Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Gav Lortisse had started his audio journal only after the virus attack. None of the others knew about it. Actually Baltiel probably knew about it, because he took the role of Overall Command very seriously, and possibly Senkovi had hacked through Lortisse’s personal security because he had no sense of boundaries that weren’t his own. Nominally, though, documenting his own private spiral into madness kept Lortisse sane. He was a team player, Lortisse, always willing to pitch in with other people’s projects, to do the legwork, get a sweat up on someone else’s ticket. And he talked to himself, and his suit compiled hours and hours of his circular reflections. Eventually someone would object to the storage space his journal was using, but not for a long time.

“Baltiel has me out for specimens again. He wants the tortoises if he can’t get the fliers. Lante wants them, too. She loves cutting the poor bastards up. It’s like she thinks she can read the future in their entrails or something.” There was a word for that, but he couldn’t remember it, so he had his suit link to the habitat system to hunt it down as he continued his careful progress over the salt marsh.

“I don’t know how we ever expected it to work out.” It was a recent revelation this, and he was still feeling it out like a rotten tooth. “I mean, they’re all gone. Not a peep since the attack. Not from home, not from any ships.” Narrating it to himself, hearing his voice breathy in his own ears, gave him a curious illusion of control, as though he was hearing the story long after, when everything actually had worked out. As though he was telling some notional grandchild. Except…

Behind him a hauling remote was following at a set distance, waiting for his signal. It had three tortoises in its bed already, aimlessly crawling over the plastic. More specimens for Lante to dissect. He stooped over another of the creatures. There were plenty of them; scientific depredation wouldn’t make a dent. Of course, people had probably said that about mammoths and bison and actual tortoises, once upon a time, but right now Lortisse reckoned even the plodding nature of Nod was more than enough to overcome the efforts of four poor humans.

“We’re all going spare, but so gently,” he continued his narrative. “It’s like seeing something break up in zero gravity, the pieces gradually falling away from each other. But why not? The world ended. There’s no force pulling us together any more. I see Kalveen and she’s constantly improving on systems, designing… palaces, mansions, habitats the size of cities, planning them out with fail-safes and redundancies and… on a scale we could never build, not the four of us, not forty of us. She says it’s the future, but she can’t believe it. She can give us a virtual tour of floating cities on Damascus, of airborne dome-complexes on Nod that have a zero footprint, where the alien life just goes on unmolested beneath your feet. And it’s mad, it’s all mad.”

The remote came at his signal and he loaded up his latest victim. Is this what I’ve come to? Driving the execution wagon for brainless alien shellfish? But it got him out under the sky. It exercised the muscles. Better than staying cooped up with Baltiel and Rani and…

“And Erma,” he finished the thought aloud. “She’s always talking about breeding a new generation in the vats, only we don’t even have the vats yet, and she never seems to get started. There’s always some other thing that needs planning out. She can’t get her head past the stage where it becomes real and there are… what, some sickly, feeble children someone has to take care of. She knows the automatics can’t just do it for us, but it’s not as though any of us want the responsibility. Give us a next generation, sure, but don’t make us care for it. Senkovi cares more for his octopodes than any of us would for those poor goddamn children.”

The hauling remote always made the tortoises limpet down on the rock. Something about it said “predator” in a way Lortisse’s human form didn’t. It was a wide, flat thing on six narrow legs, and probably its shadow resembled one of the fliers, or at least to the weird eyes of a tortoise. Anyway, the other animals nearby had all fled or were hunkered down enough to make it impossible to pry them free without killing them. Lortisse continued his ramblings, stepping carefully around the pools, the remote following at its polite undertaker’s distance. “And so Erma just goes on doing piecework dissections for Yusuf, because Yusuf’s the craziest of us all. Because he just wants to carry on as though nothing happened. It’s like he doesn’t even understand it’s all gone. He wants to study the aliens, as though they care, as though anybody ever will. He thinks as long as he’s doing his job—or, not even his job, but the job he gave himself before it all went to hell—that things are still okay. That it’s all business as usual.”

He found another pool clustered with tortoises, some in the water, some at the edge, scissoring and rasping at the blackish clusters of fronds and spirals that were something like plants, something more like sessile, semi-autotrophic animals. Nod lacked hard divisions between kingdoms. Those “plants” would release swimming or airborne larvae to colonize other regions. Some of them would supplement their diet with just such microscopic flotsam; others went through mobile phases in which they metamorphosed into something entirely more active. Perhaps the tortoises had a plant stage, too. Perhaps the fliers did, putting down roots in high mountain crevices and turning their wings to the sun. Lortisse stood still, feeling the environment encroach on his mind with its very strangeness, staring out across the lumpen, low landscape towards the sea, watching rain sheeting in across the coast.

“Really, Senkovi’s the sanest of us all. I should go back to the Aegean, go swimming with his pets again. That was good. That made sense. None of this does.”

A searing pain lanced into his calf. Dumbfounded, he looked down. One of the tortoises had honed a tentacle arm into something resembling a needle and jammed it into his leg. At first he didn’t yell or call for help. He just stared at the thing as it removed the prong, his suit sealing the puncture automatically. The tortoise seemed to lose whatever interest it had in him instantly, bumbling away and scraping shells with its neighbour.

Then the pain of the incision was growing and growing until his whole leg was on fire with it. Poison! And yet no creature on Nod could have evolved a poison to attack a man of Earth, surely. But now his helmet display was covered in red lights, medical emergency signals winging to the habitat. Lortisse swayed, vision blurring, his breath abruptly laboured. He could feel a terrible pressure as his calf and thigh swelled within his suit.

Haruspex. The result of his earlier search had been waiting for him at the edge of his attention, waiting politely at the edge of his mind’s eye. To seek the future in entrails.

He lurched forwards, wheezing, gasping, even as the panicked voices of his colleagues twittered faintly in his ear.