back to the Gilgamesh,’ Lain suggested sweetly.

‘Ah, on that subject,’ the pilot broke in, ‘it looks like our damage to the drone bays has paid off. There’s no sign of a remote launch, but… wait, Gil is launching a shuttle after us.’

Scoles spun himself around, and coasted over to see for himself.

‘Guyen is really pissed,’ came Lain’s voice sotto voce in Holsten’s ear.

‘He’s crazy,’ the classicist replied.

She regarded him impassively, and for a moment he thought she was going to defend the man, but then: ‘Yeah… no, he’s crazy all right. Perhaps it’s the sort of crazy you need to have got us all the way out here, but it’s starting to go off the bad end of the scale.’

‘They’re telling us to cut engines, surrender our weapons and give up the prisoners,’ the pilot relayed.

‘What makes them think we’d do that, now that we’re winning?’ Scoles stated.

The look that passed between Lain and Holsten was in complete accord that here, in spirit, was Vrie Guyen’s very double.

Then Scoles was hovering above them again, staring down. ‘You know that we’ll kill you if you try anything?’ he told Lain.

‘I’m trying to keep track of all the ways this venture is likely to kill me but, yes, that’s one of them.’ She looked up at him without flinching. ‘Seriously, I am more concerned about that satellite. You need to cut us free right now. You need me isolating the ship’s systems so that thing can’t just walk in and take over.’

‘Why not just cut the comms altogether?’ one of the mutineers asked.

‘Good luck on getting Mason to sweet-talk the satellite if we can’t transmit and receive,’ she pointed out acidly. ‘Feel free to have someone looking over my shoulder at all times. I’ll even talk them through what I’m doing.’

‘If we lose power or control for one moment, if I think you’re trying to slow us so the other shuttle can catch up with us…’ Scoles started.

‘I know, I know.’

With a scowl, the chief mutineer produced a knife and severed Lain’s bonds – and Holsten’s too, as an afterthought.

‘You sit there,’ he told the classicist. ‘Nothing for you to do yet. Once she’s done her work, you’ll get your chance with the satellite.’ Apparently he didn’t feel that making overt death threats was necessary to keep Holsten in line.

Lain – clumsy in the lack of gravity – flailed over to the comms console and belted herself down in the seat next to Nessel. ‘Right, what we’re after here…’ she started, and then the language between them got sufficiently technical that Holsten failed to follow. It was obvious that the work would take some time, though, both reprogramming and physically cutting connections between comms and the rest of the shuttle’s systems.

Holsten gradually fell asleep. Even as he was dropping off, he felt this was a ridiculous thing to do, considering the constant threat to life and limb, combined with the fact that he had been out of the world for a century or so not so long ago. Suspension and sleep were not quite the same, however, and as the adrenaline now ebbed from his system, it left him feeling hollowed out and bone-weary.

A hand on his shoulder woke him up. For a moment, stirred from dreams he could barely recall, he spoke a name from the old world, one a decade dead even before he embarked on the Gilgamesh, millennia dead now.

Then: ‘Lain?’ because he heard a woman’s voice, but instead it was Nessel the mutineer.

‘Doctor Mason,’ she said, with that curious respect she seemed to hold for him, ‘they’re ready for you.’

He undid his seatbelt, and allowed them to pass him unceremoniously hand over hand across the ceiling, until Lain could reach out and snag him, and drag him into the comms chair.

‘How far out are we?’ he asked her.

‘It’s taken me longer than I’d thought to make sure I cut every single connection to comms. And because our friends here don’t trust me, and kept getting me to stop in case I was doing something nefarious. We’ve shielded all the shuttle’s systems from any outside transmission, though. Nothing is accepting any connection that isn’t hardwired into the ship itself, except the comms – and the comms don’t interact with the rest of what we’ve got in here. The most Doctor Avrana Kern can manage now is to take over the comms panel and shout at us.’

‘And destroy us with her lasers,’ Holsten pointed out.

‘Yeah, well, and that. But you better get on with telling her not to, right now, because the sat’s started signalling.’

Holsten felt a shudder go through him. ‘Show me.’

It was a familiar message, identifying the satellite as the Second Brin Sentry Habitat and instructing them to avoid the planet – just what they’d got when they interrupted the distress beacon the first time. But that time we’d signalled it, and it hadn’t noticed us inbound. This time we’re in a much smaller ship and it’s taking the initiative. Something’s still awake over there.

He remembered the electronic spectre of Avrana Kern appearing on the screens of the Gilgamesh comms room, her voice translated into their native tongue – a facility with language that neither he nor Lain had felt the need to comment on to the mutineers. Instead, though, he decided to keep matters formal just for now. He readied a message, May I speak to Eliza?, translated it into Imperial C and sent it, counting the shortening minutes until a response could be expected.

‘Let’s see who’s home,’ Lain murmured in his ear, peering over his shoulder.

The response came back to him, and it was disturbing and reassuring in equal measures – the latter because at least the situation on the satellite was as he remembered.

The translation came easily. Nessel, poised at his other shoulder, made a baffled noise.

Eliza, we will not interfere with Kern’s World. We are a scientific mission come to observe the progress of your experiment. Please confirm permission to land. Holsten thought it was worth a try.

Waiting for the reply was just as wearing on the nerves as he remembered. ‘Any idea when we’ll be in range of its lasers?’ he asked Lain.

‘Based on Karst’s drones, I think we have four hours nineteen minutes. Make them count.’

Eliza, I would like to speak to your sister Avrana, Holsten sent immediately, aware of time falling away, their limited stock of seconds dropping through the glass.

‘Brace yourselves,’ Lain warned. ‘If we didn’t get this right, we might be about to lose everything, possibly including life-support.’

The voice that spoke through the comms panel – without anyone giving it permission – was sticking to Imperial C at that moment, though to Holsten its haughty tones were unmistakable. The content was little more than a more aggressive demand that they alter their course.

Doctor Kern, Holsten sent, we are here to observe your great experiment. We will not alter anything on the planet, but surely some manner of observation is permitted. Your experiment has been running for a very long period of time. Surely it should have come to fruition by now? Can we assist you? Perhaps if we gather data you may be able to put it to use? In truth he had no certain idea what Kern’s experiment was – though by now he had formed some theories – and he was simply bouncing off what he had gleaned from Kern’s own stream-of-consciousness thoughts, transmitted along with Eliza’s sober words.

You lie, came the reply, and his heart sank. Do you think I cannot hear the traffic in this system? You are fugitives, criminals, vermin amongst vermin. Already the vessel pursuing you has asked me to disable your craft so that they may bring you to justice.

Holsten stared at the words, his mind working furiously. For a moment there he had been negotiating with Kern in good faith as though he was actually a mutineer himself. He had almost forgotten his status as hostage.

His hands hovered, ready to send the next signal, Why don’t you do just that…?

Something cold pressed into his ear. His eyes flicked sideways to catch Nessel’s hard expression.

‘Don’t even think it,’ she told him. ‘Because if this ship gets stopped, you and the engineer won’t live to get rescued.’

‘Shoot a gun in here and you’re likely to punch a hole straight through the hull,’ Lain said tightly.

‘Then don’t give us an excuse.’ Nessel nodded at the console. ‘You might be the expert, Doctor Mason, but don’t think I’m not catching most of this.’

Typical that now I find an able student, Holsten thought despairingly. ‘So what do you want me to say?’ he demanded. ‘You heard what I heard, then – that she knows what we are. She’s receiving all the transmissions from the Gilgamesh and the other shuttle.’

‘Tell her about the moon colony,’ Scoles snapped. ‘Tell her what they wanted us to do!’

‘Whatever we’re talking to now has been in a satellite smaller than this shuttle since the end of the Old Empire. You’re looking for sympathy?’ Lain demanded.

Doctor Kern, we are human beings, like you, Holsten sent, wondering how true that latter part could possibly be. You could have destroyed the Gilgamesh and you did not. I understand how important your experiment is to you – another lie – but, please, we are human beings. I am a hostage on this vessel. I am a scholar like you. If you do as you say, they will kill me. The words passed into cold, dead Imperial C like a treatise, as though Holsten Mason was already a figure long consigned to history, to be debated over by academics of a latter age.

The gaps between message and response were ever shorter as they closed with the planet.

‘No,’ Holsten shouted, ‘not back to Eliza!’ startling the mutineers.

‘What’s going on?’ Scoles demanded. ‘Nessel—?’

‘We’ve… dropped back a step or something?’

Holsten sat back numbly, his mind quite blank.

Suddenly Scoles was speaking in his ear. ‘Is that it, then? You’re out of ideas?’ in tones crammed with dangerous subtext.

‘Wait!’ Holsten said, but for a perilous moment his mind remained completely empty. He had nothing.

Then he had something. ‘Lain, do we have the drone footage?’

‘Ah…’ Lain scrabbled and clawed her way over to another console, fighting for space with the mutineer already seated there. ‘Karst’s recording? I… Yes, I have it.’

‘Get it onto the comms panel.’

‘Are you sure? Only…’

‘Please, Lain.’

Circumventing the comms isolation without opening the ship up to contamination was a surprisingly complex process, but Lain and one of the mutineers set up a second isolated dropbox with the data, and then patched it into the comms system. Holsten imagined the invisible influence of Doctor Kern flooding down the new connection only to find just another dead end.

Doctor Avrana Kern, he readied his next message. I think you should reconsider the need of your experimental world for an observer. When our ship passed your world last, a remote camera captured some images from down there. I think you need to see this.

It was a gamble, a terrible game to play with whatever deranged fragments of Kern still inhabited the satellite, but there was a gun to his head. And besides, he could not deny a certain measure of academic curiosity. How will you react?

He sent the message and the file, guessing that Kern’s recent exposure to the Gilgamesh’s systems would allow her to decode the data.

Bare minutes later there was an incomprehensible transmission from the satellite, very little more than white noise, and then:

And then nothing, a complete cessation of transmission from the satellite, leaving those in the shuttle to fiercely debate what Holsten had done, and what he might have achieved.

3.6 DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Great Nest has no strict hierarchy. By human standards, in fact, spider society would appear something like functional anarchy. Social standing is everything, and it is won by contribution. Those peer groups whose warriors win battles, whose scholars make discoveries, who have the most elegant dancers, eloquent storytellers or skilled crafters, these garner invisible status that brings them admirers, gifts, favours, greater swarms of sycophantic males to serve as their workforce, petitioners seeking to add their talents to the group’s existing pool. Theirs is a fluid society where a capable female can manage a remarkable amount of social mobility. Or, in their own minds, their culture is a complex web of connections re-spun every morning.

