Creations (37 page)

“No, not at all,” Safi said. “The place was closed down for the investigation. It’s been in legal limbo ever since. For eight years.”

“And the second factory?” he said, indicating off to his side. “Is that as far as you got with it?” In fact all that he could see of Anchorville’s own half-built replication was the same vague,
skeletal shape he’d seen in Safi’s videos. It didn’t look as if it had progressed much after those pictures were taken. Only getting this high had made it visible at all.

“No, that’s as far as we got. We never realised the shutdown would be for good. That was hard. We’d already proved we could make this place replicate. We could have carried on. We should have done. That’s what Niall would have wanted.”

“How can you say that after what we’ve seen?” Max said.

“It isn’t the same,” Safi said. “It’s not the same at all.”

“What isn’t the same?” Ariel said.

Neither Max nor Safi answered. It was an old argument by now and neither of them wanted to run through it again. Instead the five of them sat there in silence until, eventually, Ariel stood up and started to walk away from them.

“I’m going to keep a look-out,” he said. “You can help me if you want.” Harris and Damon both immediately got to their feet and followed him wordlessly. Max and Safi were left alone. They were silent for a long time.

Max looked up at the Earth as he sat there. Somewhere down on that planet was Gillian, possibly looking right back up at him. The last time he’d spoken to her he’d promised he’d come back safe. That was looking less likely by the minute.

“You would have liked Niall, I think,” Safi said suddenly. “You would have had a lot in common.”

“You think so? How come?”

“He was meticulous, he worked the way you work. He was cautious too; I think you would have liked some of the things he said. He believed in this technology but he believed in us controlling it, not the other way round.”

“As if that would ever be possible.”

She looked out into the distance, toward the ESOS site. “This wouldn’t have happened if he’d been running things. He’d have kept it under control.”

Max shook his head. “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my
job, it’s that life can never be controlled. Barriers and boundaries are never as strong as you think they are. Life spreads, and it always finds a way to survive.”

She turned back to face him. “Is that really what we’re looking at here? Life?”

“Yes, it is. No different from any forest or ocean on Earth. The fact these things are made of stone and metal is just incidental. They’re as alive as you and me.”

“I did wonder why Victor had brought a biologist onto the team. It didn’t seem to fit, even though you’re a math guy as well. Maybe he knew you had more to offer.”

“I doubt it. He certainly didn’t like the things I was saying.”

“Niall would have though. You should have met him. You remind me of him a lot.” She looked him in the eye. “I think, maybe that’s why —”

Ariel’s voice suddenly cut over her, calling from the other end of the structure.

“Safi! Come over here now, both of you! And bring the boxes!”

Max and Safi looked at each other, then jumped up together and hurried over to where the other three were standing, taking two of the boxes as they went. Ariel, Harris and Damon were pressed up against the railing, looking into the distance.

“Something’s coming this way,” Ariel said.

Max could see it straight away, though at first it wasn’t clear what he was looking at. It was no more than a blur of dust on the horizon, caused by something — or more than one thing — approaching at high speed. Within seconds however the objects had drawn close enough to be identified.

“Rovers,” Harris said. “It’s ESOS, it has to be. But there’s only three of them, where are the others?”

“I don’t know,” Ariel said. “Though I think we are about to find out.”

The three rovers reached Anchorville and sped alongside it to
the same stairway that Max and the others had used. They stopped and fifteen people got off, lifting a sixteenth off the back of the last one. Whoever it was, they weren’t moving.

They started up the stairway in a tight group, while Max and those on the platform moved round to meet them. Finally the first of the ESOS personnel reached the top and walked swiftly over toward them. Of the five, Max was the closest.

Max couldn’t see the man’s face until he was almost on top of him, but by then it was too late. He walked up to Max, livid with rage, and pushed him back against one of the canopy supports. He was shouting but his suit must have been on a different channel because none of the sound reached Max’s ears. All Max could do was try to stay upright and fend off the blows as he was pushed back again and again. Then Ariel appeared and grabbed the man’s arm, while one of the other ESOS men took his other arm. Between them they managed to pull him back and Max could stand up straight again. He felt bad about being caught off his guard.

