Children of Time

7.1 WAR FOOTING

They were packed into the briefing room. It was like déjà vu, but these days that seemed a good thing. Holsten was a citizen of a tiny world of cycles and repetitions, and where events failed to repeat themselves, it meant deterioration.

Some of the lights were out and that really brought it home to him. All the miracles of technology that had made the Gilgamesh possible, all the tricks they had stolen from the gods of the Old Empire… and right now they either couldn’t get all the lights working, or there were simply too many higher-priority things to be doing.

He recognized a surprising number of faces. This was clearly a Command meeting. These were Key Crew – or who was left of them. He saw the science team, a handful of Engineering, Command, Security, all people who had got on board when Earth was still a place where humans lived. These were people who had been granted custodianship over the rest of the human race.

With some notable omissions. The only department chief present – assuming you discounted Holsten himself and his department of one – was Vitas, orchestrating the bleary, recently awoken muster, ordering people according to some idiolectic system of her own. There were a handful of young faces in old shipsuits helping her – Lain’s legacy, Holsten guessed. They could have passed for the mob that he remembered from so recently, but he guessed they must be at least a generation further on from that. They had persevered, though. They had not turned into cannibals or anarchists or monkeys. Even that fragile appearance of stability gave him some hope.

‘Classicist Mason, there you are.’ It was hard to say what Vitas felt about seeing him present. Indeed it was hard to say what she felt about anything. She had aged, but gracefully and only a little it seemed. Holsten found himself indulging in the bizarre speculation that she was not human at all. Perhaps she was her own self-aware machine. Controlling the medical facilities, she would be able to hide her secret forever, after all…

He had seen a lot of mad things since setting foot on the Gilgamesh, but that would have been a step too far. Even the Old Empire… unless she was Old Empire, some anachronistic ten-thousand-year survival, fusion-driven and eternal.

Finding himself momentarily adrift from reason, he grasped for Vitas’s hand and snagged it, feeling the human warmth, willing himself to trust to his own perceptions. The scientist raised her eyebrows sardonically.

‘Yes, it’s really me,’ she remarked. ‘Amazing, I know. Can you use a gun?’

‘I very much doubt it,’ Holsten blurted out. ‘I… What?’

‘The commander wanted me to ask that of everyone. I had already guessed the answer in your case.’

Holsten became cold and still, all at once. The commander…

Vitas watched him with dry amusement, letting him hang in suspense for a few long seconds before explaining. ‘Lem Karst is the acting commander, for your information.’

‘Karst?’ Holsten felt that was hardly better. ‘How bad has it got that Karst gets to call the shots?’

There were a lot of looks from the rest of Key Crew at that remark, some frowning, others plainly sharing his opinion – including even one of the security team. It was a rare moment when Holsten would far rather be in the minority.

‘We’re travelling into the Kern system,’ Vitas explained. She turned to the console behind her, gesturing for Holsten’s attention. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but once we’re in orbit around the green planet, the Gilgamesh’s wandering days are likely to be done.’ The oddly poetic turn of phrase gave her clipped tones an unexpected gravitas. ‘Lain’s tribe have done a remarkable job in keeping him together, but it really has been damage control, quite literally. And the damage has begun to win. There’s quite a population of ship-born now, because the suspension chambers are failing beyond the point of repair. Nobody’s going to be heading off on another interstellar jaunt.’

‘Which means…?’

‘Which means there’s only one place left for us all, yes, Mason.’ Vitas’s smile was precise and brief. ‘And we’re going to have to fight the Old Empire for it.’

‘You seem to be looking forward to it,’ Holsten observed.

‘It’s been the goal of a long, long plan, Mason, and centuries in the making. The longest of long games in the history of our species, except for whatever that Kern thing has been doing. And you were right, in a way, about the commander. He’s not here to see it but it’s Guyen’s plan. It was so from the moment he set eyes on that planet.’

‘Guyen?’ Holsten echoed.

‘He was a man with vision,’ Vitas asserted. ‘He cracked under the strain at the end, but given what he’d gone through that’s hardly surprising. The human race owes him a great deal.’

Holsten stared at her, remembering how she had treated the disastrous upload of Guyen’s mind as some sort of hobby experiment. In the end he just grunted, and something of his feelings were plainly visible on his face, judging by the scientist’s reaction.

‘Karst and some of the tribe have jury-rigged a control centre in the comms room,’ Vitas said, somewhat coldly. ‘You’re Key Crew, so he’ll want you there. Alpash!’

One of the young engineers appeared at her elbow.

‘This is Alpash. He’s ship-born,’ Vitas explained, as though excusing some congenital defect. ‘Get Mason here, and the rest of Key Crew, up to the commander, Alpash.’ She spoke to the young man as though he was something less than human, something more like a pet or a machine.

Alpash nodded warily at Mason. If Vitas was his exemplar for Key Crew, he probably didn’t expect much in the way of manners. There was a distinct skittishness about him as he gathered up the recently woken engineers, security men and the like. It reminded Holsten of the way that Guyen’s cultists had treated him. He wondered what legends of Key Crew had Alpash been brought up on.

Over in comms, Karst looked refreshingly the same. The big security chief had been given the time to get some stubble going on his ravaged face, and he had obviously not been wheeled out much since Holsten last saw him, because he had barely aged.

As the surviving Key Crew filed in, he grinned at them, an expression equally of anticipation and strain.

‘Come in and find a seat, or stand, whatever you like. Vitas, can you hear me?’

‘I hear,’ the science chief’s voice crackled and spat from an unseen speaker. ‘I’ll continue to supervise the unpacking, but I’m listening.’

Karst grimaced, shrugged. ‘Right,’ he turned to address them all, looking from face to face. When he met Holsten’s eyes there was none of the expected dislike. Gone was any hint that the security man had never much cared for Holsten Mason. Absent, too, was the expected air of dismissal, that of a man of action who had no use for the man of letters. Instead, Karst’s grin dwindled to a smaller but much more sincere smile. It was a look of things shared, a commonality between two people who had been there right at the start, and were still here now.

‘We’re going to fight,’ the security chief told them all. ‘We’ve basically got just one good chance at it. You all know the score, or you should do. There’s a satellite out there that can probably rip open the Gil in a blink if we give it the chance. Now, we bolted on some sort of diffusion shielding, back when we were pirating that terraforming station – some of you maybe weren’t awake for that, but there’s a summary in the system of the changes we made. We also hardened our computer systems, so that bitch – so the satellite – can’t just shut us down or open the airlocks, that sort of trick. We’ve taken every precaution, and I still reckon toe-to-toe we might be screwed.’ He was grinning again, though.

‘But I’ve had some drones fitted out in the workshops. They’ve got shielded systems as well, and lasers that I think can burn the satellite. That’s the plan, basically. Best defence is a good offence, and so on. As we come in towards our orbit, we burn the fucker up and hope it’s enough. Otherwise it’s down to using the Gil’s forward array, and that puts us within range of retaliation.’ He paused, then finished: ‘So you’re probably wondering what the fuck I need with all of you guys, yeah?’

Holsten cleared his throat. ‘Well, Vitas asked me if I could use a gun. I appreciate I’m no great tactician, but if it comes to needing that against the satellite, we’ve probably already lost.’

Karst actually laughed. ‘Yeah, well, I’m planning ahead – planning to win. Cos if we don’t win against the satellite, there’s no point in planning anyway. So let’s assume we burn it out. What next?’

‘The planet,’ someone said. There was a curious ripple through the room, of hope and dread together.

Karst nodded moodily. ‘Yeah, most of you never saw it but, believe me, it’s not going to be an easy place to settle down on, at least at the start. Am I right, Mason?’

Holsten started at unexpectedly having his opinion solicited. But, of course, there’s just him and me who were down there on the surface. ‘You’re right,’ he confirmed.

‘That’s where guns come in, for those that feel they can lower themselves to use them.’ Karst, already pre-lowered, winched his grin up a notch. ‘Basically the planet’s full of all sorts of beasties – spiders and bugs and all manner of shit. So, while we get ourselves set up, we’re going to be burning them out, too: clearing forest, driving off the wildlife, exterminating anything that looks at us funny. It’ll be fun. Frankly it’s the sort of thing I’ve been looking forward to since I first got aboard. Hard work, though. And everyone works. Remember, we’re Key Crew. Us and the chiefs of the new engineers, like Al here, it’s our responsibility. We make this work. Everyone’s depending on us. Think about that: when I say everyone I really mean it. The Gilgamesh is all there is.’

He clapped his hands, as though that entire speech had reinvigorated him and boosted his personal morale. ‘Security team, whoever’s got the pad with our new recruits, sort them out and get them armed. Teach them which end not to look down. You lot all get to join us on the bug hunt, afterwards.’

Holsten assumed that meant everyone fool enough to say ‘yes’ when Vitas had asked them if they could use a gun.

‘Tribe,’ Karst added, then seemed to lose momentum. ‘I won’t bother telling you, as you know what you’re doing. Been doing it long enough, anyway. Alpash, stick close, though. I want you as liaison.’

‘Tribe’ seemed to be the engineers, or those descendants of theirs currently keeping the ship together. The few of them still there now bolted off, with the air of people who had found the entire proceedings boring and unnecessary, but had been aware that they should be on their best behaviour nonetheless, like children during a religious service.

‘Right, Mason… Harlen?’

‘Holsten.’

‘Right.’ Karst nodded, unapologetic. ‘Something special for you, right? You actually get to do your job. The satellite’s transmitting all sorts of shit, and you’re the only person who might know what it’s saying.’

‘Transmitting… to us?’

‘Yes. Maybe. Alpash?’

‘Probably no,’ the young engineer confirmed.

‘Anyway, whatever, take Mason here and plug him in. Mason, if you can make anything out of it, let me know. Personally I reckon it’s just gone mad.’

‘Madder,’ Holsten corrected and, although this hadn’t been a joke, Karst laughed.

‘We’re all in the boat, aren’t we?’ he said almost fondly, glancing around at the battered confines of the Gilgamesh. ‘All of us on the same old boat.’ The mask slipped, and for a second Holsten was looking into the stress-fractures and botch-job repairs that made up Karst’s over-strained soul. The man had always been a follower, and now he was in charge, the last general of the human race facing unknown odds with the highest possible stakes. His somewhat disjointed briefing now looked in retrospect like a man fighting for his composure – and holding on to it, just. Against all expectations, Karst was coping. Come the hour, come the man.

Also, he might be drunk. Holsten realized he couldn’t tell.

Alpash led him to a console, still acting as though Holsten and Karst and the rest were heroes of legend brought to life, but turning out to be somewhat disappointing in the flesh. Holsten wondered, with a professional curiosity, whether some crazy myth cycle had grown up amongst the Tribe, with himself and the rest of Key Crew as a pantheon of fractious gods, trickster heroes and monsters. He had no idea how many generations had gone by since their last actual contact with anyone not born on the Gilgamesh, since…

He had been about to ask, but a piece clicked into place and he knew that he wouldn’t ask, not now. Not when he had thought of Lain at last. For Lain must have died long, long ago. Had she thought of him, at the end? Had she come to look into the cold stillness of his coffin, her sleeping prince who she had never permitted to come back for her?

Alpash gave a nervous cough, picking up on Holsten’s suddenly changed mood.

The classicist scowled, waved off the man’s concern. ‘Tell me about these transmissions.’

With a worried look, Alpash turned to the console. The machinery looked battered, something that had been taken apart and put back together more than once. There was some sort of symbol and some graffiti stencilled on the side, which looked new. Holsten stared at it for a moment before disentangling the words.

Do not open. No user-serviceable parts inside.

He laughed, thinking that he saw the joke, the sort of bleak humour that he recalled engineers resorting to in extremis. There was nothing on Alpash’s face to suggest that he saw any humour in it, though, or that the slogan was anything other than a sacred symbol of the Tribe. Abruptly Holsten felt bitter and sick again. He felt like Karst must feel. He was just a thing of the lost past trying to recapture an almost-lost future.

‘There’s a lot of it,’ Alpash explained. ‘It’s constant, on multiple frequencies. We can’t understand any of it. I don’t know what this Avrana Kern is, but I think the commander may be right. It sounds like madness. It’s like the planet is whispering to itself.’

‘The planet?’ Holsten queried.

‘We’re not getting these signals direct from the satellite, as far as we can understand.’ Now that Alpash began speaking more, Holsten heard unfamiliar rhythms and inflections in his words – a little of Lain, a little of the Gilgamesh’s automatic systems, a little of something new. There was obviously a ship-born accent now.

Alpash brought up a numerical display that was apparently intended to be educational. ‘You can see here what we can tell from the transmissions.’ Holsten was used to the Gilgamesh sugar-coating that sort of data in a form that a layman could understand, but that concession was apparently not something the Tribe felt it needed.

Seeing his blank look, the engineer went on, ‘Our best bet is that these are transmissions being directed at the planet, just like the original numerical sequence, and we’re now catching bounce-back. They’re definitely coming to us by way of the planet, though.’

‘You’ve had any other classicists working on this, out of cargo? There must be a few students or…’

Alpash looked solemn. ‘I’m afraid not. We have searched the manifest. There were only a very few at the start. You are the last.’

Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society had possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of one old man’s head? All that history, and if… when I die…? He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s survivalist Eden.

He shivered – not from the usual human sense of mortality, but from a feeling of vast, invisible things falling away into oblivion, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Grimly he turned to the messages that Alpash was now showing him.

After some work, Holsten finally deciphered the display enough to register just how many of the recordings there were, and these presumably just a fraction of the total. What’s Kern playing at? Maybe she has gone off the deep end, after all. He accessed one, but it wasn’t anything like the other transmissions from the satellite which he remembered. Still… Holsten felt long-unused academic parts of his brain try to sit up and take notice, seeing complexity, repeated patterns. He performed whatever analysis and modelling the console allowed him. This wasn’t random static, but nor was it the Old Empire messages that Kern/Eliza had used previously. ‘Perhaps it’s encrypted,’ he mused to himself.

‘There’s a second type as well,’ Alpash explained. ‘This is how the majority go, but there are some that seem different. Here.’

Holsten listened to the chosen recording, another sequence of pulses, but this time seeming closer to what he would actually recognize as a message. ‘Just this, though? No distress signal? No number sequences?’

‘This – and as much of this as you could want,’ Alpash confirmed.

‘How much time do we have before… before things start?’

‘At least thirty hours.’

Holsten nodded. ‘Can I get something to eat?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then leave me with this and I’ll see if I can find anything in it for Karst.’ Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask him that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.

With some help from the Tribe, he was able to hunt through the Gilgamesh’s systems for at least some of his electronic toolkit to try and unpick the messages. He was given what he wanted, then left alone to work. He had a sense that, across the ship, a great many ship-born and woken were bracing themselves for the moment their lives had been leading up to for generations, and during sleeping centuries, respectively. He was happy to be out of it. Here, at this failing end of time, the classicist Holsten Mason was glad to be poring over some incomprehensible transmissions in a futile search for meaning. He was not Karst. Nor was he Alpash, or his kin. Old, I’m old, in so many ways. Old, and yet still lively enough that he was even going to outlive the ark ship itself, by the look of things.

He realized he could make nothing out of the majority of the messages. They were generally faint, and he guessed that they were being sent from the planet in all directions, just radiating out into space.

Rather, bounced off the planet. Not sent, of course not sent. He blinked, obscurely uncomfortable. Whatever their source, though, they were sufficiently far from anything he knew that he could not even be sure that they were messages, couched in any kind of code or language. Only a stubborn streak of structure to them convinced him that they were not some natural interference or just white noise.

