All Fall Down (47 page)

           
Sophie screamed in anguish. She looked between the holos, quicker, quicker. Her native compassion was waking. Huriko's face floated in front of her, a calm Yeddic gaze from the memorial service. Peter, caught in a smile. Misha. The others.

           
And amongst them all, the fulcrum. The changing agent.

           
Daoud.

           
“End holos. END HOLOS.”

           
The automata darkened.

           
Sophie sunk to the floor, rocking herself through centuries of grief and guilt. Long minutes passed, during which she was calmly regarded by the automata. She cried.

           
But soon her tears turned to anger.

           
She rose and turned to the door to the tunnel. Her face was wet with tears, darkened with anger, shame.

           
“One more check, and then I have business with you, Daoud.”

           
She put her hand to the door's security system, which was lifeless, affected by the power cut in the floors above. The skin on her palm split, rippled back. She gasped. Exposed were her delicate hand bones and a few small cybernetic implants. “Been a while since I've done that.”

           
The door came alive. Clanked. Thudded. Popped open. She winced as small pincers pulled flesh and skin back, a bloodied salve oozing through to knit the organic component together. At her feet, the robots shifted on their wheels, moving back from the arc volume that would be the door's swing, creating an empty space around her.

           
Salve dripped to the floor, smeared the door as she drew her hand across to the handle.

           
She pulled.

A thought occurred to Win. The planet's satellites still weren't working, but his probes, his black orbs, were on the ship behind them. They could triangulate the group's position locally, between the ship, the Colony entrance and inselberg, while collecting information about the eclipse. He called up the suit's command centre on his visor, and opened a short range secure connection, “Kate, it's Win. I should have thought earlier. We may not have satellite navigation, but I can release my probes and have them triangulate our position. Verigua is hooked into the ship's computer. It could process their sensor readings. They should be able to communicate over the small distance despite the
em
-interference.”

           
For a while there was no response. He started to wonder if his message had got through. But eventually came a two word reply, “Do it.”

           
While he contacted the ship, he mused over Kate's response, its curtness, the delay, the lack of discussion. It was unlike her. He communicated with the ship with a one-way channel, in military code. He didn't trust Daoud, and he didn't want to broadcast a launch code for his probes too widely in case it was taken as a hostile act.

           
To his right, Djembe walked deliberately, the suit betraying the tension in his body, his expectation of faults, pitfalls in their path. He stopped, opened a channel to them all, “Did everyone see that?” They looked at him. He pointed to their left, “I saw movement.”

           
Daoud followed his finger, looked back to Djembe, up to the sky, “The suns have started to eclipse. The lights levels have changed. It was probably your visor adjusting its polarisation.”

           
Win opened a private channel to Djembe, “The ship released my probes so I can create a local map and monitor what's happening. Don't worry.”

           
Djembe looked to the sky, “The moons have changed position. Something is happening.”

           
“Let's pick up the pace.”

           
They walked in silence.

           
Win started to receive signals from his probes. They placed a warning signal on his visor, slightly to the right of their heading. He zoomed in, saw the top fin of a ship carefully emerging from underground. “What's that? At one o'clock.”

           
“General, remind your officers that this is not the time for jumping at tricks of the light.” Daoud walked on.

           
“Where?” Kate stood between Win and Daoud's striding figure. Win put a hand on her shoulder, pointed to the rising ship with his other. “Administrator, Win's right. We're off course and something is coming out of your Colony at one o'clock to our position.”

           
The movements of his suit's slim helmet gave away his search of the horizon. His hands went to his hips.

           
Win turned to Daoud, “Administrator, why is the Colony sending up ships?” Two more dots rose slowly through the shimmering ground air, but were quickly obscured as night fell around them.

Sophie pulled and the door swung open.

           
The tunnel was pitch, the weak emergency light failing to bleed over.

           
“Daoud,” she shook her head, “you will pay for what you've made me do.”

           
Behind her, the automata were shuffling again. They retreated and banged into each other
 
as they moved down the corridor. She looked at them, frowning. She wanted to use their lights so she could see to reach one of the vehicles. Without their extra light, shadows deepened, crawling up her calves, thighs, waist.

           
There was a sucking sound, slow and organic. Sophie looked back to the door.

           
A black mass oozed around the portal, small sharp vermilion lines running over its surface.

           
She had enough time to realise that it could only be the twenty three, escaped, coalesced, before it shot out, suffocating her face, forcing its way into her mouth, nose, lungs. Other tendrils grabbed her hands, wrists, legs; forced, dissolved, entered every orifice.

           
Her cybernetic implants rushed to emergency response, pumped oxygen into her blood. The mass enveloped her, a reversing womb, taking her apart, outside and in. Furious pain roared along her nerves, everywhere at once. She fought for a few seconds and sank into battle time, an accelerated sensory response through her cyberware.

