On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  Chiku checked the time. Twenty minutes, give or take.

  She cast around for a chunk of debris and found a chest-sized boulder that would have taxed her without the suit’s ampliation. She walked to the edge of the hole, raised the boulder to her sternum and thrust it down and away as hard as she could, stepping back in the same instant so that there was no risk of the boulder crushing her feet on its way down.

  Her aim was true. The boulder crunched through the lip of overhanging floor, pulverising it. Chiku watched the debris rain down the shaft in perfect soundlessness. Now the hole was more or less the same diameter as the shaft. All she had to do was lower herself over the lip and start climbing.

  Chiku crushed her misgivings. She knelt down with her back to the hole and began to drop her right foot into the void, maintaining balance so that the weight of her suit’s life-support hump did not tip her over the edge. It did not work. Why had she ever thought it was going to? If there had been a shaft like this in a normal part of Zanzibar, there would have been railings, or something to hold onto, to help the transition into a climbing position. Here there was nothing, just a hole in the ground . . . and nothing to stop her toppling into it. She could sit with feet over the edge and somehow try and wriggle around . . .

  Chiku spotted something that might work. It was a length of pipe or spar as thick as her wrist, one end still embedded in a chunk of debris. The pipe was perhaps three metres long, its free end terminating abruptly, as if severed.

  It was madness, and she knew it, but now her actions had a momentum of their own. She carried the spar and its ragged anchor to the edge of the hole, holding it like a pole vault, and rammed the severed end into a mound of debris. It crunched, jammed, then gripped. The other end, where the chunk was still embedded, she allowed to drop between two large boulders, where it became pinned in place. The bar now ran at a tangent to the edge of the hole, half a metre from it and half a metre above the floor’s level. Chiku gave it a kick, testing its fixity.

  She knelt down, between the hole and the improvised railing. Now she was able to keep both hands on the bar. She lowered her right foot, scrabbled it around until it found the foothold. Placing more trust in the railing, she shifted her centre of gravity over the hole. Her left leg followed, finding another foothold. The bar shifted, then caught again.

  Chiku’s heart resumed beating.

  She released her right hand from the bar and lowered further, a foot at a time, until her right hand located a handhold and her face was nearly level with the rim of the hole. The foot- and handholds felt safe. With an intake of breath she released the bar, and descended fully into the shaft. Now there was nothing for it but to keep going down.

  She soon found a rhythm. Climbing in the suit was much easier than climbing without it, since the power-assist gave the illusion of effortlessness. Even the gloves were augmented, so that her fingers never began to tire. This illusion of weightless ease was treacherous, of course. She could still fall.

  Chiku paused in her descent to catch her breath and looked up. Craning her head back as far as she dared, she saw that the ragged hole had diminished to a milky circle, a false moon glimmering with the pale lights of the rescue workers in Kappa. Chiku had given no thought as to how far she ought to go before turning back.

  Further than this, certainly. She checked the time again. Her margin had diminished to ten minutes.

  She resumed the descent and kept going until she felt the shaft beginning to curve and level out. The descent became easier, but she could no longer see the hole above. No milky circle now, just swallowing blackness in both directions.

  Chiku paused, torn between continuing and turning back. Then she swallowed and carried on.

  The shaft levelled out and she stood – it was high enough that she could stand upright. The hand- and footholds were still present; perhaps they had been installed to assist locomotion under weightlessness, before the holoship was set spinning. She crunched past the remains of some of the debris dislodged from above that had fallen down the shaft, careened around the bend and come to rest here.

  She paused again and tugged Travertine’s map from her thigh pocket. It had taken some nerve to smuggle it in under the scrutiny of the techs who had helped her suit-up. Not that the map was incriminating in itself – it had the look of something executed by a child – but she had no easy explanation for bringing it with her.

  Travertine had identified this probable entry point and indicated how the shaft linked into the underground network ve had already begun to explore. There was a junction not far ahead, and a little way beyond that – within easy walking distance, Chiku judged – was the barrier, or impediment, that had blocked Travertine’s progress.

  Chiku walked another fifty metres, according to the suit, now moving horizontally, parallel to Kappa’s surface, but away from the breach. The tunnel met another. As she pushed on, trusting Travertine, she checked the time. She could still make her planned rendezvous with the search party and avoid difficult explanations – but only if she turned around soon.

