She focuses, recording, running the sequences back and forth through her internal software. The implications are of some tempering of the forbiddance – she has the sense of this linking to past associations, but not in the same way as Senkovi or Baltiel are referred to, so: more recent events? Were there those who had not let that forbiddance curtail them, perhaps? But here the recipient replies with warnings, a covert flicker of danger colours almost lost in the general alarm that seem to carry a separate message.
Be careful what you say, she translates tentatively. The furtiveness of the communication suggests that. More divisions amongst the molluscs, more factions. And what these two are worried about isn’t just the plague of Nod, but discovery by their peers.
Then Portia twitches, and a scrambled communication comes in from Viola that Helena has to beg interpretation for, to her chagrin. Portia shakes herself – she saw the old Baltiel recordings as well – and just says, ‘It has Meshner.’
‘The others?’
‘Well.’ Portia bristles. ‘What are the creatures here doing?’
‘Talking, or the nearest equivalent.’
‘No.’ Portia flags up segments of the data channel – incoming not from their interrogators but a whole separate stream of staccato chatter received from elsewhere. ‘There’s some other thing going on.’ She returns to the Lightfoot channel and Helena can just follow, Viola, get the ship moving now.
Everything about the Portiid is agitated, aggressive. Portia is in the full throes of threat-response and Helena doesn’t waste time asking questions. She goes back over the data channel, following from flag to flag, trying to understand what her friend has seen. She had been concentrating on the visual displays, but Portia had focused on the data channels.
She finds it there: a section of communications dealing entirely with the course and position of the Lightfoot, along with the disposition of several octopus vessels already out patrolling near the inner planet. They are given ludicrously grand labels, explosions of joy and pride, anger and exhilaration. Her linguist’s instincts twitch, but she has no time to decode them because the closest of them (and her rebellious mind thinks its name might be the Profundity of Depth to a Human) has been shadowing the Lightfoot, running on minimal emissions to avoid detection. Tags drawn from a dozen different Old Empire conventions that nonetheless indicated combat readiness.
She thrusts her slate at their interrogators, wrestling with language in order to ask the simplest of questions. ‘What are you doing? Why? Make it stop!’ Because why have they let Portia speak to Viola so freely if at the self-same time they were planning an attack?
Portia has found that most human of things hidden in the numbers: a countdown.
One of the octopuses drifts down to the console and begins communicating, its skin flushing and stuttering with didactic meanings. Mostly it does not understand the question, and much of the rest seems to be some personal recounting of its own attitudes that is utterly impenetrable, but she gets just enough for the bleak understanding: There are some who wish this thing done. There is a threat; there is a response to a threat. And it is plainly something entirely everyday, that random members of their race might decide to go blow up some visiting alien ambassadors without any recourse to higher powers or consensus. They fear; they seek a solution; they act.
Acted. She understands the qualifier to all these emotive messages. The gloss has faded from the feelings because they are in the past, now being twice-told over to her. The decisions Helena rails against have already been concluded, only now coming to fruition across the vast reach of space. All this diplomatic talk, and the attack was already on its way.
Kern’s voice comes over the channel, flat, stripped of the last vestige of her humanity.
‘I am detecting incoming missiles, many of them homing. Deploying countermeasures. Portia, Helena, confirm receipt.’
‘Confirmed,’ Helena whispers into the gap of long minutes and millions of kilometres.
‘It has Meshner. The thing from the station.’ Kern’s voice fuzzes with static. It almost sounds like a jag of emotion. ‘I am trying to regain contact with him. There is a signal from his implants.’
‘Kern, the attack!’ Helena shouts at her. ‘Why are you—?’
‘I need him,’ comes Kern’s affectless drone. ‘Incoming now. I think they’ve learnt. I think the chaff won’t be enough. I’m diverting all free mass and reinforcing the crew section. I—’
Helena blinks, waiting for that ‘I’ to be followed by a verb, even one as bizarre and meaningless as I need.
And she waits, waits longer, knowing that, by the time that severed dog-end of transmission reached her, the Lightfoot had already been struck, the battle over.
Later, Portia finds a reconstruction one of the octopus systems created, drawn from long-range scanner data of the incident: how the Lightfoot was light and nimble, but not quite enough. How the impacts tore into the scout ship’s drive section, rupturing the engines. How Kern jettisoned the damage, changing the ship’s aspect, fighting with centres of gravity as great spools and sheathes of hull material unwound into space to intercept the next barrage.
How they were struck, unravelling, swatted from orbit like a fly, sent spiralling down into the atmosphere of the planet below.
PAST 4
PILLARS OF SALT
1.
These days, Senkovi didn’t leave the tank.
The Aegean’s crew sections no longer rotated, but they were empty now anyway, a drifting mess of loose fragments, clothes, personal effects. Nobody went there any more, but then, he was the lone human being left in the cosmos. If Disra Senkovi considered a place out of fashion, the universe itself turned its back. He was the lone arbiter of what was in and what was out. For the last eight years or so, ‘in’ had been the flooded section in the heart of the ship, that had once housed his tanks and the progenitors of all the many inheritors of Damascus. At last count there were . . . too many octopi to count, given that they themselves seemed supremely disinterested in holding a census. Thousands; tens of thousands, spread by their weirdly social/antisocial nature into hundreds of communities across the shallower portions of the sea, and now making inroads deeper. And here was Senkovi, who had never dipped his toes into the world whose transformation he had overseen. Here was Senkovi, one hundred and eighty-nine years of age, floating in his own private fishpond.
He’d had grand plans. He would go into suspension and come out again, fifty, a hundred, five hundred years later. Except the Aegean would not last, and the octopi would not repair it, or at least he could rely on neither. And Paul’s children, the busy molluscs below, were always doing something new, alien, fascinating. And he never quite got round to it, and then, older and more peevish, he would not trust the cold-sleep chamber to wake him, would not trust the Aegean’s increasingly distributed computer network (so much of it now looping through the baffling tangle of connections on the planet). He had wandered the great empty spaces of the ship, poked through the possessions of dead men and women, let their voices play from the archival recordings so that echoing ghosts followed his bare footsteps as he padded in circles around the ring of vacant rooms.