The others, though, they were stronger, and recent analysis conducted by the Tribe suggested that they might actually be targeted towards the Gilgamesh’s line of approach, as though Kern was using the planet as a sounding board to rant incomprehensibly at them. Or the planet itself was shouting at them.

Or the planet was shouting?

Holsten rubbed at his eyes. He had been working for too long. He was beginning to come adrift from rational speculation.

These transmissions, though – at first he had thought they were as much babble as the rest, but he had cross-referenced them with some old stored records of messages from the satellite, and tried to treat them in the same way, varying the encoding by trial and error until something like a message had abruptly sprung out from the white noise. There had been words, or at least he had fooled himself that he had decoded words there. Imperial C words, words out of history, the dead language given new and mutated life.

He thought again about Alpash’s accent. These transmissions seemed almost as if someone out there was speaking some barbarous version of that ancient language, encoded just as Kern encoded her transmissions; some degraded or evolved or simply corrupted attempt at the ancient tongue.

It was proper historian work, just poring over it. He could almost forget the trouble they were all in, and pretend he was on the brink of some great discovery that anyone would care about. What if this isn’t just the crazed gibberish of a dying computer? What if this means something? If it was Kern trying to talk to them, though, then she had obviously lost most of what she was – the woman/machine that Holsten remembered had no difficulty in making herself understood.

So what was she trying to say now?

The more he listened to the clearest of those decoded transmissions – those sent directly along the line of the Gilgamesh’s approach – the more he felt that someone was trying to speak to him, across millions of kilometres and across a gap of comprehension that was far greater. He could even fool himself that little snippets of phrasing were coming together into something resembling a coherent message.

Stay away. We do not wish to fight. Go back.

Holsten stared at what he had. Am I just imagining this? None of it had been clear – the transmission was in poor shape, and nothing about it fitted in with Kern’s earlier behaviour. The more he looked, though, the more he became sure that this was a message, and that it was intended specifically for them. They were being warned off again, as though by dozens of different voices. Even in those sections he could not disentangle, he could pick out individual words. Leave. Peace. Alone. Death.

He wondered what he could possibly tell Karst.

He slept on it for a while, in the end, and then shambled off to find the acting commander in the comms room.

‘You’re cutting it fine,’ Karst told him. ‘I launched the drones hours back. I calculate about two hours before they do what they do, if it can be done at all.’

‘Burning Kern?’

‘Fucking right.’ Karst stared at the working screens surrounding him with haunted, desperate eyes that belied the easy grin he kept trying to keep pinned on his face. ‘Come on then, Holsten, out with it.’

‘Well, it’s a message and it’s intended for us – that much I’m reasonably certain about.’

‘“Reasonably certain”? Fucking academics,’ but it was almost good-natured, even so. ‘So Kern’s down to basically bombarding us with baby talk, wanting us to go away.’

‘I can’t translate most of it, but those pieces that make any sense at all seem to be consistently along that theme,’ Holsten confirmed. In fact he was feeling unhappy about his own efforts, as though in this, the last professional challenge of his career, he had made some student-level error and failed. The transmissions had been in front of him, a large body of material to cross-reference, and he had constantly felt on the edge of a breakthrough that would make it all crystal clear to him. It had never come, though, and now there was no time to go back to it. He felt that he had shackled himself too much to the way the Old Empire did things, just as everyone always had. If he had come to those transmissions with more of an open mind, rather than trying to recast them in the shape of Kern’s earlier work, what might he have found?

‘Well, fuck her,’ was Karst’s informed opinion. ‘We’re not going anywhere. We don’t have that option any more. It all comes down to this, just like it was always going to. Am I right?’

‘You are,’ Holsten replied hollowly. ‘Are we getting anything from the drones?’

‘I don’t want them transmitting anything until they’re close enough to actually get to work,’ Karst said. ‘Believe me, I remember what fucking Kern can do. You weren’t in that shuttle where she just took the whole thing over, remember? Just drifting in space with nothing but life-support, while she worked out what she wanted to do with us. That was no fun at all, believe me.’

‘And yet she let you come down and pick us up,’ Holsten recalled. He thought Karst might come back at him angrily for that, accuse him of going soft, but the security chief’s face took on a thoughtful air.

‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘And if I thought that there was any chance… but she’s not going to let us on to that planet, Holsten. We tried that one, over and over. She’s going to sit there and hoard the last chance for the human race, and let us all die out in space.’

Holsten nodded. His mind was full of that planet balefully whispering for them to go away. ‘Can I send from the ship? It might even take her attention from the drones… I don’t know.’

‘No. Complete silence from us. If she’s so crazy that she hasn’t seen us, I don’t want you clueing her in.’

Karst could not keep still. He checked with his seconds in Security; he checked with the senior members – chiefs? – of the Tribe. He paced and fretted, and tried to get some passive data on the drones’ progress, without running the risk of alerting Kern.

‘You really think she won’t see them coming?’ Holsten objected.

‘Who can know? She’s old, Holsten, really old – older than us by a long way. She was crazy before. Maybe she’s gone completely mad, now. I’m not giving her anything more than I have to. We get one shot at this before it’s down to the Gil itself. Literally one shot. Seriously, you know how much power a decent laser takes up? And believe me, those are our two best functioning drones – fucking patchwork jobs from all the working bits we could find.’ He clenched his fists, fighting against the weight of his responsibilities. ‘Everything’s falling apart, Holsten. We’ve got to get on to that planet. The ship’s dying. That stupid moon base thing of Guyen’s – that died. Earth…’

‘I know.’ Holsten hunted about for some sort of reassurance, but he honestly couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Chief,’ interrupted one of the Tribe, ‘transmissions from the drones, coming in. They’re coming up on the planet, ready to deploy.’

‘At last!’ Karst practically shouted, and stared about him. ‘Which screen’s best? Which is working?’

Four screens flared with the new images, one flickering and dying but the other three holding steady. They saw that familiar green orb: a thing of dreams, the promised land. The drones were following their path towards the satellite’s orbital track, darting in to intercept it and bring an end to it. They didn’t care about what they were seeing, unlike the human eyes now watching vicariously through their lenses.

Karst’s mouth hung open. At this moment, even the ability to curse seemed to have deserted him. He fumbled backwards for a seat, and then sat down heavily. Everyone in comms had stopped work, instead staring at the screen, at what had been done to their paradise.

Kern’s satellite was not alone in its vigil.

Around the circumference of the planet, girdling its equator in a broad ring, was a vast band of tangled lines and strands and nodes: not satellites, but a whole orbiting network, interconnected and continuous around the entire world. It flared bright in the sunlight, opening green petals towards the system’s star. There were a thousand irregular nodes pulled into taut, angular shapes by their connecting conduits. There was a bustle to it, of constant activity.

It was a web. It was as though some unthinkable horror had begun the job of cocooning the planet before it fed on it. It was a single vast web in geostationary orbit about the planet, and Kern’s metal home was just one pinpoint within its myriad complexity.

Holsten thought about those thousand, thousand transmissions from Kern’s World, but not from Kern herself. He thought about those hateful whispers telling the Gilgamesh, impossibly, to turn around and go away. Abandon hope, all ye who enter…

The drones were arrowing in now, still seeking out Kern’s satellite, because their programming had somehow not prepared them for this.

‘Spiders…’ said Karst slowly. His eyes were roving around, seeking desperately for inspiration. ‘It’s not possible.’ There was a pleading edge to his voice.

Holsten just stared at that vast snare laid around the planet, seeing more detail every second as the drones closed with it. He saw things moving across it, shuttling back and forth. He saw long strands reaching out into space from it, as though hungry for more prey. He thought he saw other lines reaching down towards the planet itself. His skin was crawling, and he remembered his brief stay on the planet, the deaths of the mutineers.

‘No,’ said Karst flatly, and, ‘No,’ again. ‘It’s ours. It’s ours. We need it. I don’t care what the fuck the bastards have done with it. We’ve nowhere else to go.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Holsten asked faintly.

‘We are going to fight,’ Karst stated, and his sense of purpose returned with those words. ‘We are going to fight Kern, and we are going to fight… that. We are coming home, you hear me? That’s home now. It’s all the home we’ll ever have. And we will mass-driver the fucking place from orbit if we have to, to make it ours. We’ll burn them out. We’ll burn them all out. What else have we got?’

He rubbed at his face. When he took his hands away, he seemed composed. ‘Right, I need more minds on this. Alpash, it’s time.’

The engineer nodded.

‘Time for what?’ Holsten demanded.

‘Time to wake up Lain,’ Karst replied.

7.2 WHAT ROUGH BEAST

Far beyond the physical tendrils with which they have ringed their planet, the spiders have extended a wider web. Biotechnological receptors in the cold of space hear radio messages, await the return of soundless calls into the void, and reach out for disturbances in gravity and the electromagnetic spectrum – the tremors on the strands that will let them know when a guest has arrived in their parlour.

They have been preparing for this day for many generations. The entire planet has, ever since they finally bridged that gap with God, fingertip to leg-tip. Their entire civilization has come together with a purpose, and that purpose is survival.

The Messenger had forever been trying to prepare them, to mould them into Her image and give them the weapons She thought they needed, in order to fight back. Only when She stopped treating them like children – like monkeys – was She able to do what perhaps She should have done from the start: communicate the problem to them; let them find a solution that was within the reach of their minds and their technology.

One advantage of God ceasing to move in mysterious ways is that the entire planet has found a hitherto unknown unity. Little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction. The Messenger was unstinting in Her assurances that the spiders would have nothing else to look forward to if the Gilgamesh was allowed to return unopposed. She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species’ history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection.

For generations, then, a political unity of the spider cities has worked towards creating this vast orbital presence, using all the tools available. The spiders have entered the space age with desperate vigour.

And Bianca looks up at the darkening sky, at the unseen filigree of Great Star Nest, the orbital city, and knows that she would rather this had not come about in her lifetime.

The enemy is coming.

She has never seen this enemy, but she knows what it looks like. She has sought out ancient Understandings, preserved across the centuries, that reach back to a time when her kind faced extinction at the jaws of a much more comprehensible foe. For, during their conquest of the ant super-colony, Bianca’s species encountered what she now knows as humanity. There were giants in the world, back in those days.

She now sees, through the long-gone eyes of a distant ancestor, the captive monster that had fallen from the sky – not from the Messenger, as had been believed, but from this approaching menace. Little did they know it was a herald of the end.

It seems so hard to believe that such a huge, ponderous thing could have been sentient, but apparently it was. More than sentient. Things like that – just as the Messenger had once been a thing like that – are the ur-race, the ancient astronauts responsible for all life that has evolved on Bianca’s world. And now they are returning to undo that mistake.

Bianca’s musings have taken her out of the vast reach of the Seven Trees conurbation and on to the closest anchor point, travelling swiftly by wire in a capsule powered by artificial, photosynthetic, self-sufficient muscle. Now she disembarks, feeling the great open space around her. Most of her world’s tropical and temperate land area is still forested, either for agricultural purposes, as wild reserves, or serving as the scaffolding that her species use to build their cities. The areas around the elevator anchor points are all kept clear, though, and she sees a great tent of silken walls a hundred feet high, culminating in a single point that stretches ever away into the high distance, beyond the ability of her eyes to follow it. She knows where it goes, though: heading up, up out of the planet’s atmosphere, then up further and further, as a slender thread that reaches halfway to the arc of the moon. The equator is studded with them.

That long-ago balloonist was right: there was an easier way to claw one’s way up and out of the planet’s gravity well and into orbit, and all it took was spinning a strong enough thread.

Bianca meets with her assistants, a subdued band of five females and two males, and they hurry inside to another capsule, this one moving by little more than simple mechanical principles utilized on a grand scale. Unimaginably far away is a comparable weight even now descending inwards towards the planet’s surface. By exercise of the sort of mathematics that Bianca’s species has been fluent in for centuries, Bianca’s own car begins its long, long ascent.

She is the general, the tactician. She is going to take her place amidst the bustling community known as Great Star Nest to mastermind the defence of her planet against the alien invaders: the Star Gods. She has ultimate responsibility for the survival of her species. A great many better minds than hers have formulated the plan that she will attempt to carry out, but it will be her own decisions that will make the difference between success and failure.

The journey up is a long one and Bianca has plenty of time to reflect. The enemy they face is the child of a technology she cannot conceive of, advanced beyond the dreams of her own kind’s greatest scientists, using a technology of metal and fire and lighting, all fit tools for vengeful deities. At her disposal is fragile silk, biochemistry and symbiosis, and the valour of all those who will put their lives at her disposal.

Fretting, she spins and destroys, spins and destroys, as she and her fellows are hauled towards the open darkness of space, and the gleaming grid of her people’s greatest architectural triumph.

Already in orbit on the globe-spanning three-dimensional sculpture they think of as Great Star Nest, Portia is steeling herself for a fight.

The great equatorial web is studded with habitats that trail out from one another, interconnect, are spun up or taken down. It has become a way of life for the spiders, and one they have taken to remarkably quickly. They are a species that is well made for a life of constant free-fall around a planet. They are born to climb and to orient themselves in three dimensions. Their rear legs give them a powerful capacity to jump to places that their keen eyes and minds can target precisely, and if they get it wrong, they always have a safety line. In a curious way, as Portia and many others have considered, they were born to live out in space.

The old cumbersome spacesuits, which once took those pioneering balloonists to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, are things of the past now. Portia and her squad traverse the lattice-strung vacuum quickly and efficiently, setting out on manoeuvres to ready themselves for the coming conflict. They carry most of their suit about their abdomens: book-lungs fed by an air supply that is chemically generated as needed, rather than stored in tanks. With their training and their technology and their relatively undemanding metabolisms, they can stay out in raw space for days. A chemical heating pack is secured beneath their bodies, along with a compact radio. A lensed mask protects their eyes and mouths. At the tip of each abdomen their spinnerets connect to a little silk factory spinning chemical silk that forms strands – formidably strong strands – in the airless void. Lastly, they have packs of propellant with adjustable nozzles, to guide their silent flight in the void.

Their exoskeletons have been coated in a transparent film, a single molecule thick, which prevents any decompression or moisture loss without diminishing much in the way of feeling. The tips of their legs are sheathed in insulating articulated sleeves to guard them from heat loss. They are the complete astronaut-soldiers.

As they cross from line to line, judging each leap effortlessly, they are swift and agile and utterly focused.

The enemy is coming at last, just as the Messenger foretold. The concept of holy war is alien to them, but this looming conflict has all the hallmarks. There is an ancient enemy that they know will negate their very existence if they cannot defend themselves. There are weapons that, try as they might, they cannot even conceive of. The Messenger did Her best to set out for them the technical and martial capabilities of the human race. The overwhelming impression received was of a terrifying and godlike arsenal, and Portia is under no illusions. The best defence her people have is that the invaders want their planet to live on – the worst excesses of Earth technology cannot be deployed without rendering the prize that both sides fight for worthless.

But there are still a great many unpredictable weapons the Gilgamesh could conceivably possess.

The spiders have done what they could in the generations allowed to them, having considered the threat and prepared what is to them the best technological and philosophical response.

There is an army: Portia is one of hundreds who will serve on the front line, one of tens of thousands whose turn will likely come to fight. They will die, many of them, or at least that is what they expect. The stakes are so high, though: individual lives are ever the chaff of war, but if there was ever a just cause, it is this. The survival of an entire species, of a whole planet’s evolutionary history, is now at stake.

She has heard that Bianca is on her way up. Everyone is glad, of course, that the commander of their global defence will be up here alongside them, but the simple fact that their leader is on her way brings it home to all of them. The time is finally here. The battle for tomorrow is beginning. If they lose, then there will be no future for them and, with that severed tomorrow, all their yesterdays will be undone as well. The universe will turn, but it will be as though they had never existed.

