A fight like this would usually end with a submission, one combatant jetting away, perhaps with an arm less. Alternatively, a death: they are quite capable of strangling or devouring one another. The Califi and Rus meddling has had one effect, though: they are a more social species than they were, and societies are built on shared signals and information.
Abruptly they break apart by mutual agreement, retreating to the far ends of the capsule. Salome starts work on circumventing the safeties again, then stops, starts and then stops. She has a new idea, relating to the physics of what happens if a space elevator car unexpectedly burst open at high altitudes. Her Crown’s grasp of this is limited, simply that now the idea of breaking out triggers a burst of chemical signals flagging up danger. In her mind, the consequence of breaking out is like a shark circling the descending capsule, a threat waiting to get her. Her Reach would have a more concrete understanding of the issue, feeling out the shape of it until the variables were all known, but the Reach has limited agency of its own and its reasoning is not apparent to the part of her that considers itself the individual that is Salome.
She reconsiders her course of action and sulks at the bottom of the capsule. Clinging to the top again, Paul slowly regains healthier shades.
4.
The vast wealth of data on the Nod biosphere, collected over so long by the orbiting module, had been lost in the Silence. The virus had devoured it; those far-off fanatics who had coded the monster had not dreamt of what their spite would erase. Probably they wouldn’t have cared.
A piecemeal copy had survived on the Aegean, buried in the comms record between the two installations, although Senkovi had only uncovered this after the work had begun anew. Baltiel knew, intellectually, that time was the one thing they had, but the loss of knowledge remained profoundly frustrating.
But they were down, now, he and the others. They were down with a new shuttle (the other vessel having been dismantled by remotes, with its systems incinerated in a fit of caution) and firmly based on the ground. Lante was already talking about how to go about farming new people: she could mix up viable genetic signatures by randomly recombining the genomes she had, but now she was wrestling with how to actually raise the resulting infants. It wasn’t as though they would spring up like magical warriors of myth, ready to start being fully-formed humans. She was working on tutelary programmes, but Baltiel kept dropping ‘socialization’ into the conversation, and Lante, for all her drive to continue the species, didn’t want to actually play mother to it. The surviving terraformers were not a good representative cross-section of humanity. After all, they had volunteered for a mission that would take them light years from home and sever them from human society for a lifetime. None of them were stay-at-home family types.
Which didn’t mean that Lante, Lortisse and Rani weren’t having some three-way fun time when they thought he wasn’t looking, but Baltiel didn’t care about that, if it helped them stay stable and happy. If he’d wanted, possibly they’d have made it a four-way, but for most of his life, he had focused on forming close work bonds that paid no heed to gender and never became possessive or physical. He suspected that it was that attitude that had recommended him for Overall Command.
They had remotes out, aerial and ground, taking fresh samples of the salt marsh fauna, and he was helping the new habitat computer integrate the data with Senkovi’s recovered archive, eliminating repetition and making new connections they had missed the first time round. For her part, Lante was acting as his hands in the habitat’s laboratory, dissecting those select specimens he deemed necessary in order to try and understand even the basics of the Nodan biology.
They had already marked several unearthly characteristics of the alien world, notably the radial symmetry. Evolutionary theorists on Earth had assumed that a front and a back were on the cards for a complex animal; apparently Nod was the exception to that rule. Baltiel paged between archive sections, navigating from the big-picture bauplan category to more specific topics.
Nod>bio>neurology>overview was next on his list, a topic curated by Lante. He skimmed the abstract:
Based on imaging of live specimens of species 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 19 and dissection of species 3, 6 and 19. All analysed species show a distributed ring-shaped system of nerve analogues with transmission of signals from cell to cell accomplished by way of a mechanism involving concentration of polarized Calcium ions, not currently fully understood. Sensory processing must somehow take place across the neural net; the closest analogue to a brain in most species is a concentrated band but the whole nervous system is more homogenous than that of Earth species and possibly the entire system acts as a single brain, or none of it does. Experimental procedures for testing the limits of specimen response to complex stimuli under review pending proposals for appropriate meaningful stimuli.
Nod was perhaps never destined to be graced by native intelligence even if it remained unspoiled by a wider human populace. Baltiel’s money was on the swift fliers, but they weren’t common and capturing one intact was a tricky prospect. Presumably they must come to land somewhere, but thus far they hadn’t tracked one to its roost. Other than that, even the complex environment of the tidal marsh seemed to have produced only dull creatures of insensate instinct.
And yet there had been the tortoise dance. It was a recording Lortisse had made when he went out with a repair unit to recover a glitchy remote. Nine of the three-foot tall shelled creatures – listed as species 3 in their database and a major part of Lante’s neurology study – had been standing in a ring, their rims almost touching. They had swayed – one way, then the other, coordinated, their arms emerging from within their carapaces to wave and twine together and then withdraw. Was it a mating ritual? Were they diseased? The bizarre display had brought the lumbering things to Baltiel’s attention, anyway. They were the giants of the marsh, relatively speaking, but he had seen them as sedate grazers, the snails of an alien shore. Now, and in the absence of a flier to study, they had become a point of particular interest.
He sorted through the submitted pages of the neurology archive, tidying up where the automatic librarian systems had made errors, some of which were the result of shoddy coding and tagging by his colleagues. Next up was—
Next up was a signal from Senkovi, the first in days. Baltiel opened a channel, knowing the signal delay would let him keep working in the gaps of their conversation.
‘Hey boss.’ Senkovi sounded manic, which was probably a good sign.
‘Disra.’
‘So, those sensors along the faultline we were having trouble with . . .’ Senkovi opened with.
Baltiel sent back a noncommittal sound, having found a narrative of a flyby over the inner desert that had somehow been logged by Lortisse as biochemistry. The Damascus project had run into a series of technical hitches, mostly because nobody had tried to regulate the chemistry and ecology of just that much virgin ocean before, and Senkovi had ended up turning out kit from the workshops that was a little on the cheap and cheerful side. Now that kit had been in place long enough for the cracks to show and he was frantically trying to get everything repaired or replaced before whole sections of the planet stopped reporting to him.