Children of Time Read online

‘I reckon it’s still just automatic signals,’ Lain guessed.

  ‘Tell it we’re responding to its distress call.’

  Holsten had already phrased a reply in scholar’s language which read as formally as an academy exercise, then had Lain and the Gilgamesh transcribe the message into the same electronic format the satellite was using.

  The waiting, as the signals danced across those millions of kilometres of void, was soon stretching everybody’s nerves.

  ‘It’s calling itself the Second Brin Sentry Habitat,’ Holsten translated eventually. ‘It’s basically telling us to alter our course to avoid the planet.’ Before Guyen could ask, he added, ‘and it’s not mentioning the distress call now. I think, because we’ve gone in with an answer to whatever it was signalling to the planet, it’s that system we’re interacting with.’

  ‘Well, tell it who we are and tell them we’re coming to help them,’ Guyen instructed him.

  ‘Seriously, I’m not sure—’

  ‘Just do it, Mason.’

  ‘Why would it be signalling elementary maths to the planet?’ Vitas complained to nobody in particular.

  ‘I can see all sorts of systems coming online, I think,’ added her underling at the sensor suite. ‘This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘I’m launching some drones, both for the sat and for the planet,’ Karst announced.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Guyen.

  ‘It doesn’t recognize us,’ Holsten reported, frantically translating the latest message from the satellite, stumbling over its antique grammar. ‘It says we’re not authorized here. It says . . . something about biological hazard.’ And, at the shudder that went through the crew, ‘No, wait, it’s calling us an unauthorized biohazard. It’s . . . I think it’s threatening us.’

  ‘How big is this thing, again?’ Karst demanded.

  ‘A little under twenty metres on its longest axis,’ was the reply from the science team.

  ‘Well, then, bring it on.’

  ‘Karst, this is Old Empire tech,’ Holsten snapped.

  ‘We’ll see what that’s worth when the drones get there.’ As the Gilgamesh was still fighting to slow down, the drones outstripped it rapidly, their own thrust hurrying them towards the planet and its lone sentinel at an acceleration that a manned craft could not have managed without pulping its occupants.

  ‘I have another warning to divert,’ Holsten reported. ‘Look, I think we’re in the same position as with the distress call. Whatever we’re sending it just isn’t being recognized by the system. Probably if we were supposed to be here we’d have the right codes or something.’

  ‘You’re the classicist, so work them out,’ Guyen snapped.

  ‘It’s not like that. It’s not like the Old Empire had a single . . . what, password or something.’

  ‘We have archives of Imperial transmissions, don’t we? So just strip some protocols from those.’

  Holsten sent a glance of mute appeal towards Lain, but she was avoiding his gaze. Without entertaining any hope whatsoever, he began paring ID and greetings codes from those fragments of Old Empire recordings that had survived, and throwing them at random towards the satellite.

  ‘I’ve got signal from the drones on screen,’ Karst reported, and a moment later they were looking at the planet itself. It was still just a glint, barely distinct from the surrounding starfield, even with the best magnification of the drones’ electronic eyes, but they could see it growing. A minute later and Vitas pointed out the tiny pinprick shadow of its moon passing across the planet’s surface.

  ‘Where’s the satellite?’ Guyen demanded.

  ‘Not that you’d see it at this distance, but it’s coming round from the far side, using the planet’s atmosphere and the moon to bounce its signal to us.’

  ‘Drone parties splitting off now,’ Karst reported. ‘Let’s take a proper look at this Brin thing.’

  ‘More warnings. Nothing’s getting through to it,’ Holsten slipped in, aware that by now nobody was really listening to him.

  ‘Karst, remember, no damage to the satellite once you contact,’ Guyen was saying. ‘Whatever tech’s there, we want it in one piece.’

  ‘No problems. And there she is. Starting our run right now.’

  ‘Karst—’

  ‘Relax, Commander. They know what they’re doing.’

  Holsten glanced up to see the drones fixing their aim at a point on the growing green orb’s circumference.

