Nemesis (59 page)

Ryan edged closer, blade swishing, shield held close. Will watched him and at the same time tried not to be distracted by the tight clarity of the vision. The longer it held, the more convinced he became that the swarm wanted to use his own bias for human experiences against him. He knew he needed to spread his attention. He reached for the walls of his perception and pushed.

As his mind stretched outwards, he belatedly noticed the swarm had quietly pulled its drones away from the planet to a safe distance. In doing so, however, they’d abandoned their nestship. Will seized the opportunity. He reached up from the planet, swamped Nelson’s hold on the
Ariel Two
and fired on the derelict. He took a leaf out of Ann’s book and targeted its primary power couplings. The sky flared white and Snakepit acquired a rather ugly new moon.

At the same time, Will’s sword slashed down, smashing Ryan’s shield to pieces in a single stroke. The young hero lay in the dust, scrabbling backwards. With the enemy’s nestship dead, Will had control over the orbital arena. In human terms, the fight would have been over. Except, of course, the swarm had obviously chosen to leave the hulk exposed.

‘Is that enough?’ said Will. ‘Do you need more proof?’

The Ryan-thing sneered at him. ‘We’re just getting started.’

It took advantage of his focus on orbital dominance to force a genetic change in Snakepit’s tunnel tissue at key sites, including the remaining defensive nodes. Will moved to block and found himself fighting another battle over the planet’s communication network as soon as his grip on the starship loosened. Before he could blink, Ryan had a sword in each hand and was leaping to the offensive. Will found himself countering a flurry of rapid blows.

He grunted under the strain and the arena shattered into a nightmare mishmash of tactical displays. His subminds bombarded him with global maps, molecular diagrams and ecological webs. While Will struggled to absorb it all, the swarm mobilised armies of local fauna and had them descend on his area of tunnel control, carrying waves of tailored fungal disease. When Will tried to lock down the fauna, the entire planet went into spasm.

Pain shot through his head. The cathedral-metaphor snapped back, only to shear and warp like twisted rubber. The Ryan-thing doubled in size. Will found himself fighting not a man but a monster like something out of an old passive vid. Sword-arms erupted out of its sides. Its skin took on a hideous grey hue. Only the youth’s grinning face remained human.

Will knew then that he didn’t stand a chance of beating the mutants on their terms. No wonder the swarm had been so confident. He lacked experience attacking on multiple complexity scales simultaneously and barely knew his way around the planet, even with the curator’s help. At this rate, the best he’d manage was a delaying action to give Ann time to leave and burn Snakepit from space.

He had to look to his own strengths and change the terms of the fight. Will knew his cellular systems inside out while the mutants’ conscious grasp of their emergent biology was sketchy at best. That had to count for something. So while the swarm pummelled him over the big-picture items, Will hit them where he knew they’d hurt.

He summoned genetic tailoring tools and synthesised Earth-style viruses the mutants could never have seen, targeting sequences in their co-opted human genes. Then he sacrificed tunnel mass like crazy to scale the weapon up and poured it into areas of mutant control by the ton.

‘Have some Ebola,’ he growled while he juggled the concepts flashing past.

A knife flew from his hand and embedded itself in the Ryan-monster’s neck. It roared as black blood fountained out. Mutant tissue in the tunnel system went into immunological shock everywhere Will’s viruses had been inserted. While the swarm scrambled to combat and repair what he’d done, Will followed up with a deluge of Creutzfeldt-Jakob prions – a direct punch to their borrowed human nervous systems. Another knife landed. This time in the monster’s eye.

While the Ryan-thing screamed, Will tried an attack on a different scale. Using the Transcended tools for inorganic manipulation, he threw together a bioceramic battlebot template. He cobbled bits from the
Ariel Two
’s Fecund historical database and merged it with data from the planet’s own library of worker drone designs. Then he fired the template out across the world via Snakepit’s vast nervous system to every tactically viable site he could find.

In a hundred million locations across the planet, bulbs started crusting up from tunnel floors at a fantastic rate. Real organisms took a long time to assemble. Disposable robots, Will knew well, could be made fast, and nobody had been better at that than the Fecund. Snakepit wilted from the outrageous energy expenditure he was clocking up. Tunnel temperatures jumped a degree and a half planet-wide. Groans of stressed tunnel fabric drove bird analogues everywhere into panic. But Will pressed ahead, driving for the advantage.

