Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Page B

it.
    I was thinking of that when another comms burst came through. For a moment I was gladdened—just seeing the scroll of numbers and symbols, even if it meant nothing to me, made me feel closer to the Tereshkova. Home was just three shells and a sprint across vacuum away. Almost close enough to touch, like the space station that had sped across the sky over Klushino, when my father held me on his shoulders.
    “Dimitri,” crackled a voice. “Galenka. Yakov here. I hope you can hear me.”
    “What is it, friend?” I asked, hearing an edge in his voice I didn’t like.
    “You’d better listen carefully—we could get cut off at any moment. Baikonur detected a change in the Matryoshka—a big one. Shell 1 pulsations have increased in amplitude and frequency. It’s like nothing anyone’s seen since the first apparition. Whatever you two are doing in there-it’s having an effect. The thing is waking. You need to think about getting out, while the collision-avoidance algorithm will still get you through Shell 1. Those pulsations change anymore, the algorithm won’t be any use.”
    “He could be lying,” Galenka said. “Saying whatever he needs to say that get us to go back.”
    “I’m not lying. I want you to come back. And I want that Soyuz back so that at least one of us can get home.”
    “I think we’d better move,” I said.
    “The remaining samples?”
    “Leave them. Let’s just get back to the ship as quickly as possible.”
    As I spoke, the comms window blipped out. Galenka pushed away from the Progress. I levered myself onto the nearest thorn and started climbing. It was quicker now that we didn’t have to carry anything between us. I thought of the changing conditions in Shell 1 and hoped that we’d still be able to pick a path through the lethal, shifting maze of field-lines.
    We were half way to the Soyuz—I could see it overhead, tantalising near—when Galenka halted, only just below me.
    “We’re in trouble,” she said.
    “That’s why we have to keep on moving.”
    “Something’s coming up from below. We’re not going to make it, Dimitri. It’s rising too quickly.”
    I looked down and saw what she meant. We couldn’t see the Progress anymore. It was lost under a silver tide, a sea of gleaming mercury climbing slowly through the thicket, swallowing everything as it rose.
    “Climb,” I said.
    “We aren’t going to make it. It’s coming too damned fast.”
    I gritted my teeth: typical Galenka, pragmatic to the end. But even she had resumed her ascent, unable to stop her body from doing what her mind knew to be futile. She was right, too. The tide was going to envelope us long before we reached the Soyuz. But I couldn’t stop climbing either. I risked a glance down and saw the silver fluid lapping at Galenka’s heels, then surging up to swallow her lowest boot.
    “It’s got me.”
    “Keep moving.”
    She pulled the boot free, reached the next thorn, and for a moment it appeared that she might be capable of out-running the fluid. My mind raced ahead to the Soyuz, realizing that even if we got there in time, even if we got inside and sealed the hatch, we wouldn’t be able to get the ship aloft in time.
    Then the fluid took more of Galenka. It lapped to her thighs, then her waist. She slowed her climb.
    “It’s pulling me back,” she said, grunting with the effort. “It’s trying to pull me in.”
    “Fight it.”
    Maybe she did—it was hard to tell, with her movements so impeded. The tide consumed her to the chest, taking her backpack, then absorbed her helmet. She had one hand raised above her head, grasping for the next thorn. The tide took it.
    “Galenka.”
    “I’m here.” She came through indistinctly, comms crackling with static. “I’m in it now. I can’t see anything. But I can still move, still breathe. It’s like being in the immersion tank.”
    “Try and keep climbing.”
    “Picking up some suit faults now. Fluid must be interfering with the