  ‘Look at that colour,’ Vitas breathed.

  ‘Unhealthy,’ Lain agreed.

  ‘No, that’s . . . that’s old Earth colour. Green.’

  ‘This is it,’ one of the engineers whispered. ‘We’re here. We made it.’

  ‘Visual on the satellite,’ Karst announced, highlighting a tiny glint on the screen.

  ‘“This is the Second Brin Sentry Habitat,”’ Holsten read out insistently. ‘“This planet is claimed by the . . .” The, what? Something . . . “Exaltation Program, and any interference is forbidden.”’

  ‘Exaltation what?’ Lain asked sharply.

  ‘I don’t know. I . . .’ Holsten was racking his brains for references, hunting through the ship’s archives. ‘There was something about . . . the Old Empire fell because it descended into sinful ways. You know the myth cycle?’

  A few grunts of confirmation.

  ‘The exaltation of beasts – that was one of the sins of the ancients.’

  Karst let out a yelp of surprise and moments later the transmissions from his satellite-bound drones exploded into static.

  ‘Ah, shit! Everything heading for the satellite just died!’ he bellowed.

  ‘Lain—’ Guyen started.

  ‘Already on it. Last moments of . . .’ A busy silence as she worked. ‘Here, this is the last one to go, by about a second. There – brief power surges – and the other drones are gone. Then this one goes right after. It just blew your drones, Karst.’

  ‘What with? Why would it need a—?’

  ‘Look, that thing could be serious military hardware, for all we know,’ Lain snapped.

  ‘Or it would need to be ready to track and deal with deep-space object impact,’ suggested Vitas. ‘Anti-asteroid lasers, maybe?’

  ‘I’m . . .’ Lain was frowning at the readouts. ‘I’m not sure it did shoot . . . Karst, how open are the drone systems?’

  The security chief swore.

  ‘We are still heading towards it,’ Holsten pointed out. Even as he said this, some of the other drone screens were dying – the machines Karst had been sending planetside. The satellite was snuffing them out the moment it rounded the world enough to obtain line of sight.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Karst demanded, fighting for control, sending his last pair of machines zigzagging towards the planet. A moment later there was a sudden energy spike, a colossal expenditure of power from the satellite, and one of the two surviving machines was gone.

  ‘Now that was a shot,’ Lain confirmed grimly. ‘That atomized the bastard.’

  Karst swore foully as he coded instructions for the last machine, sending it spiralling towards the planet, trying to keep the curve of the horizon between the drone and the satellite.

  ‘Are those weapons a danger to the Gilgamesh?’ Guyen asked, and the room fell silent.

  ‘Probably, yes.’ Vitas sounded unnaturally calm. ‘However, given how much energy we’ve just seen, its ability to use them may be limited.’

  ‘It won’t need a second shot at us,’ Lain said grimly. ‘We’re not going to be able to deviate from this course – not significantly. We’re already decelerating as much as is safe – we have too much momentum. We’re plotted to come into orbit.’

  ‘It’s telling us to leave or it will destroy us,’ Holsten said tonelessly. As the Gilgamesh’s computers adapted, they became quicker at bringing him a comprehensible record of the signal, and he found that he was now reading the reproduction of an ancient script almost fluently. Even bef
ore any demands from Guyen, he was already phrasing his reply: Travellers in distress. Do not initiate hostile action. Civilian transport ship requires assistance. Lain was looking over his shoulder critically as he sent it.

  ‘It is adjusting its positioning,’ from the science team.

  ‘Pointing at us,’ Guyen concluded.

  ‘It’s an inexact comparison, but . . .’ But yes, in the minds of everyone there.

  Holsten could feel his heart hammering madly. Travellers in distress. Do not initiate hostile action. Civilian transport ship requires assistance. But the message wasn’t getting through.

  Guyen opened his mouth to issue some desperate order, but Lain burst out, ‘Send it back its own distress call, for fuck’s sake!’

