Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

“Maybe they want you as a live host for it,” Portia suggests darkly. Helena shudders, but at the same time that doesn’t feel right, and she has come to the very unscientific conclusion that gut feelings about the octopuses and their intentions are a good yardstick. So much of their communication is just gut feelings, after all, modified by sporadic data on the sub-channel, as though a wildly invested artist is jabbering about a new project while, in her other ear, an accountant dryly intones just how much it will cost.

What her gut feeling tells her is that the octopus faction she is addressing, in the person of whichever of its members feel most engaged with the idea at the time, is after something different. An entire section of their conversation seems to have no relevance to anything else but they are enormously excited about it. Helena sees clashing, rainbow shades she never marked in any of them before. And then the data comes in, the complex strands of numbers, equations in formats that Helena’s headware and slate together cannot even display properly.

“It looks like…” Portia turns the slate in her palps, the figures reflecting in her huge main eyes. “Numbers,” she finishes, annoyed at her own limitations, her lack of control. “Deep physics.”

Whatever it is, the locals—these locals—are very keen on it, and Helena decides it is the point of what they are after, that everything else is just serendipity or complication.

She and Portia have already agreed to go. The only thing delaying the departure has been the garrulousness of the locals, their insistence in explaining in great detail things that their guests are not emotionally, linguistically or just plain intellectually able to appreciate. Only the enthusiasm comes through, and that is weirdly relatable, almost endearing. Helena had been like that about her Portiid translation project, trying to get out a thousand-word concept into a hundred-word pitch for her academic superiors.

They care, she decides. Whatever they are about, they care deeply in the moment that they are about it, and then the next moment they might not care at all, or care about some other thing, but the threads of the things they are invested in go on, and come back to them. All that factional shifting, but she feels that individual priorities just ebb and flow like tides within them, rather than being swept away.

Soon after that, and little the wiser, they are aboard a ship.

The ship itself is smaller and more elaborately shaped than the enormous spheres the octopus space navy apparently favours. This one is four globes, ranged from large to small in a tapering chain, each one fitted with a separate set of what Helena thinks are probably drives rather than weapons. And why? Does it separate, every sphere its own escape capsule? She hopes she won’t have to find out. The penultimate sphere has obviously been the subject of recent cephalopod engineering, however, because it is full of air.

She had wondered about the logistics. The octopuses are water creatures suspended in a watery medium, cushioned against any stresses of acceleration, but Helena knows enough physics to worry about the airy cavities in her body and what precisely would happen if a dense medium around her underwent a sudden change of pressure as she hung unprotected within it. The solution, according to her hosts, is a small sphere lined with some manner of transparent gel, presumably to serve as a cushion against acceleration, although Helena determines she will keep her suit and helmet on at all times to avoid getting mired and ending up smothered in the walls. There is nothing else, none of the clutter the locals evidently like, their bars and posts to cling to. The whole thing looks far more like a prison cell than anything she has been a tenant of so far.

From the inside she can still see blurrily out in all directions. On board the forward section of the vessel a handful of octopuses are either performing vital pre-flight checks or just attacking the control consoles in fits of pique. Much of her view is blocked by the internal architecture which fills the centre of many of the spheres, making tiny planetoids of rugged sea floor for the crew to crawl about on or hide within. The technology is far from anything human hands might design; she can recognize almost none of its function.

Beyond the walls of the ship, in the greater hangar space beyond, she can see more of the locals, and her translation software begins to tell her belatedly that all is not well. She had fallen into the trap of thinking that she was dealing with a united civilization, hierarchically organized and capable of being treated as a single entity. Whether that could ever be a possibility is a point for the historians and sociologists, but in this solar system it is actively excluded by the nature of the inhabitants. The cephalopods gathering outside are looking angrier and angrier, and the movements of the crew are definitely more hurried, their moods visibly lightening with worry. It comes to Helena that she and Portia might not have been released from prison so much as stolen, and this whole mission might be going counter to the wishes of the collective zeitgeist, insofar as this culture even has one.

Just as she thinks there might be an actual angry mob gathering, everything beyond her curved wall falls away, a sudden force pushing her elbow-deep into the gel. By the time she has righted herself and assisted Portia, they are clear of the world-like bulk of the orbital globe that held them, spat out across the great roiled surface of the watery world and accelerating fast enough to keep them glued to the back of their compartment.

