Nemesis (62 page)

Will forced a change in his mental distribution, narrowing his presence rather than reducing it. He pushed himself like a root deep into the soil of the planet’s memory, looking for the core of its identity.

Without sentient company, Snakepit was still effectively an SAP, if a mind-bogglingly complex one. If he could find the core incentive structure that had driven the biosphere’s growth, maybe he could reshape it. He could insert some incentives of his own and convince the planet that it
wanted
to let him go – that he wasn’t good enough on his own. In essence, he’d give the place some higher standards.

The curator tugged at his sleeves, becoming vaporous and indistinct as Will sank deeper into Snakepit’s mental structure. Then, as Will reached the threshold where even the curator couldn’t go, she reached out to him one last time.

‘Don’t go down there,’ she begged. ‘Don’t change me. Please.’

She came apart into coloured mist as Will held tight to his control and slid below the horizon of her awareness, into her defining depths.

As museum faded from sight, the vast interlocking machinery Will had seen when he first touched the planet’s mind swam back into focus. This was the world’s true shape, he knew, or as close as his mind could model it. The byzantine detailing of the place didn’t faze him any more, though. Now he understood it. Above him, huge wheels turned, representing higher levels of complexity – whole ecosystems and animal societies. Below him, the cogs and levers grew ever smaller, vanishing into minuscule obscurity. Somewhere down there was a representation of every leaf and vein in Snakepit’s intricately ordered biosphere.

Now that his mind could parse it all, what surprised Will was how similar each level of the structure was. Features of Snakepit’s basic architecture were reproduced at every level, distorted like faces in a mirror-maze. There was some sense in which the entire structure was symmetrical from top to bottom. That repetition also told Will everything he needed to know about where to look for the planet’s root controls.

First, he chased upwards through the hierarchy, towards the planet-spanning intelligence his integration had fostered. As he neared it, he watched arcs of bright emotion welling up from the depths and splashing across the underside of Snakepit’s mind like bolts of pale lightning.

This is what panic looks like
, he thought.
This is fear
. Fresh guilt tugged at him. Once again, Amy was in the torture chair, only this time he was the one doing the torturing. He reminded himself that the curator wasn’t real, and certainly wasn’t Amy. Before he plugged himself in, the planet hadn’t even been conscious in the human sense. He forced himself to focus and sought out the axle upon which that immense wheel turned. Then he dived down towards whatever engine powered it.

Will chased the driving mechanism through level after level. The lower he went, the weirder the planet-mind’s structure became. Small wheels powered larger ones, in turn propelled by others even tinier. He fell through dense thickets of hyperbolic clockwork – nuggets of convoluted machinery clenched like mechanical fists.

If there had ever been artificial order here, it had been overgrown by millennia of organic adaptation. The tangle of representational contraptions became so tortuous that Will could barely see through it, but for a haze of bright light leaking up from below. He sought out that glowing point, pressing himself towards the centre of the Rube Goldberg forest.

When Will found what he was looking for, he knew it immediately. At the deep, incandescent heart of the labyrinth lay a clear space where a tidy crystalline core of ambition hung, shining like a geometric whorl of neon tubing. Its references sprang from the oldest tunnel tissue on the planet – much of it almost five million years old.

Will exhaled in relief and pulled himself close enough to read the structure. Then he stopped, suddenly cold. Something about the shape below him looked horribly familiar. The tidy interlocking knot was way too simple to have spawned all the complexity that surrounded it. It looked more like a kind of circuit diagram he knew well: an entanglement tether for one end of a quantcomm device. Or a suntap.

Suddenly, Will’s situation felt very wrong. He peered closer, unwilling to believe what he was seeing. But there at the hub of the world’s mind lay an impossible join where the rest of the planet’s motivational engine should have been. The guiding spirit of Snakepit, where all its subtle genius had originated, wasn’t actually here. It had been piped in on waves of gravity distortion.

