Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky Read Free Book Online Page B

understanding only that they are safe with her, not realizing that, in extremis, they themselves will become the meal.
    Portia is still hungry – honeydew is subsistence stuff, nourishing without the satisfaction of taking real prey. It is difficult for her to crouch there, knowing that there are aphids – and the male – within reach, but she can look ahead and see that her long-term plan will suffer if those are consumed now. Her lineage has always specialized in looking ahead.
    And in looking beyond, too. Now she squats at the entrance to the makeshift tent forming their camp, Bianca and the male nestling beside her for warmth, and looks out through the gaps in the canopy at the lights populating the night sky. Her people know them and see paths and patterns in them and realize that they, too, move. Portia understands that their celestial journeys are predictable enough to use when navigating her own. One, though, is special. One light does not tread a slow and year-long course over the heavens, but hurries past, a genuine traveller just as she is. Portia looks up now and sees that tiny glint of reflected light passing overhead, a solitary motile speck in the vast dark, and she feels a kinship with it, lending to that orbiting pinpoint as much of an arachnomorphic personality as she can conceive of.

2.3 ENIGMA VARIATIONS
     
    This time they had all of Key Crew out of the morgue – Holsten almost the last one to appear, stumbling on numb feet and shivering. He looked better than a lot of them, though. His little jaunt – mere moments of personal time and over a century ago – had loosened him up. Most of the people he was now looking at had last opened their eyes while the
Gilgamesh
shared a solar system with the failing husk of Earth.
    They were crammed into the briefing room, all grey faces and shaven heads, some of them looking malnourished, others bloated. A few had pale mottling across their skins: some side-effect of the sleep process that Holsten couldn’t guess at.
    He saw Guyen, looking more alert than anyone else there, and guessed the mission commander had ordered himself to be woken early, so that he could assert his bright, brisk dominance over this room full of zombies.
    Holsten checked off the departments: Command, Engineering, Science, and what looked like the whole of Security too. He tried to catch Lain’s eye but she barely glanced at him, nothing in her manner admitting to any century-ago liaison.
    ‘Right.’ Guyen’s sharp tone drew all ears as a final few stumbled in. ‘We’re here. We’ve made it with five per cent loss of cargo, and around three per cent system deterioration according to the engineers. I consider that the greatest vindication of the human spirit and strength of will that history has ever known. You should all be proud of what we’ve achieved.’ His tone was adversarial, certainly not congratulatory, and sure enough he went on, ‘But the real work is yet to come. We have arrived and, as you all know, this was supposedly a system the Old Empire spacefleet frequented. We set our course for here because these were the closest extra-solar coordinates where we could hope to find a liveable habitat, and perhaps even salvageable tech. You all know the plan: we have their star maps, and there are other such locations within a relatively short journey of here – just a short hop compared to the distances we’ve already travelled without mishap.’
    Or with just five per cent mishap
, Holsten thought, but did not say. Guyen’s belief in the extent of the Imperial presence within this system was also highly speculative, from the classicist’s own perspective – and even ‘Old Empire’ was a maddeningly inaccurate term. Most of the others looked too groggy to really think beyond the words themselves, though. Again he glanced at Lain, but she seemed to be focused only on the commander.
    ‘What most of you do not know is that the
Gilgamesh
intercepted transmissions