One key reason this all works is that the middling unpleasant labour is undertaken by males – who otherwise have no particular right to claim sanctuary within the Nest at all, if they lack a purpose or a patroness. The hard labour – forestry, agriculture and the like – is mostly undertaken by the domesticated ant colonies that the Great Nest spiders have manipulated into working with them. After all, the ants work by nature. They have no inclination or capacity to consider the wider philosophy of life, and so such opportunity would be wasted on them. From the point of view of the ant colonies, they prosper as best they can, given the peculiarly artificial environment they find themselves enmeshed in. Their colonies have no real concept of what is pulling their strings, or how their industry has been hijacked to serve Great Nest. It all works seamlessly.

Portia’s is a society now pulled taut to breaking point. The fact of the encroaching ant column demands sacrifices, and there is no chain of command to determine who must make them and for whose benefit. If the situation becomes much worse, then Great Nest will start fraying apart, fragmenting into smaller fugitive units and leaving only a memory of the high point of spider culture. Alternatively some great leader might arise and take control of all, for the common good – and later, if human examples can be valid guidelines, for the personal good. But, either way, the Great Nest that Portia knows would cease to be.

It would not be the first lost metropolis. In its ceaseless march across the continent, the ant colony has obliterated a hundred separate, distinct and unique cultures that the world will never know again, exterminating individuals and overwriting ways of life. It is no more than any conquering horde has ever done in pursuit of its manifest destiny.

Portia’s military exploits have won some esteem for her peer group, but Bianca is currently their greatest asset: one of the Nest’s most admired and maverick scholars. She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back. She is also a recluse, wanting little more than to get on with her experiments – a common trait for those driven to build on their inherited Understandings – which suits Portia’s peers well, as otherwise Bianca might decide that she was owed rather more of the group’s good fortune.

However, when she sends a messenger, her peers come running. Should Bianca suddenly feel unappreciated, she would have her pick of the peer groups of Great Nest to join.

Bianca is not within Great Nest proper. True science demands a certain seclusion, if only so that its more unexpected results can be safely contained. Portia’s people are, by ancestry, born problem-solvers, and given to varying their approach until something succeeds. When dealing with volatile chemicals, this can have drawbacks.

Bianca’s current laboratory, Portia discovers, is well within the territory of one of the local ants’ nests. Approaching the mound along a trail marked out for the ants to avoid, she feels herself reluctant, pausing often, sometimes lifting her forelegs and displaying her fangs without intending to. The old association between ants and conflict is hard to shake.

The chamber she finds Bianca in would have been dug by the ants themselves, before being cordoned from their nest by the application of colony-specific scents. Such measures have been attempted in the past to ward a settlement from attack by the encroaching super-colony, but never successfully. The ants always find a way, and fire does not care about pheromones.

Silk coats the walls of the chamber, and a complex distillery of webbing hangs from the ceiling, providing the mixing vessels of Bianca’s alchemy. A side-chamber houses a pen of some manner of livestock, perhaps part of the experiment, perhaps simply convenient sustenance. Bianca presides over the whole enterprise from up on the ceiling, her many eyes keeping track of everything, signalling to her underlings with palps and sudden stamping motions when her direction is required. Some light falls in from the entryway above, but Bianca is above the routines of night and day, and has cultured luminescent glands from beetle larvae to glitter amid the weave of her walls like ersatz constellations.

Portia lets herself down into the chamber, aware that part of the floor is also open, giving on to the ant colony below. Through the thinnest skein of silk, she can see the constant, random bustle of those insects going about their business. Yes, they work tirelessly, if unknowingly, for Great Nest’s continued prosperity, but if Portia cut through that membrane and entered their domain, then she would meet the same fate the ants reserve for all intruders, unless she had some chemical countermeasure to preserve her.

She greets Bianca with a flurry of palps to renew their acquaintance; the exchange contains a precisely calculated summary of their relative social standings, referencing their mutual peers, their differing expertise and the esteem that Bianca is held in.

The alchemist’s reply is perfunctory without being discourteous. Asking Portia to wait, she turns her main eyes on the busy laboratory below them, checking that matters in hand can be left without her close attention for a few minutes.

Portia gives the activity below a second glance, and is shocked. Your assistants are male.

Indeed, Bianca agrees, with a stance that suggests this topic is not a new one.

I would have thought they would prove insufficient for the complexity of such work, Portia assays.

A common misunderstanding. If well coached and born with the pertinent Understandings, then they are quite able to deal with the more routine tasks. I did once employ females, but that results in so much jostling for status and having to defend my preeminence; too much measuring of legs against each other – and me – to get the work done. So I settled on this solution.

But surely they must be constantly trying to court you, Portia replies perplexedly. After all, what else did males actually want out of life?

You have spent too long in the peer houses of the idle, Bianca reproaches her. I choose my assistants for their dedication to the work. And if I do accept their reproductive material from time to time, it’s only to preserve the new Understandings we come up with here. After all, if they know it, and I know it, the chances are good that any offspring should inherit that Understanding as well.

Portia’s discomfort with this line of reasoning is evident in her shifting stance, the rapid movement of her palps. But males do not—

That males can transmit to their offspring knowledge that they learn during their lives is an established fact, as far as I am concerned. Bianca stamped harder to impose her words over Portia’s. The belief that they can only pass on their mothers’ Understandings is without foundation. Be glad for our peer group that I at least comprehend this – I try to choose mates who hatched from our own crèche, as they’re more likely to already possess worthwhile Understandings to pass on, and the cumulative effect is to compound and enrich our stock overall. I believe this will become common practice, before either of us pass on. When I have time, I will start trading on the Understanding of it to those few in other peer groups who are likely to appreciate the logic.

Assuming either of us is granted so much time, Portia tells her forcefully. I will not be remaining in Great Nest long, sister. How can I help you?

Yes, you were at Seven Trees. Tell me of it.

Portia is surprised that Bianca knows even that much of Portia’s comings and goings. She gives a creditable report, focusing primarily on matters military: the tactics used by the defenders, the weapons of the enemy. Bianca listens carefully, committing the salient details to memory.

There are many at Great Nest who believe that we cannot survive, Bianca tells her when she is done. No peer group wishes to attract general scorn by being the first to abandon us, but it will happen. When one has gone, once that gap has been bridged, there will be a general rush to leave. We will destroy ourselves, and lose all we have built.

It seems likely, Portia agrees. I was at temple earlier. Even the priestess seemed distracted.

Bianca huddles against the ceiling for a moment, in a posture of disquiet. It is said that the message is contaminated, that there are other Messengers. I have spoken to a priestess who said that she felt a new message within the crystal at the wrong time, and without meaning – just a jumble of random vibrations. I have no explanation for that, but it is concerning.

Perhaps that message is meant for the ants. Portia is staring down at the scuttling insects below. The sense-image of ‘a jumble of random vibrations’ seems apposite.

You are not the first to suggest it, Bianca tells her. Thankfully, my own thoughts on message and Messenger are just that: my own – and they do not prevent me from working towards the salvation of our nest. Come with me. I have researched a new weapon, and I need your assistance in deploying it.

Portia feels a sudden hope for the first time in many days. If any mind can find a way forward, it is Bianca’s.

She follows the alchemist to the animal pens, seeing within them an unruly throng of ant-sized beetles – twenty centimetres at most. They are a dark red in colouration and most remarkable for their antennae, which spread out into a disc of fine fronds like circular fans.

I have seen these before? Portia says uncertainly with hesitant movements.

Great confronter of our enemies as you are, it seems likely, Bianca confirmed. They are a species of unusual habits. My assistants have gone into the colony below, at some risk to themselves, to find them. They live amongst the ants and yet remain unmolested. They even eat the ants’ larvae. My assistants’ reports indicate that the ants themselves are persuaded to feed these creatures.

Portia waits. Any communication from her at this juncture would be futile. Bianca has this entire encounter already planned out, point by point, to a successful conclusion.

I need you to gather capable and trusted warriors, perhaps twenty-four, Bianca instructs her. You will be courageous. You will test my new weapon, and if it fails you are likely to die. I need you to confront the colony marching against us. I need you to walk right into the heart of it.

Infiltrating an ant colony is no longer just a case of taking some heads and stolen scent glands. The super-colony has developed its defences: a blind chemical arms race run against the spiders’ ingenuity. The ants now use the chemical equivalent of shifting cyphers that change over time, and in different detachments of the sprawling colony, and Portia’s kin have been unable to keep up. The chemical weapons the spiders use to disrupt and confuse their enemies are shortlived, and barely an annoyance in the face of the sheer scale of the enemy.

The increased security of the colony has had a catastrophic impact on a number of other species. Ant nests are ecosystems in their own right, and many species live in uneasy communion with them. Some, like the aphids, provide services, and the ants actively cultivate them. Others are parasitic: mites, bugs, beetles, even small spiders, all of them adapted to steal from the ants’ table or to consume their hosts.

The majority of such species are gone from the super-colony now. In adapting to defend against the external enemy, the increased chemical encryption used by the ants has also unmasked and eliminated dozens of unwelcome guests within the ants’ domain. A very few, however, have managed to survive by ingenuity and superior adaptation. Of these, the Paussid beetles – Bianca’s current area of study – are the most successful.

The Paussids have dwelt within ant nests for millions of years, utilizing various means to lull their unwitting hosts into accepting them. Now the nanovirus has been working with them and, although they are not as intelligent as Portia, they still have a certain cunning and the ability to work together, and utilize their versatile pheromonal toolkit with considerable insight.

Each individual Paussid has a suite of chemicals to manipulate the ants around it. The individual ants – sightless and living in a world entirely built on smell and touch – can be fooled thus. The Paussid chemicals artfully create an illusory world for them, guiding their hallucinations to induce suborned units of the ant colony to do their bidding. It is fortunate for Portia and her people that the Paussids have not yet quite reached a level of intellect that would allow them to look beyond their current existence as a self-serving fifth column amongst the ants. It is easy to envisage an alternate history where the advancing ant colony became merely the myriad-bodied puppet of hidden beetle overlords.

The changing chemical codes of the colony provide a constant challenge to the Paussids, and individual beetles exchange chemicals continuously to update one another with the most efficient keys for unlocking and rewriting the ants’ programming. However, the simple feat of living undetected amongst the ants is left to the Paussid’s secret weapon: a refinement of their ancestral scent that Bianca has detected and become fascinated by.

Portia has listened carefully as Bianca sets out her plan. The scheme seems somewhere in between dangerous and suicidal. It calls for her and her cohorts to seek out the ant column and ambush it, to walk straight into it past the multitude of sentries as though they were not there. Portia is already considering the possibilities: an attack from above, dropping from the branches or from a scaffolding of webbing, plunging into that advancing torrent of insect bodies. Bianca, of course, has already thought this part through. They will find the column when it is halted for the night in a vast fortress made of the bodies of its soldiers.

