The slaters had no eyes, but they had sensed the humans at the crash site, sensed them running away—and now they sensed Edie as she stepped onto the hard, dry earth. A group of three broke away from the main crowd and skittered toward her. She walked out quickly, before she could change her mind, and waited for the attack she knew would come.
“Edie, get back!” She had never heard such anguish in Finn’s voice. He was barely thirty meters away—she could see the horror in his eyes.
“I’m okay. Scarabaeus knows me. Remember?”
A year ago, she and Finn had escaped the vicious jungle after she programmed the biocyph to recognize and ignore their biopatterns. If that programming was still intact—and she was staking her life on the hope that it was—then once the cyphviruses sampled her again, they’d transmit the information to the nearest BRAT and it would give the command to leave her alone. Just like last time.
A slater rushed forward and reared up in front of her, exposing its churning jaws. Edie stood her ground. The slater snapped forward and she flung up her bare arm protectively. Pain seared through her as the slater latched on and knocked her to the ground.
It took ten seconds, maybe more. Longer than she’d expected, anyway. The slater let go with a hiss. It turned around in a slow circle, as if confused, then wandered off.
Edie didn’t want to look at her mangled arm. She forced her legs to move and ran over to Finn and Corinth. The slaters on and around them dropped away at her approach. As a group, the creatures calmed and slowed down, the clicking sounds diminishing. They meandered about the area as if they’d forgotten what they were doing there.
Finn got to his feet, still holding on to Corinth, and Edie propped him up on the other side. They went back to the habitat, moving as fast as they could—which wasn’t very fast at all. Finn was obviously exhausted, his breathing disturbingly rough. Corinth had lost the use of his legs, and Edie’s arm burned like a thousand razor blade cuts where the slater had sampled her flesh.
They stumbled through the airlock and sealed themselves in. The children’s hysteria had turned to sobs. Edie heard Cat’s low words of comfort through the dividing hatch and started to go to them.
Finn was helping Corinth onto a bunk. He pointed to her arm. “Let’s clean that up first.”
Edie glanced at her gaping wound, feeling strangely detached at the sight. Was this really part of her body? Nevertheless, Finn was right. The children didn’t need to see that much blood and ripped flesh up close.
“You help Corinth. I can deal with this,” she said.
A bandage would do, for now at least. While Finn got Corinth comfortable and organized the med-teck unit to scan his legs, Edie found tubes of saline and medigel. She rinsed off the blood and the slater’s slimy saliva, then squirted on medigel. That was enough to seal the wound. She quickly wrapped her arm in bandages to hide the gash from young eyes.
The children were desolate and just sitting around. Edie didn’t want to think about what they could have seen through the window. Hanna was in Cat’s lap, clinging, with her arms tightly wrapped around her neck. Cat looked uncomfortable but was coping well.
“Corinth is okay,” Edie said. She meant he was alive. His legs were another matter.
Galeon put his head around the doorway to see what was going on in the other pod. He was pale with shock but putting on a brave front. “What’s wrong with Finn?”
“He’s just very tired because he came out of cryosleep too quickly.”
“I think the lieutenant is dead. Those things got him.”
“Yes, they did.”
“They hurt your arm.” Galeon stared at Edie’s bandaged arm. “It was all covered in blood. I saw it.”
“I’ll be fine, too.” Her arm did feel better, thanks to the analgesic in the medigel. She recalled something Theron had said—that the slaters had toxic mucus. She needed to get back to that medkit and do some blood work.
“Why are there monsters here?” Raena asked. She was huddled on a bunk, hugging her knees.
Pris put her arm around the younger girl’s shoulders. “They’re not monsters. Everything on this world is made by Macky. The creatures are part of Macky. They only hurt Edie accidentally. They won’t hurt us.”
Edie wasn’t so sure of that, but she was grateful for Pris’s calming words.
“What’s going to happen now?” Galeon asked.
“I don’t know. We’ll talk about it and decide what to do next.”
“I know what to do next,” Pris said. “We have to go out there.” She pointed at the city. “We have to find Macky and talk to him.”
Edie’s analysis of her own blood showed elevated levels of neuroxin byproducts. The biocyph in her cells broke down neuroxin as soon as it entered her system, so those elevated levels told her exactly what the “toxin” in the slaters’ mucus was—neuroxin, or something so similar her body didn’t distinguish. She’d given Scarabaeus the template for the drug when she’d used her implant to kill Haller on her last visit to the planet. The biocyph machinery had figured out a way to create organisms that could synthesize a near-perfect copy. And so neuroxin had ended up as part of the slaters’ physiology.
“So the planet recognized you,” Finn said when she showed him the results. “Shouldn’t it recognize me, too?”
“Not through an e-shield. You’d have to turn it off. But not when the slaters are around. They’d have to bite you before they recognized you, and this bite would be fatal to any non-Talasi.”
