Children of Time Page 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I still do not understand, she confesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3.9 FIRST CONTACT

  They were down.

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

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

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

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

  ‘H-hh . . .’ he managed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Biohazard?’ Nessel asked him.

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

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

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

  ‘You’re volunteering?’ Scoles asked acidly.

  ‘Sure I am.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘But is it safe?’ Lain pressed.

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

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

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

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