“Das ist genug! Das ist genug!” they heard Joel shouting. He’d stepped forward from amongst the group and switched his suit to the correct channel. “That is enough! We are not going to do this!”

“Then ask them!” the first man shouted in heavily accented English. He’d been let free on one side and retuned his own communicator, though Ariel still held him on the other side. “Ask them why they left us, why they stole our rover! We could have escaped, all of us!”

“And what would you have done if we’d stayed?” Harris said. “Left us behind? We only took one rover, we left enough for you.”

“No, you didn’t!” the man shouted, now trying to get free from Ariel’s grip. “We were too slow, we couldn’t go fast enough. Do you know what you’ve done? We lost nine men back there!” Then he stopped struggling, though Ariel still held on tight. None of the other ESOS personnel had spoken or come forward,
but they had almost encircled Max and the others, their expressions harsh.

“We tried to escape,” Joel said, once the first man had calmed down. “All of us. We got on the five rovers, but we were overloaded. They caught us easily. Two vehicles were destroyed.”

“But what would have happened if we’d stayed?” Max said, repeating Harris’s question. “We would still have taken up one of the rovers for ourselves when we did go. Or would you really have left us there?”

“If it was up to me, we would have done,” Oliver said. He’d been among the last to climb the stairs and had been leaning against the rail at the back of the group ever since. It looked as if he’d only just recovered from the climb.

“In that case we did the right thing by escaping, didn’t we?” Ariel said.

“You attacked our people, you stole our property and you left us to die,” another of the ESOS men said. “How can that be right?”

“You created those things in the first place,” Ariel said. “You live with the consequences.” Then he walked away, back to the lookout post on the opposite side.

They split into two groups after that; the ESOS personnel staying by the stairway, while, Max, Safi, Harris and Damon joined Ariel. By now the injured ESOS man had been carried up the stairs and laid down on the platform. His suit didn’t appear to be punctured, but it had taken some external damage and he still wasn’t moving. Joel went over to him briefly then joined Max and the others at the far end. They stood in a loose circle next to the railing, all except for Ariel, who was looking out into the distance with his back to the others. Joel was the first to speak.

“I am sorry about what happened just then,” he said. “We have had a difficult journey. Nine of us died. It was only because
they stopped to feed on the first two rovers they attacked that the rest of us were able to escape at all. I am glad we found you though. We knew you would come here. We could even follow your wheel marks once we got away from the colonies.

“When did you finally decide to leave?” Max said.

“Our buildings were attacked. They came up the service line, stripping it as they went. Once they got to us we only had minutes to escape. We would have done too, if we had been able to drive fast enough. There is a new machine, faster than anything we’ve ever seen. It is — monstrous. That is the only way I can describe it.”

“We’ve seen one. We ran into it on the way here.”

“How did you escape?”

“We destroyed —
killed
it. With explosives.”

Joel nodded. “Clever. I saw you had taken some of our blasting charges. I wish we had had time to take similar precautions. I never thought they would get through the barrier so quickly.”

“So how did it happen?” Safi asked him. “How did they get out?”

“Easily,” Joel said, shaking his head. “Only miners and replicators are fitted with boundary sensors. These new machines, however, are not a new design of miner. They are based on reapers.”

“Reapers?”

“They work inside the colony, breaking down other machines and recycling the materials. Kambria must have decided to use them for gathering materials, rather than miners. They were never intended to travel far from the colony itself and never designed to recognise the boundary. A regrettable mistake.”

“You create life, you should expect it to live,” Max said.

“That is true,” Joel said.

“Speaking of which,” Ariel said. “I believe we have company.” He still had his back to them, facing into the west. “They are
coming.”