I have developed something new, Bianca explains. Armour for you. But you will only be able to don it when you are about to make your attack.

Armour strong enough to ward off the ants? Portia is justifiably doubtful. There are too many weak points on a spider’s body; there are too many joints that the ants can seize upon.

Nothing so crude. Bianca always did like keeping her secrets. These Paussids, these beetles, they can walk through the ant colonies like the wind. So will you.

Portia’s uncertainty communicates itself through the anxious twitching of her palps. And I will kill them, then? As many as I can? Will that be enough?

Bianca’s stance says otherwise. I had considered it, but even you, sister, could not stop them in such a way, I fear. There are just too many. Even if my protection kept you safe for that long, you could kill ants all day and all night, and still there would be more. You would not keep their army away from Great Nest.

Then what? Portia demands.

There is a new weapon. If it works… Bianca stamps out her annoyance. There is no way of testing it but to use it. It works on these little colonies here, but the invaders are different, more complex, less vulnerable. You will simply have to hope that I am correct. You understand what I am asking of you – for our sisterhood, for our home?

Portia considers the fall of Seven Trees: the flames, the ravenous horde of insects, the shrivelling bodies of those who were too slow or too conscientious to escape. Fear is a universal emotion, and she feels it keenly, desperately wanting to flee that image, never to have to face the ants again. Stronger than fear are the bonds of community, of kinship, of loyalty to her peer group and her people. All those generations of reinforcement, through the success of those ancestors most inspired by the virus to cooperate with their own kind, now come to the fore. There comes a time when someone must do what must be done. Portia is a warrior trained and indoctrinated from an early age so that now, in this time of need, she will be willing to give up her life for the survival of the greater entity.

When? she asks Bianca.

Sooner is better. Gather your chosen; be ready to leave Great Nest in the morning. For tonight the city is yours. You have laid eggs?

Portia answers in the affirmative. She has no clutch within her ready for a male’s attentions, but she has laid several in the past. Her heritage, genetic and learned, will be preserved if Great Nest itself is. In the grander scheme of things, that means that she will have won.

That night, Portia seeks out other warriors, veteran females she knows she can rely on. Many are from her own peer group, but not all. There are others she has fought alongside – whom she has sometimes fought against, in displays of dominance – whom she respects, and who respect her. Each one she approaches cautiously, feeling her way, telegraphing her intent, paying out Bianca’s plan length by length until she is sure of them. Some refuse – either they are not persuaded by the plan, or they lack the requisite degree of courage, which is, after all, near-total fearlessness; a devotion to duty almost as blind as that of the ants themselves.

Soon enough Portia has her followers, though, each one then taking to the high roads of Great Nest to make the most of this night, before the morning calls upon them to muster. Some will resort to the company of their peer groups, others seek out entertainment – the dances of males, the glittering art of weavers. Those who are ready will let themselves be wooed, then deposit a clutch of eggs in their peer house, so as to preserve as much of themselves as they can. Portia herself has learned many things since her last laying, and feels some remorse that those Understandings, those discrete packets of knowledge, will be lost when she is lost.

She goes to temple again, seeking that fugitive calm that her devotions bring, but now she remembers what Bianca has said: that the voice of the Messenger is not alone, that there are faint whisperings in the crystal that worry the priestesses. Just as she has always believed that the mathematical perfection of the message must have some greater, transcendent significance beyond the mere numbers that compose it, so this new development surely has some wider meaning too vast to be grasped by a poor spider knotting and spinning that familiar tally of equations and solutions. What, then, does it mean? Nothing good, she feels. Nothing good.

Late that night, she sits in the highest reaches of Great Nest, staring at the stars and wondering which point of light up there is whispering incomprehensible secrets to the crystals now.

3.7 WAR IN HEAVEN

Kern had severed all contact, leaving the mutineers’ shuttle to glide on towards the green planet, eroding the vast intervening distances a second at a time. Holsten did his best to sleep, crouching awkwardly on a chair that was ideally designed to cushion the stresses of deceleration but very little else.

He drifted in and out of slumber, because Kern’s absence had not shut down radio communications. He had no idea who fired the first linguistic shot, but he was constantly being woken by a running argument between Karst – on the pursuing shuttle – and whoever was manning the mutineers’ comms at the time.

Karst was his usual dogmatic self, the voice of the Gilgamesh with the authority of the whole human race behind him (via its unelected representative, Vrie Guyen). He demanded unconditional surrender, threatened them with a space-borne destruction even Holsten knew the shuttles were not capable of, vicariously invoked the dormant satellite’s wrath and, when all else failed, descended to personal abuse. Holsten developed the idea that Guyen was holding Karst personally responsible for the mutineers’ escape.

There was mention made of him and Lain, however – that was the only positive. Apparently Karst’s orders did include recovery of the hostages at some level, though possibly not top priority. He demanded to speak to them, to be sure they were still alive. Lain shared a few acid words with him that both satisfied him on that issue and dissuaded him from asking any more. He continued to include their return unharmed in his list of monomaniac demands, which was almost touching.

The mutineers, for their part, bombarded Karst with their own demands and dogma, going into considerable detail about the difficulties the moon colony would face, and asserting the lack of need for it. Karst countered with the same reasons Lain had already given, albeit less coherently, sounding very much like a man parroting someone else’s words.

‘Why did they even give chase?’ Holsten asked Lain wearily, after this slanging match over the comms had finally defeated any possible chance of further sleep. ‘Why not just let us go, if they know how doomed this whole venture is? It’s not just for us two, surely?’

‘It’s not for you, anyway,’ she riposted. Then she relented, ‘I… Guyen takes things personally.’ She said it with an odd twist, so that he wondered just what her experience of this might be. ‘But it’s more than that. I accessed the Key Crew Aptitudes, once, in the Gilgamesh’s records.’

‘Command access only,’ Holsten noted.

‘I’d be a pisspoor chief engineer if that could stop me. I wrote most of the access scaffolding. You ever wonder what our lord and master scored so high on, that he got this job?’

‘Well now I’m wondering.’

‘Long-term planning, if you can believe it. The ability to take a goal and work towards it through however many intervening steps. He’s one of those people who’s always four moves ahead. So if he’s doing this now, it may look just like pique but he’s got a reason.’

Holsten considered that for some while, whilst the mutineers continued ranting at Karst. ‘Competition,’ he said. ‘If by chance we get past the satellite and on to the planet… and survive the monster spiders.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ Lain agreed. ‘We sod off to Terraform B, or whatever the place is, then come back a few centuries later to find Scoles is well established on the planet, maybe he even cuts a deal with Kern. Guyen…’

‘Guyen wants the planet,’ Holsten finished. ‘Guyen is looking to beat the satellite and take over the planet. But he doesn’t want to have to fight anyone else for it, as well.’

‘And more – if Scoles does set up there and sends a message saying, Come on down, the spiders are lovely, then what if a load of people want to join him?’

‘So, basically, Guyen can’t ignore us.’ And a thought came to Holsten on the tail end of that: ‘So basically the best result for him, other than surrender, would be Kern blowing us to bits.’

Lain’s eyebrows went up and her eyes flicked over to the wrangle in progress at the comms.

‘Can we hear if Karst is transmitting to the satellite?’ Holsten asked her.

‘Don’t know. I can have a go at finding out, if these clowns’ll let me try.’

‘I think you should.’

‘Yeah, I think you’re right.’ Lain unclipped her webbing and pushed herself carefully from the seat, attracting the immediate attention of most of the mutineers. ‘Listen, can I have the comms for a minute? Only—’

‘He’s launched a drone!’ the pilot shouted.

‘Show me.’ Scoles lunged forwards, got a hand on Lain’s shoulder and simply shoved her, breaking her grip on Holsten’s seat back and sending her tumbling towards the back of the cabin. ‘And she doesn’t get near anything until we know what’s going on.’

There was a clatter and an oath as Lain hit something and scrabbled for purchase to prevent a rebound.

‘Since when do these shuttles carry drones?’ Nessel was asking.

‘Some of them are equipped for payload, not cargo,’ came Lain’s voice from behind them.

‘What can the drones do?’ someone demanded.

‘Might be armed,’ the pilot explained tensely. ‘Or they could just ram us with it. A drone can accelerate faster than us, and we’re starting deceleration anyway. They must have launched it now because they’re close enough.’

‘Why are we letting them catch us?’ another mutineer yelled at him.

‘Because we need to slow down if you don’t want to make a big hole in the planet when we try to land, you prick!’ the pilot yelled back. ‘Now get strapped in!’

Amateurs, Holsten thought with creeping horror. I am on a spacecraft intending to make a landing on an unknown planet, and not one of them knows what they’re doing.

Abruptly down was shifting towards the front of the shuttle as the pilot fought to cut their speed. Holsten scrabbled with his seat, sliding forwards until he got a grip.

‘Drone’s closing fast,’ Nessel reported. Holsten remembered how swiftly the little unmanned craft had closed the distance between the Gilgamesh and the planet, the time before.

‘Listen,’ came Lain’s forlorn voice as she worked her way forward again, hand over hand, ‘was there any traffic between Karst and the satellite?’

‘What?’ Scoles demanded, and then an ear-wrenching screech erupted from the comms that had everyone clutching at their ears, Nessel slapping at the controls.

Holsten saw Scoles’s lips shape the words, Shut it down! It was plain from Nessel’s frustration that she couldn’t.

Then the sound was gone, but it had paved the way for a familiar voice.

It came over the speakers with the booming volume of a wrathful god, uttering the elegant, ancient syllables of Imperial C as though it was pronouncing the doom of every hearer. Which it was.

Holsten translated the words as: This is Doctor Avrana Kern. You have been warned not to return to my planet. I do not care about your spiders. I do not care about your images. This planet is my experiment and I will not have it tainted. If my people and their civilization are gone, then it is Kern’s World that is my legacy, not you who merely ape our glories. You claim to be human. Go be human elsewhere.

‘She’s going to destroy us!’ he shouted. For a long moment the mutineers just stared at one another.

Lain hung on to the seat backs, pale and drawn, awaiting developments. ‘So this is it, then?’ she groaned.

‘That’s not what she was saying,’ Nessel objected, although precious few people were listening to her.

Welcome to the classicist’s lot, Holsten thought drily. He closed his eyes.

‘The shuttle’s changing course,’ the pilot announced.

‘Bring it back on. Get us down to the planet, no matter what—’ Scoles started.

The pilot interrupted him. ‘The other shuttle. The Security shuttle. We’re still good, but they’re…’ He squinted at his instruments. ‘Drifting? And the drone’s off now… it’s not following our course adjustments. It’s going to overshoot us.’