While he struggled to hold his plan together, the mutants counter-punched by sawing away at the maze of links that tied his subminds into the planet’s processing substrate. Before Will even noticed what was happening, his grasp of the planet’s intricate biology had faltered. Previously concise concepts smudged back into incomprehensible alien gibberish. Visualisations that had been clear and familiar became walls full of mind-strangling glyphs he could barely look at, let alone read.

‘You are not at home here,’ the swarm snarled as its weapons slashed the musty air. ‘You are a fake and you will die.’

Will looked down to find his sword-arm gone. It lay quivering on the floor beside him. He backed away as the half-blind monster stomped forward. Will squeezed what was left of his attention onto his solution, willing it to rise, ready or not.

Organically manufactured monsters – nightmare things halfway between lobsters and giants – rose from the soil all over Snakepit. About a third weren’t finished and sagged wetly back into the ground. The rest marched into battle.

And in shadowed arena of Snakepit’s defensive dreamscape, a thousand flagstones cracked at once. A host of undead warriors began to claw their way out of the ground on every side, hissing and clattering as they came, battered swords in their skeletal hands.

Biology, Will still struggled with. Robots, however, were easy. He knew what to do with robots. Artificial shit-kickers marched on every single mutant landing site simultaneously. All across the globe, he found the same picture – a gang of armed mutants huddled around a biomembrane interface site, with a single co-opted human host glued directly into the processing substrate.

With a single will, the mutants sprang up to fight, but they couldn’t move fast enough. Will’s machines descended upon them, their dead ceramic limbs scything wildly. They were just as indifferent to the mutants’ subtle bio-assaults as they were to gunfire. The battle became a bloody war of attrition, stacked heavily in Will’s favour.

The swarm fell back. Landing pods they’d dropped across the planet rose up on jointed legs, uncoupling from entrances cut into the tunnel walls. Weapons on their hulls sprayed gouts of flame. But Will’s army had the edge by then. His creations clambered up through the breached tunnel walls, smashing at the pods, ripping away leg-joints and ceramic hull plates until only pieces remained.

When the battle ended, a curious silence fell over the world. Will’s grasp of the alien technology began to flow back into him like a returning tide, and with it understanding of the full implications of his achievement.

Will had
asserted primacy
. He’d won the planet and everything on it, including those Nems that remained, their nucleic code, their communications protocols and everything else that comprised them. With the knowledge he now held, he could keep the Nems away from Snakepit indefinitely. But he could do better than that. Now he had the means to prevent the attack on Earth altogether, providing he could reach the Tiwanaku swarm in time.

Snakepit sighed to itself. He could feel the curator’s identity inside him, savouring her victory and gearing up to incorporate him permanently into her bosom. On the floor of Snakepit’s temple of combat, the monster lay in pieces. The war-dead clattered to the ground. Trumpets fanfared as the priestess descended to meet her conquering hero.

Will paused to gather his addled thoughts, refocused his attention and with no small amount of guilt began the delicate process of backtracking his way out of Snakepit’s systems as fast as he could. His rival might be vanquished, but Will had no intention of going ahead with a marriage that would permanently turn him into an alien god if he could possibly help it. With what he knew now, it was more important than ever that he make it off the planet in one piece.

18.3: ANN

Ann heard the soldiers before she saw them. Will’s shadow reacted inside her, ramping up her body’s defences and preparing for a fight.

[
No,
] said Ann. [
This is my body and we’re doing things my way. No more mindless violence.
]

The smart-cells paused, wary of her choice, but backed down.

She raised her hands and let the soldiers come to her. There were eight of them jogging through the scarlet bracken with weapons drawn, visors alight with tactical data. She watched their surprise as they took in the sight of her standing naked and alone. They crabbed forward, taking up positions all around her, bio-bullet weapons aimed.

[
Do I have to worry about those guns?
] Ann asked her shadow.

[
Not any more. You’re the proud owner of the cellular equivalent of Nem-shielding.
]

Ann smiled inwardly while making sure the soldiers caught not a whiff of it.

‘Get down on the ground!’ the squad lead shouted.