  Holsten goggled at her for a moment, then let out a cry of some nameless emotion – triumph inextricably mixed with annoyance at not having thought of it himself. Moments later it was done.

  There were some hard minutes, then, waiting to see how the satellite would react, to see if they had been in time. Even as Holsten returned the satellite’s own distress signal to it, the attack could already have been sent leaping across space towards them, fast enough that they would not even know until it struck.

  Finally, Holsten sagged back in his seat with relief. The others were crowding round, staring at his screen, but none of them had the classical education to translate it, until he put them out of their suspense.

  ‘“Please hold for further communication”,’ he told them, ‘or something like that. I think – I hope – it’s gone to wake up something more sophisticated.’

  There was a murmur of conversation behind him, but he was counting the minutes until the next transmission arrived. When the screen filled instantly with code, he was elated for a fraction of a second before letting out a hiss of exasperation. ‘It’s gibberish. It’s just a wall of nonsense. Why is it—?’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ Lain interrupted him. ‘It’s a different sort of signal, that’s all. Gilgamesh has matched the encoding with some stuff in your archives, old man. It’s . . . hah, it’s audio. It’s speech.’

  Everyone was silent once more. Holsten glanced around at a cramped room full of bald men and women, all looking in less than good health, still shivering from the aftereffects of their unthinkably long suspension, and all unable to keep up with the revelations and emotional trauma of their current situation. I’m honestly not sure who’s even still following this. ‘Probably it’s still an automated . . .’ he started, but tailed off, not sure if he even had the energy for the argument.

  ‘Right. Gilgamesh has done his best to decode, based on the fragments in archive,’ Lain reported. ‘Everyone want to hear this?’

  ‘Yes,’ Guyen decided.

  What came to them from the ship’s speakers was hideous: a corroded, static-spiked mess in which a female voice could just be discerned, nothing but isolated words breaking in and out of the interference – words in a language that nobody but Holsten could comprehend. Holsten had been watching the commander’s face, because it had been obvious to him what they would get, and he saw a spasm of rage spike there briefly before being fought down. Oh, that’s not good.

  ‘Mason, translate.’

  ‘Give me time. And if you can clean it up any, Lain . . . ?’

  ‘Already on it,’ she muttered.

  Behind them, the others began speculating cautiously. What had been speaking? Was it merely an automatic message or . . . Vitas was speculating on the Old Empire’s supposed intelligent machines – not just a sophisticated autonomous engine like the Gilgamesh but devices that could think and interact as if they were human. Or more than human.

  Holsten hunched over his console, phones to his ears, listening to the incrementally clearer versions that Lain was scrubbing for him. At first he couldn’t understand more than a few words, having to slow the transmission down and focus on small slices of it, while trying to wrestle with a thoroughly unexpected intonation and pattern of speech. There was a lot of interference, too: a weird, irregular rise and fall of static that kept interfering with the actual message.

  ‘I’ve got the drone into the atmosphere,’ Karst announced abruptly. Everyone had almost forgotten him, as he sent instructions to his one surviving remote, with no idea of whether each refinement to its course would arrive in time to prevent its destruction. When he had the attention of the majority, he added, ‘Who wants to see our new home?’

  The drone’s images were grainy and distorted, a high-altitude scan of a world so green that one of the scientists asked if the picture had been recoloured.

  ‘You’re seeing exactly what the drone’s seeing,’ Karst assured them.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ someone put in. Most others simply stared. It was beyond their experience and their imagination. The Earth that they remembered had not looked like this. Any such verdant explosion had been locked away in the years before the ice, and it never returned after the toxic thaw. They came from a planet immeasurably poorer than this one.

  ‘All right.’ The conversation behind Holsten had grown into a hubbub of speculation, then died away into ennui in the time it had taken him to adjust to the new transmission. ‘Translation, here.’

  He sent it to their screens: The Second Brin Sentry Habitation acknowledges your request for assistance. You are currently on a heading that will bring you to a quarantine planet, and no interference with this planet will be countenanced. Please provide full details of your emergency situation so that habitat systems may analyse and advise. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in any way.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Karst declared, and, ‘Doesn’t know about the last drone, then. I’ve set it so as to try and keep to the far side of the planet from that thing.’