‘Unless that’s what they want. Maybe it’s a bomb,’ Scoles suggested.

‘Going to have to be an almighty big bomb to get us at the distances we’re talking about,’ the pilot said.

‘It’s Kern,’ Lain declared. Seeing their baffled faces she explained, ‘That warning wasn’t just for us; it was for everyone. Kern’s got them – she’s seized their systems. But she can’t seize ours.’

‘Good work there,’ Holsten muttered into the mask radio around his neck.

‘Shut up,’ she returned by the same channel.

Then Kern’s voice was on the radio again: a few sputtering false starts and then words emerging in plain language, for everyone to understand.

‘Do you think that you have escaped me just because you have locked me out of your computers? You have prevented me turning your vessel round and sending it back to your ship. You have prevented me dealing with you in a controlled and merciful manner. I give you this one chance now to open access to your systems, or I will have no option but to destroy you.’

‘If she was going to destroy us, she’d have done it already,’ one of the mutineers decided – on the basis of what evidence, Holsten did not know.

‘Let me get at the comms,’ Lain said. ‘I’ve got an idea.’ Once again she kicked off for the comms panel and this time Scoles hauled her to him, a gun almost up her nose. Her deceleration-weight yanked at him, and the pair of them nearly ended up crashing into the pilot’s back.

‘Doctor Mason, your opinion on Kern?’ Scoles demanded, glaring at Lain.

‘Human,’ was the first word to come to Holsten’s mind. At Scoles’s exasperated glower, he explained, ‘I believe she’s human. Or she was human, once. Perhaps some melding of human and machine. She went through the Gilgamesh’s database, therefore she knows who we are, that we’re the last of Earth, and I think that means something to her. Also, a laser like she’s got must be an almighty energy sink compared to just shutting us down or telling our reactor to go critical. She won’t use her actual weapons unless she absolutely has to. Even Old Empire tech has limits, energy-wise. So she’ll shoot us as a last resort, but possibly she’ll try to get rid of us without killing us, if she can. Which she can’t at the moment because we’ve sealed her off in the comms.’

Scoles let Lain go with an angry hiss, and she instantly started explaining something to Nessel and one of the mutineers, something about restoring some of the links to the shipboard computer. Holsten only hoped she knew what she was doing.

‘Will she try to kill us?’ Scoles asked him flatly.

What can I say? Depends what mood she’s in? Depends which Kern we’re talking to at any given moment? Holsten unclipped his strapping and slowly crawled towards them, with the idea that perhaps he could talk Kern round. ‘I think she’s from a culture that wiped itself out and poisoned the Earth. I don’t know what she might do. I think that she’s even fighting with herself.’

‘This is your final warning,’ Kern’s voice came to them.

‘I can see satellite systems warming up,’ the pilot warned. ‘I reckon it’s locked on.’

‘Any way of getting round the planet, putting the other shuttle in the way?’ from Scoles.

‘Not a chance. We’re wide open. I’m on our landing approach now, though. It’s got a window of about twenty minutes before we’ll be in the atmosphere, which might cut down on its lasers.’

‘Ready!’ Lain chimed in.

‘Ready what?’ Scoles demanded.

‘We’ve isolated the shipboard database and linked it to the comms,’ Nessel explained.

‘You’ve given this Kern access to our database?’ Scoles translated. ‘You think that’ll sway her?’

‘No,’ Lain stated. ‘But I needed access to a transmission. Holsten, get over here.’ There was a horribly undignified piece of ballet, with Holsten being manhandled over until he was clipped into a seat at the comms panel, leaning sideways towards the shuttle’s nose as the force of their cut speed tugged at him.

‘She’s going to burn us up,’ Lain was telling them, as she got Holsten settled. The prospect seemed almost to excite her. ‘Holsten, you can sweet-talk her? Or something?’

‘I – I had an idea…’

‘You do yours and I’ll do mine,’ Lain told him. ‘But do it now.’

Holsten checked the panel, opened a channel to the satellite – assume it hasn’t been eavesdropping on everything, anyway – and began, ‘Doctor Kern, Doctor Avrana Kern.’

‘I am not open to negotiation,’ came that hard voice.

‘I want to speak to Eliza.’

There was a brief, clipped moment of Kern speaking – and then Holsten’s heart leapt as it was overwritten by a transmission in Imperial C. Eliza was back at the helm.

As swiftly as he could, Holsten had his reply ready and translated. Eliza, we confirm we have no intention of interacting with Kern’s World, because he was fairly sure Eliza was a computer and who knew what the limits of its cognition and programming were?

Eliza, please may we speak to Doctor Avrana Kern?, Holsten sent.

The expected voice thundered through the enclosed cabin, ‘How dare you—?’

‘And away,’ Lain said, and Kern’s voice cut off.

‘What was that?’ Scoles demanded.

‘Distress signal,’ Lain explained. ‘A repeat transmission of her own distress signal,’ even as Holsten was sending, Doctor Kern, please may I speak to Eliza?

The response that came back was garbled almost into white noise. He heard a dozen fragments of sentence from Kern and from the Eliza system, constantly getting chopped out as the satellite’s systems tried to process the high-priority distress call.

‘Almost to atmosphere,’ the pilot reported.

‘We’ve done it,’ someone said.

‘Never say—’ Lain started, and then the comms unit went so silent that Holsten looked at its readouts to make sure it was still functioning. The satellite had ceased transmitting.

‘Did we shut it down?’ Nessel asked.

‘Define “we”,’ Lain snapped.

‘But, look, that means that everyone can come to this planet, everyone from the Gil—’ the woman started, but then the comms flared with a new signal and Kern’s furious voice whipped out at them.

‘No, you did not shut me down.’

Lain’s hands were immediately at her waist, fastening the crash webbing, and then scrabbling for Holsten.

‘Brace!’ someone shouted ludicrously.

Holsten looked back at his original seat, towards the rear of the shuttle. He actually had a brief glimpse back into the cargo bay, seeing the desperate flailing about as the mutineers there tried to fully secure themselves. Then there was a searing flash that left its image on his retinas, and the shuttle’s smooth progress suddenly became a tumble… and from outside there was a juddering roar and he thought, Atmosphere. We’ve hit atmosphere. The pilot was swearing frantically, fighting for control, and Lain’s arms were tight about Holsten, holding him to her, because she had not been able to get all his webbing secured. For his part he gripped the seat as tight as he could even as the world tried to shake him loose.

The doors to the cargo hold had closed automatically. At that point he did not realize it was because the rear half of the shuttle had been shorn away.

The front half – the cabin – fell towards the great green expanse of the planet below.

3.8 ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE

Portia’s people have no fingers, but her ancestors were building structures and using tools millions of years before they attained anything like intelligence. They have two palps and eight legs, each of which can grip and manipulate as required. Their whole body is a ten-digit hand with two thumbs and instant access to adhesive and thread. Their one real limitation is that they must fashion their work principally by way of touch and scent, periodically bringing it before their eyes to review. They work best suspended in space, thinking and creating in three dimensions.

Two strands of creation have given rise to Portia’s current mission. One is armour-smithing, or the equivalent in a species with access to neither fire nor metal.

The ant column has stopped for the night up ahead, forming a vast and uniquely impregnable fortress. Portia and her cohorts are twitching and stamping nervously, aware that there will be plenty of enemy scouts blindly searching the forest, attacking all they come across and releasing the keen scent of alarm at the same time. A chance encounter now could bring the whole colony down on them.

Bianca is fussing over her males as the butchers set to work killing and dismembering her pets. The males will perform their part of the plan, apparently, but they lack the nerve to form the vanguard. It is Portia and her fellows who will undertake the impossible task of infiltrating the colony while it sleeps, taking their secret weapon with them.

The collection of Paussid beetles that Bianca had accumulated have been driven here from Great Nest. They are not herding animals by nature and the going has been exasperating, meaning that they have arrived alarmingly late in the night, getting close to the dawn that will see the enemy on the move again.

Several of the inventive beetles have escaped, and the rest appear to be communicating via scent and touches of the antennae, so that Portia wonders if some mass action is being planned on their part. She has no idea if the Paussids can think, but she reckons their actions are more complex than those of simple animals. Her world is one in which there is no great divide between the thinkers and the thoughtless, only a long continuum.

The beetles have left any intended breakout too late, however. Now they are penned in and Bianca’s people kill them quickly and efficiently and peel off their shells. Great Nest artisans promptly begin fashioning armour from the pieces, cladding Portia and her fellows as completely as possible in heavy, cumbrous suits of chitin mail. They use their fangs and the strength of their legs to twist and crack the individual sections of shell to make a better fit, securing each plate to its wearer with webbing.

Bianca explains the theory, as they work. The Paussid beetles seem to use numerous and very complex scents to get the ants to feed them, and otherwise provide for them. These scents change constantly as the ants’ own chemical defences change. The beetles’ chemical language has proved too complex for Bianca to decode.

There is a master-scent by which the beetles live, however, and that does not change. It is not a direct attack on the ants themselves, but simply functions to inform the colony Nothing here. The beetle does not register with the ants at all, unless it is actively trying to interact with them. It is not an enemy, not an ant, not even an inanimate piece of earth, but nothing. For the blind, scent-driven ants, the beetles utilize a kind of active invisibility, so that even when touched, even when the ant’s antennae play over the beetle’s ridged carapace, the colony registers a blank, a void to be skipped over.

The null scent persists even through death, but not for very long, hence this massacre of the beetles at the eleventh hour. Bianca cautions Portia and her fellows that they must be swift. She does not know how long the protection will last.

So we can just kill them, and they will not know, Portia concludes.

Absolutely not. That is not your mission, Bianca replies angrily. How many of them do you think you could possibly destroy? And if you begin attacking them, their own alarm system may eventually override the scent of your armour.

Then we will kill their egg-laying caste, Portia tells her. The ant colony on the move is still a growing organism, constantly churning out eggs to replace its losses.

You will not. You will distribute yourselves about the colony as planned, and wait for your packages to degrade.

The packages are the other part of the plan, and represent the other end of spider craftsmanship. Bianca makes them herself by brewing up a chemical from prepared compounds and the remains of the Paussids, and sealing it in globules of webbing. Again, it will not keep for long.

The alchemy of Portia’s people has a long history, evolving at first from the scent markers their distant ancestors used, and then becoming swiftly more elaborate and sophisticated after contact with species like ants, who can be deftly manipulated and enticed by artificial scents. To a spider like Bianca, personally experienced and blessed with past generations of Understanding to assist her, mixing chemicals is a visual experience, her senses blending into one another, allowing her to use the formidable ocular parts of her brain to envisage the different substances that she works with and their compounds in a representational mental language of molecular chemistry. She spurs her alchemical reactions with the use of exothermic catalysts that generate heat without a dangerous open flame.

