Nemesis (43 page)

Not for the first time, the words of the Prophet Sanchez came to mind. He’d told them as the
Ariel Two
hovered over Bogota with weapons primed that the Earth wouldn’t change – that people would keep hating. He’d been right. Despite his bitterness and his fury, that old bastard had understood Earth more deeply than anyone who’d come along since.

The guards deposited Will at a well-appointed suite equipped with a full-sized bed, an entertainment centre and numerous other luxuries he couldn’t have cared less about. They sealed the door behind him. Will didn’t mind. Until he understood more about Snakepit’s artificial life, he didn’t intend to go anywhere.

He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at nothing. At that moment what he wanted most was access to the League’s bio-lab research database, but he strongly suspected they wouldn’t be granting it any time soon. He reached out via his sensorium to the local network and found a message from Pari waiting.

‘Hi, Will,’ she said. ‘For the obvious reasons, we’re limiting your network access to entertainment and some material on the League project that we’ve prepared for you. I recommend our geographic survey of Snakepit, or Ann’s models of the war. Should you try to stray any further, you’ll find that security here has been designed with you in mind. Our protocols use a stack of SAP models of your identity built around the years of data we’ve collected. They’re programmed to anticipate your likely hacks and employ your own defences against you. I don’t recommend testing them. We have fifteen years of curated material on your soft-incursion techniques. I’m hoping that’s enough encouragement for you to wait and think about all of this a little more before you decide to do something.’

Will shook his head. He’d shared his knowledge freely with the Fleet and now they were using it against him. Idiots. He tried a few idle hacks anyway and found them efficiently, even zealously, repulsed, just as Pari said they would be.

Fine, so they’d proofed their systems against attacks by Will Monet. In that case, he’d just think like someone else instead. He’d seen a very convincing example of hacking in action aboard the
Chiyome
– one he’d wanted to study further when he had time. Right now, all he had was time. He walked as far as the data port on the wall. He assumed it had been coated with the League’s co-opted bioweapon and a quick check with a cautiously extended filament revealed that it had. Perfect. They’d even left him samples to work with.

Will paused to concentrate while he manufactured a set of biologically inert tools inside his body, then coughed them up in a capsule, like an old-fashioned escapologist regurgitating a swallowed key. Using the needle from the kit he’d built, he took a pinhead-sized sample of the Snakepit organism and dropped it onto a slide. He laid the slide on the suite’s bathroom floor and cupped a hand over it, manipulating the tissue of his palm into a small, sealed lab of his own. With a pair of hair-sized tweezers, Will started physically teasing the sample apart. At the end of the day, nothing beat a biological system like overwhelming physical force.

Handling such a dangerous organism necessarily made Will’s techniques crude. He knew there’d only be a certain amount he could learn looking at the cells this way, but he had to start somewhere. The ribosome analogues he found were utterly cryptic, as were the coding-compounds in the nuclei, so he didn’t bother with those. He concentrated on the basic cellular machinery and the production-line Golgi body mechanism he’d spotted, which gave him enough data to start reverse-engineering the cell’s elegant mechanics.

The first thing he noticed was that parts of the life form in front of him were clearly missing. Signalling molecules were binding to specialised vesicles with nothing in them and just sitting there like trucks backing up to a disused warehouse. Someone in the League had hacked this organism already, either to prevent Will from learning too much, or to reduce the risk of contagion. No wonder they’d been so absurdly confident sitting in the same room as the stuff.

So far as Will could tell, the cells used a kind of biochemical search to synthesise new attacks. Multi-walled protein engines locked in a supracritical state churned out a constant supply of molecular novelty. Those products that managed to make it out of their gated enclosures were passed to a duplication area before being parcelled up and relayed to the edges of the cells in the sub-cellular equivalent of tagged bags, ready for deployment.

As Will figured out the mechanics of the cells’ attack mechanism, he copied it to a software model and used that as the framework for a new soft-incursion program. The process required a little creative license, but he let himself be guided by the example before him rather than giving in to the temptation to build code the way he normally would. Then, once assembled, he allowed the new program to access his complete range of intrusion tools, all broken down into swappable modules as if they were amino acids to be deployed in combination.

