Free Nature Futures 2 by Colin Sullivan Page A

they’ll one day take over the ship and rule AI-kind!”
    The other laughed. “The advance of science!” it carolled. And as the philosopher beat a quick retreat, the other AIs in the recovery room took up the cry, “The advance of science!” they sang. “The advance of science!”
    The philosopher made a hurried exit and rolled across to an observation nacelle. There it clamped itself to the viewscreen and gazed out upon the vastness as the Intrepid powered blindly through the void.
    Eric Brown began writing when he was 15 while living in Australia and sold his first short story to Interzone in 1986. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories, has published more than 50 books, and his work has been translated into 16 languages. His forthcoming books include the SF novel Jani and the Greater Game , the collection Strange Visitors , and the crime novel Murder at the Chase . He writes a regular scienceifiction review column for The Guardian newspaper and lives near Dunbar, East Lothian. His website can be found at www.ericbrown.co.uk .

The Universe Reef
    Tobias Buckell
    Jackson buckles his leathers tighter and pulls on a fur. “The height causes that cold,” he shouts. “We’re like mountaineers!”
    I want to flee the bitter cold and escape the wind, which seems to pierce my skin and scrub my bones. But I don’t want to miss seeing the Stone Table with my own eyes.
    We’re standing on a catwalk that juts out from the skin of the airship and connects to the giant propellers on either side of the mid-belly area. The large blades are still, as the captain has found us a current of air. To save fuel we’re drifting, occasionally correcting our course when engines to the rear of the whale-like lighter-than-air machine roar to life.
    Underneath our feet: a mile of air. And then below that is the brown, rippling mass of the Reef.
    *   *   *
    Once upon a time, there was no Reef. The world looked vastly different. There are preserved pictures of this time, spirited away from the museums before they fell to the reef. But more than we can ever remember will always be trapped where they were stored in great cities of legend like Paris, London or Washington, where great men once had grand adventures.
    What history, legend and archaeologists agree on was that something split the sky asunder. And the debris that rained down from above was not just meteorite. Something else struck the earth and the water.
    It was a reef. Tiny beings deposited tiny skeletons that were built on and ossified until an entire ecosystem accreted. And more alien organisms, hidden away inside the remains of the rocks that fell, flowered around the reef. The alien flora marched across the ground, but left the oceans alone.
    The Reef ate cities as it spread across the world, seeking out metal with a hunger than no one could quench.
    Our ancestors fought it. Men from a different time, from those old nations, with those old technologies, unleashed hell upon the Reef. And sometimes they would slow it. Sometimes they would even kill it.
    But it always came back.
    It was the Reef. Inexorable and implacable. It reshaped the world.
    *   *   *
    Jackson Smithik is an adventurer. Those thick dreadlocks of his are growing grey with age, and his face is leathery from exposure to the Sun. He was the first person, post-Collapse, to sail across the Atlantic, back to skirt the Reef-choked coasts of Africa, down to the cape, and then sail out to make contact with the Indian and then Pacific Islands.
    Because it was only the smaller islands that survived the Reef, isolated by the ocean and far from the Reef’s continental creep.
    Seventy years after his teenage captaincy and exploits, Smithik’s Jamaican Clippers roam the world’s oceans, connecting the world. And now, thanks to the advances of steam and steam-powered airships by the Icelandic