Song of Scarabaeus (26 page)

The tuber that imprisoned Kristos sank to the ground like a deflated balloon.

“We have to get him out,” she said.

Finn nodded and took a step toward her.

Something hit the side of Edie's head and she yelped. The
sensation was muted by the shield, but it still felt like she'd been punched. More whiptail attacks on Finn came in quick succession, from all directions, leaving him whirling in confusion. They bounced off his shield and he held his fire. Edie leapt to help, pulling up when one more fell short, the tip landing a meter from her boots. It writhed on the ground, possibly injured by Finn's first shot.

“Stay close,” Finn said as she went to his side. “Stay low. And stay
calm
.”

She nodded, crouched, spur at the ready, peering into the living jungle. For a tense minute, nothing happened.

“What the hell is this stuff?” Finn said.

“I don't know.” She just wanted to get to back to Kristos.

“Come on, you must've seen a lot of weird shit in your time.”

“Not like this.”

She'd never seen anything like it. A half-meter-wide flattened reed anchored the creature or plant, or whatever it was, within the vegetation mass. At the other end its tapered tip folded and twisted in on itself like origami. More than anything the tip resembled a locust, as long as Edie's leg. She caught glimpses of moist, speckled pink flesh within the squirming folds.

Her heart pounded, and that wasn't good for Finn. She took deep breaths and concentrated on looking out for the next attack. Were these things harmless or not? They couldn't penetrate the shields, but prolonged physical battering would drain the batteries as the shields wasted energy dispersing the impact. With shields down, they'd be exposed to the cyphviruses that permeated the planet.

Which was already Kristos's fate, if he was still alive.

Behind her, Finn continued turning a slow circle. What terrified Edie more than the whiptails was the way the jungle moved around them, shifting and heaving like a leviathan waking from slumber. To get out of this place they were going to have to go through that.

Two more whiptails lashed out, one catching Finn's leg
and almost tripping him up. He fired in the general direction of its anchor, but the vegetation was too thick and tangled to accurately judge where they were coming from.

Edie grabbed a stick and prodded the half-dead fleshy thing near her feet. It reacted instantly, coiling around the stick, holding it fast. Then it let go. It had either died or decided the piece of debris wasn't worth its time.

And then the jungle seemed to inhale, and she held her breath with it. She heard only silence, but felt the pulse of the jungle beating. Faster.

Finn sensed it, too. He shifted uneasily. “What the hell…?”

A quick, violent quake shuddered across the landscape. It wasn't the ground that moved but the things around them, vibrating as one beast. Again the whiptails shot out, but this time a dozen or more at once, in a coordinated circle from every direction. Finn pushed Edie to the ground and covered her with his body as the heavy tips battered him. One caught his wrist and he snaked it free. She felt him fumble for his rifle, and as soon as the whiptails withdrew he rolled onto his back and opened fire in a wide arc into the undergrowth.

The foliage exploded, disintegrating amid hissing steam. Edie covered her head as fronds and branches tumbled to the ground. Higher up, the vines scrabbled for a hold, thrashing about as their scaffolding was cut out from beneath them. Those that broke and fell landed on Finn and Edie, bouncing off their shields in a patter of sizzles and pops.

The air smoldered. Unseen creatures shrieked and scurried.

Finn shouldered the rifle and surveyed his handiwork.

Edie gasped in the scorched air, cranking up the filters on her shield. “Must've been the flash bomb. We were fine until that went off. Some sort of defensive mechanism kicked in.”

Thick vines squirmed around them, unraveling, creeping in from every direction, reaching with seeking, trembling
tendrils. The area was fast becoming a choking, tangled web and soon it would be impossible to move through it at all.

An alarm sounded on Finn's shield. He checked the monitor on his belt and threw Edie a worried look.

“Must've been damaged. Thirty minutes left. How much on those battery packs you salvaged?”

“A few hours, all up, but its leaking just like you said. Mine too—it's reading five hours left.” They weren't going to make it. “We have to get back to the clearing. To the BRAT. Maybe I can recharge our shields from its power source.”

Finn slapped a fresh clip into the rifle and nodded curtly. “This way.”

He grasped her hand and pulled her along at a half-crouch, back toward the boulder, ducking a new wave of whiptails that flayed their shields. They approached the collapsed tuber that encased Kristos. Cocooned in a tight mass of vines, all that remained was a desiccated husk, its surface gray and cracked.

