Great North Road Page 11
‘I can agree with that. St Libra is a very big planet, and we are only really familiar with one continent, Ambrose; and nobody’s even explored the western side of that. Who knows what could be skulking around the rest of the world.’
‘Exactly. Has the Newcastle murder told us anything?’
‘Not a thing. However, the detective in charge is convinced something is out of kilter. The fact that they cannot identify the victim is extremely unusual. Other than that, and the method, I’m not sure . . .’
‘We weren’t sure after the Bartram atrocity, either. And that’s despite what AIA did to that poor girl. Another coincidence to consider, perhaps.’
‘That there is never proof is proof? I suppose it makes as much sense as the rest of this. I’d hate to rely on that supposition alone.’
‘I know. But there are a lot of factors pushing me to suspect that there is something on St Libra that has remained hidden until now. We have to know, Colonel, we cannot face two enemies across interstellar space. And this one is different, this one is smart and subtle. It eludes us. And I cannot allow that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Unless the Newcastle police quickly provide some very strong evidence that this is a mundane, copy-cat human-on-human murder, the expedition will go ahead. I’ve always been uncomfortable about St Libra, there’s too much we don’t know about that world.’
‘I’d like to go, sir.’
‘Of course. The composition of the expedition is already being negotiated by the major government blocs, everyone is keen to have their presence felt. As it’s St Libra, that wretched Charmonique Passam will be the official head to keep Grande Europe happy. You on the other hand will be the AIA’s representative, and mine.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I wouldn’t thank me if I were you. The responsibility will be enormous. If you discover a threat you will have to determine right away if it can be tolerated. The Zanth we can do nothing about. Not yet. But this, this seems more physical, more animal. It is an intelligence we can perhaps comprehend. One that operates close to our level.’
‘The noble savage.’
‘This century’s equivalent, perhaps. And we can’t permit that. Precautions are in place against such a development. Detestable, yes; disgusting, morally bankrupt – all these things, but also essential.’
‘I understand, sir. I won’t let you down.’
*
Now, it is named Zanthworld 3. That wasn’t always its name. Humans lived on it once. Eighteen million of them. Back then they called it New Florida. A world that was eerily Earth-like, hosting broad continents of lush vegetation and rugged coastlines. Three small moons orbited, creating enchanting dapples of different coloured moonlight at night along with boisterous tides to pound the cliffs. Walking among its trees and skimming across the vast everglades the first settlers could so easily believe it was Earth itself in that peaceful time after the last ice age and before the rise of mechanized humankind. A time where unspoilt tranquillity reigned.
To a degree that admirable vista remained even after the gateway ushered through the eager people in their hundreds of thousands. The new settlers were proud of their world’s majesty, and did their best not to repeat the hack-and-burn mistakes perpetrated against the old homeworld. Of course, there had to be development to bedrock an economy, something that would give them equal footing with the rest of the trans-stellar states of the United States of America, which even then incorporated three new planets in addition to the original continent back on Earth. But they kept it simple; it was always obvious that this planet’s wealth lay in its land. Farming was its future.
Captain Antrinell Viana still occasionally caught sight of the odd farm building through the tough triple-layer windscreen of the excursion rover as it rumbled across Zanthworld 3’s thoroughly alien landscape. The rover he drove was large at ten metres long, with a cabin that served both as living quarters and a lab fitted out with the most advanced analysis equipment available. Right at the back was the decontamination chamber where the HDA research team could suit up before venturing out across the Zanth. Power was delivered from five separate fuel cells, driving individual electric hub motors on each of the triple wheel sets. Puncture-proof tyres that stood as high as a man’s shoulder in combination with long gas suspension pistons provided a reasonably smooth ride on the weird surfaces it was designed to traverse. And there was enough redundancy in the drive system to get the rover home if up to eighty per cent of the mechanics and electrics ever failed or went offline.
Knowing that, Antrinell could steer along the inclines and curving banks with a reasonable degree of confidence. He’d lost count now of how many missions he’d undertaken on various Zanthworlds in the twelve years since he’d qualified from the HDA academy. Well over a hundred, at any rate. A lot of staff on the deep research teams quit field work after twenty or thirty missions. Depression was the most common reason cited. Coming face to face with something so off-scale massive, a genuine irresistible force made real and completely in-your-face, eventually got to people. But Antrinell had his faith to comfort him; like everyone who answered the calling of the Gospel Warriors, he believed that Jesus would protect them, that God would ultimately show humans the way to salvation, and that the Zanth would eventually be broken. So he wasn’t intimidated or disheartened by the Zanth, instead he saw it for what it was: hopeless evil arrogance, a cancer upon the glorious universe which God had created for life to flourish. By being here, by testing and experimenting, by discovering the Zanth’s secrets, he was undertaking God’s true work.
‘Picking up the beacon signal,’ Marvin Trambi said from the seat beside Antrinell. ‘It hasn’t shifted much.’
Antrinell got his e-i to lock the beacon signal onto the 3D radar image projected across the windscreen. It shone like a pink star, two and a half kilometres away, on a buttress shaft that was reasonably flat.
