Nothing between him and the sea rose past his waist. There were slimy, muddy humps and there were rocks worn down by the constant patience of the tides. Between them was a vast network of hollows and channels, a single body of water at high tide, a thousand, thousand separate ponds at low. It was a complex environment, transformed from moment to moment, the ambassador between the ecologies of the depths and those of the dry interior. If there was anywhere Nodan life might have become complex, then surely it was here.
There were fliers overhead, like gulls. Perhaps they would be the seeds of intelligence. They were active predators; he’d seen footage of them swooping down on luckless marsh-dwellers. They had a hydrostatic skeleton like most life on Nod and flew by rapid inflation and deflation of their broad vanes, a process that looked like stop-motion photography, and like they shouldn’t have any business in the air. They were the most aggressively active things on the planet, the airborne lords of Nod.
On the ground there were plenty of things for them to eat, which would likely be the main subject of Baltiel’s studies for the years to come. Hundreds of different lineages of radially-organized creeping and swimming things called the marsh home, from the microscopic to the tortoises that could reach three feet high. Not actual tortoises, of course, or even much like them, but they secreted stony shells and lumbered about on tubular feet, placidly grazing, and the name had stuck. The fliers obviously liked the taste of them, when they could winkle parts of them from their mobile fortresses. Baltiel watched one now, mindlessly plodding over the path he’d taken from the shuttle. It had six legs, exuded and retracted in turn, and six tentacle limbs it used to scrape and gather its harvest of sessile plant-like creatures. As he watched, the thing slowly let out an arm to touch the very ground Baltiel had trodden. Was some part of its limited sensorium encountering an alien chemical, the residue of his boot soles perhaps? The tortoise seemed to spend a lot of time considering the possibility, but then it set off again, sloping down into the next pool in search of sustenance it could understand.
He turned and followed the others into the habitat.
They didn’t seem to feel the same sense of anticlimax. The air was full of their chatter as they checked in with Skai. Baltiel called up the latest on the Aegean and Senkovi’s idiot games. The ship was still dark, Senkovi’s crew were exchanging anxious communiques with Skai’s people about what happened if it didn’t light back up on schedule. We go in and salvage what’s left, was the obvious answer to that. We find Disra’s body. Nobody was saying it; everyone was thinking it.
Lante gave him a grin. She was a heavyset woman, her hair cropped almost to her skull, her skin ashen in the artificial light. Rani was shorter and darker, always slightly dishevelled; even standing there in her suit it showed in the cant of her helmet. Lortisse was a tall man, half a head over his commander, with a dark beard held back by a net to stop it fritzing with his HUD controls. These were Baltiel’s people, his disciples. Their names would appear in the history books, under his own.
Then Rani was frowning. The expression made it look as though she’d just remembered something she meant to pack. Too late to go back for it now.
He sent her a query over their local net and she linked him in to a transmission from Skai.
‘Repeat,’ he instructed, rather than having to replay and catch up.
‘I said we’ve been getting the strangest signal from Earth. It was only on the news channels first, but now it’s on all of them, every frequency.’ Skai’s voice was glitchy with static. ‘One moment it was the usual war stuff, then it’s just this—’
Her image in their HUD froze, the expression of mild puzzlement on her face drawn out and out until it became unsettling.
‘Skai?’ Baltiel pinged her, sending a request to connect, and received a scatter of contradictory responses from the network. The others were casting sidelong glances, trying their own diagnostics and getting nowhere.
For a moment Skai’s image was alive again, skipping straight from mild puzzlement to mid-panic. ‘—od, the system, it . . .’ – stutter, freeze – ‘contact with the shuttle. Han, Han, do you . . .’ A staccato pattern of flashes that hurt the eye, as though some message was being beamed through their pupils to scratch madly at their retinas. ‘—coming down . . . ife support, someone . . . ease.’ They had no visuals now, just that one woman’s voice, torn up by static, far away and getting further. In the background was interference and feedback and, if Baltiel stretched his imagination, terrified screaming. ‘Anyone?’ Skai shouted. ‘Anyone?’ But there was no-one, and a moment later not even her.
Baltiel and his crew stared at each other, not quite processing what had happened. Each of them kept trying to connect to the module, receiving nothing but static, white noise they couldn’t parse.
‘The hell . . .?’ Lante’s was the first human voice to break the quiet. Everything they had heard, they heard via their comms implants, which should have kept them all one happy family even at this distance.
‘Is this one of Senkovi’s jokes or something?’ Lortisse added. He didn’t like Senkovi much.
Rani was tweaking the parameters of their instruments to try and get past whatever was blocking transmissions. Right then, nobody really thought anything had gone wrong, not with anything save communications.
Baltiel took a deep breath, knowing he had to make a command decision but too short of information to know what it should be.
The lights died, first the lambent illumination around them, then the dull red emergency lamps, and then, last of all, the purple glow of the screen Rani was looking into. They were left with a residual amber radiance from everywhere and nowhere; the sunlight from outside leaking a little through the fabric of the habitat.
Baltiel pinged Rani or tried to. He had no sense of signal sent, certainly no confirmation it had been received. He queried his suit. Nothing. He moved, feeling the full weight of all that cumbersome protection. The servos ground at the joints, refusing to assist him.
A white beam flicked on: Rani had an emergency torch and was flashing it around. Baltiel saw her mouth moving and lurched closer.
‘Suit’s dead!’ He read her lips as much as anything, in the shaking light.
‘How much air?’ Lortisse must be half deafening himself. His voice sounded like someone in another room with the door closed.
‘Can’t tell!’ Rani yelled distantly back. ‘All dead.’
Baltiel went to signal that they should have at least eight hours each, but of course there were no comms. In-suit exposure to the outside had only been planned for the few steps between shuttle and habitat, but he was diligent, as were they all. The suits had been topped up, that much he remembered. Except he was feeling dreadfully short of breath already, which was impossible. The pumps should have their own power, should be independent of any failure of the suit’s systems.
Unless they had been explicitly told to shut down. It was theoretically possible, as part of a maintenance cycle. Everything’s shut down. An attack. Nothing’s working except us.
‘Shuttle!’ Lortisse shouted, lurching for the habitat airlock, which stayed resolutely closed. He fumbled for the manual release, winching the near door open, shuddering and gasping until he fell to his knees. Grimly, Baltiel took a leaden step over and found the emergency release on the man’s helmet, cracking it open so that Lortisse exchanged the dying air in his helmet for the slowly dying air of the habitat. He followed by removing his own, gasping at the rubber-smelling pocket of atmosphere he suddenly had access to, and soon enough they’d all done the same.