What’s that? There is a roaring sound outside and something passes over the ship, a shadow against the pale translucence of the ceiling. Fabian sees a flare from outside, the Lightfoot’s hull shrivelling slightly in a wash of heat. Something metal is coming down, gleaming in the sun, glowing slightly from a hurried re-entry. It is a drone, not his little eye-in-the-sky but one of the space exploration drones they deployed to look at the orbital. For a moment he’d thought that it was another missile come to make an end of them all.
This is more difficult than I’d anticipated. Kern, saying un-Kernish things in an un-Kernish way, but a voice more and more familiar as Fabian receives it.
The drone lands badly, falls over and rolls against one of the starfish, which withers away from the hot metal.
Artifabian, I need . . . please . . . take this and apply directly to the organism. The drone’s casing pops even with the words, and something is ejected, to rattle against the stone of the altiplano. Artifabian leaps on it, a single predatory motion, then patters hurriedly back. Fabian can make out a drill-head, part of the drone’s regular arsenal.
The monster, by that time, is standing right before them. Its faceplate now is a spiral, segmented shell like a centipede at rest, like a single compound eye. It seems to regard them, and Fabian shuffles left and Viola right, trying to split its attention. Zaine is its focus, though, and she is in no physical state to get away from it. Her face is twitching like something caught in a web, her eyes very wide.
Artifabian leaps, driving the drill-piece into the gap already torn in the creature’s outer shell. For a moment it seems a magnificently pointless gesture to Fabian. Then Viola is at a console, having shuffled considerably further than he did, and is receiving data from Kern, or from whoever is sitting in Kern’s place.
A makeshift syringe, that drilclass="underline" containing . . . more of the same. Viola cannot understand it. Artifabian has just injected the creature with a shot of the same organism, the specimen from the orbital.
Just wait, the computer’s voice tells them, still filling out with personality. It’ll be fine. We’re golden, Fabian. There’s so much I need to tell you.
Meshner . . .? Fabian asks timidly.
Partly. I’ve assumed Kern’s functions, or I’m trying to. She put me in here, but none of it runs as easily as she said it would.
And where is Kern? Viola demanded.
She withdrew to the implant, Meshner says. She . . . This is her plan. I’m just doing my part.
What’s it doing? This is Artifabian, translating for Zaine, because the creature has not moved since the robot struck. It might as well be an ungainly statue, one arm outstretched towards nothing.
It’s receiving an ambassador, Meshner tells them. It is hearing a revelation. It’s like religion, really. And if we’re right, it’s not a threat, any more. And just maybe it’s an opportunity.
***
Meshner does his best to keep the Lightfoot in repair over the next several days, enough that none of them starve or run out of power or are forced to trust the vagaries of the local atmosphere. Staying suited is a profound inconvenience for everyone concerned but, even if the parasitic entity is not airborne, nobody wants to risk there being something else with which no diplomatic treaties have been drawn up.
The thing itself, the humanoid thing of rock and shell and slime-mould ooze, has gone but not far. It squats out on the plateau, and the starfish have laboriously crept away from it because they can sense what it is. To Fabian it has a weirdly tragic air, a thing rejected even by its own world. Meshner has explained what Kern did, by then; what she made the parasite understand. And what one sample understands can be instantly assumed by any other colony it comes into contact with. The organism is many, but it is also one, microscopic cells trading encoded understandings like Earth bacteria exchange immunity genes. The parasite will be different going forwards, Meshner claims. It will not seek to come as a devourer, but as a co-traveller. Viola is already considering how such a thing might be of use, how its Understandings might be put in service of the Portiid drive for knowledge and discovery. Fabian has already decided that this is one branch of science she can have sole dominion over, as far as he’s concerned.
And at last the cavalry arrives. One day they glance at the sky above and there is something there, like a second moon. Not the science vessel, nor its military escort; certainly not the Voyager which still lurks in the outer system, too far to ever tender aid. Instead, Meshner introduces his crew to the Profundity of Depth, the curved hull of which shimmers with colours as though it is shouting insults at the planet below. Insults perhaps, but no warheads.
The rescue comes soon after, a spherical vessel tumbling from orbit, unmanned, to scream like a banshee on jets of superheated steam as it hovers over the altiplano, spooling out tendrils to gather up the Lightfoot entire and repatriate it to space rather than just snatch up the individual crew – which, from Meshner’s disembodied point of view, is just as well. They will be kept in strict quarantine for some time, but time is what they have regained now they have escaped being stranded on an inhospitable alien world.
Eventually, the science vessel and its escort arrive, and the Lightfoot crew are reunited with Helena and Portia. The scientists themselves have already lost interest in their new allies. They are going over the orbital with great enthusiasm, dismantling a great clutter of mechanisms for further study. They have come after their scion, Noah, whose work was so rudely interrupted. For them, the fate of the parasite and the alien ambassadors was only ever a sideline, a gambit to keep the warmongers away while they worked, and one that has paid off.
20.
By the time the Voyager finally arrives, after crossing all the great empty reaches between the outer solar system and the shores of Damascus, Helena is at the level of ordering creature comforts from the octopus orbitals’ fabricators: Human and Portiid food constructed from spare molecules; furniture, laboratory equipment. They have a little enclave, the Lightfoot’s structure worked into a section of one of the Homeship globes, the one bubble of air in the great watery necklace Damascus wears. A year and more as guests of the octopuses and they are still not exactly trusted, yet. Whichever shifting alliance of cephalopods considers the alien visitors its business on any given day is doubtless keeping a few protuberant eyes on them, but in the absence of evident betrayal or a political convulsion amongst their hosts, an amicable interspecies peace has slowly incubated. Each day Helena can communicate a little more precisely, refining her software, finding shortcuts in the mess of Old-Empire-derived computer architecture the molluscs use, trusting to her gut feeling and the shifting hues of the bodysuit she had devised.
Portia is the happiest to see the Voyager. She is bored, cooped up on the orbitals. How do you think the octopuses feel? Helena asks her, but Portia is too fractious to show much empathy. She wants new horizons, or why else go to space? She’d even started drumming about going to Nod, setting foot on the alien world. She is the greatest explorer of her people, after all, in her own humble opinion, and it rankles with her that Fabian and Viola beat her to it.
Zaine is also more than happy that the mothership is due. She has healed as best she can by now, but human medical care is not something their hosts ever felt a need to research after Senkovi died, and the relevant Understandings were lost in the attack on the Lightfoot. She has a dozen kinks and imperfectly-healed breaks that have left her on a diet of painkillers and frustration, longing for corrective work in the Voyager’s infirmary.