Just as the chemicals themselves have a limited lifespan, so do their webbing containers. Precisely crafted, they will release their payload within moments of each other, which is essential timing as Portia and her fellows will have no way to coordinate with each other.

Bianca hands them their weapons, and they know what they must do. The mobile fortress of the enemy is ahead of them, through the dark forest. They must accomplish their task in the short time gifted to them or they will die, and then their civilization will follow them. Still, every part of them that cares for self-preservation balks at it. Nobody enters an ant colony’s travelling fortress and survives. The advance of Portia and her fellows is slow and reluctant, despite the chivvying of Bianca from behind. A fear of extinction was their birthright long before intelligence, and certainly long before any kind of social altruism. Despite the stakes, it is a hard fear to suppress.

Then the night is made day, and the spiders look up at a sky from which the stars have been briefly banished.

Something is coming.

They can feel the air shake in rage, the ground vibrate in sympathy, and they crouch inside their heavy armour, terrified and bewildered. A ball of fire comes streaking across the sky, with a trail of thunder rushing after it. None of them has any idea what it can possibly be.

When it strikes the ground, well within the ant colony’s scouting range, it has lost a great deal of its speed, but the impact still resonates through their sensitive feet as though the whole world has just cried out some vast, secret word.

For a moment they remain still, petrified in animal terror. But then one of them asks what it was, and Portia reaches within herself and finds that part of her that was ever open to the incomprehensible: the fearful and the wonderful understanding that there is more in the world than her eyes can see, more than her feet can feel.

The Messenger has come down to us, she tells them. In that moment – out of her fear and her hope – she has quite convinced herself, because what has just happened is from so far beyond her experience that only that quintessential mystery can account for it.

Some are awestruck, others sceptical. What does that mean? one of them demands.

It means you must be about your work! Bianca hammers out from behind them. You have little time! Go, go! And if the Messenger is here with you, then that means she favours you, but only if you succeed! If it is the Messenger, show her the strength and ingenuity of the Great Nest!

Portia flags her palps in fierce agreement, and then they all do likewise. Staring at the trail of smoke still blotting out the night stars, Portia knows it is a sign from the sky, the Messenger’s sky. All her hours spent in reverent contemplation of the mathematical mysteries of Temple, on the brink of revelation, seem to her to have led to this.

Onward! Portia signals, and she and her cohorts head off towards the enemy, knowing that Bianca and her team will be following behind. The beetle-shell armour is heavy, obscures their vision, is awkward to run in and makes jumping impossible. They are like pioneering divers about to descend into a hostile environment from which only their suits can protect them.

They hurry along the forest floor as best they can, the armour catching on their joints, hobbling and crippling them. They are determined, though, and when they come close to ant scouts scouring the area, they pass by in their black armour as though they were nothing but the wind.

The scouts themselves are agitated, already on the move, heading for that gathering smoke and fire where the Messenger has visited, no doubt ready, in their blind and atheistic way, to cut a firebreak to preserve their colony – and, unwittingly, their colony’s enemies.

Then the fortress of the colony is right in front of Portia and her fellows. The fortress is the colony. The ants have made a vast structure around a tree trunk, covering tens of square metres horizontally and vertically, constructed only from ants. Deep within the heart of it will be hatcheries and nursery chambers, food stores, racks of pupae where the next generation of soldiers is being cast, and all of these rooms and the tunnels and ducts that connect them are built from ants, hooked on to one another with their legs and mouthparts, the entire edifice a voracious monster that will devour any intruder who dares enter. The ants are not wholly dormant, either. There is a constant current of workers coursing through the tunnels, removing waste and the bodies of the dead, and the corridors themselves shift and realign to regulate the fortress’s internal temperature and airflow. It is a castle of sliding walls and sudden oubliettes.

Portia and her fellows have no choice. They are the chosen warriors of Great Nest, tough veteran females who have faced the ants on dozens of battlefields. Their victories have been few and small, though. Too often, all they have achieved is to either lose less or lose more slowly. By now they all know that mere skill at arms, speed and strength cannot defeat the numbers and singular drive of the super-colony of which this fortress is only a single limb. And for all they do not understand it, Bianca’s plan is the only plan they have.

They split up as they near the fortress, each seeking a different entryway into the mass. Portia elects to climb, lugging her bulky second skin up a ladder of living ant bodies, feeling their limbs and antennae twitch as she crosses them, investigating her plated underside. So far so good: she is not immediately denounced as an intruder. She is more than able to imagine what would happen if the colony knew her for what she actually was. The very wall would become a blade-lined maw to dissect and consume her. She would have no chance at all.

Some distance away, one of her fellows meets exactly this fate. Some gap in her armour has let out the scent of spider, and at once a pair of mandibles clenches on one of her leg joints, severing that limb at the knee. The brief rupture of fluid excites the other nearby ants, and in moments there is a full scale seething of angry, defensive insects. Whilst those parts of the spider that are still armoured are ignored, the ants follow the blood, tunnelling into the kicking intruder’s innards via the wound, cutting her apart from the inside whilst letting the obscuring armour fall off piece by piece, unseen and unseeable.

Portia presses on grimly, finding one of the openings through which the fortress breathes and forcing her bulk into it, clawing at a mat of sluggish bodies for purchase. Her palps hold the slowly disintegrating package close to her to avoid snagging it on the angular shapes that make up every solid surface around her. She burrows on into the mass of the colony, following their airways and walkways, jostling the scuttling workers but attracting no attention. The armour is serving its purpose.

And yet she is aware that all is not well; she is invisible, but she causes ripples. When she blocks an airway, the colony notices. When she must pry ant bodies apart to force her way through, she adds to a slow, general sense in the ants’ collective understanding that something is not quite as it should be. As she presses on into the lightless reaches of the living fortress, she is aware of incrementally greater movement and mobility around her, a disturbance that can only be a symptom of her own infiltration. The tunnels behind her are closing; the colony investigating, by its massed sense of touch, what it cannot smell.

Ahead of her she feels a quick movement that is not an ant. For a moment she is blindly face to face with a Paussid beetle that investigates her stolen carapace and then retreats in horrified fright. Instinctively she pursues, allowing the beetle to show her the inner ways of the nest, while pushing herself to the limit. By now she is overheating, running out of strength in her muscles, her heart barely able to keep oxygenated fluids moving about the hollow inside of her body. She finds herself losing focus, moment to moment, only ancient instinct keeping her moving.

She can feel the whole colony unfolding around her, waking up.

Then it happens. A questing antenna finds a gap where her own cuticle is exposed, and at once there is a dead weight at the end of one of her legs as the ant latches on mindlessly, sounding an alarm that has the tunnel about her breaking apart into individual ants, each searching for the intruder they know must be present.

Portia wonders if she has progressed far enough. After all, her own survival is not necessary for Bianca’s plan to work, even though she would personally prefer it.

She tries to bundle herself up, tucking her legs in, but the ants are all over her, and she quickly finds it hard to breathe, too hot to think. They are smothering her with their relentless enquiries.

The package she has been carefully guarding seizes this moment to come apart, its webbing fraying by carefully coordinated measures, its pressurized chemical cargo unleashing itself in an explosion of stinking, acrid gas.

Portia loses consciousness, nearly suffocated in that initial detonation. On slowly returning to herself after an unknown period of time, she finds herself on her back, legs curled in, still in most of her beetle armour and surrounded by ants. The entire fortress has collapsed and dissolved into a great drift of insect bodies, from which a handful of individual spiders are even now digging themselves free. The ants do not resist them. They are not dead: they wave their antennae hopefully and some of them make uncertain moves here and there, but something has been struck from the colony as a whole: its purpose.

She tries to back away from the quiescent colony, but they are crowding her on all sides, a vast field of fallen insect architecture. It seems to her that at any moment they must surely remember their place in the world.

Less than half her infiltration force remain alive, and they stumble and crawl over to her, some of them injured, all of them exhausted by the weight of armour they have been forced to wear. They are in no state to fight.

Then one of her fellows touches her to attract her attention. Their footing of dazed ants is too inconstant to hold a conversation upon, so she signals broadly with her palps: She comes. They come.

It is true: Bianca and her male assistants have arrived, and they are not alone. Trotting tamely by their side are more ants, smaller than most of the invader castes and presumably reared from the domesticated colonies that Great Nest interacts with.

Portia stumbles and drags herself over to the edge of the tumbled fortress, hauling herself from the slough of feebly-moving bodies to collapse in front of Bianca.

What is going on? she asks. What have we done?

I have simply saturated the area with a modified form of the Paussid beetle chemical that has protected you thus far, Bianca explains with precise motions of her feet, whilst her palps continue signalling instructions to her staff. You and your sisters had sufficiently infiltrated the colony, and the radius of the gas was sufficiently large, that we have caught the entire column – as I had hoped. We have blanketed them in a scent of absence.

The males are now priming the tame ants for some manner of action, by exposing them to carefully calibrated scents. Portia wonders if these little workers are to be the executioners of that great mass of their hostile brethren.

I still do not understand, she confesses.

Imagine that most of the ways the ants know about the world, all the ways that they act and react, and most importantly the way that their actions spur other ants on to action, are a web – a very complex web, Bianca explains absently. We have unravelled and consumed that web entirely. We have left them without structure or instruction.

Portia regards the vast host of aimless ants on every side. They are defeated then? Or will they re-weave their web?

Almost certainly, but I do not intend to give them the chance.

The tame herd ants are going amongst the larger invaders now, touching antennae urgently, communicating in the way of their kind. Portia watches their progress at first with perplexity, then with awe, then with something closer to fear at what Bianca has unleashed. Each ant that the tame workers speak to is immediately filled with purpose. Moments later it is about its frantic way, just like ants everywhere, but its task is simple: it is talking with other ants, reviving more of its stunned brethren, converting them to its cause. The spread of Bianca’s message is exponential, like a disease. A wave of new activity courses across the face of the fallen colony, and in its wake is left a tame army.

I am weaving them a new structure, Bianca explains. They will follow the lead of our own ants now. I have given them new minds, and henceforth they are our allies. We have an army of soldiers. We have devised a weapon to defeat the ants, no matter how many of them there are, and make them our allies.

You are truly the greatest of us, Portia tells her. Bianca modestly accepts the compliment, and then listens as the warrior goes on: Was it you, then, that made the ground shake? That made the light and the smoke that distracted their scouts?

That was not my doing, Bianca admits hesitantly. I am still awaiting news of that, but perhaps, when you have shed that ungainly second skin, you may wish to investigate. I believe that something has fallen from the sky.

3.9 FIRST CONTACT

They were down.

