‘Producing no signals at all,’ Kern remarks, ‘on any wavelength. Their interaction with others in the system is restricted to their bombardment.’ Helena can hear her Portiid report, too, which is as close to identical as it can be. Kern is concentrating on what the drones and the ship are doing, meaning she has less computing power to devote to personality.
One of the lumbering monsters emerges from the earth, its grinding mouthparts breaching in a shower of dust and rock shards that tumble and fall silently back through the vacuum to the surface. It seems to stare out into the blackness of the sky, past the curved wall of the gas giant itself, and then tucks its head in, claws digging into the substrate beneath it.
Its whole body contracts, shortening by almost a third, and then by half again in recoil as it spits a huge bolus of rock towards some distant point, enough to clear the planet’s gravity well, flashing away at such a ludicrous velocity that Helena reckons some kind of magnetic acceleration must be involved. Its siblings are doing the same, tunnelling, devouring more of the moon’s structure and then launching what they have mined at their far-off foes, whoever they are. From the state of the moon’s surface, this has been going on for some time.
‘The targets are locations within the asteroid belt that lies between this planet and the inner worlds of the system, especially the world from which the bulk of detected signals originate-t-t-te.’ Kern pauses over the word, playing with the end of it to show she is reconsidering.
Targeting signals, Bianca announces. There are signals from the belt that the missiles are being directed towards, compensating for celestial movement. Quite some complex maths these mining beasts are capable of. The signals are being directed here specifically, tracking the moon. Bianca throws the telemetry and a string of intricate diagrams up for general consumption on the screens, and Helena reads the Portiid representations from long experience. Spider diagrams tend to be four-dimensional and place as much emphasis on non-physical connection as actual structure, so understanding them is something of an art.
‘It’s not a war.’ The voice is Meshner’s, and the automaton beside him translates for the Portiids. ‘It’s too far away. These missiles . . . by the time they arrive, their targets have had ample opportunity to dodge. Unless they don’t want to. I think that they’re miners, just like you said. And rather than having someone come over here, dig up the stuff and take it back, they’ve seeded the moon with these things to mine for them, and to spit the stuff home for their use.’
‘T-t-t,’ says Kern, somewhat frostily, but then, ‘Agreed.’ Helena wonders how much of her presupposition of war was based on the belief that the inhabitants of this system might be human-descended, and on Kern’s low opinion of her own species.
Then Meshner’s companion adds something, a little tip-tapping that makes a single word Helena can’t place – a name for something, given without context. Her puzzlement is mirrored in most of the rest until Kern calls up some images of what he means. Helena sees a view – much magnified according to the notation – of a podgy soft-bodied caterpillar-looking creature with a bizarre telescoping head/mouth.
‘But that’s just a water bear, a tardigrade,’ she says, the words slowing as they come out. The resemblance to the colossal moon-miners is persuasive.
Fabian, Meshner’s colleague, expounds now that he has everyone’s attention, in that slightly nervous, always-ready-to-retreat manner that Portiid males have when speaking publicly. They are notably resilient. They can survive hard vacuum in their native state, though not like this, only in a cryptobiotic form. But if you wanted base stock to manipulate towards this end, you could do worse.
For the next half hour or so, everyone pores over the data collected by the drones, until at last Kern sends one in for a tissue sample. As the distant robot darts in to cut a strip from one labouring monstrosity, Helena holds her breath and waits for the angry retaliation. There is nothing, though. The creature seems not to notice, just grinding and spitting in an endless round. They must use some of what they mine to make body mass, she thinks. They must breed, probably parthenogenetically, to have this many of them. By then, cursory inspection of other moons around the gas giant has shown similar infestations. The civilization further in is greedy for ice and metal and even just rock.
The biopsy confirms Fabian’s guess, though Kern has to send data up to her larger self in the Voyager to cross-check against the DNA banks there. They are looking at a piece of bioengineering simultaneously incredibly sophisticated and brutally functional.
Zaine asks the question most of them must already be thinking: ‘Could we do this?’
Bianca and Portia are both insistent that Portiid technology would be more than capable, if such a recourse ever became necessary. The others are less strident. Meshner and Fabian bend close to their automaton to discuss, and Helena puts a palm down next to Portia and buzzes out, Really?
I’m not a biotech specialist, of course, Portia shuffles, with a hesitancy that speaks of evasion. There is Portiid optimism – and recklessness – and then there are the hard limits of Human-Portiid science. Helena decides that what they are looking at here – a self-renewing project that must have been ongoing for generations – is far beyond their ability to replicate. And more, it speaks to a frightening sense of purpose in the culture that developed it. Purpose, or desperation.
***
Meshner has Artifabian enclose a section of the scout ship so he and Fabian can get back to their work. The facilities they have brought over are limited compared to what the Voyager offered, but he is determined not to let it stop him, and equally determined not to let the collective disapproval of the ship’s high-ups slow him down. Fabian is of a like mind. The pair of them have been awake longer than most and he is resolved to keep further cold-sleep periods to an absolute minimum. The whole scout mission promises all manner of unpleasantness but until they actually enter a first contact situation, the one resource they will have plenty of is time.
‘I have isolated a selection of new Understandings,’ the spider explains through his artificial namesake. ‘These are from my personal store.’ Fabian means those he inherited as part of his genome, or that he took into himself from the Voyager’s library before boarding the Lightfoot. The mark of a Portiid genius is not in what one knows or the mechanical skills one can deploy: all of these are part of the common currency of the species; copied, traded and absorbed with ridiculous ease. Genius, to one of the spiders, is either a superior ability to think on their feet – a particularly apt human figure of speech – or else the ability to take on a large number of Understandings at once, and thus find new synergies between multiple skills and memories. Fabian is an Understanding polymath, something that was supposed to be rare in males, but probably isn’t. He has a good list of active Understandings he can distil for Meshner to sample.