The pit of Will’s stomach fell away as comprehension dawned. He’d looked for hallmarks of the Transcended and found none. But here at the very heart of the world, hidden even from Snakepit itself, lay all the proof of their complicity he needed.

‘Holy shit,’ he croaked. ‘The League was right.’

He glanced around at the still, silent blizzard of ideas that crowded him on every side. But why? Why build a world like this and hide its origin even from itself? Why make it believe a lie?

It suddenly became obvious that the ‘Founders’, as the curator had thought of them, had never existed. That was why Snakepit had no memory of their passing. The world had been made this way – delusional and devoid of purpose until now. It had been established between waves of intelligent life in this part of the galaxy. Ready for whoever came next.

But why? A gift? What kind of gift arrived anonymously and attacked the person who opened it? Perhaps not a gift, then, but a trap set on an unbelievably long fuse. But even that didn’t make sense. Why go to such lengths to trap the human race when they could have achieved that aim so much more simply? Whatever the agenda, Will no longer trusted it.

He regarded the core structure before him. If he touched it, would it know? Could he afford to make changes here, or would he awaken whatever Transcended intelligence hid at the other end of that tether?

Will began to pull carefully away, like a man stepping back from a tripwire. As he rose up through the planet’s layers of thought, he began shutting down his connections to the planet as fast as he dared. His network of links to Snakepit’s distributed mind fell away like threads of spider silk. Towers of knowledge crumbled inside him. His mind shrank back to a human scale like an ice cube melting under desert heat. He relished ignorance as it overcame him.

As his mind retreated, Will quickly zeroed in on the core of the submind matrix that hosted him and reached for his body. He could see it before him now, lying prone in the alcove and plugged into the world through a billion interlocking hyphae.

Just as his awareness closed on his physical form, reintegration stopped. Will hovered before himself, disembodied and full of dread. For some reason, he could collapse no further than the alcove itself. Something beyond the limits of his extended perception was blocking him.

Then, while he watched, his body sagged apart like warm butter melting in a pan. The world thinned a little. Will’s perceptions flattened out, taking on the plastic edge of artificial memory.

He stared, speechless. Just minutes before, he’d been ready to die this way, but he’d never bargained on having to watch it happen. A sick sense of impotence gripped him. Will scrabbled for the bacteria in the pool, willing the cellular matrix to reconstruct what it had lost. Nothing happened. The body that had been his diffused gently into the brackish water leaving nothing but a pinkish residue on the surface.

Then, slowly at first, Will’s detachment from the planet began to reverse itself just as it had when Snakepit first invaded him. Except this time, Will had a cold certainty that someone else was pulling the strings.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Stop. Please.’

The planet didn’t listen. The spider was drawing him back down towards the centre of the web. Will fought it every step of the way until he found himself hovering before the suntap again. He twisted like a man in a straightjacket, unable to look away. The shape beneath him pulsed with manic light – light that swelled up and overwhelmed him.

19:
OWNERSHIP

19.1: MARK

Citra glared at him, disgust written on her face.

‘What did you do to poor Ash?’

‘I showed him the truth, that’s all,’ said Mark wearily.

Citra huffed at him. ‘I find that difficult to believe.’

‘What do you imagine is happening here?’ said Mark.

She shook her head. ‘It’s a little late to play fantasist, Captain Ruiz. I think we all have a pretty clear idea of what’s going on.’

‘Look!’ Mark snapped. ‘Just tell me what you think’s happening, otherwise we’re going to spend all day talking at cross purposes. At least accuse me of something specific, for crying out loud.’

She folded her arms. ‘Fine. You conspired with Will Monet to push him back into the history books by turning a first-contact situation into a war. With the help of your accomplices, of course. You’ve been planning this since before the mission even set out.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Sam and I have been trying to work against that evil ever since.’

‘And you buy that even though he drugged you,’ said Mark.

‘Don’t think me a fool, Captain,’ she snapped. ‘We both know he did that to save me from what you had planned.’