The cabin section of the shuttle had still been passably aerodynamic, and the pilot had deployed braking jets and air scoops and chutes to slow them, yet still it seemed that the first human footprint on this new green world would be a colossal crater. Somehow, though, the mortally wounded craft had battled through the air, swinging with the turbulence and yet never quite spinning out of control. Holsten learned later that jettisoning the cargo hold was in fact something the vessel was supposed to be able to do. The pilot had dumped the last twisted stump of it just before they hit atmosphere, letting the mangled chunk of wreckage streak across the new world’s sky as though signifying a new messiah.

Not to say that the landing was gentle. They had come down hard enough, and at a sufficiently unwise angle, that one of the mutineers was ripped from his straps to smash bodily – fatally – into the comms panel, while Holsten himself felt something give in his chest as physics fought to free him from the restraints Lain had finally managed to get closed over him. He lost consciousness on impact. They all did.

When he woke, he realized they were down but blind, the interior of the cabin dark save for a cascade of warning lights telling them all just how bad it was, the viewscreens dead or smashed. Someone was sobbing and Holsten envied them, because he himself was having a hard time just drawing breath.

‘Mason?’ sounded in his ear – Lain speaking over the mask comms, and not for the first time from the sound of it.

‘H-hh…’ he managed.

‘Fuck.’ He heard her fumbling about next to him, and then she was muttering, ‘Come on, come on, we must have emergency power. I can see your fucking lights, you bitch. You don’t flash your fucking lights at me to tell me there’s no…’ and then a dim amber illumination seeped in from a strip that encircled the cabin near the ceiling, revealing a surprisingly tidy crash scene. Aside from the one luckless deceased, the rest of them were still strapped into their seats: Scoles, Nessel, the pilot and one other man and woman of the mutineers, plus Lain and Holsten. The fact that the landing had been survivable by mere fragile humans meant that most of the cabin interior was still intact, though almost nothing appeared to be functioning. Even the comms panel appeared to have been exorcized from Avrana Kern’s malign ghost.

‘Thank you, whoever that was,’ Scoles said, then saw it was Lain and scowled. ‘Everyone speak up. Who’s hurt? Tevik?’

Tevik turned out to be the pilot, Holsten somewhat belatedly discovered. He had done something to his hand, he said; perhaps broken something. Of the others, nobody had escaped bruises and broken blood vessels – every eye was red almost to the iris – but only Holsten appeared to be seriously injured, with what Lain reckoned was a cracked rib.

Scoles hobbled from his seat, fetched medical supplies and began handing out painkillers, with a double dose for Tevik and Holsten. ‘These are emergency grade,’ he warned. ‘Means you won’t feel pain much at all – including when you should. You can end up tearing your muscles really easily by overdoing it.’

‘I don’t feel like overdoing it,’ Holsten said weakly. Lain stripped his shipsuit down to the waist and strapped a pressure bandage about his chest. Tevik got a gel cast to keep his hand together.

‘What’s the plan?’ Lain was asking as she worked. ‘Seven of us to populate a new Earth, is that it?’ When she looked up, she found Scoles was training a gun on her. Holsten saw the thought occur to her to say something sarcastic, but she wisely fought it down.

‘We can do it with five,’ the mutineer chief said quietly. His people were watching him uncertainly. ‘And if I can’t count on you, we will. If we’re going to survive out there, it’ll be tough. We’ll all need to rely on one another. Either you’re part of the team now, or you’re a waste of resources that could be allotted to someone more deserving.’

Lain’s eyes flicked between his face and the gun. ‘I don’t see that I have a choice – and I don’t mean that because you’re about to shoot me. We’re here now. What else is there?’

‘Right.’ Scoles nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re the engineer. Help us salvage everything from this thing that’s going to be useful. Anything we can use for heat or light. Any supplies here in the cabin.’ A tacit acknowledgement that all the gear he had planned to use, to build his brave new world, had been cut from him along with the bulk of his followers, up at the atmosphere’s edge.

‘I’ve got readings from outside,’ Tevik reported, having jury-rigged something on his console one-handed. ‘Temperature’s six over ship standard, atmosphere is five per cent oxygen over ship standard. Nothing poisonous.’

‘Biohazard?’ Nessel asked him.

‘Who knows? What I can tell you, however, is that we have precisely one sealed suit between us, because the rest were back in the hold when it blew. And without the scrubbers working, my dial here says we’ve got about two hours breathable air max.’

Everyone was silent for a while after that, thinking about killer viruses, flesh-eating bacteria, fungal spores.

‘The airlock’ll work on manual,’ Lain said, at last. While everyone else had been thinking about impending doom, she had just been thinking. ‘The medical kit can run an analysis on the microbial content of the air. If it’s alien stuff we’re fucked, because it won’t know what to make of it, but this is a terraformed world, so any bugs out there should be Earth-style, let’s hope. Someone needs to go out and wave it around.’

‘You’re volunteering?’ Scoles asked acidly.

‘Sure I am.’

‘Not you. Bales, suit up.’ He prodded the other female mutineer, who nodded grimly, shooting an evil look at Lain.

‘You know how to work the medical analyst?’ Lain asked her.

‘I was a clinician’s assistant, so better than you do,’ the woman Bales replied tartly, and Holsten recalled that she had been the one to case up Tevik’s hand.

They got her into the suit, with difficulty – it wasn’t a hard suit like the security detail had been wearing, just a ribbed white one-piece that hung slack off her frame, given that they wouldn’t need to pressurize it. The helm had a selection of visors to guard against anything ranging from abrasive dust to the searing naked glare of the sun, and enough cameras and heads-up displays to let the wearer run around blindfold, if need be. Working patiently, Nessel connected the medical scanner to the suit systems, and Lain managed to use emergency power to resurrect one of the small view-screens in the cabin to receive Bales’s camera feed. Nobody said anything about the vast scope of unknown dangers that could be waiting out there for this woman, and which her suit could not possibly have been designed for.

Scoles hauled open the airlock, and then shut it behind her. With no power to the doors, she would have to do the rest herself.

They were watching through her lenses as she got the external door open, whereupon the dark of the airlock was replaced by a dull, amber glare, the camera’s viewpoint swinging wildly as Bales stepped down from the hatch. When their vantage point stabilized, the scene revealed looked like some vision of hell: blackened, smoking, some of it still on fire, the external emergency lamps lighting up the choked air in an unhealthy yellowish fog.

‘It’s a wasteland,’ someone remarked, and then Bales stopped looking back down the charred furrow the shuttle cabin had raked in the soil, and turned her lens, and her eyes, on the forest instead.

Green, was Holsten’s first helpless thought. In fact it was mostly shadowed darkness, but he remembered what the planet had looked like from orbit, and this was it: this was that great verdant band that had clad most of the tropical and temperate regions. He examined his memories of Earth – distant, poisoned Earth. By his generation, there had been nothing left like this, no riot of trees towering high, stretching into a vaulted, many-pillared space, out from the splintered hole that the shuttle’s fist had broken into it. It was life, and only now did Holsten realize that he had never really seen Earth life, as it had been intended. The home he remembered was just a dying, browning stub, but this… Gently, almost imperceptibly, Holsten felt something breaking up inside him.

‘Looks better than the inside of the Gil,’ Nessel suggested tentatively.

‘But is it safe?’ Lain pressed.

‘Safer than suffocating in here, you mean?’ Tevik asked derisively. ‘Anyway, the medical scanner is working. Sampling now, it says here.’

‘…hear me…?’ came a faint voice from his console, and he jumped.

‘Comms is fried,’ Lain said tersely. ‘There’s a lot of crap in here that can be repurposed as a receiver, though. Don’t think we can answer yet.’

‘…know if you’re getting this…’ Bales’s voice ghosted in and out of audibility. ‘I can’t believe we’re…’

‘How long for the scanner?’ Scoles demanded.

‘It’s working,’ Tevik said noncommittally. ‘High microbial count already. Some of it recognized, some not. Nothing definitely harmful.’

‘Gather the kit and be ready to get out as soon as we get the all-clear.’

‘…not seeing any sign of biohazard…’ from Bales.

‘Give it time, come on,’ Tevik’s answering, unheard complaint. ‘All sorts of crap out there. Still no yellow lights, but…’

Bales screamed.

They heard it: tinny and distant as though it was some tiny person locked away within the cabin’s workings. The camera view was suddenly wavering wildly, then Bales appeared to be fighting with her own suit.

‘Fuck me, look at that!’ Lain spat. Holsten had only a blurred view of something spiny, leggy, attached to the woman’s boot. The screaming continued, and now there were audible words, ‘Let me in! Please!’

‘Open the airlock!’ Scoles shouted.

‘Wait, no!’ from Tevik. ‘Look, we can’t flush the air out. Nothing’s working. The air out there is planet-air. If there’s shit in it, we get it the moment we open the inner door!’

‘Open the fucking thing!’

And now Nessel was hauling on the lever, dragging the door open. Holsten had a mad moment of holding his breath against the anticipated plague before recognizing the stupidity of it.

Well, we’ve all got it now.

‘Get the guns. Get the gear. We’re here now, and it’s survive outside or die inside,’ Scoles snapped. ‘Everybody out, and quick!’

Nessel was already dragging at the outer door, tearing open their little illusion of security. Beyond was the real world.

They could hear Bales screaming as soon as the outer door opened. The woman lay on the ground just outside, smashing both hands against her suit, kicking and flailing as though beset by an invisible attacker. Everyone except Holsten and Tevik piled out to help her, trying to get her under control. They were shouting her name now, but she was oblivious, thrashing out at them, then trying to force her helmet off as though she was suffocating. One foot was a red ruin – seeming half cut away – the leg of her suit slashed open with a weird precision.

It was Nessel that released the catch and dragged Bales’s helmet off, but the screaming had already turned to a ghastly liquid sound before then, and what came out first, after the seal broke, was blood.

Bales’s head flopped aside, eyes wide, mouth open and running with red. Something moved at her throat. Holsten got sight of it just as everyone else suddenly recoiled: a head rising from the ruin of the woman’s throat, twin blades brandished at them under a pair of crooked antennae that flicked drops of Bales left and right as they fidgeted and danced.

Then Scoles shouted and kicked madly, flinging something away from him, and Holsten saw that the ground around them was crawling with ants, dozens of ants, each as large as his hand. Monkeys might be merely a memory of Old Empire, but spiders and ants had paced humanity to the ends of the Earth, and now here they were waiting on this distant world. In the leaping, dim light cast by the fires the insects had gone unnoticed, but now he saw them everywhere he looked. More of them were scissoring their way free of Bales’s suit, each emergent head accompanied by a slick of sluggish blood from the wounds the things had carved in her.

Scoles began shooting.

