Children of Time Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Seven Trees starts to burn.

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

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

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

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

  3.3 ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

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

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

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

  ‘Hey,’ he tried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Lain—’ Holsten started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Who else is there?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘When he loses.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Monsters can be fought,’ Scoles declared implacably.

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