All Fall Down (2 page)

The windward horizon brightened a little more. The shadows in which the mass brooded deepened.

           
In the inselberg's valley, the darkness increased as the storm worsened, and the entity became more and more a presence in shadows.

Huriko took a step forward, one foot in the valley, the other in the storm. She felt a pull in her stomach. All thought of the storm and the deadly sunrise was whipped away. Slowly, she loosened part of her headscarf, exposing more of her face covering. When they were clear of material, she lifted up the goggles, to look on the thing with her own eyes. The planet was supposed to be sterile. Nothing lived here, except the colonists. There was no water until seventy kilometres into the crust. There was no vegetation, algae, microbes, fungi, eukaryotes. Nothing. And humanity had never discovered alien life. So what was it?

Tentatively, she stepped into the valley and reached out a hand, palm outwards. She pulled her trailing foot in from the storm. The entity didn’t move. Huriko glanced out of the valley towards the horizon line. Maybe there was a little time to spare. She pulled the glove off her outstretched hand, took a deep breath, and put it against the entity, the thing. She touched it and it felt familiar. It didn't move. There was no smell, no movement. It was still. She closed her eyes and in her mind she heard it sing to her; sing to what was inside in her belly.

And when she opened her eyes, vermilion lines appeared on the black pitted surface, surrounding her hand, poisoning the shadows. She froze, locked into a rigid angle of limbs. The song in her head matched the scream of the storm at her back. Her eyes filled with sickly red.

Within seconds there was a soft fall of grey ash onto the valley floor.

The vermilion lines cooled to black. The entity rose silently into the air, out of the valley, stretched its shape horizontally, and raced like the wind into the storm front, towards the dark violet of the opposite horizon.

There was a flash of green as the yellow sun broke the Colony-side horizon line.

And Huriko Maki was no more.

Chapter 2 – Innocent Victims

Doctor Masjid Currie waited by the grav-chair and holographic surgical space. He had much on his mind and wiping this young man's memory and implanting a false one, a memory of moving medical equipment, was a distraction he didn't need.

           
Masjid needed to talk to the Administrator, Daoud, but he hadn't responded to his urgent communiques. Masjid wondered if he was falling out of favour with Daoud. Or maybe just out of usefulness, as his major research approached its final phase. But below the Colony, the situation had changed. The specimens, the twenty three, would keep him useful a while longer. It was a good idea to remain useful around Daoud.

           
While he waited, he reviewed the records he stored outside of the Colony's Artificial Intelligence, in the secret computer network they had built into the Colony decades previously.

           
His records showed this. The procedure on Huriko had worked, but she had become unstable. Her dreams gave her away. Her diary was littered with evidence. Her behaviour had become erratic. Daoud had ordered the experiment terminated before they were exposed.

           
The twenty three specimens, the “pods” they called them, would not now be joined by a twenty fourth specimen grown outside the lab, grown in Huriko's womb.

           
The pods. The mysterious, silent, inactive pods they had created over twenty years ago. Daoud wanted one more, a comparator. A final attempt at the experiment, to make it work. And he'd given over the last of the alien DNA sample he'd brought from – where? Daoud had never said, refused to divulge the information. It was highly adaptable genetic material. The original experiment had worked first time and created twenty three viable embryos. In the nutrient tanks they had turned from blastocysts to black spheres and absorbed all the nutrients Masjid could supply for a week and then. And then... nothing. They reached a size, about half a metre, and stopped absorbing nutrients. Their surfaces hardened and they'd entered some kind of stasis, something connected with the unusual DNA. It certainly had no relation to the human DNA they'd mixed it with. The twenty three had been put in individual cells, separated for safety, where these long decades they'd remained inactive, save for an occasional movement, a roll in a small circle.

           
But now it seemed their long hibernation – gestation, maybe? - might be at an end.

           
Why didn't Daoud respond to his communiques?

The door chimed. Masjid straightened his lab coat. “Enter.”

The door opened. Kiran Ha'doek walked in, dressed in a pilot's suit, a deep brown leather all-in-one, loosely buckled down the front. He was young, this boy. A triangular face, skin still soft, barely midway through his twenties. Hair still thick and dark. “Doctor, I was told to report to you?”

“Come in. You're a pilot?”

           
“Yes, sir.”

“Well, no flying here. I just have some equipment to move. Can I show you where?” Masjid waved his hands at some crates. “I'm getting a little old for this kind of thing.”

Kiran nodded and moved past him. When he was out of Kiran's eye line, Masjid put a dermal patch on a finger and pressed it briefly to the back of Kiran's neck. The pilot gasped and fell to the floor, unconscious.

“I'm so sorry, young man.”

Masjid raised the pilot's body onto the operating couch with a grav-field. He pulled down the holo surgical tool over Kiran's head. While it mapped Kiran's neuronal structure, Masjid looked at a nearby holo display. It showed the planet surface obscured by the oncoming storm. Somewhere in that was Huriko. She would be desperately signalling for help. Poor woman, he thought. She didn't deserve this. If only her gene type hadn't been so compatible.