He was calm, ridiculously calm, as he levelled his pistol to pick out each target carefully, but he still hit only one out of two, unable to track the insects’ rapid, random movements. It was a forlorn hope. Everywhere Holsten looked on the ground there were ants, not a vast carpet of them but still dozens, and they were converging on their visitors.

‘Get in!’ Tevik shouted. ‘Inside, now, all of you!’ and he went down with a yell, rolling over, tearing at his thigh where an insect was clinging, its scissor jaws embedded in him, tail curling under itself to sting and sting. Nessel and Lain pushed past Holsten, almost knocking him out of the hatch in their hurry to get back in. Scoles was right behind them, shoving Tevik forwards and then frantically fumbling another clip into his gun. The remaining mutineer was trying to drag Bales after them.

‘Leave her!’ Scoles shouted at him, but the man didn’t seem to hear. The ants were already crawling over him, and yet he was still hauling at the ragged weight that was Bales, as blindly single-minded as the insects themselves.

Lain had ripped the ant off Tevik, but the insect’s head was left behind, still holding its grip, and the man’s leg was visibly swelling where the sting had lanced through his shipsuit. He was screaming, and now the man outside was screaming too; Scoles was trying to force the airlock closed, but there were ants already inside with them, rushing about the enclosed confines of the cabin, seeking out fresh victims.

Holsten crouched by Tevik, trying to work the ant’s head free of his leg and aware that his ribs should be vociferously complaining right then. In the end he had to pry it out with pliers, whilst Tevik clutched at the floor, emergency painkillers unequal to the task.

Holding up the head, Holsten stared at it. The bloodied mandibles looked weirdly heavy, metallic.

Scoles now had the airlock shut and he, Nessel and Lain had been stamping on every insect they found, whilst the cabin slowly filled up with an acrid reek from their crushed bodies. Holsten looked over just as they spotted one more ant up on the consoles.

‘Don’t smash the electronics,’ Lain warned. ‘We may need… was that a flame?’

There was a brief flash and flare at the ant’s abdomen, which it was directing aggressively towards them.

Aiming was the word that came to Holsten’s mind.

Then that end of the cabin was on fire.

The crew reeled back from the sudden jet of flame that sprayed burning chemicals across the confined space. Nessel fell back over Holsten and Tevik, beating at her arm. Suddenly there was a line of fire between them and the airlock, leaping absurdly high, seeming to burn fiercer and faster than there was any reason for. And the ant was still spewing it out; now the plastics of the consoles were melting, filling the air with throat-catching fumes.

Lain lurched to the rear, coughing, and slapped at one of the panels, hunting for an emergency release. Holsten realized that she was trying to open the shutters to the hold – or where the hold had been. A moment later the back wall of the cabin irised out into open space and Lain almost fell through.

Scoles and Nessel went straight out with Tevik between them, and Lain hauled up Holsten under the armpits and helped him follow.

‘The ants…’ he managed.

Scoles was already looking around, but somehow the great host of insects they had seen earlier appeared to have disintegrated in just the few moments they were inside. Instead of the purposeful coalescing of an insect horde there were now just little knots of fighting insects all about – turning on one another or just wandering blankly around. They seemed to have lost all interest in the shuttle. Many were heading back into the trees.

‘Did we poison them or something?’ Scoles asked, stamping on the closest just to be on the safe side.

‘No idea. Maybe we killed them with our germs.’ Lain collapsed next to Holsten. ‘What next, chief? Most of our kit’s on fire.’

Scoles stared about him with the baffled, angry look of a man who has lost control of the last shreds of his own destiny. ‘We…’ he started, but no plan followed the word.

‘Look,’ said Nessel, in a hushed voice.

There was something approaching from the treeline, something that was not an ant: bigger, and with more legs. It was watching them; there was no other way to put it. It had enormous great dark orbs, like the eyesockets of a skull, and it approached in sudden fits of movement, a rapid scuttle, then it was still and regarding them once more.

It was a spider, a monster spider like a bristling, crooked hand. Holsten stared at its ragged, hairy body, its splayed legs, the hooked fangs curled beneath it. When his gaze strayed to the two large eyes that made up so much of its front, he felt an unbearable shock of connection, as though it was trespassing on territory he had only ever shared with another human being before.

Scoles levelled his pistol, hand shaking.

‘Like on the drone recording,’ Lain said slowly. ‘Fuck me, it’s as long as my arm.’

‘Why is it watching us?’ Nessel demanded.

Scoles swore, and then the gun boomed in his hand, and Holsten saw the crouching monster spin away in a sudden flurry of convulsing limbs. The mutineer chief’s expression was slowly turning to one of despair – that of a man who, it seemed, would next turn the gun on himself.

‘What am I hearing?’ Nessel asked.

Holsten had somehow just thought it was a rolling echo of the gunshot, but now he realized that there was something more, something like thunder. He looked up.

He didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. There was a shape in the sky. It grew larger as he watched, slowly descending towards them. A moment later a bright wash of light seared down from it, illuminating the entire crash site in its pale radiance.

‘Karst’s shuttle,’ Lain breathed. ‘Never thought I’d be glad to see him.’

Holsten looked over to Scoles. The man was staring up at the descending vehicle, and who could guess at what bitter, desperate thoughts were passing through his head?

The approaching shuttle got to about ten feet off the ground, jockeyed a little, and then picked a landing site some way back down the devastated scar that the crash-landing cabin had created. Even as it came down, the side-hatch was opening, and Holsten saw a trio of figures in security detail armour, two of them with rifles already levelled.

‘Drop the weapon!’ boomed Karst’s amplified voice. ‘Surrender and drop the weapon! Prepare to be evacuated.’

Scoles’s hand was shaking, and there were tears at the corners of his eyes, but Nessel put a hand on his arm.

‘It’s over,’ she told him. ‘We’re done here. There’s nothing left for us. I’m sorry, Scoles.’

The mutineer chief gave a final glance around at the looming forest that no longer seemed so wonderfully vibrant and green and Earth-like. The shadows seemed to throng with unseen eyes, with chitinous motion.

He dropped the pistol disgustedly, a man whose dreams had been shattered.

‘Okay, Lain, Mason, you come right over here first. I want to check you’re unharmed.’

Lain did not hesitate, and Holsten shambled after her, feeling only the faintest deadened sense of pain, yet still having to labour at both breathing and walking, weirdly disconnected from his own body.

‘Get in,’ Karst told them.

Lain paused in the hatch. ‘Thank you,’ she said, without so much of her usual mockery.

‘You think I’d leave you here?’ Karst asked her, visor still looking outwards.

‘I thought Guyen might.’

‘That’s what he wanted them to think.’

Lain didn’t look convinced, but she helped Holsten up after her. ‘Come on, get your prisoners and let’s get out of here.’

‘No prisoners,’ Karst stated.

‘What?’ Holsten asked, and then Karst’s men started shooting.

Both of them had taken Scoles as their first target, and the mutineer leader went down instantly with barely a yell. Then they were turning their guns on the other two – Holsten barrelled into them, shouting, demanding that they stop. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Orders.’ Karst shoved him back. Holsten had a wheeling glimpse of Tevik and Nessel trying to put the crashed cabin between themselves and the rifles. The mutineer pilot fell, struggled to his feet clutching at his injured leg, and then jerked as one of the security men picked him off.

Nessel made it to the treeline and vanished into the deeper darkness there. Holsten stared after her, feeling a crawling horror.

Would I rather be shot? Surely I would. But it wasn’t a choice anyone was asking of him.

‘We have to get her back, alive,’ he insisted. ‘She’s… valuable. She’s a scholar, she’s got—’

‘No prisoners. No ringleaders for a future mutiny,’ Karst told him with a shrug. ‘And your woman up there doesn’t care so long as there’s no interference to her precious planet.’

Holsten blinked. ‘Kern?’

‘We’re here to clear up the mess for her,’ Karst confirmed. ‘She’s listening right now. She’s got her finger on the switch of all our systems. So it’s straight in, straight out.’

‘You bargained with Kern to come and get us?’ Lain clarified.

Karst shrugged. ‘She wanted you out of the picture down here. We wanted you back. We cut a deal. But we need to get going now.’

‘You can’t…’ Holsten stared out from the hatch at the deep forest beyond. Call Nessel back just to have her executed? He subsided, realizing only that, at heart, he was just glad to be safe.

‘So, Kern,’ Karst called out, ‘what now? I don’t much fancy going into that to get her, and I reckon that would just involve more of that interference you don’t want.’

The clipped, hostile tones of Avrana Kern issued from the comms panel. ‘Your inefficiency is remarkable.’

‘Whatever,’ Karst grunted. ‘We’re coming back to orbit, right? Is that okay?’

‘It would seem the least undesirable option at this point,’ Kern agreed, still sounding disgusted. ‘Leave now, and I will destroy the crashed vessel.’

‘The…? She can do that?’ Lain hissed. ‘You mean she could have…’

‘It’s kind of a one-shot. She’s got our drone up there under her control,’ Karst explained. She’s going to stick it into the crash there and then do some kind of controlled detonation of its reactor – burn up the wreck without flattening the entire area. Doesn’t want her precious monkeys playing with grown-up toys or something.’

‘Yeah, well, we didn’t see any fucking monkeys,’ Lain muttered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

3.10 GIANTS IN THE EARTH

Portia examines the creature as it sleeps.

She was not in time to see any of the momentous, inexplicable events that left a great, burning scar across the face of her world – the fires that are still burning despite the ants’ best efforts to contain them. From others of her kind she has heard a garbled version of events, crippled by the tellers’ inability to understand what it is they have witnessed.

It will all be remembered though, through the generations to come. This Understanding, this contact with the unknowable, will be one of the most analysed and reinterpreted events of all her species’ histories.

Something fell from the sky. It was not the Messenger, which clearly retains its regular circuit of the heavens, but in the mind of Portia and her kin it seems linked to that orbiting mote. It is a promise that the skies are host to more than one mobile star, and that even stars may fall. Some hypothesize that it was a herald or forerunner, a message from the Messenger, and that if its meaning can only be interpreted, then the Messenger will have new lessons to teach. Over the generations, this view – that a test has been set beyond the simple, pure manipulation of numbers – will gain in popularity, whilst simultaneously being viewed as a kind of heresy.

The events themselves seem inarguable, however. Something fell, and now it is a blackened shell of metals and other unknown materials that defy analysis. Something else came to earth, and then returned to the sky. Most crucially, there were living things. There were giants that came from the sky.

They were fighting off scouts from the ant colony when Portia’s people first saw them. Then, when the scouts had been killed or converted, the giants killed one of Portia’s own people – one of Bianca’s assistants. After they departed, they left some bodies of their own kind, some killed by the ants, others just dead from mysterious wounds. Swift work by Bianca’s team removed these remains from the scene, with fortunate timing given the explosion that occurred soon after, ending any useful enquiry, and killing a further handful of Bianca’s males.