Portia knows that the great minds of her species have considered many diverse weapons and plans. She must take it on faith that the strategy she has now been given is the best: the most achievable and the most acceptable.

She and her squad gather, watching other bands of soldiers surge and spring across distant sections of the webbing. Her eyes stray to the high heavens. There is a new star up above, now, and it foretells a time of terrible cataclysm and destruction simply by its appearance. There is no superstitious astrology in such predictions. The end times are truly here, the moment when one great cycle of history grinds inexorably into the next.

The humans are coming.

7.3 MAIDEN, MOTHER, CRONE

‘What do you mean, “Wake Lain”?’

Karst and Alpash turned to Holsten, trying to read his suddenly agonized expression.

‘What it sounds like,’ the security chief replied, baffled.

‘She’s alive?’ Holsten’s fingers crooked, fighting the urge to grab one or other of them and shake. ‘Why didn’t anyone… why didn’t you… why only wake her now? Why isn’t she in charge?’

Karst obviously took issue with that, but Alpash stepped in quickly. ‘To wake Grandmother is not something to be done lightly, by her own orders. Only in matters of emergency, she said. She told us: when I next wake, I want to walk upon a green planet.’

‘She told you that, did she?’ Holsten demanded.

‘She told my mother, when she was very young,’ the engineer replied, meeting the classicist’s challenging stare easily. ‘But it is recorded. We have records of many of Grandmother’s later pronouncements.’ He bent over a console, calling up a display that shuddered patchily. ‘But we should go now. Commander…?’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll hold the fort here, shall I?’ Karst said, plainly still smarting somewhat. ‘You get the woman up and on her feet, and then link to me. Give her the situation and tell her that Vitas and I need to touch heads with her.’

Alpash headed off into the ship, away from Key Crew and most of the living areas that Holsten was familiar with. The classicist hurried after him, not much wanting to be left with Karst, still less wanting to get lost within the flickering, ravaged spaces of the Gilgamesh. Everywhere told the same story of slow autolysis, a cannibalism of the self as less important parts and systems were ripped out to fix higher-priority problems. Walls were laid open, the ship’s bones exposed. Screens flared static or else were dark as wells. Here and there huddled small pockets of the Tribe, still about the essential business of keeping the ship running, despite the immediate crisis, their heads close together like priests murmuring doctrine.

‘How do you even know how to fix the ship?’ Holsten asked of Alpash’s back. ‘It’s been… I don’t know how long it’s been. Since Guyen died, even, I don’t know. And you think you can still keep the ship running? Just by…? What do you…? You’re learning how to make a spaceship run by rote or…?’

Alpash looked back at him, frowning. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what the commander means, when he says “Tribe”. The chief scientist, too. It pleases them to think of us as primitives, inferiors. We, in turn, are bound to respect their – your – authority, as our precursors. That is what our grandmother laid down. That is one of our laws. But we do nothing “by rote”. We learn, all of us, from our youngest age. We have preserved manuals and lectures and tutorial modules. Our grandmother has provided for us. Do you think we could do all we have done if we did not understand?’ He stopped, clearly angry. Holsten had obviously touched a nerve already rubbed raw by the other Key Crew. ‘We are of the line of those who gave their lives – all of their lives – to preserve this vessel. That was and is our task, one to be undertaken without reward or hope of relief: an endless round of custodianship, until we reach the planet we were promised. My parents, their parents and theirs, all of them have done nothing but ensure that you and all the other cargo of this ship shall live, or as much of them as we could save. And it pleases you to call us “Tribe” and consider us children and savages, because we never saw Earth.’

Holsten held his hands up appeasingly. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve taken this up with Karst? I mean, he’s kind of depending on you. You could… make demands.’

Alpash’s look was incredulous. ‘At this time? With the future of our home – our old home and our new – hanging in the balance? Would you say that was a good time for us to start arguing amongst ourselves?’

For a moment Holsten studied the young man as though he was some completely new species of hominid, separated by a yawning cognitive gulf. The feeling passed, and he shook himself. ‘She did well when she set down your laws,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you.’ Alpash apparently took this as a validation of his entire culture – or whatever it was that had developed amongst his weird, claustrophobic society. ‘And now at last I get to meet her, here at the end of everything.’

They passed on through a wide-open space that Holsten suddenly recognized, the remembrance coming to him halfway across it, looking at the raised stage at one end where stubs of broken machinery still jutted. Here Guyen had stood and made his bid for eternity. Here the earliest progenitors of Alpash’s line had fought alongside their warrior queen and Karst’s security team – some of whom were surely recently reawakened, possessing living memories of events that for Alpash must be song and story and weirdly twisted legend.

A lone screen hung at an angle above the torn-up roots of the upload facility, flickering malevolently with scattered patterns. As though Guyen’s ghost is still trapped inside there, Holsten thought. Almost immediately, he thought he did see, for a broken moment, the rage-torn face of the old commander in the flurrying striations of the screen. Or perhaps it had been Avrana Kern’s Old Empire features. Shuddering, he hurried on after Alpash.

The place he ended up in had been a storeroom, he guessed. Now they stored only one thing there: a single suspension chamber. At the foot of the pedestal was a huddle of little objects – icons heat-moulded in plastic into an approximation of the female form: offerings from her surrogate children, and their children, to the guardian-mother of the human race. Above that desperate little display of hope and faith were tacked little scraps of cloth torn from shipsuits, each bearing some close-written message. This was a shrine to a living goddess.

Not only living but awake. Alpash and a couple of other young engineers were standing back respectfully while Isa Lain found her balance, leaning on a metal spar.

She was very frail, her earlier heaviness eaten away from her frame, leaving skin that was bagged and wrinkled and hung from her bones. Her near-bald scalp was mottled with liver spots, and her hands were like bird’s claws, almost fleshless. She stood with a pronounced hunch, enough that Holsten wondered if they’d altered the suspension chamber to let her sleep out the ages lying on her side. When she looked up at him, though, her eyes were Lain’s eyes, clear and sharp and sardonic.

If she had said, then, ‘Hello, old man,’ like she used to, he was not sure that he could have borne it. She just nodded, however, as though nothing was to be more expected than to find Holsten Mason standing there, looking young enough to be her son.

‘Stop your bloody staring,’ she snapped a moment later. ‘You don’t look such a picture yourself, and what’s your excuse?’

‘Lain…’ He approached her carefully, as though even a strong movement of air might blow her away.

‘No time for romance now, lover boy,’ she said drily. ‘I hear Karst’s fucked up and we’ve got the human race to save.’ And then she was in his arms, and he felt that fragile, thin-boned frame, felt her shaking suddenly as she fought the memories and the emotions.

‘Get off me, you oaf,’ she said, but quietly, and she made no move to push him away.

‘I’m just glad you’re still with us,’ he whispered.

‘For one more roll of the dice, anyway,’ she agreed. ‘I really did think that I might get some honest natural gravity and decent sunlight when they cracked me open. Was that too much to ask for? But apparently it was. I can’t believe that I even have to do Karst’s job these days.’

‘Don’t be too hard on Karst,’ Holsten cautioned her. ‘The situation is… unprecedented.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ At last she shook him off. ‘I swear, sometimes I think I’m the only competent person left in the whole human race. I think that’s the only thing keeping me going.’ She made to stride past him, but stumbled almost immediately, and her next step was decidedly less ambitious, a careful hobble while leaning on her stick. ‘Never grow old,’ she muttered. ‘Never grow old and then go into suspension, that’s for sure. You dream young dreams. You forget what you’re coming back to. Fucking disappointment, believe me.’

‘You don’t dream in suspension,’ Holsten corrected her.

‘Look at you, the fucking expert.’ She glowered at him. ‘Or am I not allowed to swear now? I suppose you expect some sort of fucking decorum?’ Behind her defiance there was a terrible desperation: a woman who had always been able to simply physically impose her will on the world, who now had to ask its permission and the permission of her own body.

Holsten brought her up to date with developments on the way back to join Karst. He could see her determinedly fitting each piece into place, and she wasn’t slow to stop him and ask for clarification.

‘These transmissions,’ she prompted. ‘Do we reckon they’re actually from the planet, then?’

‘I have no idea. It’s… it explains why most of it’s completely incomprehensible, I suppose. It doesn’t explain the stuff that sounds a bit like Imperial C – so maybe that is Kern.’

‘Have we tried talking to Kern?’

‘I think Karst was pinning everything on mounting a sneak attack.’

‘How subtle of him,’ she spat. ‘I reckon now’s about the time to talk to Kern, don’t you?’ She paused, breathing heavily. ‘In fact, go do it now. Just get on with it. When we hit comms, I’ll talk guns with Karst. You can talk whatever-the-fuck with Kern, find out what she’s saying. Maybe she doesn’t actually like spiders crawling all over her. Maybe she’s an ally now. You never know until you ask.’

She had so much of her old sense of purpose still clinging to her, like the tatters of a once-magnificent garment, that Holsten was considerably heartened up until the moment that she reached comms and saw what the drones were transmitting. Then Lain stopped in the hatchway and stared, exactly as aghast and lost as all the rest of them. For a moment all eyes were fixed on her, and if she had declared it all a lost cause then and there, there might have been nobody else willing to take up the baton.

But she was Lain. She endured and she fought, whether satellites or spiders or time itself.

‘Fuck,’ she said expressively, and then repeated it a few more times, as if taking strength from the word. ‘Holsten, get on the comms to Kern. Karst, get Vitas over here, and then you can start telling me just what the fuck we can do about that mess.’

With the comms at his disposal – or at least after Alpash had explained half a dozen workarounds the engineers had come up with to deal with system instability – Holsten wondered what he could possibly send. He had the satellite’s frequency, but the space around the planet was alive with whispering ghosts: those faint transmissions that were, he had to admit now, not just signals from the satellite bouncing off the planet below it.

He tried to feel some sort of awe about that, and about the unprecedented position that he was in. The only emotion he could muster was a worn-out dread.

He began to assemble a message in his impeccable Imperial C, the dead language that looked to be about to survive the human race. This is the ark ship Gilgamesh calling for Doctor Avrana Kern… He stumbled over ‘Do you require assistance,’ his mind thronging with inappropriate possibilities. Doctor Kern, you’re covered in spiders. He took a deep breath.

This is the ark ship Gilgamesh calling Doctor Avrana Kern. And, face it, she knew them and they knew her; they were old adversaries, after all. We are now without any option but to land on your planet. The survival of the human race is at stake. Please confirm that you will not impede us. It was a wretched plea. He knew that, even as he let the message fly off at the speed of light towards the planet. What could Kern say that would satisfy them? What could he say that would dissuade her from her monomaniacal purpose?

Vitas had arrived by then, and she, Karst and Lain had their heads close together, discussing the important stuff, whilst Holsten was left babbling into the void.

Then a reply arrived, or something like it.

It was sent from the point in the web that Karst had figured to be the satellite, and it was far stronger than the feeble transmissions he had been analysing before. There seemed little doubt that it was directed at and intended for the Gilgamesh. If it was Kern, it seemed she was long gone: it was not her crisp, antique speech, but more of the weird, almost-Imperial that he had caught before, a jumble of nonsense and letter-strings that looked like words but weren’t, and in the midst of them all a few words and what might even be sentence fragments, like an illiterate aping writing from memory. An illiterate with access to a radio and the ability to encode a signal.

He re-sent his signal, asking for Eliza this time. What was there to lose?

The return was more of the same. He contrasted it with its predecessor: some repeated sections, some new ones, and by now his professional eye was seeing certain recurring patterns in those sections he could not interpret. Kern was trying to tell them something. Or at least something was trying to tell them something. He wondered if it was still simply ‘Go away’ and, if that was the case, would it now be a warning for their benefit? Turn back before it’s too late?

But there was no back for them. They were now on a oneway journey towards the only potentially viable destination they could possibly reach.

He pondered what he might be able to send, so as to jolt Kern into some semblance of comprehensible sentience. Or was Kern, too, now a failing machine. Was the end coming for all of the works of human hands, even as it was for their masters?

It seemed intolerable that the universe could be left to the creators of that planet-spanning web, to a legion of insensate crawling things that could never know the trials and hardships that poor humanity had suffered.

A new message was being broadcast at them on the same frequency. Holsten listened to it dully: not even a mimicry of language now, just numerical codes.

To his shame, it was the Gilgamesh that recognized it, rather than he himself. It was the signal that Kern had, once upon a time, been sending down towards the planet. It was her intelligence test for monkeys.

Without much examination of his motives, Holsten composed the answers – with help from the Gilgamesh towards the end – and sent it back.

Another battery of questions followed – new ones this time.

‘What is it?’ Lain was at his shoulder, just like old times. If he didn’t look back, he could even fool himself that rather less water had flowed under the bridge since they were first playing this game.

‘Kern’s testing us,’ he told her. ‘Maybe she wants to see if we’re worthy?’

‘By setting us a maths exam?’

‘She never made much sense at the best of times. So why not?’

‘Get her the answers, then. Come on.’

Holsten did so – finding it so much quicker to assemble a response once the complexities of actual language were removed from the equation. ‘Of course, we have no idea of the purpose of this,’ he pointed out.

‘But we can still hope it has a purpose,’ she replied crisply. Holsten was vaguely aware of Vitas and Karst hovering in the background, impatient to get on with talking about the offensive.

There was no third round of the test. Instead they got another blast of the maddeningly near-to-Imperial C that Holsten had seen before. He analysed it swiftly, passing it through his decoders and pattern-recognition functions. It seemed simpler than before, and with more repeated patterns. The phrase came to him, like talking to a child, and he experienced another of those vertiginous moments, wondering who or what it was that was speaking, far out there. Kern, surely? But Kern made strange – stranger – by the curdling effects of time and distance. But, even though Kern’s little Sentry Habitat was the origination point of the signal, a part of him understood already that this was not so.

‘I can identify some words used frequently,’ he announced hoarsely, after he and his suite of programs had finished their work. He could not keep the quaver out of his tones. ‘I’ve found what’s definitely a form of the verb “approach” and the word “near”, and some other indicators I’d associate with “permission” or “agreement”.’

That pronouncement got the thoughtful silence it deserved.

‘They’ve changed their tune, then,’ Karst remarked at last. ‘You said it was all “fuck off” before.’

‘It was.’ Holsten nodded. ‘It’s changed.’

‘Because Kern’s in desperate need of our superior maths skills?’ the security chief demanded.

Holsten opened his mouth, then shut it, unwilling to make his suspicions real by voicing them aloud.

Lain did it for him. ‘If it’s actually Kern.’

‘Who else?’ but there was a raw edge to Karst’s voice that showed he was not such a blunt tool, after all.

‘There’s no evidence that anything but Kern exists to transmit from there,’ Vitas said sharply.

‘What about that?’ Holsten jabbed a finger at the screen still showing the drone’s images.

‘We have no way of knowing what has transpired down on that planet. It was an experiment, after all. It may be that what we are seeing is an aberration of that experiment, just as was the grey planet and its fungal growth. The point remains that the Kern satellite is still present there, and it’s where the signal comes from,’ Vitas set out doggedly.

‘Or it may be—’ Lain started.

‘It’s possible,’ Vitas cut her off. The very suggestion seemed abhorrent to her. ‘It changes nothing.’

‘Right,’ Karst backed her up. ‘I mean, even if they’re – if Kern’s – saying, yeah, come on down, what do we do? Because, if she’s got all her stuff, she can cut us up as we touch orbit. And that’s not even thinking about that bastard mess and what that could do. I mean, if it’s something that’s grown up from the planet, well, it’s Kern’s experiment, isn’t it? Maybe it does what she says.’

