The shuttle bay was evacuated around them, the air jealously grabbed back before it could be wasted. The bay doors opened, the clamps released and the rotation of the module gently released the shuttle out into space along a perfectly plotted pitch.
Baltiel had chosen the salt marsh biome for his base because it was more hospitable than the searing inland deserts. Not that their suits didn’t have temperature control, but the less the technology had to work, the longer it would last without maintenance. Of the land biomes it seemed the most populous, too – where an anthropocentric eye could perhaps see evolution striving to produce something more. And that was an illusion, surely. Probably the great fonts of evolutionary activity were elsewhere, and left to their own devices there would have been some great new wave of development from the deep sea, or the floating creatures of the upper atmosphere. But moot, now. We can only observe the present, before we go on to destroy the future. The thought made Baltiel so angry, but unless the commander of the next ship along was also a radical conservationist, how could any of this life have long-term prospects? Oh, surely individual species would survive alongside humans, or be relegated to reserves and zoos, but the ecological history of Earth showed how pitiful such measures were. One of the terraforming programme’s great triumphs was being able to reconstruct whole Earth ecosystems – systems that didn’t exist as anything other than deathbed wounded back on their original planet. Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in. We wrecked it all, back home, Baltiel thought. And by the time we understand Nod we’ll have wrecked it here as well. For a moment he’d had a mad dream of an Earth-mimic Damascus and an alien Nod side by side, co-existing. The spiralling bad news from home had ground down that dream into a kind of bleak nihilism. We will learn what we can and record it. I will be able to say, ‘I walked there.’ They can’t take that from me, no matter who comes. Even the thought of Earth, the political rants, the casualty figures, the spiralling insanity, made his gut clench, but he consciously banished the images and medicated the gut reaction, just like they all were doing these days. I will not let a little global war ruin my moment. And it’s all history anyway, by the time it reaches us.
The shuttle was falling into its pre-planned descent, Rani keeping a close eye in case she needed to intervene. Lortisse had a presence in the shuttle performance system, but it was more out of habit than genuine worry. Lante appeared to be dozing, even as they came into contact with the upper atmosphere. Baltiel himself was staring at the images – views of Nod from the module, from the shuttle: a world of brown, black and red, far from the green-blue jewel of a terraformed New Earth.
A transmission came in from the Aegean and he looked at it, despite everything. What now? But it was gibberish, just strings of alphanumeric characters chopped up to look like language but devoid of meaning.
A practical joke? Because that was something on Senkovi’s file, one of his ways of impressing on lesser people just how clever he was, although this didn’t seem up to his usual standard. He sent a query back.
They were going for a shallow descent to save wear and tear on the shuttle as much as possible, but also so Baltiel could use the ventral cameras to get a new fly-by view of his domain. Below them was the obsidian expanse of the ocean. The wine-dark sea. Too high right now to see anything more, but they would get a good skim over the waves before they crossed past the coast.
‘Hey, boss, no, all fine.’ 8jsgjg r jg81 ufwytmv-i9r f ‘All under control here. All fine. How’s the flight?’ kksn hu9 d i99t k.
‘Disra, what the hell?’ Abruptly there was a very uneasy feeling in the pit of Baltiel’s stomach because he was getting a lot of ghosting nonsense from the Aegean around Senkovi’s signal, multiple separate transmissions from the ship that manifested as sudden intrusions of nonsense audio shutting out the man’s voice channel.
‘It’s . . . Look, boss, don’t panic. I’m going to have to turn it off and on again.’
I made the wrong call. He was in the Nod orbital’s only shuttle and it was committed to the approach now. There was no way he could go and help Senkovi. Although even if we were still sitting back up there in orbit, it’d take the best part of a year with the positions the planets are in right now. ‘Explain,’ he demanded curtly.
‘I’m having some system infiltration issues,’ came Senkovi’s voice, trying and failing to be casual about it. ‘I . . .’ hhs i4 gk; gg 8lubj2 ‘I need to restart the ship’s systems from scratch, boss. I’m really sorry. It’s a bit’ n83.ljsg.n hgikkkd ‘screwed up.’
Baltiel’s insides were screwing themselves up, partly in worry, partly furious that somehow Senkovi had managed to piss on his moment of glory. ‘Explain,’ he repeated, and then, looking at an initial analysis of the nonsense transmissions, ‘Are you being hacked?’
‘No. No, no. Yes.’ Senkovi’s delayed response sounded as though it was somehow funny, whilst simultaneously being horribly serious. ‘Look, I’m sending the others off on the shuttle, just in case things,’ 9wks rj i934mmgpppphhhhheeelllohellohellowhatwhat ‘uh, just in case things go really badly, which they won’t, but it’s all a bit,’ whatwhat95mg; hooqueryquery ‘you know, kind of . . . I’ve said that if things go really badly they should skip over to Nod and throw themselves on your mercy. Not their fault. All mine, okay?’
‘Disra, just tell me what the hell!’ Baltiel had already shouted over the man’s babble. The increasingly organized nature of the other signals was prickling the hairs on his neck. Has he kickstarted the ship into full AI or something?
‘Victim of my own success,’ came Senkovi into a sudden silence as the other transmissions cut off. ‘I’ve clamped down on bandwidth but I can’t keep them bottled up. I’m taking it all offline. All you need to know. Normal service will resume shortly.’
‘That is not all I need to know!’ Baltiel was trying to interrogate the Aegean but, between Senkovi trying to cover himself and whatever chaos was actually going on over there, he wasn’t getting a coherent picture. On the screens in front of him, the Nodan seascape was lost in the shuttle’s rushing progress, and now there was red desert below. According to his diagnostics there were half a dozen net presences in the Aegean’s system, weird undirected processes lurching around trying to access ship systems.
He’d thought his demand must have come too late, but Senkovi obviously caught it before flipping the switch. ‘All right, boss, here’s the lowdown,’ came the reply. ‘I may have failed to contain my experimental subjects properly.’
‘Explain.’
‘I’ve been training them up, teaching them basic communications so they could interact with the equipment on Damascus. They’ll be useful. We’ll need them. Only they’re curious, right? It’s inbuilt with them, and I’ve been using the Rus-Califi viral catalyst to select for that, only I didn’t realize how quickly they’d catch on.’
In the midst of all the man’s justifications, Baltiel suddenly understood what Senkovi meant. ‘Disra, are you talking about your damned octopodes?’