As he mapped Kiran's memory proteins, Masjid's mind wandered. In all his years, with all of the politicking he'd involved himself in to climb to the top of his profession, all of the professional backstabbing undertaken, he had never once created innocent victims. And now he had helped create two. He looked at the young man in front of him and thought that at least Kiran was only being lied to about his morning's activities.

Masjid glanced again at the holo of stormy static. “I'm so sorry, Huriko,” he said, and switched off the holo of the storm.

Masjid wasn't used to this kind of guilt. And now it was only Daoud's vision of the future which kept Masjid from going to the Central Cadre about the specimens, hidden in the dark, a secret known only to four people. He shook his head and started Kiran's memory wipe and modification.

A light appeared on Administrator Daoud's wrist pad.

The signal had bypassed the Colony's official comms traffic monitoring; Daoud's wrist pad had entangled electron pairs specifically linked to the comms relay. He had established this hidden part of the comms system while the planet was still being scouted and before its AI had grown and achieved sentience. Hiding other things from the AI after its awakening – as it was termed – had been more difficult, and involved what appeared to be a tragic accident. Daoud turned from the observation platform at the Colony's uppermost floor.

Finally, he thought, the time had come.

Sophie arrived at Daoud's office and waited for the door to open.

           
When she entered, he was sitting behind his desk. Ever since she'd met him he'd only ever dressed in black. He was like a slice of night. Only his coffee-skin lightened his aspect: the black hair, black loose top, black trousers, black shoes. He nodded to her, and pressed his right thumb onto his wrist pad and waited a few seconds. “There, we're unmonitored.”

           
“What is it, Sir?”

           
“The herald has arrived.”

           
Sophie raised an eyebrow.

           
“I received the signal just before I asked you here.”

           
“Our information was correct, then.”

           
Daoud nodded. “What of the other thing, the tidying up?”

           
“On the surface now.” Sophie's tone was neutral. “The storm is particularly intense, she won't survive.” There was a silence, which Sophie broke first, “Will that be all?”

           
Daoud stood and walked to a holo-table. He waved his hands through its activation cubes and spoke some words in holoparse, the language used to program holographic computer interfaces and scenarios. “There's something I want to show you.”

           
Sophie frowned and at a gesture from Daoud, walked over to the table, standing opposite him.

           
“You don't remember our first meeting,” Daoud looked into Sophie's eyes.

           
She shook her head, “You know I'm grateful for what you did. Pulling me from the wreckage. I could never have transmitted the signal to Qin Space for the refugees and their proto-AI if you hadn't.”

           
Daoud nodded, and spoke again in holoparse. The table's surface, thus far veneered with a thin, ghostly blue light, coloured and grew a hologram. Now a ship could be seen through breaks in trees, a palm forest, obviously crashed. Wreckage was scattered far and wide, and smoke poured from its engines. The single person cockpit was empty, the cockpit cover missing.

           
The holo moved, and it became apparent from the movement that this was recorded from a headset – it was a live recording from someone's point of view.

           
Sophie watched the holo, her forehead creased.

           
A hand appeared, slowly bringing a palm leaf into place, which obscured the scene. Whoever it was, was deciding which way to go. The view, the person, looked right where palm trunks criss-crossed and became tangled in vines, and to the left where there was a gap just big enough for a person. The person ran for the gap and edged slowly through. The palm trunks were matted and red ants could be seen scurrying in and out of the individual trunk fibres.

           
Sophie looked to Daoud, a question on her face. The light from the holo, a torch light from the person's head, shone off Sophie's platinum hair. Daoud did not look back.

           
Back in the holo and through the palm trunks, the person moved through dense undergrowth, their hands occasionally visible, pushing back stems and leaves. Eventually they reached the clearing and the smouldering ship. A scanning device appeared in the holo, held in the person's right hand. In vibrant blue the ship parts were highlighted, some immediately flashing to red: danger. Technical information surrounded an ion drive, warning of an explosion risk. Behind the ship was a different set of signals in a faded green. The person broke into a jog now, the holo bumping up and down as the person dodged pieces of ship debris and small fires. On the other side of the ship was a torso, clad in the remnants of a deep space pilot's suit, and the remains of its limbs, shattered and pulverised under ship parts, or in the case of one arm, simply missing from the elbow down.

           
The person ran to the injured pilot and as the view closed into the pilot's head and a hand reached out to put two fingers to the neck to check for a pulse, their reflection could be seen in the pilot's navi-goggles: Daoud, younger, face a little fatter.

           
Sophie stopped breathing and watched more intently. She'd known it must have been him, must have been the crash where she'd died, but she had needed to see his face for proof.

           
The holo fingers drew back and the view changed as the holo-Daoud took out the scanner and changed the settings. A weak heartbeat appeared on the scanner's screen, and grew weaker.