There was an awkward pause, everyone waiting to see if someone, anyone, would argue the other side, just for the form of it. Holsten turned the words over, trying to put together a sentence that didn’t sound flat-out crazy.

‘There was a tradition the Old Empire once had,’ Vitas stated slowly. ‘It was a choice they gave to their criminals, their prisoners. They would take two of them and ask them to spare or to accuse each other, each making the decision quite alone without a chance to confer. All went very well indeed if they both chose to spare one another, but they suffered some degree of punishment if they both accused each other. But, oh, if you were the prisoner who decided to spare his friend, only to find you’d been accused in turn…’ She smiled, and in that smile Holsten saw suddenly that she had grown old, but that it showed so little on her face – kept at bay by all the expressions she did not give rein to.

‘So what was the right choice?’ Karst asked her. ‘How did the prisoners get out of it?’

‘The logical choice depended on the stakes: the weighting of punishments for the different outcomes,’ Vitas explained. ‘I’m afraid the facts and the stakes here are very stark and very plain. We could approach the planet in the hope that we were, against all past experience, now being welcomed. As Karst says, that will leave us vulnerable. We will put the ship at risk if it turns out that this is really a trick, or even that Mason has simply made some error in his translation.’ Her eyes passed over Holsten, daring him to object, but in truth he was by no ways that confident of his own abilities. ‘Or we attack – use the drones now, and prepare to back up that first strike when the Gilgamesh reaches the planet. If we do that, and we are wrong, we are throwing away a priceless chance to reach an accommodation with an Old Empire intelligence of some sort.’ There was genuine regret in her voice. ‘If we go in peace, and we are wrong, we are most likely all dead, all of us, all the human race. I don’t think we can argue with the weighting that we have been given. For me there is only one rational choice at this point.’

Karst nodded grimly. ‘That bitch never liked us,’ he pointed out. ‘No way she’d suddenly change her mind.’

Several centuries later and a lot of spiders is a long way from ‘suddenly’, Holsten thought, but the words stayed unspoken in his head. Lain was looking at him, though, obviously expecting a contribution. So now people actually want to listen to the classicist? He just shrugged. He suspected that the loss, if they went to war on false pretences, might be far greater than Vitas claimed, but he could not argue with her assessment of the complete total loss of everything there was if they erred too far on the path of peace.

‘More importantly, the logic is universal,’ Vitas added, looking from face to face. ‘It truly doesn’t matter what is waiting for us at the planet. It’s mathematics, that’s all. Our adversary faces the same choice, the same weighting. Even if to welcome us with open arms and have us then play the responsible guest may give the best results all round, the cost of being betrayed is too high. So we can look into the minds of our opponents. We know that they must make the same decision that we must make: because the cost of fighting needlessly is so much less than the cost of opting for peace and getting it wrong. And that same logic will inform the decision of whatever is there, whether it’s a human mind or a machine, or…’

Spiders? But it was plain that Vitas wouldn’t even utter the word, and when Lain spoke it for her, the science chief twitched ever so slightly.

So Vitas doesn’t like spiders, Holsten considered morosely. Well, she wasn’t down on the bloody planet, was she? She didn’t see those bloated monsters. His eyes strayed to the image of the webbed world. Can it be sentience? Or is Vitas right and it’s just some mad experiment gone wrong – gone right, even? Would the Old Empire have wanted giant space-spiders for some purpose? Why not? As a historian I must concur that they did a lot of stupid things.

‘Come on, then,’ Karst prompted. ‘I’m pressing the button, or what?’

In the end everyone was looking at Lain.

The old engineer took a few careful steps forward, stick clacking on the floor, staring at the drone’s camera image of the shrouded planet. Her eyes, that had witnessed centuries pass in a kind of punctuated stop-motion, tried to take it all in. She had the look of a woman staring bleak destiny in the eye.

‘Take out the satellite,’ she decided at last, quietly. ‘We go in fighting. You’re right, there’s too much at stake. There’s everything at stake. Bring it down.’

Karst sent the order briskly, as though afraid that someone would get cold feet or change their mind. Millions of kilometres away, in the direction of the Gilgamesh’s inexorable progress, the drones received their instructions. They already had the metal fist of the satellite targeted, trapped as it was in that vast equatorial web.

They carried the best lasers that the Tribe had been able to restore, linked to the remote vessels’ little fusion reactors. They had already drifted as close as they dared, jockeying for geostationary orbit above the trapped satellite with as little expenditure of energy as they could get away with.

They loosed, the two of them together, striking at the same spot on the satellite’s hull. Somewhere far distant, Karst would be tensing, but the image he would be reacting to would already be old by the time he saw it.

For a moment nothing happened, as energy was poured into the ancient, ravaged shell of the Brin 2 Sentry Pod. Karst would have his fists clenched, staring at the screens with veins standing out on his forehead, as though his will could cross space and time in order to make things happen.

Then, with a silent flowering of fire almost instantly extinguished, the drilling beams reached something vital within, and the millennia-old home of Doctor Avrana Kern was ripped open, the webs on either side shrivelling and springing away under the sudden excess of heat. Still gouting out its contents into the hungry emptiness of space, the shattered satellite slipped free from its tangle of moorings, burning a hole in the great web, and was propelled away from the drones by the outrush of material from its jagged wounds.

The drones themselves had given their all, the discharge of their weapons leaving their reactors cold and draining them dry. They tumbled off across the face of the web, to fall or to drift away.

The satellite, though, had a more definite fate. It fell. Like Kern’s experimental subjects so very very long before, it was jolted out of its orbit, to be gathered up by the arms of the planet’s gravity, spiralling helplessly into the atmosphere, where it streaked across the sky, just an old barrel with a single ancient monkey in withered residence, delivering a final message to the anxious eyes below.

7.4 END TIMES

They watched it burn its way across the sky.

Although active Messenger-worship was almost nonexistent in these more enlightened times – what need of faith when there was ample proof of the precise nature of God? – the spiders watched that fiery trail, either with their own eyes or through the surrogate eyes of their biological systems, and knew that something had gone out of their world. The Messenger had always been there. They retained the memories of distant, primitive times when that moving light in the heavens had been both compass and inspiration to them. They recalled the heady days of Temple, and the earliest communications shared between God and Her congregation. Something that has been a part of their cultural consciousness from their earliest times; something that they know, rationally, to be older than their very species; and now it is gone.

In the quiet dark of his work-chamber, Fabian feels a shock of emotion go through him that he had not expected. He, of all spiders, is not religious. He has no time for the unknowable, save to pin it down by experiment and reason, and thus make it knowable. Still…

He has been watching on a filmy screen, the image formed from thousands of tiny chromatopores of various colours expanding and contracting to form pinpoint parts of the overall picture. Deep underground, as his chambers are, there is no chance of him witnessing this first-hand. He is a pallid, angular, unkempt specimen of his species, and seldom cares much about seeing the sun; instead he works to his own rhythms that have little to do with day or night.

Well, he remarks to his only constant companion, I suppose that backs up everything you have told us.

Of course. The response comes from the very walls, an invisible presence all around him like a familiar demon. And you must retaliate at the first opportunity. They will give you no chances.

The connection peer group seemed to be having some success, just before, Fabian notes. The curved walls of the chamber around him seethe and crawl; a thousand thousand ants engaged in the inscrutable bustle of activity that allows this colony – a super-colony really, risen again after all this time – to function in the unique way that it does.

There was never any chance of their success. I am only glad that they have been shown this unequivocal demonstration of the enemy’s intent. I am concerned about the strategy to be employed, however. It is a strange thing, this bodiless speech. Muscular pistons in the walls create the vibrations that simulate a spider’s elegant footfalls. Elsewhere, the thing communicates by radio still, but here Fabian can speak to it as though it was a spider: a particularly aloof, temperamental female, he considers, but still a spider.

It speaks in that curious negotiated language that was long ago devised for communication between the spiders and their God, but recently it has taken to bringing up a pair of phantom palps on the screens to add emphasis to its language, adopting a bizarre pidgin of the spiders’ own visual language. Fabian, who has never been comfortable much with his own kind, finds it congenial company. That, and his unarguable skill with chemical architecture and conditioning, has earned him this vital role. He is the hands and the confidant of the Messenger, as she is now.

I wonder if there was anything left, at the end, of me. The words were slow, hesitant. At first Fabian wonders if another glitch has developed in the machinery, or possibly in the colony’s conditioning. Then he decides that this is one of those times when his companion is dredging up some remnant intonation or rhythm of speech that it might have used in another age, in another form.

Doctor Avrana Kern, he addresses it. It does not like him to call it God or Messenger. After long haggling, they have found a form of arbitrary movements that seem to recall to it the name it once went by. It is one of many idiosyncrasies that Fabian is happy to indulge. He has a special relationship with God, after all. He is Her closest friend. He is responsible for maintaining Her proper functioning and untangling any errors in Her conditioning.

Around him, in a network of tunnels and chambers the geography of which is constantly being altered, dwells a colony of hundred million insects. Their interactions are not as fast as an electronic system built by human hands, but each insect’s tiny brain is itself a capable engine for data storage and decision making, and the overall calculating power of the colony as a whole is something that even it cannot assess. Cloud computing: not speed but an infinitely reconfigurable breadth and complexity. There is more than enough room for the downloaded mind of Avrana Kern.

It took a long time to work out how to do it, but in the end she was only information, after all. Everything is only information, if you have sufficient capacity to encompass it. A long time, too, to copy that information from satellite to a holding colony on the surface. A long – a much longer – time for what they had downloaded to organize itself to the extent that it could say I am. But it is, now, and they have had a long time. The colony that Fabian lives within and tends is God made flesh, the incarnation of the Messenger.

Fabian opens radio contact with one of the orbital observatories and checks on the approach of the enemy, which is in a trajectory that confirms it will be seeking orbit around their world. This is a time for waiting, now. Across the planet, they are all waiting: not just the spiders, but all those species they have connected with. They will all be under the hammer soon, facing with their numbers and their ingenuity a species that created them without ever meaning to, and now seeks to erase them just as thoughtlessly. There are spiders, ant colonies, stomatopods in the ocean, semi-sentient beetles and a dozen others of varying proportions of intellect and instinct, all in some faint way aware that the end times are here.

Up on the orbital web, Bianca can plan no more. Portia waits with her peers, ready to fight the returning space-gods. For now they can only cling to their webs, as the extended senses their technology gives them track the approach of the end.

And then the great bulk of the Gilgamesh is drawing close, at the end of its long deceleration, its ailing thrusters fighting to slow it to the point where the momentum of a dive past the planet will mesh with the reaching gravity and bring the ark ship into orbit.

Although they have been aware of the dimensions of the enemy, from their own measurements and Kern’s records, the sheer scale of the Gilgamesh is awe-inspiring. More than one spider must be thinking, How can we fight such a thing?

And then the ark ship’s weapons unleash their fire. Its approach has been calculated to put the equatorial web in the sights of its forward-facing asteroid lasers and, in that fleeting pass, the Gilgamesh makes full use of its window of opportunity. The web has no centre, no vital point where a surgical strike might cause widespread damage, and so the lasers just sear out indiscriminately, frying strands, cutting open nodes, tearing great gashes in the overall structure of the web. Spiders die: exposed suddenly to vacuum, thrown out into space or inwards towards the planet, some few even vaporized by the incendiary wrath of the lasers themselves.

Portia receives damage reports even as she and her warrior peer group prepare for their counterattack. She is aware that they have just lost, in one searing instant, a certain number of soldiers, a certain proportion of their weapons – all just blindly snuffed out. Bianca confers with her, her radio vibrating with electric current to simulate the dancing rhythms of speech.

The battle plan is unchanged, Bianca confirms. She will already have a complete picture of what they have lost and what they still have. Portia does not envy her the task of coordinating all their orbital defences. Are you ready for deployment?

We are. Portia feels a swelling of angry determination at the destruction. The deaths, the destruction of the Messenger, the heedless brutality of it all, fire her up with righteous zeal. We will show them.

We will show them, Bianca echoes, sounding equally determined. You are the swiftest, the strongest, the cleverest. You are the defenders of your world. If you fail, then it will be as though we never lived at all. All our Understandings will be nothing but dust. I ask you to keep the plan in mind at all times. I know that some of you have qualms. This is not the time for them. The great minds of our people have determined that what you are to do is what must be done, if we are to preserve who and what we are.

We understand. Portia is aware that the great star-blotting form of the ark ship is nearing. Already other detachments are launching.

Good hunting, Bianca exhorts them all.

All around, the orbital weapons of the web are in action. Each consists of a single piece of debris, a rock hauled up by the space elevator or captured from the void, held under enormous tension within the net – and now suddenly released, hurled at great speed into the vacuum towards the ark ship.

But tiny, Portia considers. Those vast boulders she remembers seeing are nothing to the ark ship. Surely its shell must be proof against any such missiles.

But the spiders are not simply throwing rocks. The hurled missiles have multiple purposes, but mostly they are a distraction.

Portia feels the webbing tense around her. Ensure your lines are properly coiled, she sends to her peers. This will be rough.

Seconds later, she and her peers are flung into the void on an oblique line that will intercept the Gilgamesh’s pass as it enters a stable orbit.

She clutches her legs tightly into her body by instinct at first, a shock of terror erupting in her mind and threatening to overwhelm her. Then her training takes over and she begins checking on her soldiers. They are spreading out as they fall towards their rendezvous with the Gilgamesh, but they are still linked by lines to a central hub, forming a rotating wheel, just one of many now spinning towards the Gilgamesh.

The ark ship’s lasers burn the first few rocks, heating them explosively at carefully calculated points to send them tumbling out of its path. Others slam into the vast vessel’s sides, rebounding or embedding. Portia sees at least one thin plume of lost air from a lucky or unlucky strike.

Then she and her peers are bracing for impact. Her radio feeds them second-by-second instructions from the computing colonies on the orbital web, to help them slow down their approach with their little jets and their meagre supply of propellant. Portia is very aware that this is quite likely to be a one-way trip. If they fail, there will be nothing to journey back to.

She has slowed as much as she is able, spinning out more line from the centre of the wheel to put her further away from her sisters. She spreads her legs and hopes that she has managed to do away with just enough momentum.

She lands badly, fails to catch hold with the hooks of her insulated gloves, bounds back from the Gilgamesh’s hull. Others of her team have been luckier and now they latch on with six legs and reel in their errant peers, Portia included. One is unluckier, landing at an angle and smashing her mask. She dies in an agonized flurry of twitching legs, her helpless cries coming to her companions through the metal of the hull.

There is no time for sentiment. Her corpse is secured to the hull with a little webbing, and then they are on the move. They have a war to fight, after all.

We will show them, Portia thinks. We will show them the error of their ways.

7.5 MANOEUVRES

‘Rocks! They’re throwing rocks at us!’ Karst declared incredulously. ‘They’re space-age stone-age!’

One of the console displays flickered and went out and others began to dot with baleful amber displays.

‘Karst, this isn’t a warship,’ Lain’s brittle voice snapped. ‘The Gilgamesh wasn’t designed for any sort of stresses except acceleration and deceleration, certainly not impact—’

‘We have a hull breach in cargo,’ Alpash reported, sounding as though someone had trampled over his holy places. ‘Internal doors are…’ For a moment, apparently, it wasn’t clear whether they were or weren’t, but then he got out, ‘Sealed off, the section’s sealed off. We have… cargo loss—’

‘Cargo is already in vacuum, or close to. Exposure shouldn’t cause any harm,’ Vitas broke in.