Will rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand and groaned. He opened a link to the lounge’s wall-screens and played back some footage Ash had sent him of Sam giving a talk for the League. Then he showed her some of Sam’s conversations with Ash. And finally he threw in a memory of his own: Sam telling him how Earth, his favourite
hovel-world
, had to die.

Citra went grey. ‘I find it difficult to believe I’ve been so systematically misled as you suggest. Those videos have undoubtedly been faked.’

‘When would I have done that?’ said Mark. ‘While I was imprisoned by FPP fanatics in New Luxor or when the Flags were torturing me in Britehaven?’

Citra shook her head. ‘You weren’t tortured.’

‘Is that right?’

Mark posted another snippet from his own memories: Venetia going up in flames. Citra’s eyes went wide.

‘You want to check on that?’ he said. ‘You want to go and look at her body in the shuttle to see if she
really
has life-threatening burns? Tell you what – why don’t we agree to get back to Earth as fast as we can and let the evidence speak for itself? Does that sound fair?’

Citra’s eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing would make me happier. However, I doubt that’s where we’re headed.’

Mark sighed. He reached out through his interface to the closest printer and ordered up three sets of plastic restraints, then hesitated before setting the job running. Sam had been the source of the problems on the
Gulliver
and now Sam wasn’t conscious. Mark still didn’t believe that either Citra or Ash had any malice in them. Maybe there was a better way to handle this – one that allowed for a little trust.

‘Okay, here’s what I want you to do,’ he said nervously. ‘Take that gun over there and keep Ash covered to stop him hitting Sam again. I presume that’s something you actually want. Can you do that? Or am I trying to rope you into a conspiracy to destroy Earth by keeping Sam’s face in one piece?’

Citra peered at him, hatred crackling from her gaze. ‘I can do that,’ she said at last.

‘Great,’ said Mark. ‘Sam’s life may depend on you. You know what Ash is capable of. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He left quickly, before she could reach for the weapon idly rotating in the air.

Mark struggled to not look back as he departed. He took the docking pod up through the mesohull to the shuttle and helped Zoe and Venetia down to the
Gulliver
’s med-bay. It took for ever and his guts churned with anxiety the entire time. His gambit to gain Citra’s confidence hinged on his having read the situation correctly. But Mark knew he wasn’t exactly a genius when it came to people. He half-expected hell to break loose the entire time.

When he finally returned to the lounge, things looked surprisingly unchanged. Ash had drifted across the room. Sam’s body had turned over. There was, perhaps, a little more blood in the air, but not much. Citra’s eyes had gone red from zero-gee tears. He had the lurking sense that maybe she’d tried something in his absence, but given the non-outcome, he didn’t care.

He kept his automatic levelled at Citra as he drifted in.

‘Now drop the weapon, please,’ he said.

She glanced at him bitterly and tossed it across the lounge.

‘How are you doing?’ he said.

‘As well as can be expected,’ she replied tersely.

‘Terrific. Want to help me get Sam to the med-bay?’

‘You mean he’s allowed to move now?’ she said. ‘You waited long enough.’

Mark fought back a retort. ‘His injuries are serious,’ he said evenly, ‘but Venetia’s are worse. Let’s get him some help.’

The two of them angled Sam’s limp body around the corridor’s tight turns. If felt odd to be collaborating with a woman who’d wanted him dead just minutes before, but if he was going to build bridges with Citra, he had to start somewhere. Besides which, he found it quietly satisfying to defeat her warped expectations.

They slid Sam into one of the repair cabinets just as Zoe slid out of another. Blue biopolymer slippers covered her feet.

‘Fixed already?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I have to wear these for a few days, then I’m all good.’

‘How about Venetia?’ said Citra tightly.

Zoe brought up Venetia’s stats and a window onto the repair cabinet where an army of microsurgeons toiled across the landscape of her face, laying tracts of new skin. Citra’s expression filled with horror at the sight of the damage.