As before, a distant cloud of grey dust was the first sign that something was approaching, though this time it was clear that a far greater number was on its way. Even as the nearer ones came into focus, more appeared behind them, rising up from beyond the horizon and racing toward the Anchorville stronghold.

“Machines,” Harris said. “Just like the last one. Dozens of them.” He turned to Joel. “You idiots had your transmitters live the whole way here, didn’t you?”

“Yes, we had to,” Joel said. “We had to communicate.”

“You’ve led them right to us!”

“In that case we should prepare ourselves,” Ariel said. “Bring more explosives down here. And spread people round the whole perimeter, quickly!”

Joel ran off at once to organise his own people, while Max and the others stayed at the corner nearest the approaching machines. By now they had halved the distance from the horizon.

“Help me get these things set up,” Harris said, already unloading charges and detonators and slotting them together. This time there was no point adding transmitters or decoys; from the top of Anchorville the best they could do was use them as grenades. Max, Safi and Damon knelt down and started assembling the units into piles of ready-made weapons. Glancing down the length of the structure they could see the ESOS personnel doing the same thing with the other boxes, under Joel’s direction. Then the first of the machines arrived.

“Give me one, fast,” Ariel said. Max stood up as he handed the charge over and suddenly saw how quickly the machines had covered the distance. Three of them were at the front, heading straight for the near corner of the structure. Ariel took the charge, armed and zeroed the timer, then threw it as hard as he could toward the machines. He lunged forward into the safety rail with the effort, bending the barrier with his weight as he fell
against it.

The charge hit the ground about thirty feet from the bottom of one of Anchorville’s pillars and exploded almost instantly. The machine that Ariel had aimed at was another twenty feet away. The blast sent it flying, peppered with shrapnel, but had a similar effect on the base of the pillar. Whole sections of latticework fell outward, severed from the main body of the support. They even felt the explosion fifty feet up on the platform.

“I can’t throw far enough, not wearing this suit!” Ariel said. “The pillars are too wide!”

Looking down over the railing, Max could see what he meant. The bottom of each pillar flared outward like a buttress. If Ariel couldn’t throw far enough to miss them then it was unlikely anyone could.

“We nearly got hit as well,” Damon said. “Those fragments are flying for miles.”

Then they felt another jolt coming up through the structure, then another. They looked back at once to where the ESOS personnel were standing and saw them throwing their own explosives over the side where more machines had now arrived. They could hear shouts and yells as the blasts got their targets but it was clear that the damage being inflicted on Anchorville was just as great. Safi ran down toward the ESOS positions, looking over the edge of the railing as she did so.

“Stop! You’re weakening the structure!” she shouted. Two more blasts were set off before anyone listened to her. It was Joel who finally stopped the attack, calling in German for it to end. He ran over to Safi.

“What are we supposed to do?” he called. “This is all we have!”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But we’re doing more damage than they are like this.”

Max was still at the western end of the structure. He looked over the edge at where the remaining machines had now arrived,
well over thirty of them. With no hesitation at all they had got to work on the lower portions of the framework, stripping the metal components and fittings away from the fused basalt girders. It looked as if they only had minutes to go before the structure they were standing on would become unstable.

They needed something else, he realised, some way of fending off the machines without risking their own survival. Then an idea struck him. In any other circumstances it would have seemed like madness, but looking round he could tell that no one else had any better plans. If they only had minutes to live then anything was worth a try.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to get something.”

He ran off, heading down the length of Anchorville until he reached the steps, then began jumping down them three at a time, grabbing the rail for support between each leap. The ESOS men he’d passed on the way watched him as he went, presumably wondering what he was up to, though only Safi called after him. “Max! Where are you going?” she said, but he didn’t answer her. Instead he carried on down to ground level and ran over to the rover they’d arrived on. The nearest machines were just a hundred feet away but didn’t seem to notice him. He went up to the rear seats of the rover then bent down and pulled out the bundle of marker poles from the survey kit he’d noticed when they first took the thing. He also took the long narrow spade that was used for planting them, then ran back to the stairway and started climbing.