Children of Time (60 page)

He remembered very clearly when he himself had gone through that training. It had seemed a complete waste of time, but he had wanted to win a place in Key Crew on the
Gilgamesh
and it had been something they had been looking for. He had spent months bumbling about in orbit, learning how to move in zero gravity, how to step with magnetic boots, acclimatizing to the nausea and the disorientation of such a hostile and inimical environment.

Nobody had mentioned fighting an army of spiders for the survival of the human race, but Karst half-fancied he might have imagined it, day-dreamed it back when he was young and the
Gilgamesh
project was still just an idea. Surely he had seen himself standing on the hull of a mighty, embattled colony ship, weapon to hand, beating away the alien horde.

Now, in the airlock, his breath loud in his ears and the suit’s confines pressing and leaden, it didn’t seem at all as much fun as he had imagined.

The hatch they were about to exit through was set in the floor, from where he was standing. There would be a vertiginous shift of perspective as they got out, carabinered to one another and trying not to be flung off the ship’s side by the rotating section’s centripetal force. Then they would have to trust to their boots to hold them, progressing along a surface that would constantly try to dislodge them. Things would have been easier, perversely, had they been accelerating or decelerating in deep space, with the inner sense of ‘down’ falling towards the front or the rear of the ship, and the rotating sections stilled, but they were in orbit now, free falling around the planet, and therefore forced to fake their own gravity.

‘Chief!’ one of his team warned. ‘We’re losing air.’

‘Of course we’re—’ Then he stopped, because he hadn’t given the order to open the external doors. They had been standing here on the brink for some time and the words had been reluctant to emerge. Now someone – some
thing
– was forcing his hand.

Somewhere on the hatch there must be a pinhole letting out their air. The spiders were out there, right now, trying to claw their way in.

‘Everyone latch down and lock your boots,’ he ordered and, now he was faced with action, the thoughts were coming smoothly and without undue emotional embroidery. ‘You’d better crouch low. I want the outer door opened quick as you like, without the air venting first.’

One of the Tribe confirmed his instructions in his ear, and Karst followed his own advice.

Instead of the steady grinding of the hatch that he expected, someone had obviously taken that ‘quick as you like’ to heart and activated some sort of emergency override, snapping the hatch open within seconds so that the pressurized air around them thundered through the resulting breach like a hammer. Karst felt it raking at him, trying to drag him out with it, to enjoy the vast open vistas of the universe. But his lines and boots held, and he weathered the storm. One of his team was immediately torn loose beside him, yanked halfway through the opening and only saved by her anchoring line. Karst reached out and grabbed her glove, clumsily pulling her back until she was against the subjective floor beside the gaping hole.

He saw some fragments, then: jointed legs and a torn-open something that must have been most of a body caught by the mechanism of the hatch. Beyond . . .

Beyond were the enemy.

They were in disarray, crawling over one another. Several had been battered away by the decompression, and he hoped that a few had been lost to space, but there were at least three or four dangling out at the end of threads and beginning to climb back up towards the hatch. Karst aimed his gun. It was built into his glove, and was a refreshingly simple piece of kit, overall. Nothing in the airless wastes of vacuum would stop a chemical propellant working if it contained its own oxygen, and the airless void should be a perfect marksman’s paradise, his range limited only by the curve of the
Gilgamesh’
s hull.

He wanted to say something inspiring or dramatic but, in the end, the sight of the creeping, leg-waving, spasmodically scuttling monsters so horrified him that, ‘Kill the fuckers,’ was all he could manage.

He shot but missed three times, trying to adjust for the surreal perspective and mistaking the distance and size of his quarry, his suit’s targeting system mulish about locking on to the little vermin. Then he caught it, sending one of the beasts that still remained on the hull spinning away. His team were shooting as well, careful and controlled, and the spiders were plainly utterly unprepared for what was happening. Karst saw their angular, leggy bodies being hurled away on all sides, the dead ones dangling straight out from the hull like macabre balloons.

Some of them were returning fire, which gave him a nasty turn. They had some sort of weapons, though the projectiles were slow and bulky compared to the sleek zip of bullets from the human-made guns. For a moment Karst thought that they were throwing stones again, but the missiles were something like ice or glass. They shattered against the armoured suits, causing no damage.

