On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  The coming and going of service vehicles delayed docking for thirty minutes. The shuttle waited its turn, then fell into the open maw of the polar aperture.

  Zanzibar, like Malabar, had the proportions of a fat ellipsoid. All the holoships looked similar from the outside, and all were within a few kilometres of being the same size. Fifty kilometre walnuts, skewered on the long axis of their engines.

  Chiku had seen them being born, in the year before she went to Quorum Binding. She had gone out to the birthing orbits from Triton, on a sumptuous high-burn liner the size of a small city-state. The holoships were strung out like beads on an invisible wire, all at varying stages of completion. Gravity tractors hauled in asteroids, mountains of rock and ice selected for size, composition and stability, raw matter for the shaping. They chiselled and cored the asteroids, voiding mighty chambers large enough to swallow the liner a thousand times over. They fused and glued loosely-bound rubble piles, infiltrated rock and ice with webs of spiderfibre reinforcement, until they had the integrity to withstand spin and the ferocious, barely-contained impulse of a truly monstrous Chibesa engine. They bottled and pressurised the interior chambers, then gifted them with warmth and water and ten thousand forms of plant and animal life. Then they built towns, cities and parks, schools, hospitals and seats of government, and allowed people to begin moving in, eager droves of them, in their hundreds and thousands. What had been a shell became a place.

  Last of all, the Chibesa engines were lit. With the slowness of clouds the readied arks began to pull away from the birthing orbits. They went out in caravans, for mutual support. Each caravan was part of a larger flow of holoships, assigned to a particular solar system. Hundreds, for the most popular target systems. Typically a dozen or so holoships would be organised into a local caravan, with one or more light-years between each caravan.

  It took years, decades, for the holoships to reach their cruising speeds. But once that had been attained – presently a whisker under thirteen per cent of the speed of light – there was no immediate requirement to re-employ their engines. Some of the holoships, like Zanzibar, had partially dismantled their engines so that the forward and aft polar apertures could be used for the docking of large ships. The dismantled components were moved into secondary chambers, like the pieces of an ominous puzzle.

  Chiku’s little vessel was now sliding into the space that would once have been occupied by the end of the Chibesa engine. Larger ships, shuttles and taxis were attached around the curving walls, linked by connecting tubes and service umbilicals. The taxi matched rotation, docked. Clamps secured and the airlock connector grappled into place.

  Chiku set about loosening her restraints. ‘An hour ago, our only concern was how our presentation had gone down.’

  ‘The elephants are safe, aren’t they?’ Namboze asked. ‘Whatever was in that chamber, that’s nowhere near the elephants.’

  ‘They should be all right,’ Chiku said. ‘The damage is nowhere near the main community cores, either, or the school chamber.’

  They disembarked from the taxi. Chiku had been anticipating chaos in the processing area on the other side of the lock, but everything was surprisingly ordered, albeit busier than usual, and with an unmistakable air of heightened tension. Walls were alive with status reports – images and text updates, refreshing and scrolling constantly. Pulsing bars of red, outlining doors and windows, signified a shift to emergency conditions.

  Chiku struggled to remember the last time this had happened. The Pemba loss, perhaps. Maybe the occasional emergency drill. But even those were extremely uncommon.

  Chair Utomi, busy with crisis management, had tasked another Assembly member to meet the diplomatic party at the dock. Chiku was only slightly surprised to see her old colleague Sou-Chun Lo.

  ‘Have you any idea what happened?’ Namboze asked.

  ‘Whatever it was, it doesn’t seem to have gone beyond Kappa Chamber. We’re hoping and praying that was the end of it.’

  ‘Kappa Chamber,’ Chiku echoed in a low voice. A weird chime of déjà vu, there and gone in a moment.

  ‘Chiku, Noah – your children and immediate family have been accounted for and are safe,’ said Sou-Chun Lo. ‘Gonithi – there’s no immediate reason to worry for your friends and colleagues. I doubt any of them were in Kappa, unless they had a direct connection to any of the research programmes.’