‘We have damage to forty-nine chambers,’ Alpash told her. ‘From the impact, and from electrical surges resulting from the damage. Forty-nine.’

For a moment nobody felt up to following that. Half a hundred deaths from a single hit. Trivial, compared to the overall cargo manifest. Horrifying, though, to go behind that word ‘cargo’ and think about the implications.

‘We’re in orbit, one hundred and eighty kilometres out from the web,’ Karst said. ‘We need to fight back. They’ll be throwing more stones at us.’

‘Will they?’ Holsten’s meagre contribution.

‘Maybe they’re reloading.’

‘What other damage?’ Vitas asked.

‘I… don’t know,’ Alpash admitted. ‘Hull sensors are… unreliable, and some have been lost. I don’t believe any essential systems have been damaged, but there may be weakening of the hull in other areas… our damage-control systems have been refined so as to concentrate on emergencies and critical areas.’ Meaning that they simply hadn’t been able to properly maintain the entire network.

‘We can reposition the lasers,’ Karst stated, as though it was a natural sequitur to what had last been said. Perhaps in Karst’s head it was.

‘We can probably reposition the ship rather more easily,’ Lain told him. ‘Just turn him round so that the asteroid arrays are aiming towards the web. In orbit, our orientation doesn’t matter.’

Karst blinked at that, obviously still somewhat married to the idea that the front end should go first, but then he nodded. ‘Well, let’s start on that, then. How long?’

‘Depends how responsive the systems are. We may need to do some spot repairs.’

‘We may not have—’

‘Fuck off, Karst. I am literally in the same boat as you. I will do it as fast as it can be done.’

‘Well, right.’ Karst grimaced, apparently remembering that his status as acting commander had been sidelined once they woke up Lain.

The ancient engineer lowered herself in front of one of the working consoles, a handful of her Tribe gathered around her to do her bidding. She looked terribly tired, Holsten thought, and yet there was still an energy to her he recognized. Time had fought with Lain for possession of this bent, fragile body, and so far time had lost.

‘We are simply not going to be able to burn our way to control of the planet,’ Vitas stated.

‘Sure we are,’ Karst said stubbornly. ‘Seriously, we can probably cut across that entire web, just send it fucking off into space like an old… sock or something.’ And then, ‘Shut up, Holsten,’ when the classicist seemed about to take issue with his simile.

‘Karst, please check the available power to the asteroid array,’ Vitas said patiently.

Karst scowled. ‘So we recharge them.’

‘Using all the energy that is currently ensuring that systems like life-support or reactor-containment keep working,’ Vitas agreed. ‘And, even if you get it right, what then? What about the planet, Karst?’

‘The planet?’ He blinked at her.

‘You were planning to just trip down there in a shuttle and plant a flag? If that’s what near-orbit looks like, what do you think you’d find on the surface? You’re going to laser all of that, too, are you? Or will you take a disruptor, or a gun? How many bullets do you have, precisely?’

‘I’ve already got the security team and some auxiliaries woken up and armed,’ Karst said stubbornly. ‘We’ll go down and make a beachhead, establish a base, start pushing out. We’ll burn the fuckers. What else can we do? Nobody said it was going to be easy. Nobody said it would happen overnight.’

‘Well, it might come to that,’ Vitas conceded. ‘And if it does, I shall stay up here and coordinate the assault, and good luck to you. However, I hope there will be a more efficient way to dispose of our pest problem. Lain, I’ll need at least one of the workshops up and running at my direction, and access to all the old files – anything we’ve still got regarding Earth.’

‘What’s the plan?’ Lain asked without looking back at her.

‘Brew up a present for the s-s-… for them, below.’ This time Vitas’s stutter was clear enough that everyone noticed it. ‘I don’t think it should be impossible to put together some sort of toxin that will target arthropods, something to eat away at their exoskeletons or their respiratory system, but that won’t have any ill effect on us. After all, assuming they’re derived from actual Earth spiders, they’re essentially a completely different form of life to us. They’re not like us at all, in any way.’

Holsten, listening, heard too much emphasis on those words. He thought of broken messages in Imperial C. Had it been Kern herself, or something just parroting Kern’s words?

In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.

Nobody was paying attention to him, especially as he wasn’t voicing any of these thoughts that entered his head, so he found a console that looked halfway operational and got into the comms system.

As he had expected, there was a great deal of broad-frequency radio activity issuing from the planet. The destruction of the Sentry Habitat meant that nothing was coming to them now as clearly – possibly it had been merely a powerful transmitter for the planet, at the end. But the green world itself was alive with urgent, incomprehensible messages.

He wanted to think of something wonderful, then: some perfect message that would somehow bring comprehension in its wake, open a dialogue, give everyone options. The cruel arithmetic of Vitas’s prisoners locked him down, though. We couldn’t trust them. They couldn’t trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He thought of human dreams – both Old Empire and new – of contacting some extra-terrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We’d never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we’d still be those same two prisoners forced to trust – and risk – or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.

Then there came a new transmission, from the planet direct to the ship, fainter than before, but then it was not using the satellite as a relay any more. One word in Imperial C, but absolutely clear in its meaning.

Missed.

Holsten stared, opened his mouth two or three times, about to draw someone’s attention, then sent a simple message back on the same frequency.

Doctor Avrana Kern?

I told you to stay away, came the immediate, baleful response.

Holsten worked swiftly, aware that he was negotiating now not for the Gilgamesh but as Earth’s last classicist in the face of raw history. We have no option. We need to get off the ship. We need a world.

I sent you to a world, ungrateful apes. The transmission came from the planet, pulsing strongly out of the general riot of signals.

Uninhabitable, he sent. Doctor Kern, you are human. We are human. We are all the humans there are left. Please let us land. We have no other choice. We cannot turn back.

Humanity is overrated, came Kern’s dark reply. And, besides, do you think that I am making the decisions? I’m only an advisor, and they didn’t like my preferred solution to the problem that is you. They have their own ways of dealing with trouble. Go away.

Doctor Kern, we are not bluffing, we really have no option. But it was just like before: he was not getting through. Can I talk to Eliza please?

If there was anything left that was Eliza and not me you’ve just destroyed it, Kern responded. Goodbye, monkeys.

Holsten sent further transmissions, several times over, but Kern was apparently done with talking. He could hear the woman’s contemptuous voice as he read through the impeccable Imperial C, but he was far more shaken with the ancient entity’s suggestion that the creatures on the planet would not be held back even by her. Where has her experiment taken her?

He glanced about him. Vitas had gone now, heading off for her workshop and her chemicals, ready to sterilize as much of the planet as was necessary so that her species could find a home there. Holsten wasn’t sure how much would be left of what made the place attractive for habitation, after she was finished. But what other choice have we? Die in space and leave the place to the bugs and to Kern?

‘We’re still losing hull sensors,’ Alpash noticed. ‘The impacts may have caused more damage than we thought.’ He sounded genuinely worried, and that was a disease that others caught off him almost immediately.

‘How can we still be losing them?’ Lain demanded, still concentrating on her own work.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m sending out a drone, then. Let’s take a look,’ Karst stated. ‘Here.’ After some fumbling, he got the drone’s-eye-view up on one of the screens as it manoeuvred somewhat shakily out of its bay and coasted off down the great curving landscape of the ship’s hull. ‘Fuck me, this is patched to buggery,’ he commented.

‘Mostly from what we installed after the terraform station,’ Lain confirmed. ‘Lots of opening her up and closing her back down to get new stuff in, or to effect repairs…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘What was that?’

‘What now? I didn’t see—’ Karst started.

‘Something moved,’ Alpash confirmed.

‘Don’t be stupid…’

Holsten stared, seeing the lumpy, antennae-spiked landscape pass. Then, at the corner of the screen, there was a flurry of furtive, scuttling movement.

‘They’re here,’ he tried to say, but his throat was dry, his voice just a whisper.

‘There’s nothing out there,’ Karst was saying. But Holsten was thinking, Was that some kind of thread drifting from that antenna? Why are the hull sensors going down, one by one? What is that I see moving…?

‘Oh, fuck.’ Karst suddenly sounded older than Lain. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

In the drone’s sight, a half-dozen grey, scrabbling forms passed swiftly over the hull, running with slightly exaggerated sureness out in the freezing, airless void, even leaping forwards, catching themselves with lines, leaving a tracery of discarded threads latticing the Gilgamesh’s exterior.

‘What are they doing?’ Alpash asked hollowly.

Lain’s voice, at least, was steady. ‘Trying to get in.’

7.6 BREAKING THE SHELL

One of Portia’s peers operates a bulky device of silk-bound glass that acts as an eye, containing a colony of tiny ants whose sole function is to create a compound view of the sights before them and relay it back to the orbital web and to the planet. Bianca can then give moment-to-moment orders to best exploit their new position up on the exterior of this vast alien intruder. This is just as well, for Portia would not have the first idea what to make of anything she sees. Every detail is bizarre and disturbing, an aesthetic arising from the dreams of another phylum, a technology of hard metal and elemental forces.

Bianca herself has little better idea what to do with it, but the images are being routed down to the vast colony-complex that is Doctor Avrana Kern, or what is left of her. Kern can make an educated guess at what Portia is seeing, and offers her recommendations, some of which are taken, some of which are discarded. Kern has fallen far from her status as God. She and the leaders of her erstwhile flock have undergone some bitter disagreements about the fate of the human race currently aboard the Gilgamesh. She argued and threatened, and in the end she begged and pleaded, but by then the spiders had their assault planned, and were not to be swayed. In the end Kern was forced to accept the hard decisions of those that had once been her faithful, and were now her hosts.

Now she has identified the hull sensors for Portia and the other bands of orbital defenders. They have been busy crossing the hull to put out the Gilgamesh’s eyes.

Portia has little concept of the living contents of the ark ship at this point. Intellectually, she knows they are there, but her mind is focused on this stage of her duty, and the concept of a vast ship of giants goes further than her imagination will stretch. Nonetheless, her mental picture of the processes going on within is surprisingly accurate. They will detect us, and they will know that we will try and break in. In her mind, the Gilgamesh is like an ant colony, one of the bad old kind, and any moment the defenders must boil out, or else some weapons will be deployed.

There will be a small number of hatches that lead to the interior, Bianca instructs. Continue to destroy sensors as you travel, to hamper their ability to respond. You are looking for either a large square… With meticulous patience Bianca gives concise descriptions of the various possible means of access to the Gilgamesh’s interior, as dredged from Avrana Kern’s memory of her own encounter with the ark ship: where they launch their shuttles, where there are maintenance hatches, airlocks, drone chutes… Much is conjecture, but at least Kern was once of the same species as the ark ship’s builders. She has a common frame of reference, while Portia cannot even guess at the purpose or function of the profusion of details on the Gilgamesh’s hull.

If the spiders possessed a certain form of determination, then they would be able to enter the ark ship without needing to find a weak point. After all, they have access to chemical explosives that carry their own oxygen and would trigger in a vacuum. Their space-age technology has its limits, though. Tearing the ship open is not a preferred option. If nothing else, Portia and her peers are intending to rely on the ark ship’s air, even though it is short of oxygen compared to their usual needs. The respirators about the spiders’ abdomens have a limited lifespan, and Portia is keenly aware that they would prefer to return home across the void as well. Better to establish a controlled breach, and then seal it off once her spiders are inside.

A curious sensation washes over her, like nothing she has experienced before, setting her tactile sense organs quivering. The nearest equivalent she could name would be that a wind had blown past her, but out here there is no air to move. Her fellows, and other peer groups currently engaged on the assault, have felt it too. In its wake, radio communications become patchy for a brief while. Portia cannot know that her adversaries inside the ship have improvised an electromagnetic pulse to attack the spiders’ electronics. The two technologies have passed each other in the night, barely touching. Even Portia’s radio is biological. What little the pulse can touch of it is instantly replaced; the technology is mortal, born to die, and so every component has replacements growing behind it like shark’s teeth.

Portia has located a hatch now, a vast square entryway sealed behind heavy metal doors. Immediately she broadcasts her position to nearby teams who begin to converge on her position, ready to follow her in.

She calls forwards her specialist, who begins drawing the outlines of the hole they will make with her acids. The metal will withstand them for a while yet, and Portia steps from foot to foot, anxious and impatient. She does not know what will greet them once they get inside – giant defenders, hostile environments, incomprehensible machines. She has never been one to just sit and wait: she needs to plan or she needs to act. Denied either, she frets.

As the acid begins to work, reacting violently with the hull and producing a frill of vapour that disperses almost immediately, others of the team begin weaving an airtight net of synthetic silk between them, which will close up the breach once the team is inside.

Then radio contact is gone abruptly, swallowed by a vast ocean-wash of white noise. The denizens of the ark ship have struck again. Immediately Portia begins searching for clear frequencies. She knows the giants also use radio to speak, hence it seems likely that they may have held some channels open. In the interim, though, her squad is cut off – as are all of the hull squads. But they know the plan. They already have their instructions on precisely how to deal with the human menace – both the waking crew and the vastly greater number of sleepers that Kern has described. The precise details will now be down to Portia’s discretion.

Uppermost in her mind at this point is that the inhabitants of the Gilgamesh are taking an active hand in their own defence, at last. She has no idea how this might manifest, but she knows what she would do if an attacker were gnawing at the walls of her very home. The Portiid spiders have never been a passive or defensive species. No patient web-lurkers they – they attack or counterattack. They are made to go on the offensive.

Without the radio, close-range communication remains possible, just. Be ready, they will be coming, she taps out on the hull, flashing her palps for emphasis. Those not directly involved in breaching the hull fan out, watching to all sides with many eyes.

7.7 THE WAR OUTSIDE

‘Hah!’ Karst shouted at the screens. ‘That screws over their fucking radio.’

‘It’s not exactly a killer blow.’ Lain rubbed at her eyes with the heel of one hand.

‘It doesn’t deal with the implications of them having radio in the first place,’ Holsten remarked. ‘What are we dealing with here? Why aren’t we even asking that question?’

‘It’s obvious,’ came the terse voice of Vitas from over the comms.

‘Then please explain, because precious little is looking obvious to me right now,’ Lain suggested. She was concentrating on the screens, and Holsten had the impression that her words had more to do with being irritated at Vitas’s superior manner.

‘Kern’s World was some sort of bioengineering planet,’ Vitas’s disembodied voice explained. ‘She was creating these things. Then, knowing we were returning, she’s broken them out of stasis at last, and has deployed them against us. They’re fulfilling their programming even after the destruction of her satellite.’

Holsten tried to catch the eyes of Lain or Karst or, indeed, anyone, but he seemed to have faded into the background again.

‘What does that mean the surface is going to be like?’ Karst asked uneasily.

‘We may have to conduct some widespread cleansing,’ Vitas confirmed with apparent enthusiasm.

‘Wait,’ Holsten muttered.

Lain cocked an eyebrow at him.

‘Please let’s… not repeat their mistakes. The Empire’s mistakes.’ Because sometimes I feel that’s all we’ve been doing. ‘It sounds like you’re talking about poisoning the planet to death, so we can live on it.’

‘It may be necessary, depending on surface conditions. Allowing uncontrolled biotechnology to remain on the surface would be considerably worse,’ Vitas stated.

‘What if they’re sentient?’ Holsten asked.

Lain just watched, eyes hooded, and it looked as though Karst hadn’t really understood the question. It was now Holsten versus the voice of Vitas.

‘If that is the case,’ Vitas considered, ‘it will only be in the sense that a computer might be considered sentient. They will be following instructions, possibly in a way that gives them considerable leeway in order to react to local conditions, but that will be all.’