The spiders were unexpectedly resilient, clad in some sort of close-woven armour that had them dancing about under the impact of the bullets without necessarily letting any penetrate, and Karst and his fellows had to hose several of them with shot before something got through.

They exploded quite satisfactorily, though, once they died.

Soon, if there were any enemy survivors, they had fled; Karst paused a moment, reporting back to Lain before taking the big step of putting himself outside on the hull, out before the curtailed horizon of the
Gilgamesh
.

Then there was nothing for it – so he went.

The heavy EVA suits were proper military technology, although most of the actual military systems Karst would have liked to have accessed were not online or had been removed entirely. After all, the engineers had not needed sophisticated targeting programs when going out to make repairs. Like everything else that survived of the human race, a tyranny of priorities had come into force. Still, the suits were reinforced at the joints, and armoured everywhere else, with servos to help the determined space warrior actually move about in them. They had an extended air supply, recycled waste, controlled temperature and, if the hull sensors had actually been left intact, then Karst would have had a lovely little map of everything around him. As it was, he climbed laboriously through the hatch in a second skin that bulked out his torso and each limb to twice its actual circumference, feeling hot and cramped, sensing the slight shudder as ancient and lovingly maintained servomotors considered each second whether or not they would relinquish the ghost and seize up. Some of the suits still had functioning jet packs to allow for limited manoeuvring while away from the hull, but fuel was at a premium, and Karst had given the order to save it for emergencies. He was unconvinced that using the antiquated, oft-repaired flight packs was not just one step too far towards a death-trap.

His image of his surroundings was the cluttered and narrow view from his faceplate, and a handful of feeds from cameras on his squad-mates’ suits, which he was having difficulty matching up to the actual individuals concerned.

‘Lain, can you send everyone instructions on a formation, and their place in it?’ It felt like admitting defeat, but he did not have the tools that the suit’s inventor had anticipated to hand. ‘I need eyes looking out every way. We’re heading for Shuttle Bay Seven doors. Close this airlock behind us. And the outer door’s compromised somewhere—’

‘It’s not closing,’ came Alpash’s voice. ‘It . . . something’s gone wrong.’

‘Well . . .’ and then Karst realized he had nothing much to say to that. He could hardly demand they came out and fixed it right now. ‘Well, seal the inner door until we return. We’re going now.’

Then Lain’s instructions came through: showing them her best guess at a route to take, and a formation for the security team to fall into, eyes focused all around.

‘We’ve got another drone launching,’ she added. ‘I’ll send it far out to look down on you, and patch it into your . . . fuck.’

‘What?’ Karst demanded immediately.

‘No drone. Just get to the shuttle bay, double-time.’

‘You try fucking double-time in these things.’ But Karst was moving, the point of the arrow, and his team shambled into place, step after hulking metal step along the hull. ‘And let me guess: drone bay after the shuttle, right?’

‘Well done.’

The drone had simply not got out of the bay, hanging tangled in webbing that its sensors could not even detect, its launch hatch still open. Holsten had no idea what sort of access the drone bays gave to the rest of the ship, but Lain was already sending people that way, so presumably that meant the creatures were aboard.

They had camera feeds from Karst and a handful of his people, though by no means all, recording their slogging progress outside on the hull, constantly surveying the ground before them over that truncated horizon.

‘Blind!’ hissed Lain furiously. The network of hull sensors was in pieces, hundreds of maintenance-hours of damage inflicted in just minutes. ‘Where are they, then? Where else?’

Holsten opened his mouth – another chance for a trite and meaningless remark, and then alarms began to go off.

‘Hull breach in cargo,’ Alpash said flatly, and then, with a curious deadness to his tone, ‘That’s a second breach, of course. After the impact earlier.’

‘There’s already a hole in cargo,’ Lain echoed the sentiment, eyes seeking out Holsten’s. ‘They’re probably already inside.’

‘Then why make another hole?’