Most of the slaters had retreated from the area. Every so often one crept around outside the habitat, no longer displaying aggressive behavior. Perhaps this was a normal part of their routine. Edie had observed other fauna, too—several species of flying insects, including one that looked like a bright-red miniature dragonfly, and a curious spiky tailless lizard that occasionally popped up from underground warrens to cause a brief frenzy among the slaters. Through the rest of the morning, Edie kept the children occupied with watching for new creatures. They took turns operating the external cams to get a closer look.
This was not an ecosystem that fitted together well. Why would it be? The biocyph marched to its own rhythm. It could create and mold genomes on a daily basis, any way it wanted. The question was—what was driving it? Edie had to find the answer.
Corinth slept soundly, drugged up on painkillers and wrapped in splints. At least the e-shield had kept the toxic mucus away. Cat checked the comm system obsessively for any sign that the commsat was functional again. Edie sat down beside Finn and handed him a heated ration pack.
“I’m going to walk down to the city and jack into the BRAT seed,” she told him.
If she’d expected a negative reaction, she didn’t get it. “What do you think you’ll find?”
“What I hope to find is whatever has taken over the biocyph. The gross morphological changes in that city—and presumably in all of the organisms across the planet—can only be accounted for by a major change in the target ideal of the BRATs. Theron was convinced the biocyph grew so complex it evolved sentience. The children keep talking about a personality. It seems impossible, but—”
Finn held up a hand to stop her, and she realized she’d been babbling about stuff he couldn’t possibly care about. “Maybe you should just ask it how the hell we can get off this planet. Preferably before Natesa shows up.” Finn glanced through the open dividing hatch to where the children were amusing themselves with the cams. “I don’t want to drop dead in front of them,” he said.
Edie didn’t know what to say. Her heart clenched whenever she thought of what must be going through Finn’s head. She refused to even think of how she would feel if he died.
“Maybe there’s something Scarabaeus can do about that, too,” she said finally. “It controls the commsat. Maybe it could block the signal from her detonator. Achaiah said it’s basically a commlink.”
“At that range, the commlink doesn’t need a satellite.”
Edie nodded, feeling wretched. “At least we can find out if she’s even out there. Maybe she’ll crash before she knows what hit her.”
“If she has her finger on that detonator, then I hope so. Take the spur.”
“I think that’s a bad idea.”
“I wouldn’t let any of my men go out there unarmed.” Perhaps he was referring to Vlissides, who had let Corinth do just that.
“I’m not one of your men. And you’re not in charge here.”
He smiled unexpectedly. “You’re right. This is your world. Do what you have to.”
Without her e-shield, Edie’s every sense was alive to Scarabaeus. As she left the habitat behind, her boots crunched on the parched earth, kicking up the occasional smooth pebble that told her this was a dry riverbed. The dust smelled clean. No hint of fresh greenery or rotting vegetation. The biocyph had used up almost every gram of biomass in the vicinity and channeled it all into the city. The low shrubs that appeared as she drew closer to the city were little more than awkward clots of brown sticks, the life drained out of them.
Every five minutes she checked in with Cat, wishing it were Finn on the other end of the line. Every minute drew him closer to possible death. She pushed that unbearable thought from her mind.
The living city loomed larger in the distance. The ground became rockier, forcing her to slow down as she climbed over small boulders and traipsed up and down inclines. Here a few things grew—mosses and ferns entwined with a slender thorny vine. A year ago, the vegetation in the megabiosis jungle had been translucent, probably fungal and parasitic, not photosynthetic. Now there were green plants. Delicate blue flowers on impossibly long stalks sprouted from the moss. Edie plucked one to examine it closer, and realized it wasn’t a true flower at all, just a complex structure of folded pigmented fronds. No stamen or petals. Yet it had fooled her at first glance.
She heard the occasional buzz and chirp of insects. There was no further sign of the slaters, but she no longer feared them. Nothing here would harm her.
A new sound emerged on the edge of her awareness, growing louder with each step. The rush of water. She smelled it, too—fresh and slightly metallic. As she climbed to the top of a particularly large hillock, the view on the other side took her breath away. A lake had formed in a natural crater. Its banks were lush with reeds and taller plants that looked almost like trees, but not quite. Branches fanned outward from central disks, bending in graceful curves to trail needlelike leaves in the water. Everything had a primeval appearance, harking back to the way this world had looked when she’d first visited it eight years ago. Yet it was all a little odd. True woody trees, like flowers, represented a stage of evolution too advanced for this world. Instead, Edie saw ancient species masquerading as more modern Terran analogs.
Or perhaps she was seeing what she wanted to see. When she’d discovered what had happened to Scarabaeus, the mutated disaster her kill-code had wrought, she’d wanted to repair the damage and had failed. Now, in this oasis anyway, something beautiful had evolved out of that mess.