The Zanth might not intimidate Antrinell, but every time he ventured across Zanth he was disturbed by its sheer strangeness. Three hours ago they had emerged from the gateway onto a patch of land close to the coast, one of the last remaining clear spots on the planet which was still recognizably a terrestrial-match world, with grass and fern trees still alive despite the green-mist sky. Nervous surviving animals quivered behind bushes and skipped along gullies, triple-segment eyes staring out at the big vehicle which lumbered past. Blotting out the horizon was the Zanth, its boundary creeping forward inexorably towards the sea.
They drew closer to the perverted wonder that had become the ground, and eventually mounted the smooth aquamarine edge of the Zanth as if they were rising onto an ancient cooled lava spill. That impression only lasted a minute. This was no longer a geological landscape crafted by the stately thrust of ice age glaciers and underlying million-year tectonic currents. The Zanth had fallen upon the land, and subsumed its original quality, subverting it, twisting and reshaping both the solid profile and internal atomic structure, a conquest conducted at both the micro and macro levels. It was a process outside of nature, and which nature could never compete against.
The rover was now driving through a bizarre topology, as if the surface was transforming into a hive structure secreted by toxed-up mountain-sized bees. The Zanth consumed soil, rock, water, and vegetation alike, infusing the mass with its own purpose. Sink holes opened up, miles deep and tens of miles wide, the consumed material flowing up through vast columns of translucent matter resembling crystal, but never so static, so primitive. The interlocking lattice they wove through the sky was always an erratic asymmetrical labyrinth with strands arching tens of kilometres into the thinning air. Impossible had they been composed of ordinary matter. Pillars as broad as mountains and a hundred times taller: gravity would have brought them crashing down as soon as they curved away from the horizontal. But fundamental gravity didn’t seem to bother Zanth in its formation phase, it possessed an interstice with quantum fields which defied scientific rationale.
A couple of kilometres from the beacon, Antrinell caught sight of a farmhouse. It was embedded in a purple-tinted column that was twelve hundred metres thick, with bent chrome-green buttress wings that themselves turned and intersected to form an arching bird’s-nest roof a few hundred metres above, as if in tiny worshipful mimicry of the greater composition all around. The perfectly ordinary two-storey house was still resting on a scoop of raw soil, as if it had been ripped from the ground by a wild tornado. Now it hung a hundred and fifty metres above the excursion rover, tilted at a good fifty degrees from horizontal. Its symmetrical composite panel walls and strictly functional PV solar roof portrayed a complete contrast to the irrational chaos of the Zanth topology which had captured it. As Antrinell saw it now, the structure it was in the middle of was a disintegration drizzle, with each particle locked in a slo-mo spray away from the original outline. Recordings of similar embeddings always showed the inevitable absorption into the overall lattice of the Zanth as the structure’s original molecules were methodically broken apart and distorted.
All that witnessing the sad, lost house did for him was reinforce the bitterly won knowledge that every human now laboured under: nothing evaded the Zanth. Nothing survived. Everything became Zanth in the end.
Antrinell began to steer the rover up a sharp incline. The equipment package which included the beacon was just above one of the intersections. Twelve strands curved together amid a cluster of fungal-profile protrusions and undulating hollows.
‘I’m going to turn us round before we egress,’ Antrinell said.
Marvin pointed at a pair of bulbous distensions thirty metres high, shimmering purple and grey in the weak light percolating through the fog. ‘There’s room between those two.’
‘Okay.’ Antrinell shifted the wheel slightly, and the rover tilted as it tracked along a sharp slope. Millimetre wave radar measured the gap between the bulbs. Marvin was right, it was big enough for the rover to pass through. If they got wedged stuck, it was a long walk back to the gateway. Everyone in the HDA’s Frontline research division had seen the recordings of suited figures trapped inside Zanth material, long dead but with their edges dissolving. The fragments expanding. Vanishing.
There were some human sects, with mad perverted followers and manipulative leaders, who considered such transmutation to be the true path to immortality. That to be absorbed then merge with Zanth was the entrance to everlasting life, that your essence would be embraced by Zanth. That somewhere, somehow within its matrix of weird molecules and different quantum composition you would continue, that Zanth would cherish you for your gift of individuality, carry you down the galactic epochs and on through eternity. There was no afterlife, they preached, no truth in the primitive holy books. The Zanth brought a new life now and for ever.
Antrinell knew it did nothing of the sort. He’d seen enough Zanth to know it didn’t care, didn’t even notice humans, nor any biological life. He knew what a blight upon God’s creation Zanth really was, and he never wavered from that truth.
The rover nosed through the gap and started down a thirty-degree incline. They were close to the rim of the junction now, front wheels barely five metres away, and the surface was a smooth curve of gold and scarlet diffraction patterns. Antrinell moved them on until they were a safer distance from the edge, and stopped.