‘No,’ said Holsten patiently, ‘what if they are actually sentient. Alive and independent, evolved?’ Exalted, came the word inside his head. The exaltation of beasts. But Kern had spoken only of her beloved monkeys.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Vitas snapped, and surely they all heard the tremble in her voice. ‘In any event, it doesn’t matter. The logic of the prisoners’ choice holds. Whatever we are ranged against, it is doing its best to destroy us. We must respond accordingly.’

‘Another drone gone,’ Karst announced.

‘What?’ Lain demanded.

‘With the hull sensors being picked off I’m trying to keep tabs on the fuckers with drones, but they’re taking them out. I’ve only got a handful left.’

‘Any armed like the ones that took down Kern?’ the old engineer asked.

‘No, and we couldn’t use them, anyway. They’re on the hull. We’d damage the ship.’

‘It may be too late for that,’ Alpash commented levelly. He showed them one of the last drone images. A group of spiders was clustered at one of the shuttle-bay doors. A new line in the metal was visible, flagged by a ghost of dispersing vapour down its length.

‘Fuckers,’ said Karst solemnly. ‘You’re sure we can’t electrify the hull?’ That had been a hot topic of conversation before they tried the EMP burst. Alpash had been trying to work up a solution for a localized electrical grid around wherever the spiders were located, but the infrastructure for it simply was not there, let alone the enormous energy that would be needed to accomplish it. Talk had then devolved towards lower-tech solutions.

‘You’ve got your people armed and ready?’

‘I’ve got a fucking army. We’ve woken up a few hundred of the best candidates from cargo and put disruptors into their hands. Assuming the little bastards can be disrupted. If not, well, we’ve broken out the armoury. I mean,’ and his voice trembled a little, small cracks evident from a deep, deep stress, ‘the ship’s so fucked a few more holes won’t make any difference, will they? And anyway, we can still stop them getting in. But if they do get in… we may not be able to contain them.’ He fought over that ‘may’, his need for optimism crashing brutally into the wall of circumstances. ‘It’s not like this ship was laid out with this kind of situation in mind. Fucking oversight, that was.’ And a rictus grin.

‘Karst…’ Lain began, and Holsten – always a little behind – thought she just wanted to shut him up and spare him embarrassment.

‘I’ll get suited up,’ the security chief said.

Lain just watched him, saying nothing.

‘What?’ Holsten stared. ‘Wait, no…’

Karst essentially ignored him, eyes fixed on the ancient engineer.

‘You’re sure?’ Lain herself seemed anything but.

Karst shrugged brutally. ‘I’m doing fuck all good up here. We need to go clear those vermin off the hull.’ There was precious little enthusiasm in his voice. Perhaps he was waiting for Lain to give some convincing reason that he should stay. Her creased face was twisted in indecision, though, an engineer seeking a solution to a technical problem she could not overcome.

At that point Holsten’s console flickered into activity again, and he realized the attackers on the outside had located the clear channels that Karst had been using to control his drones; and that Karst would soon be using to communicate with the ship. It was Holsten’s job to notify everyone the moment the spiders made this discovery, but he said nothing, part of him staring at the sudden patchy scatter of signals being picked up by the Gilgamesh’s surviving receivers, the rest of him listening to the conversation going on behind him.

‘Your team?’ Lain prompted at last.

‘My core team are suited and ready,’ Karst confirmed. ‘It looks like we might have a fight the moment we open the airlock. Little bastards could be out there already, cutting in.’ Nobody was arguing with him, but he went on, ‘I can’t ask them to go and me stay behind,’ and then, ‘This is what I’m for, isn’t it? I’m not a strategist. I’m not a commander. I lead people: my team.’ He stood before Lain like a general who had disappointed his queen and now felt that he had only one way to redeem himself. ‘Let’s face it. Security was only ever here to keep Key Crew and cargo in place for the duration of the trip. But if we have to be soldiers, then we’ll be soldiers, and I’ll lead.’

‘Karst…’ Lain started, and then dried up. Holsten wondered whether she had been about to say something bizarrely trite, some piece of social ornament like, If you don’t want to go, then don’t. But they were long past what people did or didn’t want to do. Nobody had wanted the situation they found themselves in now, and their language, like their technology, had been pared down to only those things essential to life. Nothing else, none of the fripperies and flourishes, had been cost-effective to maintain.

‘I’ll get suited up,’ the security chief repeated tiredly, with a nod. He paused as though he wanted to throw out some more military form of acknowledgement, a salute from those about to die, and then he turned and left.

Lain watched him go, leaning on her metal stick, and there was a similar ramrod stiffness to her bearing despite her crooked spine. Her bony knuckles were white, and everyone in that room was watching her.

She took two deliberate steps until she was at Holsten’s shoulder, then glowered about her at the handful of Tribe engineers still left in comms.

‘Get to work!’ she snapped at them. ‘There’s always something that needs fixing.’ Having dispersed their attention, she took a deep breath, then let it out, close enough to Holsten’s ear that he heard the faint wheezing of her lungs. ‘He was right, wasn’t he?’ she said very softly, for his ears only. ‘We need to clear them from the hull, and the security detail will fight better if Karst’s out there with them.’ It was not that she had told the man to go, but a word from her might have stopped him.

Holsten glanced up at her and tried to make himself nod, but something went wrong with the motion, and the result was meaningless and noncommittal.

‘What’s this?’ Lain demanded abruptly, noticing the stream of signals on his screen.

‘They found our gap. They’re transmitting.’

‘Then why the fuck didn’t you say?’ She called out, ‘Karst?’ then waited until Alpash confirmed that she was connected to the man. ‘We’re changing frequencies, so get your people ready,’ next giving him the new clear channel. ‘Holsten—’

‘Vitas is wrong,’ he told her. ‘They’re not biological machines. They’re not just Kern’s puppets.’

‘And how are you supposed to have worked that one out?’

‘Because of how they communicate.’

She frowned. ‘You’ve cracked that now? And didn’t think to tell anyone?’

‘No… not what they’re saying, but the structure. Isa, I’m a classicist, and a lot of that is a study of language – old languages, dead languages, languages from an age of humanity that doesn’t exist any more. I’d stake my life that these signals are actually language rather than just some sort of instructions. It’s too complex, too intricately structured. It’s inefficient, Isa. Language is inefficient. It evolves organically. This is language – real language.’

Lain squinted down at the screen for a few seconds until the transmissions abruptly cut off, as the jamming switched frequencies. ‘What difference does it make?’ she asked quietly. ‘Does it get Vitas’s fucking prisoners out of their cells? It doesn’t, Holsten.’

‘But—’

‘Tell me how it helps us,’ she invited. ‘Tell me how any of this… speculation does us any good. Or is it just like all the rest of your bag of tricks? Academic in every sense of the word.’

‘We’re ready,’ came Karst’s voice at that moment, as though he had been politely waiting for her to finish. ‘We’re in the airlock. We’re about to open the hatch.’

Lain’s face was like a death mask. She had never been intended as a commander, either. Holsten could see every one of those centuries of hard decisions in the lines on her face.

‘Go,’ she confirmed, ‘and good luck.’

Karst had a squad of twenty-two ready to go, and that used up all the heavy EVA suits that were still functioning. Another twelve were currently being worked on, and he was only grateful that the Tribe had needed to go out and make patch repairs on the hull, or he might not even be able to field that many soldiers. Soldiers: he thought of them as soldiers. Some of them actually were soldiers, military woken up from cargo either this time or the last time, added piecemeal to the security detail whenever he had needed a bit more muscle. Others were veterans of his team: Key Crew who had been with him from the start. He was taking only the best, which in this case meant almost everyone who had the appropriate EVA training.

He remembered very clearly when he himself had gone through that training. It had seemed a complete waste of time, but he had wanted to win a place in Key Crew on the Gilgamesh and it had been something they had been looking for. He had spent months bumbling about in orbit, learning how to move in zero gravity, how to step with magnetic boots, acclimatizing to the nausea and the disorientation of such a hostile and inimical environment.

Nobody had mentioned fighting an army of spiders for the survival of the human race, but Karst half-fancied he might have imagined it, day-dreamed it back when he was young and the Gilgamesh project was still just an idea. Surely he had seen himself standing on the hull of a mighty, embattled colony ship, weapon to hand, beating away the alien horde.

Now, in the airlock, his breath loud in his ears and the suit’s confines pressing and leaden, it didn’t seem at all as much fun as he had imagined.

The hatch they were about to exit through was set in the floor, from where he was standing. There would be a vertiginous shift of perspective as they got out, carabinered to one another and trying not to be flung off the ship’s side by the rotating section’s centripetal force. Then they would have to trust to their boots to hold them, progressing along a surface that would constantly try to dislodge them. Things would have been easier, perversely, had they been accelerating or decelerating in deep space, with the inner sense of ‘down’ falling towards the front or the rear of the ship, and the rotating sections stilled, but they were in orbit now, free falling around the planet, and therefore forced to fake their own gravity.

‘Chief!’ one of his team warned. ‘We’re losing air.’

‘Of course we’re—’ Then he stopped, because he hadn’t given the order to open the external doors. They had been standing here on the brink for some time and the words had been reluctant to emerge. Now someone – something – was forcing his hand.

Somewhere on the hatch there must be a pinhole letting out their air. The spiders were out there, right now, trying to claw their way in.

‘Everyone latch down and lock your boots,’ he ordered and, now he was faced with action, the thoughts were coming smoothly and without undue emotional embroidery. ‘You’d better crouch low. I want the outer door opened quick as you like, without the air venting first.’

One of the Tribe confirmed his instructions in his ear, and Karst followed his own advice.

Instead of the steady grinding of the hatch that he expected, someone had obviously taken that ‘quick as you like’ to heart and activated some sort of emergency override, snapping the hatch open within seconds so that the pressurized air around them thundered through the resulting breach like a hammer. Karst felt it raking at him, trying to drag him out with it, to enjoy the vast open vistas of the universe. But his lines and boots held, and he weathered the storm. One of his team was immediately torn loose beside him, yanked halfway through the opening and only saved by her anchoring line. Karst reached out and grabbed her glove, clumsily pulling her back until she was against the subjective floor beside the gaping hole.

He saw some fragments, then: jointed legs and a torn-open something that must have been most of a body caught by the mechanism of the hatch. Beyond…

Beyond were the enemy.

They were in disarray, crawling over one another. Several had been battered away by the decompression, and he hoped that a few had been lost to space, but there were at least three or four dangling out at the end of threads and beginning to climb back up towards the hatch. Karst aimed his gun. It was built into his glove, and was a refreshingly simple piece of kit, overall. Nothing in the airless wastes of vacuum would stop a chemical propellant working if it contained its own oxygen, and the airless void should be a perfect marksman’s paradise, his range limited only by the curve of the Gilgamesh’s hull.

He wanted to say something inspiring or dramatic but, in the end, the sight of the creeping, leg-waving, spasmodically scuttling monsters so horrified him that, ‘Kill the fuckers,’ was all he could manage.

He shot but missed three times, trying to adjust for the surreal perspective and mistaking the distance and size of his quarry, his suit’s targeting system mulish about locking on to the little vermin. Then he caught it, sending one of the beasts that still remained on the hull spinning away. His team were shooting as well, careful and controlled, and the spiders were plainly utterly unprepared for what was happening. Karst saw their angular, leggy bodies being hurled away on all sides, the dead ones dangling straight out from the hull like macabre balloons.

Some of them were returning fire, which gave him a nasty turn. They had some sort of weapons, though the projectiles were slow and bulky compared to the sleek zip of bullets from the human-made guns. For a moment Karst thought that they were throwing stones again, but the missiles were something like ice or glass. They shattered against the armoured suits, causing no damage.

The spiders were unexpectedly resilient, clad in some sort of close-woven armour that had them dancing about under the impact of the bullets without necessarily letting any penetrate, and Karst and his fellows had to hose several of them with shot before something got through.

They exploded quite satisfactorily, though, once they died.

Soon, if there were any enemy survivors, they had fled; Karst paused a moment, reporting back to Lain before taking the big step of putting himself outside on the hull, out before the curtailed horizon of the Gilgamesh.

Then there was nothing for it – so he went.

The heavy EVA suits were proper military technology, although most of the actual military systems Karst would have liked to have accessed were not online or had been removed entirely. After all, the engineers had not needed sophisticated targeting programs when going out to make repairs. Like everything else that survived of the human race, a tyranny of priorities had come into force. Still, the suits were reinforced at the joints, and armoured everywhere else, with servos to help the determined space warrior actually move about in them. They had an extended air supply, recycled waste, controlled temperature and, if the hull sensors had actually been left intact, then Karst would have had a lovely little map of everything around him. As it was, he climbed laboriously through the hatch in a second skin that bulked out his torso and each limb to twice its actual circumference, feeling hot and cramped, sensing the slight shudder as ancient and lovingly maintained servomotors considered each second whether or not they would relinquish the ghost and seize up. Some of the suits still had functioning jet packs to allow for limited manoeuvring while away from the hull, but fuel was at a premium, and Karst had given the order to save it for emergencies. He was unconvinced that using the antiquated, oft-repaired flight packs was not just one step too far towards a death-trap.

His image of his surroundings was the cluttered and narrow view from his faceplate, and a handful of feeds from cameras on his squad-mates’ suits, which he was having difficulty matching up to the actual individuals concerned.

‘Lain, can you send everyone instructions on a formation, and their place in it?’ It felt like admitting defeat, but he did not have the tools that the suit’s inventor had anticipated to hand. ‘I need eyes looking out every way. We’re heading for Shuttle Bay Seven doors. Close this airlock behind us. And the outer door’s compromised somewhere—’

‘It’s not closing,’ came Alpash’s voice. ‘It… something’s gone wrong.’

‘Well…’ and then Karst realized he had nothing much to say to that. He could hardly demand they came out and fixed it right now. ‘Well, seal the inner door until we return. We’re going now.’

Then Lain’s instructions came through: showing them her best guess at a route to take, and a formation for the security team to fall into, eyes focused all around.

‘We’ve got another drone launching,’ she added. ‘I’ll send it far out to look down on you, and patch it into your… fuck.’

‘What?’ Karst demanded immediately.

‘No drone. Just get to the shuttle bay, double-time.’

‘You try fucking double-time in these things.’ But Karst was moving, the point of the arrow, and his team shambled into place, step after hulking metal step along the hull. ‘And let me guess: drone bay after the shuttle, right?’

‘Well done.’

The drone had simply not got out of the bay, hanging tangled in webbing that its sensors could not even detect, its launch hatch still open. Holsten had no idea what sort of access the drone bays gave to the rest of the ship, but Lain was already sending people that way, so presumably that meant the creatures were aboard.

They had camera feeds from Karst and a handful of his people, though by no means all, recording their slogging progress outside on the hull, constantly surveying the ground before them over that truncated horizon.

‘Blind!’ hissed Lain furiously. The network of hull sensors was in pieces, hundreds of maintenance-hours of damage inflicted in just minutes. ‘Where are they, then? Where else?’

Holsten opened his mouth – another chance for a trite and meaningless remark, and then alarms began to go off.

‘Hull breach in cargo,’ Alpash said flatly, and then, with a curious deadness to his tone, ‘That’s a second breach, of course. After the impact earlier.’

‘There’s already a hole in cargo,’ Lain echoed the sentiment, eyes seeking out Holsten’s. ‘They’re probably already inside.’

‘Then why make another hole?’

‘Cargo’s big,’ Alpash said. ‘They must be boring in all over the ship. They don’t need hatches. We…’ His eyes were wide as he looked at Lain beseechingly. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Cargo…’ Holsten thought of those thousands of sleepers, oblivious in their little plastic coffins. He thought of spiders descending upon them, coasting in the gravity-free vacuum towards their prey. He thought of eggs.