His experiment complete, Will destroyed his tiny lab, lay back on the couch and put his new tool to work against the station’s security. He interlaced the new program’s requests with some simple hacks of his own to make the intrusions look like persistent nuisance attempts to probe their limits. The new code fumbled at first, no doubt prompting low-level alerts in Pari’s data display, so Will bred a small population of his bio-programs and had them compete. Maybe a little selection pressure would help.

At first, it looked hopeless. Warnings from network defence began to accumulate in his sensorium by the dozen. Then came the counter-attacks. Not content with rebuffing Will’s constant attempts to infiltrate the system with bogus traffic, the League’s defensive program began to feign collapse, leading Will’s code into access-traps before cracking it and shutting it down. Ironically, they couldn’t have helped him more. Under tightened selection pressure, Will’s bio-progams rose impressively to the challenge. Within five minutes, station security was quietly, unquestionably broken.

Will kept his nuisance program aimlessly running so they wouldn’t notice the change and tsked to himself. The League should have known better. Software models of people worked just fine for crowds. For individuals, though, they couldn’t stand up for long when confronted with a little genuine creativity. Pari should never have told him how her security worked. Without that clue, Will might have struggled for hours and given up hope.

With the room under his control, he reached out with half his mind to the bio-lab database and started sucking down files. With the rest of his attention, he started inserting little pieces of himself into the station architecture. When the time came, he’d be ready to move.

14.4: MARK

Venetia strode off along the ledge with Mark and Zoe hurrying behind. She took them to the nearest junction point – a narrow oval gap in the tunnel wall – and through to a ledge on the other side. But for the thin, dusty light pouring through the opening, this new tunnel lay in complete darkness.

‘There should be another raft here,’ she said, fumbling blindly along the wall. ‘There’s supposed to be one at each of these junctions for the research crews to use. Got it!’ she said, and lifted another yellow capsule into the meagre light.

She set it down on the floor in front of them and fumbled with the tags on the side, activating an LED lamp. The flare of light revealed a second canal of still, black water lying before them, surrounded by another tunnel lined with alien art. Venetia inflated the raft and dropped it quietly onto the chill liquid below.

‘Research rafts are larger,’ she told them. ‘Plus they come with engines – assuming there’s still charge in this battery, of course. It’s probably been a while.’

‘Any heating?’ said Zoe, wrapping her arms around herself.

Venetia shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not. It’s going to be a cold afternoon. Better get used to it.’

They gingerly lowered themselves down into a plastic inflatable craft little different from the one they’d just left. This time, Mark exercised care not to get wet. Venetia handed him a telescopic paddle to push off from the edge.

‘Here goes nothing,’ she said and fired up the electric motor.

They all cheered a little as it purred to life. Venetia took them out into the middle of the canal and away from the junction. Darkness swallowed them instantly.

‘Won’t they come looking here as soon as they find the pod?’ said Mark.

Venetia nodded. ‘Undoubtedly, but if they want to find us, they’ll have their work cut out for them.’

Just a few minutes later they encountered another junction, this one set low enough in the side of the tunnel that they could navigate straight through it. After that, the branches came swiftly. Venetia took them this way and that through an apparently endless labyrinth of identical waterlogged tubes, each narrower than the last. Friezes of cavorting Fecund figures crowded them on every side. The frail light from the raft’s lamp cast heavy shadows against the stone. The turret-shaped eyes on every beaked face seemed to track them as they passed.

‘I get it,’ said Mark, glancing up at the gargoyles closing in over his head. ‘Plenty of room to get lost.’

‘Once you leave the main arteries, things get complicated quickly,’ said Venetia. ‘This is a delivery system for habitation warrens – the Fecund equivalent of that suburb we saw on the way to New Luxor.’

‘Some suburb,’ said Zoe, gazing out at the lightless maze surrounding them.

Abruptly, their tunnel opened onto a narrow space that had to be at least fifty metres high. Rows of identical holes lined the walls, each about large enough for a person to crawl into, presuming they had no intention of ever coming back out. Narrow metallic ladders protruded from the stone between each column of cells. Stalks that might once have held lighting bulbs hung far overhead.

