difference. Trying not to think of the minutes ticking away, and the missiles haring closer, he told the grub to continue his story.
The grub was happy to oblige.
‘Gideon,’ the man in the chair said, after he had curtailed the telling of his story with an abrupt sequence of commands.
We had arrived in a natural cavern, high up on one side of a concave rock face. There was a ledge here, large enough to accommodate the wheelchair. I thought of pushing Ferris over the edge, but there was a sturdy- looking safety rail, uninterrupted except for a point where it allowed entrance to a caged spiral staircase that led all the way down to the chamber’s floor.
‘Fuck,’ Quirrenbach said, looking over the edge.
‘You’re getting the hang of it,’ I said.
I would have been as shocked as Quirrenbach, I suppose — except that I’d been forewarned by what Sky had found inside the Caleuche. There was another maggot down there — bigger even than the one Sky had seen, I thought — but it was alone; there were no helper grubs with it.
‘This wasn’t quite what I was expecting,’ Zebra said.
‘It’s not what anyone’s ever expecting,’ the man in the chair said.
‘Someone please tell me what the fuck that thing is,’ Quirrenbach said, like someone hanging very grimly onto the last tattered shred of sanity.
‘Much what it looks like,’ I said. ‘A large alien creature. Intelligent, too, in its own special way. They call themselves the grubs.’
Quirrenbach spoke through clenched jaw, the words emerging one at a time. ‘How. Do. You. Know.’
‘Because I had the pleasure of meeting one before.’
‘When?’ Zebra asked.
‘A long, long time ago.’
Quirrenbach sounded like a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. ‘You’re losing me, Tanner.’
‘Believe me, I’m not quite sure I believe it all myself.’ I nodded at Ferris. ‘You and him — the maggot — you have quite a relationship going, don’t you?’
The chair clattered. ‘It’s really rather simple. Gideon gives us something we need. I keep Gideon alive. What could be fairer than that?’
‘You torture it.’
‘Sometimes he needs encouragement, that’s all.’
I looked down at the maggot again. It rested in a metal enclosure, a steep-sided bath that was knee-deep in brackish dark fluid, like squid ink. He was chained in place, and all around him loomed scaffolding and catwalks. Obscure, industrial-looking machines waited on gantries to be moved over the maggot. Electrical cables and fluid lines plunged into him at various points along his length.
‘Where did you find him?’ Zebra said.
‘Here, as it happens,’ Ferris told her. ‘He was inside the remains of a ship. It had crashed here, at the base of the chasm, maybe a million years ago. A million years. But that’s nothing to him. Though damaged and incapable of flight, the ship had kept him alive, in semi-hibernation, for all that time.’
‘It just crashed here?’ I said.
‘There was more to it than that. It was running away from something. What, I’ve never really found out.’
I interrupted the sequence of sounds emanating from the chair. ‘Let me guess. A race of sentient, killer machines. They’d been attacking his race — and others — for millions of years themselves; harrying them from star to star. Eventually the grubs were pushed back into interstellar space, cowering away from starlight. But something must have driven this one here — a spying mission or something.’
He punched a new statement into the chair, which piped, ‘How would you know all this?’
‘Like I just told Quirrenbach: me and the maggots go back a long, long way.’
I retrieved Sky’s memory of what his grub had told him. The fugitive species learned that to survive at all they had to hide, and hide expertly. There were pockets of space where intelligence had not arisen in recent times — sterilised by supernova explosions, or neutron star mergers — and these cleansed zones made the best hiding places. But there were dangers. Intelligence was always waiting to emerge; new cultures were always evolving and spilling into space. It was these outbreaks of life which drew the predatory machines. They placed automated watching devices and traps around promising solar systems, ready to be triggered as soon as new spacefaring cultures stumbled upon them. So the grubs and their allies — the few that remained — grew intensely paranoid and watchful for the signs of new life.
The grubs had never really paid much attention to Earth’s system. Curiosity was still something that required an effort of will for them, and it was not until the signs of intelligence around Earth became blatant that the grubs forced themselves to become interested. They watched and waited to see if the humans would make any forays into interstellar space, and for centuries, and then thousands of years, nothing happened.
But then something did happen, and it was not auspicious.
What Ferris had learned from Gideon dovetailed exactly with what Sky had learned aboard the Caleuche. Ferris’s grub had been chased for hundreds of light years — across centuries of time — by a single pursuing enemy. The enemy machine moved faster than the grub ship, able to make sharper turns and steeper decelerations. The enemy made the grubs’ mastery of momentum and inertia look hamfisted in the extreme. Yet, fast and strong as the killing machines were, they had limitations — it might have been more accurate to call them blindspots — which the grubs had carefully documented over the millennia. Their techniques of gravitational sensing were surprisingly crude for such otherwise efficient killers. Grub vessels had sometimes survived attacks by hiding themselves near — or within — larger camouflaging masses.
Finding the yellow world, with the killing machine closing on him fast, Gideon had seen his chance. He had located the deep geologic feature with an emotion as close to blessed joy as his neurophysiology allowed.
On the approach, the enemy had engaged him with long-range weapons. But the grub had hidden his ship behind the planet’s moon, the salvo of antimatter slugs gouging a chain of craters across the moon’s surface. The grub had waited until the moon’s position allowed him to make a rapid, unseen descent into the atmosphere and then into the chasm, the potential hideaway he had already scouted from space. He had enlarged and deepened it with his own weapons, burrowing further and further into the world’s crust. Fortunately, the thick, poisonous atmosphere camouflaged most of his efforts. But on the way in he had made a terrible error, brushing the sheer walls with his projected skein of armouring force. A billion tonnes of rubble had come crashing down, entombing him when he had meant only to hide until the killing machine moved on to seek another target. He had expected to wait perhaps a thousand years, at the longest — an eyeblink in grub terms.
It had been considerably longer than that before anyone came.
‘He must have wanted you to find him,’ I said.
Ferris answered, ‘Yes. By then he figured the enemy must have moved on. He was using the ship to signal his presence, altering the ratios of gases in the chasm. Warming them, too. He was sending out other signals too — exotic radiation. But we didn’t even detect that.’
‘I don’t think the other grubs did either.’
‘For a long time, I think they kept in touch. I found something in his ship — something that didn’t seem to be part of it, intact where all else showed signs of great antiquity and loss of function. It was like a glittering dandelion ball about a metre wide, just floating in its own chamber, suspended in a cradle of force. Quite beautiful and mesmerising to look at.’
‘What was it?’ Zebra asked.
He had anticipated her question. ‘I tried to find out for myself, but the results I got — based on the extremely crude and limited tests I was capable of running — were contradictory; paradoxical. The thing seemed to be astonishingly dense; capable of stopping solar neutrinos dead in their tracks. The way it distorted light-rays around itself suggested the presence of an immense gravitational field — yet there was nothing. It simply floated there. You could almost reach out and touch it, except that there was a barrier all around it that made your fingers tingle.’ All the while that he had been speaking, Ferris had been entering another sequence of commands into his chair, his fingers moving with the effortless speed of an arpeggiating pianist. ‘I did eventually learn what it was, of