           
Sophie scanned the organism looking for a weakness. Images burst into her head. Butterflies in a fractal storm. Children's laughter. Emotion flooded her: curiosity, innocence, the need for comfort.

           
She thought of Huriko. The hybrid child Daoud wanted to make. And thinking of that, she knew what she had to do. His war was starting above. She had to end it as quickly as possible.

           
While her body burned in digestion and dissolution; while her pores, fat, bones screamed as they were stripped into molecules no longer related to her body; while her cybernetic implants went off line one by one; she brought her cybercode, Verigua's programs and her own consciousness into one, into a singular biological algorithm. She reached out through her remaining cyberware to the automata, tried to download her essence to them, but they returned blankness, no entry signs, empty command lines. And she realised why each one was powering down: its driving force was being retracted. Finally she made a count of them: just over a score, twenty three. She made the connection. The twenty three biological entities in the secret lab had been observing the Colony for some time. Slaving automata, infiltrating Verigua.

           
An alien consciousness probed her mind.

           
Her body was dissolving into the organic mass. She was once again on the edge of death, her brain and cyberware the last vestiges of what she'd once been. There was no more pain, she was beyond it, her nerve pathways overloaded or gone.

           
She made her decision. Once, long ago, she had birthed a new order, brought peace through delivering a baby AI from the Qin to the Settled Quarters. She would do it again, she would die and be reborn, and work to bring down Daoud's plan.

           
Her last thoughts were painted in broken pastels, dream fragments. Images, half remembered, of home, of comfort, of peace, of a room full of children, playing, screaming, laughing, bursting with energy. Of a room full of children, wheeling in broken sunlight. Tumbling and falling and climbing over each other, faces coming up for air, mouths wide, eyes sparkling. Of a room. Of children. Of children in a ring, in a circle, running ring-a-ring-a-rosey, and in their centre, sitting proud and sentient and patient and aloof, a cat with butterfly wings.

Chatter filled the evacuation bunker: moans, sniping. Other voices sought to calm, pacify. Then there were the voices that projected order, the genesis of tasks, evacuation management. Masjid left them behind to make a final inspection of the entrance way. He couldn't contact Daoud or Sophie. The simulation seemed too real. He suspected the evacuation was genuine. His knowledge of the Colony's superstructure remained hazy. Did it have the capacity to induce earthquakes? To shake the stairwells? Surely not.

           
His staff, fortunately, were caught in a collective grief, their critical thinking numbed, blunted. No one had yet seriously questioned the deep rumbles. Masjid walked along the entrance corridor. The bunker behind him, voices melting to a hubbub. The door they'd carefully closed behind them he opened once more, against protocol. No alarms triggered. A distant screeching of metal on metal ticker taped down the stairwell, hazy spirals of sound from far above. A bass line fanfare, the chthonic shocks of grinding earth complemented the high pitch of tortured metal. He held up his emergency light, which was lost in the stairwell, absorbed by the hungry dark.

           
More rumbling. He felt it though his feet, put a hand to the wall. Above, a door banged open or slammed closed, he couldn't tell.

           
“Copper?” There was a tang. Metallic vapours. He sniffed. It was almost a blood smell. Old. Meaty. He refocused his torch to a thinner beam, a longer searchlight, and immediately dropped it, the clatter masking his gasp. Carefully he picked up the torch, swung it up, hand trembling. In the air above hung a spiral, a helix, a merry-go-round comprised of twenty three black pods. He watched them rise into the dark vault of the stairwell and disappear one by one.

           
When he returned to the bunker, mouth dry, two solid emergency doors sealed behind him, he forgot about Sophie, forgot about Daoud. He stilled the cynics, lent authority to those organising the evacuation procedures. The bunker was too well protected for them to feel the quivering earth, and the biocrete and carbonised metals shaking around them. Yet still, a tremor ran through his hand.

Chapter 13 - planetfall

“What the HELL'S THAT!” The
Hand
's pilot pointed at the sky, terror cracking her voice through their helmets.

           
Night fell so quickly that they were all left stumbling as their suits adjusted. The suns still burned the desert floor a dark radius away. The earth was in a perpetual ecstasy of trembling. Their balance was thrown off by the rushing wind and abused air, by the terrible sound of the mass sliding above them. Win fell back on his military training to control the animal urge to flee into the featureless expanse.

           
Above, the carbonised underbelly of a city, a great star cruising ship of no human design, coarsened the atmosphere. They were caught in the deep shadow of its outer edge, the night passing within two minutes as the city took up station towards the horizon behind them, over their own ship. Twin sunlight leaped on them once more: burning tiger in the night. The blue sun was one quarter across the disk of its fatter partner. Hallucinatory aurora stroked the skies, danced around a second city further away to their right, its scarab-like shell rising in gleam and zinced jade behind the inselberg.