At the time, nobody realized that one of the star-creatures had remained alive and entered the forest.

Now Portia examines the thing, as it appears to sleep. The shape of a human being sparks no ancestral recollection in her. Even had her distant antecedents any memories to pass on, their tiny keyhole’s span of vision would have been unable to appreciate the scale of anything so large. Portia herself is having difficulties: the sheer size and bulk of this alien monster give her pause for thought.

The creature has already killed two of her kind, when it encountered them. They had tried to approach, and the thing had attacked them on sight. Biting it had little or no effect – being designed for use against spiders, Portia’s venom has limited effect against vertebrates.

If it was just some monstrous, oversized beast, then to trap and kill it would be relatively simple, Portia decides. If the worst came to the worst, they could simply set the ants on it, as they are obviously more than equal to the task. The mystical significance of this creature is a different consideration, however. It has come from the sky: from the Messenger, ergo. It is not a threat to be confronted, but a mystery to be unravelled.

Portia feels the thrumming of destiny beneath her feet. She has a sense that everything that is past and everything that is to come are balanced at this point in time, the fulcrum resting within herself. This moment is one of divinely mandated significance. Here, in its monstrous living form, is some part of the Messenger’s message.

They will trap it. They will capture it and bring it back to Great Nest, using all the artifice and guile at their command. They will find some way to unravel its secret.

Portia glances upwards – the canopy of the forest keeps the stars from her view, but she is keenly aware of them: both the fixed constellations that wheel slowly across the arch of the year and the Messenger’s swift spark in the darkness. She thinks of them as her people’s birthright, if her people can only understand what they are being told.

Her kind has won a great victory over the ants, turning enemies into allies, reversing the tide of the war. From here on, colony after colony will fall to them. Surely it is in recognition of this, in reward for their cleverness and endurance and success, that the Messenger has sent them this sign.

With her body twanging with manifest destiny, Portia now plans the capture of her colossal prize.

3.11 THIS ISLAND GULAG

From the comms room, Holsten watched the last shuttle depart for the moon base, carrying its oblivious human cargo.

Guyen’s plan was simple. An active crew of fifty had been woken up and briefed on what was expected – or perhaps demanded – of them. The base was ready for them, everything constructed by the automatics during the Gilgamesh’s last long sleep, and tested fit for habitation. It would be the crew’s job to keep it running and operational, so as to turn it into a new home for the human race.

They would have another two hundred in suspension – ready to call on when they needed them – to replace losses or more hopefully to expand their active population when the base was ready for them. They would have children. Their children would inherit what they had built.

At some time in the future, generations later, it was anticipated that the Gilgamesh would return from its long voyage to the next terraforming project, hopefully carrying a cargo of pirated Old Empire technology that would, as Guyen said, make everyone’s lives that much easier.

Or enable him to mount an attack on the Kern’s satellite and claim her planet, Holsten thought, and surely he wasn’t alone in thinking that, though nobody was voicing it.

If the Gilgamesh did not return – if, say, the next system had a more aggressive guardian than Kern, or some other mishap should befall the ark ship – then the moon colony would just have to…

‘Manage’ was the word that Guyen had used. Nobody was going behind that. Nobody wanted to think about the limited range of fates possible for such a speck of human dust in the vast face of the cosmos.

The newly appointed leader of the colonists was not another Scoles, certainly. That intrepid woman listened to her orders with grim acceptance. Looking into her face, Holsten told himself that he could see a terrible, bleak despair hiding in her eyes. What was she being handed, after all? At the worst a death sentence, at the best a life sentence. An undeserved penal term that her children would inherit straight from the womb.

He started when someone clapped him on the shoulder: Lain. The two of them – along with Karst and his team – had only recently got out of quarantine. The only good out of the whole of Scoles’s doomed excursion planetside was that there didn’t seem to be any bacteria or viruses down there that posed an immediate danger to human health. And why would there be? As Lain had pointed out, there hadn’t seemed to be anything human-like down there to incubate them.

‘Time for bed,’ the engineer told him. ‘Last shuttle’s away, so we’re ready to depart. You’ll want to be in suspension before we stop rotation. Until we get our acceleration up, gravity’s going to be all over the place.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m chief engineer. I get to work through it, old man.’

‘Catching up on me.’

‘Shut up.’

As she helped him out of the chair, he felt his ribs complain. He had been told the suspension chamber would see him heal up nicely while he slept, and he fervently hoped it was true.

‘Cheer up,’ Lain told him. ‘There’ll be a whole treasure trove of ancient nonsense for you, when you wake up. You’ll be like a kid with new toys.’

‘Not if Guyen has anything to say about it,’ Holsten grumbled. He spared a last look at the viewscreens, at the cold, pale orb of the prison moon – the colony moon, he corrected himself. His unworthy thought was, Rather you than me.

Leaning on Lain a little, he walked carefully off down the corridor, heading for the Key Crew sleep room.

3.12 A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

The fallen giant had died, of course, but not for a long time. Until then she – Portia and her kin found it difficult to conceive of this thing as anything other than a she – had dwelt in captivity, eating that limited selection of foods that she was willing to consume, staring out through the mist-coloured walls that kept her in, gazing up at the open top of her pen, where the scholars would gather to observe her.

The dead giants were dissected and found to be essentially identical to mice in almost all internal structures, save for a difference of proportion in the limbs and certain organs. Comparative study confirmed their hypothesis that the living giant was probably a female, at least by comparison to its smaller endoskeletal cousins.

The debate on its purpose and meaning – on the lesson that the arrival of such a prodigy was intended to teach – lasted for generations, over the whole span of the creature’s long life and beyond. Its behaviour was strange and complex, but it seemed mute, producing no kind of gesture or vibration that could be considered an attempt at speech. Some noted that when it opened and closed its mouth, a cleverly designed web could catch a curious murmur, the same that might be felt when objects were pounded together. It was a vibration that travelled through the air, rather than across a strand or through the ground. For some time this was hypothesized as a means of communication, provoking much intelligent debate, but in the end the absurdity of such an idea won out. After all, using the same orifice for eating and communication was manifestly too inefficient. The spiders are not deaf, exactly, but their hearing is deeply tied into their sense of touch and vibration. The giant’s utterances, all the frequencies of human speech, are not even whispers to them.

Anyway, the airborne vibrations grew fewer and fewer during the thing’s captivity, and eventually it ceased to make them. Some suggested this meant the creature had grown content with its captivity.

Two generations after it was taken, when the events surrounding its arrival had already passed into something resembling theology, one attendant noticed that the giant was moving its extremities, the deft sub-legs that it used to manipulate objects, in a manner imitative of palp-signalling, as though it was trying to mimic the basic visual speech of the spiders. There was a renewed flurry of interest, and a great deal of visits from other nests and trading of Understandings to enlighten future generations. Sufficient experimentation suggested that the giant was not simply copying what it saw, but that it could associate meaning with certain symbols, allowing it to request food and water. Attempts to communicate on a more sophisticated level were frustrated by its inability to approximate or comprehend more than a few very simple symbols.

The baffled scholars, drawing on their species’ accumulated years of study, concluded that the giant was a simple creature, probably designed to undertake labour suitable for a thing of its immense size and strength, but no more intelligent than a Paussid beetle or a Spitter, and perhaps less.

Shortly after, the giant died, apparently of some infirmity. Its body was dissected and studied in turn, and compared to the genetically encoded Understandings resulting from examinations of the original dead giants from generations earlier.

Speculation as to its original purpose, and connection with the Messenger, continued, with the most commonly held theory being that the Messenger was served in the sky by a species of such giants, who performed necessary tasks for it. Therefore, in sending down its dumb emissaries so many years before, some manner of approbation had been intended. The inheritance of Understandings placed something of a curb on the spiders’ ability to mythologize their own history, but already the correlation of their victory over the ants and the arrival of the giants had become firmly accepted as somehow related.

However, by the time this last giant died, the world of Portian theology was already being rocked by another revelation.

There was a second Messenger.

By that time the war with the ants was long over. The Paussid strategy had been successfully prosecuted against colony after colony until the spiders had reduced the insects’ influence back to its original territory, where once an ancient Portia had raided their temple, stolen their idol, and unknowingly brought the word of the Messenger to her own people.

The scholars of Portia’s kind had been keen not to reprogram the ant colony, as they had done with its various limbs and expeditionary forces, because in doing so its unique abilities would be lost, and the spiders were not blind to the advances that the colony’s development had unlocked. So it was that years of complex campaigning had been entered into – at some considerable cost in lives – until the ant colony was manoeuvred into a position where cooperation with its spider neighbours became the most beneficial course of action, whereupon the ant colony passed, without acrimony or resentment, from an implacable foe to an obliging ally.

The spiders were quick to experiment with the uses of metal and glass. Creatures of keen vision, their studies into light, refraction and optics followed swiftly. They learned to use carefully manufactured glass to extend the reach of their sight to the micro- and macroscopic. The older generation of scholars passed the torch seamlessly to a new generation of scientists, who turned their newly augmented eyes to the night skies and viewed the Messenger in greater detail, and looked beyond.

At first it was believed that the new message came from the Messenger itself, but the astronomers quickly dispelled that notion. Working with the temple priestesses, they found that there was now another mobile point in the sky that could speak, and that its motion was slower, and curiously irregular.

Slowly, the spiders began to build up a picture of their solar system by reference to their own home, its moon and its Messenger, the sun, and that outer planet which itself possessed an orbiting body that was sending out its own, separate signal.

The one problem with this second message was that it was incomprehensible. Unlike the regular, abstractly beautiful numerical sequences that had become the heart of their religion, the new messenger broadcast only chaos: a shifting, changing, meaningless garble. Priestesses and scientists listened to its patterns, recorded them in their complex notation of knots and nodes, but could draw no meaning from them. Years of fruitless study resulted in a feeling that this new source of signal was some antithesis of the Messenger itself, some almost malevolent source of entropy rather than order. In the absence of more information, all manner of curious intentions were credited to it.

Then, a few years later, the second signal ceased to vary and settled on a single repeated transmission, over and over, and this again led to a mass of speculation across what had by then become a loose-knit global community of priest-scientists. Again and again the signal was parsed for meaning, for surely a message repeated over and over so many times must be important.

There was one curious school of thought that detected some manner of need in the signal, and quaintly fancied that, out there through the unthinkable space between their world and the source of that second message, something lost and desperate was calling for help.

Then the day came when the signal was no more, and the baffled spiders were left staring blankly up into a heaven suddenly impoverished, but unable to understand why.