Perhaps Lain harboured similar thoughts. ‘Karst!’ she snapped. ‘Karst, we need your people inside.’

‘We’re coming up on the shuttle-bay hatch now,’ Karst reported, as though he hadn’t heard.

‘Karst, they’re inside,’ Lain insisted.

There was a pause, though the clomping progress of the cameras didn’t slow. ‘Get people there from the inside. I’ll deal with this, then we’ll head back in. Or do you want them actually right outside your door?’

‘Karst, cargo is without gravity and atmosphere, I can’t just send—’ Lain started.

‘Let me kill this nest and then we’ll be back,’ Karst spoke over her. ‘We’ll keep a lid on it, don’t worry.’ He sounded maddeningly calm.

Then another transmission came in from aboard the ship, a moment of garbled shouting and screaming… then nothing.

Silence followed. Lain and Alpash and Holsten stared at one another, appalled.

‘Who was that?’ the ancient engineer asked at last. ‘Alpash, what did we…?’

‘I don’t know. I’m trying… Call in, please, call in, all…’

There was a flurry of brief acknowledgements from different groups of the Tribe and reawakened military across the ship, and Holsten could see Alpash checking them off. Even before they had finished someone was shouting, ‘They’re here! Get out, get out. They’re inside!’

‘Confirm your position.’ Alpash’s voice was strained. ‘Lori, confirm your position!’

‘Alpash—’ Lain started.

‘That’s my family,’ the younger engineer said. He was away from his station, suddenly. ‘That’s our living quarters. They’re all in there: my kin, our children.’

‘Alpash, stay at your post!’ Lain ordered him, hand trembling on her stick, but her authority – the leverage of her age and pedigree – was right now just smoke. Alpash had the hatch open and was gone.

‘There they are,’ came Karst’s triumphant shout over the comms, and then: ‘Where are the rest of them?’

Lain’s mouth opened, her eyes dragged irresistibly towards the screens. There was a handful of spiders about the shuttle-bay hatch, caught in the glare of the sun, long, angular shadows cast down the length of the hull. Less, though, than there had been, and perhaps that just meant that the others had gone for easier access points. The chaos over the comms showed that the creatures were establishing beachheads all over the ship.

‘Karst…’ from Lain, surely too quietly for him to respond.

Holsten saw one of the spiders abruptly shatter, torn open by a shot from Karst or one of his team. Then someone shouted, ‘Behind us,’ and the camera views were swinging around, giving wheeling views of the hull and the stars.

‘I’m caught!’ came from someone, and others of the security team were no longer moving. Holsten saw one man, pinned in the camera view of a comrade, fighting something unseen, slapping and pulling at his suit, the drifting net of threads that had ensnared him invisible yet too strong to break.

The spiders were emerging then, racing along the curve of the hull with a speed that laughed at Karst’s plodding progress. Others were steering down from above, where they had been drifting at the end of more thread, climbing up against the outwards force of the rotating section; climbing to where they could leap on Karst and his men.

Karst’s upraised gun/glove, at the corner of his camera, flashed and flared, trying to track the new targets, killing at least one. They saw one of Karst’s people being hit by friendly fire, boots torn off the hull by the impact, falling away from the ship to end up jerking on the end of an unseen line, as an eight-legged monster came inching up towards his helpless, flailing form. Men and women were shouting, shooting, screaming, trying to run away at their leaden, crippled pace.

Karst stumbled back two heavy paces, still shooting, seeing his helmet display record the remaining rounds in his helical magazine. More by luck than judgement, he picked one of the creatures off as it alighted on the woman next to him, spraying freezing pieces of carapace and viscera that rattled as they bounced off him. She was caught in the webbing the little bastards had seeded the hull with, just great loose clouds of the fine stuff that had half his people now completely ensnared.

His ears were full of people shouting: his team, others from inside the ship, even Lain. He tried to remember how to shut down the channels: it was all too loud; he couldn’t think. The thunder of his own hoarse breathing roared over it, like a hyperventilating giant bellowing at each ear.

He saw another of his people fly loose from the hull, cancelling the grip of his boots without anything else to secure him. He just flew away, ascending into the infinite. If his suit had thrusters, they weren’t working now. The luckless man just kept going, receding into the infinite, as though he just could not abide to share the ship with the busy monsters intent on getting inside it.

Another spider landed on the trapped woman beside Karst, just sailing in at the end of a colossal leap, its legs outstretched. He could hear her screaming, and he stumbled forwards, trying to aim at the thing as the woman flailed and bludgeoned at it with her gloved hands.

It was clinging to her, and Karst saw it carefully line up its mouthparts, or some mechanism attached to them, and then hunch forwards, lancing her between the plates of her suit with sudden, irresistible force.

The suit would seal around a puncture, of course, but that would not help against whatever she had been injected with. Karst tried to call up medical information from her suit, but he could not remember how. She had gone still, just swaying limply against the anchor point of her magnetic boots. Whatever it was, it was quick-acting.

He finally managed to turn off all the voices in his head, leaving only his own. There was a moment of blessed calm in which it seemed possible, somehow, that he could regain control of the situation. There would be some magic word, some infinitely efficacious command that a truly gifted leader could give, one that would restore the rightful arrow of evolution and allow humanity to triumph over these aberrations.

Something landed on his back.

7.8 THE WAR INSIDE

Like an ant colony, is Portia’s thought. It is not true, though, just something she tells herself to counter the vastly alien surroundings that weigh upon her.

She comes from a city that is a forest, filled with complex many-sided spaces, and yet the architects of her people have cut even that three-dimensional geography down to their own size, compartmentalizing the vast until it is manageable, controllable. Here, the giants have done the same, making chambers that for them are perhaps a little cramped and constricting, but to Portia the exaggerated scale of it all is frightening, a constant reminder of the sheer size and physical power of the godlike beings that created this place, and whose descendants dwell here still.

Worse is the relentless geometry of it. Portia is used to a city of a thousand angles, a chain of walls and floors and ceilings strung at every possible slant, a world of taut silk that can be taken down and put back up, divided and subdivided and endlessly tailored to suit. The giants must live their lives amongst these rigid, unvarying right angles, entombed between these massive, solid walls. Nothing makes any attempt to mimic nature. Instead, everything is held in the iron hand of that dominating alien aesthetic.

Her peer group is through the savaged shuttle-bay doors, the breach sealed up behind them to minimize pressure loss. She has just had a brief window of radio contact with other groups, a hurried catch-up before the giants change their own frequency and obliterate all the others with their invisible storm. There are six separate peer groups within the great ship now, several of them in a section that had no air of its own. Attempts to coordinate are hopeless. Every troop is on its own.

They encounter the first defenders shortly afterwards: perhaps twenty giants arriving with violent intent before the spiders can set up their large-scale weapons. The vibrations of the enemy’s approach serves as forewarning of an almost absurd degree, and Portia’s band – a dozen of them now – are able to set an ambush. A hastily woven spring trap catches the front-running giants in a mess of poorly constructed webbing – not enough to hold them for long, but enough to drag them to a stop where their fellows will crash into them. They have weapons – not just the lethally swift projectiles of their compatriots outside, but also a kind of focused vibration that runs like mad screaming through every fibre of Portia’s body, shocking all the spiders into motionlessness, and killing one outright.

Then the spiders begin shooting back. The weapons slung beneath their bodies are far slower than bullets, closer to the ancient slingshots Portia’s ancestors used. Their ammunition is three-pronged glass darts, formed to spin in flight. Here, in gravity, their range is relatively short, but the interior of the Gilgamesh does not allow for much long-distance marksmanship anyway. Portia and her peers are, at the very least, extremely good shots, excellent judges of distance and relative motion. Some of the giants wear armour like those outside; most do not.

When the darts draw blood, they snap, tips shearing off and their contents being forced into the curiously elaborate circulatory systems the giants boast, to be hurried about their bodies by their own racing metabolisms. Only a tiny amount is needed for full effect, and the carefully measured concoction works very swiftly, going straight for the brain. Portia watches the giants drop, spasming and going rigid, one by one. The few armoured enemy are dealt with by the more risky approach of direct injection. Portia loses four of her squad and knows that, if the ambush had failed, they might all have died.

Still, their numbers within the ship are growing steadily. Whilst she would rather survive, she has always accepted the reasonable chance that this mission would mean her death.

Her field-chemist is still alive and ready for orders. Portia does not stint. The Messenger said there will be vents to allow circulation of air about the vessel. The precise logistics of keeping the living quarters of an ark ship supplied with breathable air are somewhat beyond Portia’s understanding, but Avrana Kern’s information has been understood to the degree required.

Their hairy bodies sensitive to movement even through their vacuum coating, the spiders quickly track down the faint motion of air from the vents. Out there, Portia knows, there will be armies of giants mustering, no doubt expecting the spiders to come against them. But that is not the plan.

The field-chemist sets up her weapon swiftly, preparing the elegantly crafted mixture to discharge into the air ducts, where it will find its way around the ship.

Move on, Portia orders when she is done. They have plenty more such chemical weapons to put in place. There are a large number of giants on the ship, after all.

When they understood at last what Avrana Kern had been trying to communicate with them; when it became obvious that the path their species travelled would bring them inevitably into collision with a civilization of giant creator-gods, the spiders turned to the past for inspiration, seeking out learning buried since the early days of their history. But, for them, history could be remembered like yesterday. They had never suffered the problem with human records: that so much is lost forever as the grinding wheel of the years groans on. Their distant ancestors, in conjunction with the nanovirus, evolved the ability to pass on learning and experience genetically, direct to their offspring, a vital stepping stone in a species with next to no parental care. So it is that knowledge of far distant times is preserved in great detail, initially passed from parents to their brood, and later distilled and available for any spider to incorporate into mind and genes.

Globally, the spiders have assembled a vast library of experience to draw upon, a facility that has contributed to their swift rise from obscurity to orbit.

Hidden in this arachnid Alexandria are remarkable secrets. For example: generations ago, during the great war with the ants, there were giants that walked briefly upon the green world, crew from the self-same ark ship that Portia has now invaded.

One of those giants was captured and held for many long years. The Understandings of the time did not include the belief that it was sentient, and scientists now twitch and skitter in frustration at what might have been learned had their forebears only tried a little harder to communicate.

However, that is not to say that nothing was learned at all from the captive giant. During its lifetime, and especially after its eventual death, the scholars of the time did their best to examine the creature’s biochemistry and metabolism, comparing it to the small mammals they shared their world with. In their library of first-hand knowledge, the spiders uncovered a great deal of how human biochemistry works.

Armed with that knowledge, and a supply of mice and similar animals as test subjects – not ideal but the best they had – the spiders developed their great last-ditch weapon against the invaders. There was much argument between the chosen representatives of cities and great peer groups, and between them all and Avrana Kern as well. Other solutions and possibilities were pared away until the spiders’ nature and the extremity of the situation left only this one. Even now, Portia and the other assault squads are the first to find out that their solution works, at least for now.

The Gilgamesh’s sensors barely register the concoction as it passes into the ship’s circulation, creeping about the rotating crew section one chamber at a time. There are no overt toxins, no immediately harmful chemicals. Some readouts across the ship begin to record a slight change in the composition of the air, but by then the insidious weapon is already wreaking havoc.

The giant warriors Portia has just defeated have been injected with a concentrated form of the drug. Portia now examines them curiously. She sees their strange, weirdly mobile eyes twitch and jerk, dragged up and about and around by the sight of invisible terrors, as the substance attacks their brains. Everything is going according to plan.

She wants to stay and bind them, but they do not have the time, and she does not know if mere silk could restrain such gigantic monsters. She must hope that the initial incapacity – seen in the mammal test subjects as well – has the intended permanent consequences. It would be inconvenient if the giants somehow recovered.

Portia’s people move on, swift and determined. The substance is harmless to their own physiology, passing over their book-lungs without effect.

Shortly after, they come to a room filled with giants. These are not armed, and they are in several sizes which Portia surmises to be adult and juveniles of various moultings. They are already succumbing to the invisible gas, staggering drunkenly about, collapsing on suddenly fluid legs, or just lying there, staring at sights that exist only in their own minds. There is a strong organic scent in the air, though Portia does realize that many of her victims have soiled themselves.

They check that there is nobody left to fight them, then they move on. There are plenty more giants to conquer.

7.9 LAST STAND

They could hear Karst shouting and screaming for an appallingly long time, his microphone fixed on an open channel. His suit camera gave them blurred glimpses of hull, stars, other struggling figures. Lain was shouting at him in a cracked voice, urging him to get inside the ship, but Karst was past hearing her, instead fighting furiously with something they could not see. From the fumbling of his gloves, glimpsed briefly in the periphery of the image, it looked as though he was trying to pry his own helmet off.

Then abruptly he cut off, and for a moment they thought he had simply ceased transmitting, but his channel remained open, and now they heard a gurgling sound, a wet choking. The wild movement of the camera had ceased, and the star-field drifted past Karst’s view almost peacefully.

‘Oh, no, no, no…’ Lain got out, before a segmented leg arched up from beyond the camera’s view to plant itself on Karst’s faceplate. They only saw a piece of the thing as it crouched on his shoulder, bunching itself for better purchase. A hairy arachnid with a shimmering exoskeleton, and a suggestion of curved fangs within some kind of mask: man’s oldest fear waiting for him here at the outer reach of human expansion, already equipped for space.

There were reports coming in from all across the ship, by then. Teams of engineers were suiting up – lightweight work suits without any of the armour or systems that had done Karst so little good – and heading into the hostile, contested territory of the cargo holds. Others were trying to repel boarders wherever the scuttling creatures had entered. The problem was that, with the hull sensors torn up in so many places, the Gilgamesh could only make a poor guess at precisely where they had broken in.

For bitter minutes Lain tried to coordinate the various groups, some of them out there on Command orders, others just vigilantes from the Tribe, or woken cargo who had been awaiting a replacement suspension chamber.

Then something changed around them. Holsten and Lain exchanged glances, both knowing instantly that something was wrong, but neither able to quite say what. Something ubiquitous, never consciously noted and always taken for granted, had gone away.

And at the last Lain said, ‘Life-support.’

Holsten felt his chest freeze at the very thought. ‘What?’

‘I think…’ She looked at her screens. ‘Air circulation has ceased. The vents have shut off.’

‘Which means—?’

‘Which means don’t do any more breathing than you have to, because we’re suddenly short on oxygen. What the fuck is…?’

‘Lain?’

The old engineer screwed her face up. ‘Vitas? What’s going on?’

‘I’ve shut the air off, Lain.’ There was a curious tone to the scientist’s voice, somewhere between determined and frightened.

Lain’s eyes were fixed on Holsten, trying to take strength from him. ‘Would you care to explain why?’

‘The spiders have released some sort of chemical or biological weapon. I’m segmenting the ship, cutting off areas that haven’t been infected yet.’

‘Cutting off areas that haven’t been infected?’

‘I’m afraid it’s quite widespread,’ Vitas’s voice confirmed almost briskly, like a doctor trying to cover bad news with a smile. ‘I think I can work around those areas and restore a limited air circulation that’s uncontaminated, but for now…’

‘How do you know all this?’ Lain demanded.

‘My assistants in the lab here have all collapsed. They’re suffering some sort of fit. They’re completely oblivious.’ A tiny, swiftly quashed tremor lay behind the words. ‘I myself am in a sealed test chamber. I was working on a biological weapon of my own to win the war, annihilate the species without having to fire a shot. How could we know they’d beat us to it?’

‘I don’t suppose that’s near completion?’ Lain asked, without much hope.