“I need to check…”

He was dead, she already knew it, but she needed confirmation. Something stuck out between the twisted fingers of the tuber: Kristos's hand, clutching at nothing. If he'd kept his shield higher, if the jungle hadn't attacked them, if they'd managed to pull him out…But he was dead, and if she and Finn didn't get to safety before the jungle overwhelmed them or their shields ran out of power, they'd end up the same way.

They climbed up the sheer face of the boulder, easier now than it would have been ten minutes ago because the jungle had descended and there were low-hanging branches to haul themselves up with. On the other side, confronted by shifting tentacles of foliage that latched onto their limbs and whipped across their faces, they made a dash for the clearing, retracing their steps even as the path was obliterated. It was only fifty meters or so, but they fought the jungle every step of the way.

When they finally broke free of the dense vegetation
and emerged into the swamp clearing, things weren't much better. Shadows shifted and wavered in the half-light and the same whiptail reeds snapped and withdrew, over and again, wherever they moved. Above them, the tunnel they'd made through the canopy had closed over as though it had never been there, and the jungle pressed down. The living cave was collapsing.

They fired when they had to, when the whiptails grabbed them or blocked their path, but it seemed that each shot only amped up the jungle's violent reaction. As the writhing vegetation edged closer, they were forced toward the center of the clearing, into the shallow swamp. Every nerve-racking step through the mud could lead them into another trap like the predatory tuber that had taken Kristos, or some other unknown danger.

“Need a damn flamethrower,” Finn muttered, checking his ammo. “Can you get us inside that thing?”

The BRAT lay ominously silent a few meters away.

There's always a way in.

Bethany's presence flooded the datastream that flowed through Edie's mind. So many years since she'd jacked into Bethany's coding. The familiar sonnets brought a wave of pleasure. The way Bethany riveted her tiers together with glyphs, using the actual glyph as a bridging subroutine instead of a simple marker. The way she wedged extra commands into empty layers to create a more compact and efficient program—more efficient for the biocyph, a nightmare for the cypherteck trying to tease the strands apart, but Edie was used to it. Edie had adapted the technique, improved it, used it herself for years.

Bethany's frank, confident, innovative personality was written into the code.

Finn stood guard beside Edie, gritting his teeth, wary of every movement of the jungle around them. From the way he rubbed the back of his neck, he was equally aware of her heightened mental state that messed with his head. They had made it across the swamp to the BRAT, dodging flailing whiptails and vines, so she could jack in. They'd emptied their spurs in the process and discarded them.

Behind them lay Zeke. Edie avoided looking at him.

The first priority was to get inside the BRAT casing, which would provide physical protection against the attacks. Then they could figure out how to recharge the shields and brace themselves for the long trek out of the megabiosis.

To get in, Edie needed to convince the BRAT to open up. She'd used the Crib's emergency codes to get past its security barricade, leaving it open to surface-level reprogramming. Now she had to decide the best way to proceed without annoying it to the point that it threw her out of the link.

She'd drained half of her remaining shield power into Finn's damaged shield, but his was draining fast as he kept the jungle at bay with the occasional rifle blast. He asked after her progress only once, and she answered him with a scowl. He kept quiet after that.

Crouched low, Edie leaned against the BRAT, fingers pressed into its single dataport.

Bethany's coding had never been the harmonies that Edie could create. No one else could do that. Bethany's sonnets were fragments of music, without melody but always melodious, like sultry wind chimes dangling in a light breeze. Endless variations on a theme. Edie could lose herself in there, in the familiar cadences, in the memories. She filed through the datastream looking for the layers she needed to work with.

The softlink physically connected her to the biocyph within the BRAT, but it was a tenuous link. It relied on the BRAT giving up its data to her, usually something it was more than willing to do—biocyph relied on external stimuli to function, and was primed to respond to cyphertecks. But this biocyph didn't want to let her in. It had built security blockades throughout the tiers, making them difficult to de-merge, as though seven years of playing the same tune had imprinted an irreversible habit upon it.

But it wasn't the same tune, Edie saw that now. A BRAT seed's instructions were to transform an alien ecology into a Terran-like environment. To use the genomes available within the existing web of life, to make simultaneous changes
from the microbe level up, in every metabolic pathway in every living thing through every level of the food chain, to create ocean, soil, atmosphere, and biosphere where humans could thrive. But after a year of dormancy brought on by Edie's kill-code that had spread from another BRAT on a faraway island, from the moment the BRATs on Scarabaeus had managed to reactivate, their instructions had changed.