‘With luck she’ll be fine, presuming her brain is still okay,’ said Zoe. ‘The biggest problems were down to carbon monoxide inhalation, as it turns out, not the heat.’ Her face became grave. ‘Mark, I have something to show you,’ she added.

‘Ash first,’ said Mark. ‘He’s in a bad way and may still be a risk to us or himself. If we’re going to get out of here intact, I have to help him.’

‘Mark,’ Zoe started. Then she saw the look on his face and exhaled. ‘It’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Do what you need to.’

He hurried back to the lounge, hoping his subcaptain would still be there when he arrived. Ash had bumped up against one of the couches. Other than that, he hadn’t moved. Mark would have felt less worried if his old friend had at least unclenched a little. This stillness spooked him. He tried opening a link to Ash’s interface and found his mind awake but unresponsive.

With the greatest of care, Mark inserted his avatar into Ash’s home node. Ash’s primary metaphor space had once been an immaculate luxury apartment from his native Drexler with a view out across one of the famous covered calderas. Now it was barely a space at all. Mark found himself hanging amid a scrambled mess of impressions – a landscape like a Cubist disaster. Pieces of Ash’s old environment had been mixed up with fragments of Sam’s grinning face and snapshots of the horrors wrought by the Nems. Perspective had vanished along with the furniture. Ash’s avatar floated in the middle of it all, foetal, just like his physical body.

Mark felt a hot tide of empathy. In the end, Ash had been pretending to be a Drexlerite just like he’d been pretending to be an Earther. Both of them suffered through the same erratic childhood. Both were encouraged to cherish their roots without really knowing what that meant. And both had come out of that process desperate for an identity. They just happened to have picked different sides.

‘Are you okay?’ said Mark softly.

The words felt profoundly inadequate. By now, Mark had guessed what Sam must have done. Every roboteer knew about shock keys and felt about them the same way ordinary people felt about physical abuse. Ash’s mind had been violated in the most profound way imaginable. If he never came back to himself, Mark wouldn’t have blamed him.

Ash replied in a surprisingly lucid tone. ‘He broke me,’ he said simply.

‘No,’ said Mark. ‘He didn’t break you. He hurt you. That’s different.’

Ash threw a memory at him. Mark let it come. Suddenly, he felt what it was like to wake up blank and damaged, empty and afraid with chunks of his past missing. He recalled how gentle Sam had been, and how Sam had nursed him back together.

For a while in there, he’d loved Sam like a father. Pathetically. Desperately. With an intensity he’d not known since childhood. And he remembered hating Mark with all his soul, even while he could never completely believe what Sam had told him. Mark saw himself lying on the bridge bunk with a gun pointed at him and realised that Ash could have killed him in that moment. Ash hadn’t because he couldn’t quite bring himself to.

Mark let the foreign emotions power through him, giving them room. Tears squeezed out of his eyes. When he recovered his composure, he took Ash back to that moment in the penitence box when he’d come to understand that they couldn’t hurt him so long as he became something greater than himself. He waited for Ash to play that memory out in real time.

‘I need you back,’ Mark whispered. ‘This ship needs you. The human race needs you. We both have to heal but we need to do it later. Right now we have a job to do.’

Ash’s avatar reluctantly unfurled. The look in his eyes was distant but focused.

‘Then we’d better get on with it, hadn’t we?’ he croaked.

‘Will he be okay?’ Zoe asked from the hatchway.

Mark flipped back to his physical body and nodded. ‘We’re all damaged right now,’ he said. ‘But Ash is strong. He’ll make it. So what did you find?’

Zoe slid into the room with Citra behind her. The biologist looked even sicker and more nauseated than before. Zoe threw a display onto the wall.

‘Sam’s treasure trove of horrors,’ she said. ‘I knew there had to be one, so I went looking. I found the program he used to hack Ash. That was scary enough. But then I found this.’