  Mason was still playing back the message, trying to work out what that continuing interference was. Like the distress call, it sounded as though there was some other message hitching a ride along with the satellite’s signal.

  ‘Is it still sending down to the planet?’ he asked Lain.

  ‘It is, but I’ve compensated for that. You shouldn’t be getting . . .’

  ‘Kern’s World?’ Vitas noted. ‘Is that a name?’

  ‘“Kern” and “Brin” are phonetic,’ Holsten admitted. ‘If they’re words, then they’re not in my vocabulary files. What response?’

  ‘Will it understand if we speak to it?’ Guyen pressed.

  ‘I’ll send an encoded message, like before,’ Holsten told him. ‘I . . . whatever it is, it’s not speaking Imperial C the way the textbooks think it should be spoken. Different accent, different culture maybe. I don’t think I could speak to it well enough to be properly understood.’

  ‘Send this.’ Guyen shunted over a block of text for Holsten to translate and encode. We are the ark ship Gilgamesh, carrying five hundred thousand humans in suspension. It is of utmost priority that we are able to establish a presence on your planet. This is a matter of the survival of the human species. We require your assistance in preserving our cargo.

  ‘It’s not going to work.’ Holsten wondered whether Guyen had somehow heard some other message from the satellite, because that wasn’t an appropriate response as far as he was concerned. He sent it off, though, and returned to listening to the previous transmission, recruiting Lain to try and parse out the rider signal, to separate out something comprehensible. And then abruptly he began to hear it, listening between the words, stock-still and gripping his console as the meaning came through to him.

  The Second Brin Sentry Habitation acknowledges your request for assistance. You are currently on a heading that will bring you to a quarantine planet and no interference with this planet will be countenanced. Please provide full details of your emergency situation so that habitat systems may analyse and advise. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in a
ny way.

  Cold so cold so very long waiting waiting why won’t they come what has happened can they all really have gone is there nobody nothing left at all of home so very cold coffin cold coffin cold nothing is working nothing working nothing left Eliza Eliza Eliza why won’t you answer me speak to me put me out of my misery tell me they’re coming tell me they’re going to come and take me wake me warm me from this cold so cold so cold so cold so cold so cold cold cold cold

  ‘Uh . . .’ Mason had kicked his seat back from his position, but the voice still droned and grated in his earphones – absolutely the same voice as the main message’s formal efficiency, but twisted by a terrible despair. ‘We may have a problem . . .’

  ‘New transmission coming through,’ from Lain, even whilst others were demanding to know what Holsten meant.

  ‘What should I do with the drone?’ Karst put in.

  ‘Just sit on it for now. Tell it to keep itself blocked from communications with the habitat,’ Guyen told him. ‘Mason—’

  But Holsten was already working through the new transmission. It was a far shorter, punchier message than the first, but the word stuck in his mind. ‘Habitat’: that was my translation. Did the ancients mean that? They couldn’t really have meant something for someone to live in. Twenty metres across, for however many millennia? No, that can’t possibly . . .

  ‘It says, do we want to speak to Eliza,’ he choked out.

  Inevitably, someone had to ask, ‘Who’s Eliza?’ as though anybody there could have answered the question.

  ‘We do,’ Guyen decided, which was just as well as Holsten had already sent the response.

  Minutes later – the delay shorter each time, as they neared the planet – something new spoke to them.

  Holsten recognized the same voice as before, though considerably clearer, and still with that horrible stream-of-consciousness backing constantly trying to break through. His translation for the others came swiftly. By now he reckoned he must be as fluent in Imperial C as anyone had ever been in post-glacial history.

  He passed it around the others’ screens: Good evening, travellers. I am Eliza Kerns, composite expert system of the Second Brin Sentry Habitat. I’m sorry, but I may have missed the import of some communications that you have already sent to me. Would you please summarize what was said?