‘See,’ said Venetia. ‘Luxury accommodation. For disposable child-slaves this would have felt pretty cushy.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Zoe.

‘It was nicer ten million years ago,’ Venetia assured them. ‘They had something like our biofabric on the walls and quite a lot of tech infrastructure down here. None of it held for long after the suntap flare, though.’

The hive area ended as abruptly as it had begun. Then, half a kilometre further downstream, the tunnel opened out again, this time onto banks of glass-fronted compartments like windows in a giant vending machine. Filthy streaks of brownish film covered most of the surface. The glass in many had eroded away in oddly rounded chunks.

‘Check this out,’ said Venetia, her eyes shining. ‘Bio-enclosures, probably for weapons testing. Isn’t it amazing that the glass lasted this long? They’re still figuring out how to make that stuff, you know. Looks like it grows straight out of the stone but it was clearly nanofactured. We don’t have anything even half that durable. Each one of those cells used to have a seal on it so they could expose the young inside to whatever organism from outside they wanted to test. It was an incredibly efficient system. That scum you can see on the glass? That’s probably what’s left of the ones trapped inside after the flare went up. This deep underground, the preservation of biomaterial is way better.’

‘They did biological experiments on their young?’ said Mark. ‘Every time I hear about the Fecund, they sound a little more disgusting.’

‘You wouldn’t be the first to have that reaction,’ Venetia assured him. ‘But they were just different from us. The Fecund didn’t really solve problems with smarts, they threw resources at them instead. And they had an inexhaustible supply of spawn. Their reasoning style was more like what we associate with the evolution of disease. They tried things out, kept what worked and ditched the rest. Their young were more like tools or experiments than treasured offspring. They didn’t have much of what humans would call creativity. On the other hand, the engineering solutions they came up with were often incredibly robust – as evidenced by the fact that any of this stuff is still here.’

‘If they were so uncreative, what’s with all the art on the walls?’ said Zoe.

Venetia laughed. ‘That’s not art. That’s education. For the Fecund, language was a means of communicating workable solutions to problems. Lining the tunnels with knowledge was just another kind of Fecund efficiency – you train up your kids even while you’re squirting them down a tube to their next high-risk assignment. Those young who made it to adulthood were revered like gods. Every one of them that came down here would have scanned the walls every day, trying to figure out a trick to make it past age five.’

‘Lovely,’ said Zoe. ‘Kindergarten pipes.’

‘Right,’ said Venetia. ‘
Oliver Twist
on an industrial scale.’

Over the hours that followed, it became clear that anyone looking for them would have an impossible job. Even if they filled the tunnels with robotic drones, there would still be too much twisting ground to cover. The Fecund tube-system ran for dozens of kilometres, dwarfing the New Luxor settlement outside.

‘I’m amazed they bother to keep this lot oxygenated,’ said Mark.

Venetia shot him a look. ‘Are you kidding? This is where all the money comes from. Once they repaired the original seals on the old network, there was no point dumping the air when the economy started to tank. They just don’t bother cycling it that often. The whole time I was here, though, I can’t recall more than two carbon-monoxide incidents.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Zoe. ‘In that case I can finally start enjoying myself.’

Venetia took them through a bewildering array of echoing underground chambers. Some spaces resembled huge tiled swimming pools. In others, canals joined and split in interlocking loops like a maze of aquatic roundabouts. To Mark’s eye, the place looked like a deranged mash-up of the sort of ancient Earth sites you found in virtual museums. A cross of Angkor Wat with a Victorian bathhouse, perhaps, with a little bit of Alcatraz thrown in for good measure.

His fear of being pursued by the colonists slowly gave way to a pressing sense of reverent unease. Something about the organic layout of the tunnel system, coupled with the cryptically ornate chambers, left him speechless. He could feel the incredible age of the place creeping into his bones along with the cold. No wonder so many scientists found Fecund sites fascinating. However, he didn’t really understand why they’d want to stay and explore. For all his awe, Mark couldn’t wait to get out. A deep, persistent chill had worked its way into his body by then and the foot he’d soaked ached constantly. He huddled in the boat and shivered. The dark felt intent on combing the heat off his skin. He wished he was wearing something other than a thin ship-suit. His stomach growled.