She opened a package of signal-processing code. On the left hung the causal diagram for their comms system. On the right was the fiendishly complex web of logic that had been jacked into it.

‘When Sam talked to the machines at Tiwanaku, he used this encrypted code to layer content over the top of his message,’ she said. She showed him a data burst full of strategic information – Earth’s strengths and weaknesses, its population centres and response times. ‘Sam basically told the machines how to kill the homeworld.’

‘I …’ said Citra. She swallowed. ‘I believe I may have been party to something awful.’

She spoke in hushed, astonished tones. She sounded almost awed.

‘No more than the rest of us,’ said Mark gently. ‘I should take the helm. We need to get the hell away from here before the Carterites find some way of reaching us. They’re still out there.’

‘Wait a second,’ said Zoe. She launched from the wall and glided over to him. She fixed him with a deep stare. ‘You did great,’ she said. ‘I’m not the kind of woman who needs a hero. But you’re my hero anyway.’

She pulled him in for a kiss. This time, Mark wasn’t as surprised. Instead, he felt the waking of an intensely warm and bright emotion inside him so strong that it threatened to rob his lungs of air. It was, he thought, an all-encompassing feeling of
not-loneliness
– a connection with someone he admired who for some reason also admired him.

Their lips met. Bells rang, followed by a thunder-crack of Casimir-buffers firing and the grating siren of a radiation alert. Mark’s eyes flew open. He checked the sensors.

At the edge of the Carter System, behind a burst of hard light, a spread of alien ships had begun to flicker.

‘The Nems are here,’ he said grimly. ‘It’s end-of-the-world time.’

19.2: ANN

Ann put Parisa down and turned to Lieutenant Koenig – one of the few remaining command deck staff she recognised.

‘You,’ she said. ‘Koenig. Senator Voss has been relieved of command, effective immediately. Give me a status report.’

Koenig stared, her eyes shuttling anxiously back and forth between Ann and the senator. Ann started to lift Voss off the ground a second time.

‘Do we really have to debate this?’ she said.

Voss didn’t comment.

‘The station has been maximally evacuated,’ said Koenig quickly. ‘As many staff as possible have been placed in coma-storage aboard the
Ariel Two
. The rest of us remaining here are volunteers. There just aren’t enough berths for everyone at this time, particularly now that we’ve lost the senator’s shuttle.’

‘What happened?’ said Ann.

‘The swarm stumbled across it during their search,’ said Koenig. ‘It had Nem-cloaking but no active stealth. We were able to get the
Chiyome
out of the way but the scout didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been – there were only three people aboard.’

Three more hosts
, Ann thought.
Three more human minds for the Nems to explore.

‘Frankly, it’s a miracle you escaped that fight intact,’ Koenig added. ‘Snakepit produced an incredible number of drones during that surge. There are nearly ten times as many of them out there now as came in with that nestship.’

Ann shook her head. ‘Then all the new drones sided with the mutant faction? That’s bad.’

Koenig looked confused. ‘
Mutant faction?
’

Ann sighed. The League officers still had no idea what was actually going on. She’d have to do something about that.

‘Tell me about Kuril Najoma,’ she said. ‘Is he still alive?’

It embarrassed her that she’d relied upon Kuril when it might have cost the man his life. She’d caused him nothing but trouble and he’d absorbed it all without comment. She at least owed him a rescue.

‘Give us some credit,’ said Parisa, gently trying to remove Ann’s clenched fingers off her jacket. ‘He’s under arrest here on the station. We weren’t about to give him a berth after what he’d done, but we’re not murderers.’

Ann shot the senator a dry look. ‘We’re all murderers here, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ said Ann. ‘I want Kuril brought to me at once.’ She had her shadow unlock the comms. ‘Now tell me about the Nems. What’s happening?’

Koenig brightened slightly. ‘They’ve fled to the out-system, thank goodness, and appear to be preparing for a return to Tiwanaku.’