Regulations were very clear that at least two people had to remain inside the vehicle at all times. Antrinell and Marvin suited up, leaving their three team-mates in the rover to monitor them constantly through a ringlink. Zanth environment suits weren’t nearly as bulky and cumbersome as a spacesuit. They came in two sections, with a tight first skin like a neoprene wetsuit, which had a collar seal to attach the big bubble helmet to. A rebreather module and emergency oxygen bottle went on next, worn as a backpack. On top of it all went a one-piece, like a loose boiler suit with integrated boots. The outer layer was a white friction-less metalloceramic fabric, which had a small current constantly running through it. Electricity was about the only thing which could keep the Zanth at bay, though observation had shown it could take hours if not days for the absorption/transformation process to begin once ordinary matter came into contact with any Zanth. Someone in a suit would have to be lying down on the Zanth for a long time before they were in any danger. But still, people felt a lot safer with an electric barrier between them and doom; HDA certainly didn’t begrudge them an extra layer of protection.
The airlock was a clinical-white cylindrical chamber with a ring of black titanium vents around the middle, and a circular door at each end. Antrinell and Marvin waited inside while their e-is ran a final batch of checks, then the vents hissed as the pressure was equalized. Rovers always maintained a positive pressure difference with the planetary atmosphere, which grew progressively easier as the Zanth consumed a planet. An atmosphere was clearly not a part of Zanth, the gases were absorbed and converted along with everything else it came into contact with. When the airlock’s outer door swung open, Antrinell was first down the ladder. He tested the ground cautiously, making sure his boot soles had a reasonable traction. Sometimes the surface of the Zanth was as slippery as an ice rink. This time it was okay, and he gave Marvin the all clear.
Together they walked over to the equipment package. It seemed strangely old-fashioned in this age of smartdust and nanojunction processors. But as experience had shown, the smaller the gadget, the easier it was perverted and absorbed into the Zanth. HDA science teams had soon abandoned the meshed sensors which they took for granted on their own worlds in favour of solid retro blocks of electronics.
The last mission had set this one up on a tripod with two-metre-long telescoping legs that carried quite a high electrical charge. Antrinell was pleased to see the Zanth hadn’t begun its absorption, all three legs remained an unblemished shiny stainless steel. Then he looked at the sensor equipment packages stacked together on top, covered in a plain thermal blanket – also conducting a charge. ‘Hell.’
‘What is it?’ Marvin asked.
Antrinell leaned in for a better look, bringing his own helmet-mounted sensors in to focus. In total there were six square packages, twenty-five centimetres along a side, and maybe ten deep. The two in the middle had amber Zanth growing out of the tiny cracks between them. Slender fronds with mushroom tips spreading out from a single anchor point in starburst formation. Even fainter, were the threads that were staining the thermal blanket itself, radiating out from the base of the fronds. The similarity to terrestrial fungi was uncanny.
‘Oh,’ Marvin said uneasily. ‘That’s not good. Do you think it’s growing resistant to electricity?’
‘Who knows?’ Antrinell waved a sensor wand over the packages. ‘There’s no defence charge running through the middle two units, but some of their internal circuitry is still functional.’
‘Okay, I’ll download the files. Maybe the guys back at Frontline can make something of it.’
Knowing what he would find, Antrinell walked over to the face of the spire which the equipment package was focused on. Two months ago they’d been here and applied a molecular virus to the surface of the Zanth. The stuff terrified most people, and Antrinell was no exception. No one outside of HDA even knew it existed. The precautions surrounding its handling were orders of magnitude stronger than those governing nukes. If it ever got loose on ordinary matter, it could conceivably devastate the entire world. There was one asteroid in a nameless star system where Frontline
had opened a gateway that was now a seething mass of brittle fractal foam, its base-energy state lowered by the molecular metamorphosis. But the key was ‘ordinary matter’.
Looking down on the virus, Antrinell could see it was dead. It had eaten its way into the Zanth, expanding progressively inwards until it was a dark-russet canker two metres across. At that point the Zanth somehow grew resistant, its own transformed molecules altering again, hardening themselves in some fashion so they could no longer be consumed by the virus. Unable to eat to grow, the molecular virus had simply died.
Antrinell unclipped the sample rod from his belt, and dipped it gingerly into the frail meringue-texture virus. It was like breaking the surface of very thin ice, a slight resistance that crumpled, then the solid-state probe slid down sluggishly. He watched the read-out in his optical grid, detailing the analysis. The virus was definitely dead, reduced to superfine dust with little cohesion. Strands were sucked into the sampler. ‘Got it,’ he said.
‘And I have the sensor data,’ Marvin said. He took a look at the deep puddle which the virus had become. ‘Just great. That must have knocked out a good ten kilograms.’ He looked round the massive opalescent structures enveloping them. ‘Only another quizzillion tonnes to go.’
Antrinell grinned wide enough for Marvin to see his teeth through the darkened helmet. ‘That’s the optimism that’ll see us all through this.’
‘How many quit from despair?’
‘You’re not a quitter.’ Antrinell pulled the sample probe out of the virus, and held it up like a victory cup. ‘Besides, we made some progress today.’
‘Progress? How exactly?’
‘Elimination. That configuration doesn’t work. We try another. Then another. Then another.’
‘Yeah, right.’