  Chiku, Noah and Namboze nodded their thanks.

  ‘You have all been working hard,’ Sou-Chun Lo said, steepling her fingers in a prayer-like gesture. ‘You should go home now.’

  ‘Provided there are suits to spare,’ Noah said, ‘Chiku and I intend to assist with the search in Kappa.’

  Chiku flicked a glance at her husband. They had discussed no such thing.

  ‘There is no need, really,’ Sou-Chun Lo said kindly. ‘You have all done more than enough for the committee in recent days. Your particular commitment has been noted, Chiku.’

  She wondered if that was a reference to their hopes of obtaining skipover.

  ‘I’d still like to help,’ Noah said.

  Chiku shook her head. ‘You can help by going and finding the children – they must be scared out of their wits. I can take care of myself here. It’s important that someone from the Assembly gets their hands dirty in the rescue effort, so it may as well be me.’

  ‘I want to help, too,’ Namboze said. ‘I have suit and field medical experience.’

  ‘We’re not expecting to find many alive,’ Sou-Chun cautioned. ‘You should be ready for that. It’s going to be messy.’

  ‘We know,’ said Chiku. ‘We saw the explosion.’ But tired as she was, she made an effort to strike a positive note. ‘Still, there’s a chance a few may have survived the blast and managed to get to suits, or pressurised structures, or even into the service tunnels under the chamber. Besides, the whole place has to be searched regardless of the likelihood of finding anyone alive. We need to know what happened in there, and whether it continues to pose a risk to us.’

  ‘There are no immediate structural concerns,’ Sou-Chun said. ‘The blast and pressure loss deflected our course by a very small amount, but our trimming motors can easily correct for that. Most of the citizens wouldn’t have felt anything – the first they knew of the accident was when Utomi appeared in their homes.’

  ‘What about the research programmes? Most of those were housed in Kappa, right? Thousands of scientists, engineers, all their support staff . . . hundreds of them must have been there at the time.’

  ‘Including Travertine,’ Noah said quietly.

  That was the connection she had almost made for herself. Travertine and Kappa.

  How could she not have seen it?

  ‘The hours ve kept . . . how could Travertine not have been there?’

  ‘Travertine?’ Namboze asked, incredulous. ‘The same Travertine?’

  ‘There’s only one Travertine,’ Noah said, with a long-suffering expression.

  ‘I thought Travertine wasn’t allowed to conduct experiments any more,’ Namboze said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Chiku answered. ‘Travertine didn’t break the old rules deliberately, they were just drawn up badly. After Pemba there was a mad rush to create new legislation, and it wasn’t done properly.’

  ‘I think Travertine knew full well what ve was doing,’ Sou-Chun said.

  ‘You could just as easily say ve acted in the interests of the local caravan,’ replied Chiku. ‘No one ever thought Travertine had been motivated by personal gain, just a desire to solve the slowdown problem. Look, can we save this for later? For all we know, ve’s among the dead or dying.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can reach the children,’ Noah said. Then he put a hand on Chiku’s elbow. ‘Be careful, please.’

  ‘I will,’ she said, and made a mental note to the effect that from this day forward she would never once complain about having an uneventful life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Chiku and Namboze went to the nearest tra
nsit point and requested pod conveyance to Kappa. When the pod arrived, it brought four workers who would soon be suiting up and going outside. The workers disembarked and Chiku and Namboze boarded and took opposite facing seats. The pod gathered speed, smooth-bored rock rushing past its airtight canopy.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Chiku told the younger woman.

  ‘Nor do you.’

  ‘I’m old enough to take some risks – and some responsibility. How old are you, Gonithi?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘In absolute years?’

  ‘Yes. I was born thirty-eight years ago.’

  ‘Then you’ve only ever known Zanzibar.’ Chiku shook her head as if this were some strange and miraculous condition, like the ability to part waves or turn base metals into gold. ‘No skipover intervals?’

  ‘I haven’t applied, and at my age I doubt there’d be any point.’