The BRATs had proceeded along a new path. Checking the log, Edie found no record of external disturbances over those seven years. No one had tampered with the biocyph. There was no aftertaste here of any other cypherteck.

It was Edie's signature—warped almost beyond recognition, but it was hers.

Her heart pounded as she processed the implications, not wanting to reach the inevitable conclusion.

They'd turned off the temperature regulators on the shields to conserve power, and it was getting cold in the depths of the jungle. Finn had been circling the BRAT to get a better view of their surroundings. He came back around the edge to report.

“Something's happening.”

She followed his gaze out into the jungle. The vines were turning opaque, and instead of their constant shifting movements, they seemed to be freezing. Finn reached out and touched the tip of a petrified vine. No longer flexible, it was now rigid and brittle. It broke off in his hand, sizzling against his e-shield. The broken end dribbled a milky sap.

The jungle was eerily silent all of a sudden.

“What did you do?” He nodded toward the panel where her fingers were pressed into the dataport, as if she was somehow responsible, but she'd not yet made any programming changes to the BRAT.

“Nothing. Maybe it's a normal process as the sun goes down.”

Finn looked dubious. He fired into the canopy, not quite directly overhead. The explosive bullet sent a torrent of vine shards raining into the swamp and the area surround
ing it. Distant shrieks ripped through the air, and some not so distant.

He fired again, with the same result. Now a blanket of razor-sharp pieces of crystalline vines covered the dead men and the remains of their equipment. Looking up into the cone-shaped tunnel that had been formed, Edie saw patches of gray, late-afternoon sky.

“Maybe Cat will see that when she flies over,” Finn said. “She can winch us out.”

It sounded like a good idea…until Edie realized the sky was disappearing. The tunnel was caving in. She grabbed a lamp and shone it upward. Ribbons of sap spurted from the broken vines. The thick fluid congealed almost instantly to melt the edges of the tunnel back together, once again forming an impenetrable mass. Considering the mobility of the vines in their flexible state, it made sense that the fluid inside had a controllable flow.

Finn raised the rifle to fire again, but Edie pulled his arm down.

“Save the bullets, Finn. There are hundreds of tons of biomass up there. Clearly it doesn't want to have a hole carved through it.”

He turned a curious look on her. “You talk about it like it has intent.”

“It does what it needs to, like any organism. Its survival must depend on the structural integrity of the megabiosis.”

A keening sound drew her attention back to the melted patch of vines. Shapes crawled through the mangled mesh. Then small creatures dropped out of the canopy—hundreds of them, scattering in all directions. Some dived into the vines and struggled to free themselves, screeching in distress, the broken edges tearing their flesh. It seemed unlikely this was natural behavior. The rifle shots must have disorientated them.

A group of the creatures plummeted straight toward the BRAT in a chaotic cloud. Finn was thrown off balance as they hit him, his shield sparking limply. Edie realized with
alarm that its power was almost dead. He hunkered down, shielding her. She felt the
thud, thud, thud
against his body as the creatures flung themselves at him in a frenzy, trying to get a grip. His shield no longer absorbed the impact of their blows. The creatures fell to the ground and scurried away on tiny legs. They were the same slaterlike creature that had jumped on Finn earlier. She saw now that the carapace lifted up and opened out, like a hard-shelled beetle, to reveal softer wings inside. And everywhere they went, they trailed a silken thread.

The slaters found Zeke's body. Edie watched in horror as they swarmed over him, cracking the vines that cocooned him, ripping the clothes on his body, and then the flesh, into thin shreds with their tiny busy jaws. The air roared with the sound of clicking wings, shattering vines and the slaters' screaming.

She leapt back into the biocyph connection. They needed a fast solution. Finn's shield was about to fail, hers wouldn't hold out much longer, and the slaters had an appetite for human flesh. She shut out the noise and fear, steadied by the grip of Finn's hand on her arm where their shields merged. She grabbed the flickering echo of her signature, buried deep within the tangle of new coding that the BRAT had written. The biocyph knew her, but that didn't mean it wanted to obey her. She captured the signature with a glyph and then laid a passive trail back through the tiers, networking multiple trails from each glyph, then more networks from each of those, so that they fanned outward in a crescendo of increasing complexity. She mentally apologized to Bethany for the brutish assault she was about to launch on the delicate workings of a biocyph seed.