The tormented face of the planet whips past beneath them for the first hours of the journey, a merciful blur shrouded in cloud; then they have completed their slingshot and are casting off into the great dark, all their engines still on full burn. Portia is feeding her data gleaned from the octopus transmissions, as best she can under the crush of acceleration. They are devouring all their fuel, exhausting reserves, soon to be on a one-way trip to nowhere at all in a piece of utter rocket science lunacy. And the drives do not let up, keeping to their remorseless acceleration, getting them rapidly clear of the large and lumbering ships that might decide to come after them. Helena, a prisoner both of molluscs and physics, can do absolutely nothing but fight to keep breathing as the force of their escape pummels her.

Just as she feels she must pass out, she catches sight of something else out there, ludicrously close: at first behind them, then coasting alongside. It is another vessel of the same general design as theirs, three more linked bubbles but considerably larger and already clipping along. She can see their drives burning, but the bigger ship’s acceleration (as fed to her by Portia’s stolen figures) is less than their own, so that they have caught up with it, and Helena understands that this larger vessel had been underway and gathering speed for a long time, slouching along as its engines overcame its leaden inertia. Had it been racing the Voyager or the Lightfoot, the Portiid vessels would be out of sight by now and already coasting to preserve fuel, hares to this tortoise.

Their little string of bubbles has slung about the water planet at a precise enough trajectory and end-velocity to intercept the larger science vessel. With barely a shudder or a knock, without any fanfare at all, they tag onto its endmost section, creating one long line of bubbles speeding through space. The mathematics involved beggar the imagination, especially as their little tail-stub has just run out of fuel, so its end-velocity precisely matches the speed of the larger ship at the very moment of meeting, and they tag on, falling into the larger vessel’s rather more sedate acceleration. Helena and Portia are twisted and bruised, but the rest of the journey promises to be more comfortable. They begin to disentangle themselves from the gel.

Portia studies the visible machinery and makes calculations. Hours later the larger vessel is still burning fuel from a supply that seems, Portia believes, barely diminished, still accelerating, catching up on that notional hare in just the way a tortoise can’t.

The octopus crew themselves have apparently lost all interest in their air-breathing cargo, and possibly in the mission itself, and Helena can only hope that their inspiration will return to them when they near their destination. Portia has calculations for that, too, tracking the planet they had left, stealing telemetry from the vessel’s unguarded systems. The projected course is an elegant curve between orbits that suggests they will be burning fuel to speed up all the way until they start burning it to slow down. Portia then tries to work out just what that says about fuel efficiency and runs into the hard limits of her own knowledge. Once again she asks the question Could we do this? and the flat-out answer is: No.

This ship is known to its crew by an emotional monicker Helena best translates as Looking at a Thing from Outside: a combination of detachment, curiosity and scientific snobbery. Despite its greater mass it will make the voyage between planets more swiftly than the Lightfoot or anything Senkovi’s people could have built.

In the chamber forward of their own floats the prisoner-turned-ambassador, and to Helena’s eyes it isn’t clear which hat the creature is currently wearing. Certainly it is alone, and it keeps one bulbous eye on the rest of its kin and one on the two alien visitors, leaving it unclear which prospect delights it less. Its colours remain very subdued, with a constant chalky flourish strobing here and there across its hide.

It is this individual that lets them know there is a problem, hours later, after she has slept and then awoken, finding herself surrounded by nothing but space and the cold, impersonal glints of stars. Portia is jabbing her, because the prisoner-ambassador has gone dead white and is clinging to the spokes that jut through the centre of its chamber. Helena fumbles for her slate, trying to make sense of what is going on, and eventually just has to ask, flashing images of curiosity and anxiety towards the creature and hoping it will deign to respond.

The ship’s crew have left it a console, and it squirms down to it, still the colour of chalk. Its visual language is all undirected fear, elements of death and violence, blame turned on Portia and herself. The data channel contains more flight calculations, though. Helena stares at it, willing it to make sense, but Portia, with her pilot’s Understandings, sees instantly.

“Another ship,” she indicates. “Approaching us. Hostile intent. Look, there are comms logs. Threats, probably.”

They couldn’t have caught up with us, Helena thinks, but of course there was already a little constellation of vessels patrolling the void between planets. This newcomer intruding on their personal space is identifying itself with a fist of bleak emotive tags she cannot immediately understand: something of desolation, something of frustrated hunger. Nor is it alone, in the wider reaches of space. There are others out there, all of the same mind, and Portia follows comms traces between them, a spider exploring a dangerous web, until she reaches the Profundity of Depth, that swatted the Lightfoot so contemptuously. And here is one of the Profundity’s allies, Shell That Echoes Only, whose angry name denotes only death and absence as clearly as a skull would to a human, here to make sure their rescue attempt is stillborn before it ever leaves the egg.