  ‘I still can’t get my head around the idea that there are grownup people walking around who’ve never lived anywhere but the holoship.’

  Namboze produced a shrug. ‘It’s normal enough to me. This is my world, just as Crucible will be my world when we get there. What was all that about, by the way?’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘Well, two things. I wasn’t sure whose side to take when you started talking about Travertine.’

  ‘Travertine’s a pretty divisive figure. Ve’s a friend of mine – or was, I suppose. When ve was last in trouble, I was one of those who pushed for a lighter punishment. The issue split the assembly – Sou-Chun was among those who felt we needed to make a clearer example of ver, if only to keep the rest of the local caravan happy.’

  Namboze brooded on this for a few seconds. ‘Weren’t you and Sou-Chun political allies at one time?’

  ‘We’re not exactly enemies, even now. I’ve known Sou-Chun for longer than you’ve been alive, and we have a lot in common. Sure, we had our differences over Travertine. And then there was that whole stupid business over what to do with the high-capacity lander – whether we should keep it or dismantle it and make room for something else. But it’s nothing, really.’ In her mind, she added: You’ll see how it is, when you’ve played at politics a little longer. Aloud, she said, ‘I still have a lot of respect for Sou-Chun.’

  The pod swerved sharply into a different tunnel and Chiku’s stomach tingled. They were travelling against Zanzibar’s spin, counteracting it to a degree.

  ‘What if this mess turns out to be something to do with Travertine?’

  ‘It won’t. Everything that went on in Kappa was under tight control. All the research programmes. Improved energy conversion and storage, better skipover protocols, more efficient recycling and repurification techniques. Rehearsal of methods that will serve us well when we land on Crucible. Agriculture, water management, low-impact terraforming. God, I sound like a politician, don’t I? But that kind of thing, anyway. Even simulations of what we can expect when we start hands-on investigation of Mandala.’

  ‘Nothing fundamental, then?’

  ‘After Pemba? Good grief, no. We’re not fools, Gonithi. I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.’

  Presently the pod slowed as it approached one of Kappa’s access stations. It was snug in the bedrock out of which the chamber had been hollowed, and provided its automatic pressure seals had closed, there was no further risk of exposure to vacuum.

  Chiku and Namboze stepped out of the pod. The atrium was as busy as the docking station, but there was also a sense of subdued resignation, of people going through the motions. And indeed as Chiku looked around, she saw rescue workers, citizen volunteers, medical teams and assembly members. But no one who looked as if they had just been pulled out the rubble, or whatever was left inside Kappa. The triage teams seemed bewildered, at loose ends.

  Chiku reminded herself that the incident had really only just happened – less than an hour ago they were still in space, waiting to dock. Why, she wondered, did the brain insist on inducing this time-dilation effect during periods of intense emotional stress? Why could it not bestow equivalent favour during Mposi and Ndege’s birthdays?

  Chiku and Namboze found a local coordinator and volunteered their services. They were shown to a staging area where suits were being issued. Some were coming fresh out of storage; others were being recycled as work teams emerged from a stint inside Kappa. Several of the suits came equipped with an extra pair of teleoperable arms, mounted at waist level, for which special operational training was required. More suits were arriving from elsewhere in Zanzibar, riding the pods under autonomous control then offering themselves up for use. They walked around headless, helmets tucked under their arms.

  Namboze was in her suit, ready to go, needing only trivial adjustments – a glove-and boot-swap, that was all – while Chiku was still struggling to find a torso section that did not feel too tight around the waist or chafe under her armpits. Finally she was done, helmet locked down, the visual field stripping away all unnecessary distractions. The suit’s power-assist made movement effortless.

  Chiku and Namboze emerged through a portcullis-like airlock into the ruins of Kappa at the top of a gently sloping ramp leading down to the chamber’s true floor. In the community cores, the pod-terminal ramps were often lined with flagpoles, benches and bright-painted concessions. But not here.