She gathered together the thousands of end glyphs and shot multiple copies of a deceptively inoffensive algorithm down every spoke of the fan simultaneously. They raced toward the central glyph, the core access point, following the trail of her signature, their paths converging again and again so that the algorithm snowballed, gathering momen
tum, until it forced apart the tiers like a wedge. It hit the core like a cymbal crash and burst open to reveal its simple command.

Open!

To her right, a seam in the BRAT quivered and cracked. She banged on the casing to attract Finn's attention. They moved around the edge of the BRAT in a crouch. Edie looked back to see the slaters carrying away the remains of Zeke's body, coordinating their efforts to drag pieces of his flesh into the jungle. The tatters of tissue that got left behind were quickly swooped upon. She looked away, feeling sick.

The slaters clambered all over the BRAT, some of them finding the crack and skittering around it, feelers probing, legs sliding on the slick surface as they tried to hold on. In a couple of seconds the gap would be wide enough for them to slip inside. Finn reached over Edie to knock them away. They curled up and rolled off as his weakening shield zapped them, and for a split second Edie recognized the spark in his shield's aura that signaled the shield had almost failed.

She extended her own shield to envelop Finn and most of the door as well. She expanded it gradually. Too fast and it would simply enclose the slaters along with them. As the periphery of the shield widened, it hit the slaters and they bounced away. The split in the seam was now half a meter wide, and protected by the bubble of her shield. Finn's hands around her waist lifted her up, and she climbed into darkness. He threw their packs in after her, then jumped inside.

Edie took one last look at the chaos outside before jamming the door shut. The seal hissed and locked.

 

Finn turned on a lamp. They were on a narrow ledge running all the way around the central core of the BRAT—a three-meter well where the biocyph and seed machinery were housed within a network of scaffolding. The casing arched over their heads. This upper part of the BRAT contained the main interface jacks and the parts of the machinery that were meant to be accessible, although not normally
after the BRAT seed had been planted and had germinated. On terraformed, colonized worlds, BRATs were left in the ground indefinitely where they continued their sampling and tinkering, fine-tuning the ecosystem for the human inhabitants, suppressing disease-causing bacterial outbreaks and algal blooms and other conditions adverse to humans and their agriculture and technologies.

Edie cranked down her shield so that it enveloped only herself and Finn. It was going to fail within minutes. Pulling the spare batteries out of her pack—the ones she'd charged with the remaining power in the rest of their team's shields—she swapped the cell over, and handed one to Finn.

The thumping and scrabbling on the outside of the BRAT returned as the slaters resumed their attack.

“So much for your bunnies,” she said grimly, making her way around the ledge.

“Did the flash bomb damage anything?”

“Biocyph's pretty much immune to EM interference, and the seed casing would protect it in any case.” She pointed out the power cell. “Do you have any idea how this works?”

“I thought BRATs were your thing.”

“I know what's down there.” She nodded into the biocyph well below the ledge. “I don't know how it's powered.”

Finn came over to take a look. He flipped open the cell and examined the traces on the circuit module.

“This won't work. Even if we can jury-rig an interface, it'll blow out the shields.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“We have to try. What other option do we have?”

He shrugged and she handed him one of the drained e-shields. She watched him open it up and tease out a wire, which he stripped with careful efficiency using his shiv.

“This is all because of me,” she said.

He met her eyes, looking shocked by the despair that choked her voice.

“Finn, I did this. My kill-code. The lock that I put on the biocyph—it's a loop of code, an irreconcilable paradigm. Makes the programming go around in circles. The biocyph gets confused and eventually it just gives up. But here, it didn't shut down. After a year, the BRATs found a way around it. They broke the lock and they've been fighting the kill-code ever since. Fighting to survive. Fighting
me
.”

“You think that explains the aggression?”

“Yes. Instead of creating a world for humans, its new target ideal became the creation of an environment to protect itself. The flash bomb was its first big test, made it aware of us as a danger. Then the shooting…” Edie slid down the cold, smooth interior of the BRAT into a tight hunch, hugging her knees. Those things that had torn apart Zeke's body, and waited outside to tear apart her and Finn—they were
her
unintended creations. “On any other world this could never have happened, I'm sure of it. This place had different raw materials to work with. Advanced lifeforms, not just algae and bacteria.”

“Helluva breeding ground for anyone interested in bio-weapons,” Finn mused.

He found the power trace on the circuit module and touched the stripped wire of the e-shield to it. The shield popped and crackled. Sparks erupted out of the connection—a short-lived mini-volcano.