‘Cargo’s big,’ Alpash said. ‘They must be boring in all over the ship. They don’t need hatches. We . . .’ His eyes were wide as he looked at Lain beseechingly. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Cargo . . .’ Holsten thought of those thousands of sleepers, oblivious in their little plastic coffins. He thought of spiders descending upon them, coasting in the gravity-free vacuum towards their prey. He thought of eggs.

Perhaps Lain harboured similar thoughts. ‘Karst!’ she snapped. ‘Karst, we need your people inside.’

‘We’re coming up on the shuttle-bay hatch now,’ Karst reported, as though he hadn’t heard.

‘Karst, they’re inside,’ Lain insisted.

There was a pause, though the clomping progress of the cameras didn’t slow. ‘Get people there from the inside. I’ll deal with this, then we’ll head back in. Or do you want them actually right outside your door?’

‘Karst, cargo is without gravity and atmosphere, I can’t just send—’ Lain started.

‘Let me kill this nest and then we’ll be back,’ Karst spoke over her. ‘We’ll keep a lid on it, don’t worry.’ He sounded maddeningly calm.

Then another transmission came in from aboard the ship, a moment of garbled shouting and screaming . . . then nothing.

Silence followed. Lain and Alpash and Holsten stared at one another, appalled.

‘Who was that?’ the ancient engineer asked at last. ‘Alpash, what did we . . . ?’

‘I don’t know. I’m trying . . . Call in, please, call in, all . . .’

There was a flurry of brief acknowledgements from different groups of the Tribe and reawakened military across the ship, and Holsten could see Alpash checking them off. Even before they had finished someone was shouting, ‘They’re here! Get out, get out. They’re inside!’

‘Confirm your position.’ Alpash’s voice was strained. ‘Lori, confirm your position!’

‘Alpash—’ Lain started.

‘That’s my family,’ the younger engineer said. He was away from his station, suddenly. ‘That’s our living quarters. They’re all in there: my kin, our children.’

‘Alpash, stay at your post!’ Lain ordered him, hand trembling on her stick, but her authority – the leverage of her age and pedigree – was right now just smoke. Alpash had the hatch open and was gone.

‘There they are,’ came Karst’s triumphant shout over the comms, and then: ‘Where are the rest of them?’

Lain’s mouth opened, her eyes dragged irresistibly towards the screens. There was a handful of spiders about the shuttle-bay hatch, caught in the glare of the sun, long, angular shadows cast down the length of the hull. Less, though, than there had been, and perhaps that just meant that the others had gone for easier access points. The chaos over the comms showed that the creatures were establishing beachheads all over the ship.

‘Karst . . .’ from Lain, surely too quietly for him to respond.

Holsten saw one of the spiders abruptly shatter, torn open by a shot from Karst or one of his team. Then someone shouted, ‘Behind us,’ and the camera views were swinging around, giving wheeling views of the hull and the stars.

‘I’m caught!’ came from someone, and others of the security team were no longer moving. Holsten saw one man, pinned in the camera view of a comrade, fighting something unseen, slapping and pulling at his suit, the drifting net of threads that had ensnared him invisible yet too strong to break.

The spiders were emerging then, racing along the curve of the hull with a speed that laughed at Karst’s plodding progress. Others were steering down from above, where they had been drifting at the end of more thread, climbing up against the outwards force of the rotating section; climbing to where they could leap on Karst and his men.

Karst’s upraised gun/glove, at the corner of his camera, flashed and flared, trying to track the new targets, killing at least one. They saw one of Karst’s people being hit by friendly fire, boots torn off the hull by the impact, falling away from the ship to end up jerking on the end of an unseen line, as an eight-legged monster came inching up towards his helpless, flailing form. Men and women were shouting, shooting, screaming, trying to run away at their leaden, crippled pace.

Karst stumbled back two heavy paces, still shooting, seeing his helmet display record the remaining rounds in his helical magazine. More by luck than judgement, he picked one of the creatures off as it alighted on the woman next to him, spraying freezing pieces of carapace and viscera that rattled as they bounced off him. She was caught in the webbing the little bastards had seeded the hull with, just great loose clouds of the fine stuff that had half his people now completely ensnared.