  Kappa was now darker than any of the thirty-five other chambers Chiku had visited in Zanzibar. Even at night, when the sky became a bowl of simulated stars, there would still have been lights from buildings and street lamps. Now the entire chamber had been enucleated, gouged clean like an eye socket. She might as well have been staring into the void between galaxies.

  The aug dropped a faint overlay across Chiku’s visual field. Compiled from Zanzibar’s own memory of itself, it revealed roads and structures, bridges and underpasses, subsurface tunnels and ducts, possible refuges for survivors. Everything was colour-coded and annotated. The overlay was updating constantly as the other search parties made their own reports and improved the aug’s real-time picture of the chamber.

  Chiku was glad of it. She had visited Kappa a few times but did not know it anywhere near as well as the residential and administrative chambers where she spent most of her days.

  ‘How are your eyes, Gonithi?’ Chiku asked.

  ‘Fine enough now.’ Namboze paused. ‘Wait a moment. Adjusting my amplification.’

  Chiku did likewise. It took an effort of will to remember the subvocal aug commands, so little did she use them. She swept her vision across the blackness and pointed. ‘Some lights over there, moving. Must be the sweep team from the next entrance along.’

  They walked down the ramp, the luminous patterning of their own suits casting two moving puddles of light as they descended. Chiku activated her crown-mounted lamp and swept the beam before her. It glanced off the sides of low, rectangular, mostly windowless buildings, reaching away on either side of a narrow thoroughfare. Some of the buildings appeared superficially intact, but many were now ruined: torn apart by the blast and decompression, or crumpled under the debris that had come raining down on them in the moments after the blowout. The thoroughfare was littered with junk: huge, scab-like chunks of wall cladding; mangled machines of unidentifiable origin; the corpses of uprooted and fallen trees; and the rubble and flattened carcasses of destroyed buildings. And nowhere a light or hint of life, save that provided by the rescue parties.

  They reached the base of the ramp and began picking their way along the thoroughfare. Chiku’s suit was sniffing the environment for human life-signs, taking care to ignore Namboze and the other searchers. So far, nothing. They pushed on, the thoroughfare connecting with another. They reached one of the buildings on their search list. On the overlay it was outlined in blue, pulsing gently – a white cube with doors and windows on the lowest floor, but otherwise blank. A tree, uprooted from elsewhere, impaled its roof. A mass of house-sized debris had collapsed against
the aft-facing wall. Otherwise the building’s integrity looked good.

  ‘This is Chiku,’ she said, calling back to the search coordinators in the pod terminal. ‘Gonithi and I have reached our first target building. The door’s still closed – doesn’t look as if anyone’s opened it before us. We’re going in.’

  ‘Tag it on your way out,’ the coordinator told her. ‘And watch your step in there.’

  ‘We will,’ Chiku replied.

  Only a handful of buildings in Kappa were capable of retaining air in the event of decompression, so those were the first to be searched. Most of the damage appeared to have been caused by the blowout rather than the flash that preceded it. Chiku had no intention of voicing theories in the junior politician’s presence, but it was beginning to look unlikely that the blast had originated inside Kappa itself. If the force of an explosion within Kappa had been sufficient to punch right through Zanzibar’s skin – through tens of metres of solid rock – there would be nothing left within the chamber.

  Therefore the blast could only have originated in the chamber’s skin.

  An airlock protected the building, but it had not retained atmosphere. Chiku and Namboze searched the pitch-black interior – a maze of corridors and bioscience laboratories, judging by the glass-walled rooms they passed – until they found their way to the rear of the structure, where its shell had been pierced by debris. They found bodies on the second floor: a woman slumped in a corridor, still clutching research notes – Chiku imagined the gale tearing the air from her lungs, the life from her body, but somehow she had held on to those notes. Two people were still seated on high stools at their desks – the blast of decompression had shoved their equipment and notes to one end of the table, like a bar being cleared for a brawl, but somehow they remained upright at their posts. On the next floor, a young man lay in a corridor, not far from a lavatory. They found another person sprawled halfway down the connecting staircase, her leg broken.