Children of Time Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How’s this?’

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

  ‘Was that seriously what you wanted to say?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Back, or she goes first!’ he yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Please listen,’ he tried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Or might be what?’ Nessel prompted him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘He’s crazy,’ the classicist replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I know, I know.’

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

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

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

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