She recognised him. ‘I know you,’ she said as she knelt. ‘It’s Sergeant Hoxer, isn’t it? You came with me on my training visit to the surface.’

‘I said,
get down
!’

Ann lay face down on Snakepit’s whisky-scented soil while they cuffed her hands behind her back.

[
Can we break these restraints?
] she asked inwardly.

[
It’s as easy as pulling. I’ll give you strength when you need it.
]

‘Where’s Will Monet?’ Hoxer barked.

‘He’s dead, Sergeant,’ said Ann. ‘Didn’t you wonder why all the Nems vanished? Will integrated himself into the planet to save us.’

‘If he’s dead, where’s the body?’

‘In a hole in the wall,’ said Ann.

Hoxer adjusted his aim. ‘Where
exactly
?’

‘About four metres up, two klicks down the tunnel. But he’s grown into the planet. The hole’s probably sealed by now.’

Is that right?’ said Hoxer. ‘How convenient. If he’s there, we’ll find him. If not, you’ll have to do better.’

‘Did you actually hear me?’ said Ann. ‘Will just saved all of our lives.’

Hoxer didn’t look remotely interested. ‘Denchak, Gupta – you two down the tunnel. Check her story out. Alert me the
moment
anything weird happens. We’ll maintain position here.’

Two of the Spatials nodded and set out, only to freeze three seconds later when a deep, unearthly groaning filled the tunnel. The very walls seemed to creak. Both men turned back to look at their sergeant.

‘Sir. Does that count?’

The sound came again, louder this time. The vegetation around them sagged like a field of deflating balloons. A few of the lighting bulbs dropped from the ceiling like luminous rain, splashing open when they hit the floor. The warm fluid inside faded as it died. Hoxer’s team pointed guns at the walls and ceiling, scanning for targets but finding none.

‘Ludik,’ said Hoxer. ‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’ Doubt had crept into the sergeant’s blocky features.

‘I have no idea,’ said Ann, ‘but I recommend that we leave quickly. Will may be encountering resistance from the planet.’

The ground shuddered. In a dozen spots dotted along the tubular meadow, dome-shaped growths had started to push through the pale soil. Thick, grey membranes with purple veins bubbled upwards with things moving inside – frightening chitinous things.

Hoxer stared at them, wide-eyed. ‘Okay. We’re moving out.’ He slapped a comm on his chest. ‘Requesting immediate lifter support. Rendezvous at the closest exit to our current position.’

‘Copy that,’ said the comm. ‘Your positions are locked. We’re coming in. We’ll be at gate nineteen before you get there.’

Hoxer gestured at Ann with his gun. ‘Move,’ he said.

Ann hurried with them up the tunnel while the landscape evolved. A garden of monsters grew around them. Pincers sloshed back and forth inside the amniotic sacs. Black compound eyes tracked them as they passed.

Ann regarded the creatures with a kind of nervous excitement. Did they belong to Snakepit, or Will, or both? They looked a little too much like Fecund repair scorpions for it to be a coincidence, but what did she know?

The birthing blisters grew from two feet high to six, to ten. The Spatials broke into a sprint. Ahead of them hung a ladder like the one Ann had come down. Denchak and Gupta went up first.

‘You next,’ said Hoxer. He released her cuffs while keeping an anxious eye on the stirring monstrosities. ‘Make it snappy.’

She was halfway up the ladder when the first of the pods began to split. A damp creature unfolded itself and staggered out like the world’s ugliest newborn calf.

[
Is this Will’s work?
] she asked her shadow.

[
I really have no idea,
] it told her. [
We don’t have a direct link any more. Feels like the sort of thing I might do, though.
]

The air beyond the exit door was a freezing surprise against her bare skin. The sunlight stung her eyes. She winced.

[
Aren’t I supposed to be invulnerable now?
] she said.

[
Sorry. Still getting used to this.
]

Her eyes immediately compensated for the light level.

Around her, a surreal landscape of undulating tunnel-backs and plant-choked interstices spread to the horizon. The open docking pod of a mini-lifter hung to her right, hovering a foot above the black corrugated ground. Overhead hovered the huge, grey envelope of the lifter, its integument rippling slowly like an inverted wheat-field.