She was tempted to linger at the lake, but the city beckoned. That was where the BRAT seed lay hidden. If she was to talk to Scarabaeus, she needed to find it. She reported briefly to Cat before moving on, skirting the banks of the lake to get back on course.
The afternoon shadows of the towering structures ahead grew longer. The largest structures were dozens of meters wide at the base, rising up from an undergrowth of ridged folds. Smaller versions were dotted around the larger ones, some malformed and lumpy, others elegant and smooth, filling every cubic meter. Edie wondered how she would ever penetrate the dense growths until she drew nearer and realized the ridges covering the ground were hollow and pierced all over with large holes ripped in the sides, like irregular windows. This was a system of tunnels, tall enough for her to stand up in.
Half an hour after leaving the habitat, she entered the outskirts of the city and her perspective changed. Details became clearer. Each structure was created from a vast rib cage of organic scaffolding that defined its shape—rounded bulges, terraced and truncated pyramids, twisted spires. These “bones” were entwined with dozens of other species—slabs of glistening fleshy moss dappled with lichen, delicate vines, multicolored funguses, and patches of brightly colored buds.
Everything twined together into clotted masses and the air hummed with the rustling and chirping of animals. Creatures clambered in and out of pockets in the scaffolding—much smaller than the slaters, many of them resembled insects but with soft, amphibianlike flesh that bulged out from between the ribs of their exoskeletons. They looked like they’d been turned inside out.
Edie waded into the undergrowth. It first clustered around her with trembling tendrils and then pulled back. The ferny growths had thick translucent stems that reminded her of the vines she and Finn had battled a year ago. Their movement was controlled by the ebb and flow of the fluid within them.
She could’ve camped on the edge of the city for a week, happily logging species and observing interrelationships. Finding the BRAT and persuading it—or whatever it was that controlled it—to return control of the commsat to humans seemed like a mundane task when confronted with this awe-inspiring, living city. But the BRAT was the priority.
There was no way of knowing where to start or which was the quickest route to the seed, so she stepped into the nearest tunnel. Its pale, damp inner walls felt sleek under her hand, like satin. Running under the surface of the walls was a network of tubules, barely visible because they were as pale as the lining of the tunnel. Edie laid her palm flat over the tubules and felt the ripple of fluid flowing through them.
The humidity was noticeably higher, although the perforations in the walls made the tunnel feel airy and light. She moved forward. Ahead, the tunnel branched into two.
Without warning, the left side of the branch began to collapse. A dark substance flowed into the tubules like poisoned blood through veins and capillaries, and the tunnel crumpled in on itself. Edie resisted the urge to turn and run. She took the other branch, which remained untouched, and continued on.
At every intersection, all tunnels but one caved in as she approached. The veins of side passages turned black, threatening to do the same, so Edie stayed out of them. She knew she was being driven in one direction. Was this sentience, or nothing more than the reflexes of a Venus flytrap?
Heading deeper into the organic city, the tunnels darkened as the sheer volume of vegetation outside blocked the sunlight. The veins in the tunnel walls glowed with soft purple phosphorescence, lighting the way. As she rounded a corner, the tunnel widened ahead. Beyond that was a wall of patchy light.
Edie approached the end of the tunnel slowly and allowed her eyes to adjust. Only when she stood on the very edge, at the top of a gently sloping ramp, did she realize she was looking into a vast cavern. Its curved walls were created from the same scaffolding as she’d seen outside. Thick curtains of semi-opaque resin dangled from ceiling to floor. It looked like partially dried sap, and divided the cavern into random smaller chambers. Suspended in these syrupy stalactites were irregular patches of phosphorescent cells. More cells covered the uneven floor in a haphazard, lumpy mosaic, glued together with matted twine. Some cells glowed with soft violet light while others lay dormant, exuding a pearly gray sheen.
Edie felt like she was on the stage of an amphitheater. No, it was the other way around. This was the exhibition and she was the audience.
Hiding in the center of the dome, draped in garlands of glistening sap, the metal casing of the BRAT was just visible. The cavern’s overwhelming size rendered it trivially small, but clearly it was intended to be the focal point. Soft folds of lush pink moss cascaded around its base like a flower in bloom.
The children would love this. That thought popped into Edie’s mind as she looked around the cavern in awe. To them, this was the true face of Macky—beauty and whimsy, with plenty of nooks to explore.
Pulsing beneath the matted floor and twisting behind the walls were the same glowing tubules from the tunnels. They were thicker here and formed raised channels. Edie stepped out of the tunnel, careful to walk between the veins. Dodging the sticky resin drapes or pushing them gently aside to clear the way, she approached the BRAT. The ground under her feet vibrated in anticipation.