‘I’m close, I think. The Gilgamesh’s records on old Earth zoology are rather incomplete. Lain, we’re going to have to—’

‘Route uncontaminated air,’ the engineer finished. She was hunched over a console, trembling hands stabbing at it in desperate, jagged flurries. She looked older, as though the last hour had loaded another decade on to her shoulders. ‘I’m on it. Holsten, you need to warn our people, get them to put on masks, or fall back to… to… to wherever I’ll tell you in…’

Holsten was already doing his best, fighting the Gilgamesh’s intermittently unreliable interface, calling up each group he could locate on the system. Some did not answer. The spiders’ weapon was spreading invisibly from compartment to compartment even as Vitas and Lain fought to seal it off.

He raised Alpash with a surge of relief. ‘They’re using gas or something—’

‘I know,’ the Tribe engineer confirmed. ‘We’re masked. Won’t work for long, though. This is emergency kit.’ His voice sounded weirdly exhilarated, despite it all.

‘Lain’s preparing a…’ the proper words fell into place just in time ‘…fall-back position. Have you seen any—?’

‘We just shot the fuck out of one bunch of them,’ Alpash confirmed fiercely. It occurred to Holsten that the fight was different for the Tribe. Yes, intellectually he knew that the Gil was the only haven for all mankind, and that his species’ survival depended on it right now, but it was still just a ship to him, a means of crossing from one place to another. To Alpash and his people it was home. ‘Right, well you should fall back to…’ and by that time Lain had prepared a route, working with furious concentration while her breath wheezed in and out between her lips.

‘Vitas?’ the old engineer barked.

‘Still here.’ The bodiless voice sounding no more distant than the scientist’s usual tones.

‘All this compartmentalization is going to hamper your own weapon’s dispersal, I take it?’

Vitas made a curious noise: perhaps it was meant as a laugh, but there was a knife edge of hysteria to sabotage it. ‘I’m… behind enemy lines. I’m cut off, Lain. If I can brew something up, I can get it to the… to them. And I’m close. I’ll poison the lot of them.’

Holsten made contact with another band of fighters, heard a brief cacophonic slice of shouting and screaming, and then lost them. ‘I think you’d better hurry,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Fuck,’ Lain spat. ‘I’ve lost… we’re losing safe areas.’ She bunched her crabbed hands. ‘What’s—?’

‘They’re moving through the ship,’ came Vitas’s ghostly voice. ‘They’re cutting through the doors, the walls, the ducts.’ The shakiness was growing in her tone. ‘Machines, they’re just machines. Machines of a dead technology. That’s all they can be. Biological weapons.’

‘Who the fuck would make giant spiders as biological weapons?’ Lain growled, still recalibrating her sealed areas, sending fresh instructions for Holsten to relay to the rest of the crew.

‘Lain…’

There was something in the scientist’s voice that made the two of them stop.

‘What is it?’ Lain demanded.

There was a long gap into which Lain spoke Vitas’s name several times without response, and then: ‘They’re here. In the lab. They’re here.’

‘You’re safe? Sealed off?’

‘Lain, they’re here,’ and it was as though all the human emotion that Vitas so seldom gave rein to had been saved up for this moment, just to cram into her quivering voice and scream out of every word. ‘They’re here, they’re here, they’re looking at me. Lain, please, send someone. Send help, someone, please. They’re coming towards me, they’re—’ And then a shriek so loud that it cut the transmission into static for a second. ‘They’re on the glass! They’re on the glass! They’re coming through! They’re eating through the glass! Lain! Lain, help me! Please, Lain! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

Holsten never got to know what Vitas was sorry for, and there were no more words. Even over the woman’s screaming, they actually heard the almighty crack as the spiders broke into her test chamber.

Then Vitas’s voice abruptly died away, just a shuddering exhalation left out of all that terrified noise. Lain and Holsten exchanged glances, neither of them finding much to be hopeful about.

‘Alpash,’ the classicist tried. ‘Alpash, report?’

No more words from Alpash. Either the ambusher had become the ambushed, or perhaps the radio wasn’t functioning any more. Like everything else, like their defence of the ship itself, it was falling apart.

The lights were going out all over the Gilgamesh, one by one. The safe zones that Lain set up were compromised just as quickly, or were not as safe as the computers told her. Each band of defenders encountered its final battle, the spiders within the ship becoming only more numerous, more confident.

And in the hold, the tens of thousands who were the balance of the human race slept on, never knowing that the battle for their future was being lost. There were no nightmares in suspension. Holsten wondered if he should envy them. He didn’t, though. Rather face the final moment with open eyes.

‘It’s not looking good.’ It was a rather laboured piece of understatement, an attempt to lighten Lain’s mind just for a moment. Her creased, time-worn face turned to him, and she reached out and clasped his hand with her own.

‘We’ve come so far.’ No indication as to whether she meant the ship or just the two of them.

They each spent a few moments in assessment of the spreading damage, and when they next spoke, it was almost together.

‘I can’t raise anyone,’ from Holsten.

‘I’ve lost integrity in the next chamber,’ from Lain.

Just us left. Or the computers are on the blink again. We lasted too long, in the end. Holsten the classicist felt that he was a man uniquely qualified to look down the road that time had set them all on. What a history! From monkey to mankind, through tool-use, family, community, mastery of the environment around them, competition, war, the ongoing extinction of so many of the species who had shared the planet with them. There had been that fragile pinnacle of the Old Empire then, when they had been like gods, and walked between the stars, and created abominations on planets far from Earth. And killed each other in ways undreamt of by their monkey ancestors.

And then us; the inheritors of a damaged world, reaching for the stars even as the ground died beneath their feet, the human race’s desperate gamble with the ark ships. Ark ship, singular now, as we’ve not heard from the rest. And still they had squabbled and fought, given way to private ambition, to feuding, to civil war. And all that while our enemy, our unknown enemy has grown stronger.

Lain had stalked over to the hatch, her stick clacking on the floor. ‘It’s warm,’ she said softly. ‘They’re outside. They’re cutting.’

‘Masks.’ Holsten had located some, and held one out to her. ‘Remember?’

‘I don’t think we’ll need a private channel any more.’

He had to help her with the straps, and eventually she just sat down, hands trembling before her, looking small and frail and old.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I led us all to this.’

Her hand was in his, cold and almost fleshless; like soft, worn leather over bone.

‘You couldn’t have known. You did what you could. Nobody could have done any better.’ Just comforting platitudes, really. ‘Any weapons in here?’

‘It’s amazing what you don’t plan for, isn’t it?’ something of Lain’s dry humour returning. ‘Use my stick. Squash a spider for me.’

For a moment Holsten thought she was joking, but she proffered him the metal rod, and at last he accepted it, hefting its surprising weight. Was this the sceptre that had kept the nascent society of the Tribe in line, from generation to generation? How many challengers for leadership had Lain beaten down with it, through the ages? It was practically a holy relic.

It was a club. In that sense, it was a quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on.

And how do they meet the world? What does the spider have as its basic tool?

Briefly he entertained the thought, They build. And it was a curiously peaceful image, but then his console sounded, and he almost fell over the stick in lunging for it. A transmission? Someone was alive out there.

For a moment he found himself trying to drag his hand back, thinking that it would be some message from them, some garbled mess of almost-Imperial C within which that inhuman intelligence, malign and undeniable, would be hiding.

‘Lain…?’ came a soft and wavering voice. ‘Lain…? Are you…? Lain…?’

Holsten stared. There was something dreadful about the words, something shuddering, damaged, unformed.

‘Karst,’ Lain identified it. Her eyes were wide.

‘Lain, I’m coming back,’ Karst continued, sounding calmer than he had ever been. ‘I’m coming back in now.’

‘Karst…’

‘It’s all right,’ came the voice of the security chief. ‘It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.’

‘Karst, what happened to you?’ Holsten demanded.

‘It’s fine. I understand now.’

‘But the spiders—’

‘They’re…’ and a long pause, as though Karst was fumbling through the contents of his own brain for the right words. ‘Like us… They’re us. They’re… like us.’

‘Karst—!’

‘We’re coming back in now. All of us.’ And Holsten had the terrifying, irrational thought of a sucked-dry, withered husk within an armoured suit, but still impossibly animate.

‘Holsten,’ Lain clutched at his arm. There was a kind of haze in the air now, a faint chemical fog – not the killer weapon of the spiders, but whatever was eating away the hatch.

Then there was a hole near its lower edge, and something was coming through.

For a moment they regarded one another: two scions of ancient tree-dwelling ancestors with large eyes and inquisitive minds.

Holsten hefted Lain’s stick. The spider was huge, but only huge for a spider. He could smash it. He could sunder that hairy shell and scatter pieces of its crooked legs. He could be human in that last moment. He could exalt in his ability to destroy.

But there were more of them crawling through the breach, and he was old, and Lain was older now, and he sought that other human quality, so scarce of late, and put his arms around her, holding the woman as tightly to him as he dared, the stick clattering to the floor.

‘Lain…’ came Karst’s ghostly voice. ‘Mason…’ and then, ‘Come on, pick up the pace,’ to his own people. ‘Cut yourself free if you’re stuck.’ And the spark of impatience there was Karst’s, through and through, despite his newfound tranquillity.

The spiders spread out a little, those huge saucer eyes fixed on the two of them from behind the clear masks the creatures were wearing. Meeting that alien gaze was a shock of contact Holsten had only known before in confronting his own kind.

He saw one of the creatures’ rear legs bunch and tense.

The spiders leapt, and then it was over.

7.10 THE QUALITY OF MERCY

The shuttle seems to take forever to fall from the clear blue sky.

There is quite a crowd gathered here, on a cleared field beyond the edge of the Great Nest district of Seven Trees City. On the ground and in the surrounding trees and silk structures, thousands of spiders are clustered close and waiting. Some are frightened, some are exhilarated, some are less than well informed regarding what precisely is about to happen.

There are several dozen seeing-eye colonies, too, and these capture and send images to chromatopore screens across the green world – to be viewed by millions of spiders, to be pored over by stomatopods beneath the waves, to be gazed at with varying degrees of incomprehension by a number of other species who stand close to the brink of sentience. Even the Spitters – the neo-Scytodes on their wilderness reservations – may see images of this moment.

History is being made. Moreover, history is beginning: a new era.

Doctor Avrana Kern watches, omnipresent, as her children prepare themselves. She is still not convinced, but so many millennia of cynicism will take time to wash away.

We should have destroyed them, is her persistent thought, but then, and despite the dispersed form she currently inhabits, she is only human.

Her surviving files on human neurochemistry, together with the spiders’ own investigations of their long-ago captive, have wrought this. She has not been its prime mover, though. The spiders themselves argued long and hard over how to respond to the long-awaited invaders, discounting her advice more than following it. They were aware of the stakes. They accepted her assessment of the path the humans would follow, if given free rein over the planet. Genocide – of other species and of their own – was ever a tool in the human kit.

The spiders have been responsible for a few extinctions along the way, too, but their early history with the ants has led them down a different road. They have seen the way of destruction, but they have seen the way the ants made use of the world, too. Everything can be a tool. Everything is useful. They never did wipe out the Spitters, just as they never exterminated the ants themselves, a decision that later would become the basis of their burgeoning technology.

Faced with the arrival of humanity, the creator-species, the giants of legend, the spiders’ thought was not How can we destroy them? but How can we trap them? How can we use them?

What is the barrier between us that makes them want to destroy us?

The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.

They have long known that, within their own bodies and in other species across their planet, there is a message. In ancient times, when they fought the plague, they recognized this as something distinct from their own genetic code, and took it to be the work of the Messenger. In a manner of speaking they were correct. Long ago, they isolated the nanovirus in their systems.

It had not escaped their notice that creatures formed like the giants – mice and similar vertebrates seeded across their world – did not carry the nanovirus, and so lacked a commonality that seemed to bind the spiders to each other and to other arthropod species. Mice were just animals. There seemed no possibility of them ever becoming anything else. Compared to them, the Paussid beetles – or a dozen other similar creatures – were practically bursting with potential.

The spiders have worked long and hard to craft and breed a variant of the nanovirus that attacks mammalian neurology – not the full virus in all its complexity but a simple, single-purpose tool that is virulent, transmissible, inheritable and irreversible. Those parts of the nanovirus that would bolster evolution have been stripped out – too complex and too little understood – leaving only one of the virus’s base functions intact. It is a pandemic of the mind, tweaked and mutated to rewrite certain very specific parts of the mammal brain.

The very first effect of the nanovirus, when it touched the ancient Portia labiata spiders so many thousands of generations ago, was to turn a species of solitary hunters into a society. Like calls out to like, and those touched by the virus knew their comrades even when they did not have enough cognitive capacity to know themselves.

Kern – and all the rest – watches the shuttle land. Up on the Gilgamesh, orbiting a hundred kilometres beyond the equatorial web and its space elevators, there are many humans, all infected, and thousands still sleeping who will need to have the virus introduced to them. That task will take a long time, but then this landing is the first step towards integration, and that will also take a long time.

Even within the spiders, the nanovirus has fought a long battle against ingrained habits of cannibalism and spouse-slaying. Its notable success has been mostly within-species, though. Portiids have always been hunters, and so pan-specific empathy would have crippled them. This was the true test of their biochemical ingenuity. The spiders have done their best, conducting what tests they can on lesser mammals, but only after Portia and her peers had taken control of the ark ship and its crew could the truth be known.

The task was not just to take a cut-down version of the virus and reconfigure it so as to attack a mammal brain: difficult enough on its own, but essentially useless. The real difficulty for that legion of spider scientists, working over generations and each inheriting the undiluted learning of the last, was to engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to that similarity. Kinship at the submicrobial level, so that one of the Gilgamesh’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children.

Once the shuttle has landed, the spiders press closer, a seething, hairy greyish tide of legs and fangs and staring, lidless eyes. Kern watches the hatch open, and the first humans appear.

There is a handful of them only. This is, in itself, an experiment simply to see if the nanovirus fragment has produced the desired effect.

They step down among the tide of spiders, whose hard, bristly bodies bump against them. There is no evident revulsion, no sudden panic. The humans, to Kern’s reconfigured eyes, seem entirely at ease. One even puts her hand out, letting it brush across the thronging backs. The virus in them is telling them all, This is us; they are like us. It tells the spiders the same, that crippled fragment of virus calling out to its more complete cousins: We are like you.

And Kern guesses, then, that the spiders’ meddling might go further than they had thought. If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?

Probably, thinks Kern sourly. She wants to discuss it with Fabian, but even her faithful acolyte has crept out into the sunlight to watch this first-hand.

At the shuttle’s hatch, Portia steps out after the humans, along with some of her peer group. The enormity of what she has played a part in is mostly lost on her. She is glad to be alive: many of her fellows are not so lucky. The cost of bringing the human race around to their point of view has been high.

But worth it, Bianca had assured her, when she aired that thought. After this day, who knows what we may accomplish

together? They are responsible for our being here, after all. We are their children, though until now they did not know us.

Amongst the humans is one who Portia had thought was injured or ill, but now understands to be simply at the end of her long giant’s life. Another, a male, has carried her from the shuttle and laid her on the ground, with the spiders forming a curious, jostling but respectful circle around them. Portia sees the ailing human’s hands clench at the ground, gripping the grass. She stares up at the blue sky with those strange, narrow eyes – but eyes in which Portia can find a commonality, now that the bond of the nanovirus runs both ways.

She is dying, the old human – the oldest human there ever was, if Kern has translated that correctly. But she is dying on a world that will become her people’s world: that her people will share with its other people. Portia cannot be sure, but she thinks this old human is content with that.