  Then her helmet light fell on something ahead, at the limit of her vision, and she had to know what it was. The shaft widened ahead, the smooth-bored walls curving away on either side of her, and she could just make out something waiting there, dark and squat, curves and angles. Some kind of machine. It could have been a generator or water purifier.

  It was neither of those things.

  It was a transit pod, big enough to carry both freight and passengers, shaped like a fat, blunt-ended capsule with doors and cargo hatches in its curving, slug-back sides. Chiku’s memory prickled. She had travelled in pods like this, in the early days of the voyage, but fifty or seventy-five years into the crossing, Zanzibar’s entire internal transit network had been ripped out and refurbished. Somehow the engineers had missed this pod along with Travertine’s forgotten subterranean tunnel system.

  The pod rested on triplet induction rails spaced around the widened shaft at separations of one hundred and twenty degrees. They gleamed clean and cold, stretching into the distance as far as her helmet light could illuminate. Concentric red circles glowed at intervals along the tunnel.

  This was wrong. She could accept a minor detail of Zanzibar’s history being forgotten and omitted from the structural logs. But this tunnel was huge and the presence of a transit pod suggested that it continued for some distance. And the pod was big enough to carry almost anything Chiku could imagine.

  She touched a hand to its side. Through the glove, she felt dead ages of cold and silence, as though this pod had been waiting here, biding its time with a monumental patience. She could also feel the faintest tremble of waiting power, as if it was still energised, still drawing wattage from the induction rails. They ended here, terminating in large angled buffers designed to stop a runaway pod. This one had stopped safely a couple of metres from the buffers.

  Chiku walked to the end facing into the tunnel, where the converging lines of rails gleamed back in brassy tones. The pod was sealed. She brushed her hand against the faint oval outline of the forward passenger door, wondering who had last travelled in this vehicle – someone still aboard Zanzibar, perhaps, or one of the holoship’s architects, completing their final inspection before the CP drive had been lit.

  The door’s outline lit up at her touch, glowing neon purple against the pod’s black surface. Chiku took an involuntary step backwards as the door bulged out of its recess and slid to one side along the hull.

  Chiku stared at the cabin space. Subdued lights and an arrangement of deep, plushly padded seats made the interior look warmly inviting. The tunnel was in vacuum now, but the passengers would normally have boarded in a fully pressurised environment.

  Chiku could not help herself. She stepped into the glowing cabin and took one of the seats, which looked brand new. There were no controls to speak of, merely an angled console beneath the curving forward window. An illuminated three-dimensional map of the holoship’s transit links
appeared to hover under the console’s glossy black surface. Chiku compared it against her memories. Though the basic arrangement of chambers had been fixed since launch, the interconnections had undergone several changes. Over the years, the citizens aboard Zanzibar had imposed workable, human solutions on the architects’ scrupulously logical intentions. Major routes, designed to be vital trunks, had fallen into puzzling disuse, while a number of secondary connections had proven vastly more popular. The most direct routes between chambers were not always preferred, and over the years the map had been redrawn and simplified, pruned of surplus branches.

  Chiku touched her glove to the console and one route flared to particular brightness. She tried to follow it through the confusion of connecting lines, but the knot was tangled. It led forward, though, to the holoship’s leading pole. Chiku noticed some words hovering beneath the console’s surface that had not been there a moment before.

  Chamber Thirty-Seven.

  Another phrase followed, pulsing gently.

  Submit for familial genetic verification.

  This, Chiku surmised, was as far as Travertine had come. Ve had found the pod but it was beyond vis ability to make it move. By intuition or investigation, Travertine had concluded that it was waiting to taste an Akinya’s blood.

  That might have been nothing more than an inspired guess on Travertine’s part – a gambit to buy Chiku’s sympathy and support in the trial, before it could be put to the test.

  There was a very simple way to tell.

  Chiku’s finger hovered above the panel for a moment before she lowered it to within a skin’s breadth of the surface. She thought it unlikely that the machine would be able to sample her DNA through the fabric of her glove, but it was not a chance she was prepared take. She lifted her hand away from the panel without touching it, warily, like a saboteur stepping back from a primed bomb.

  And then stepped out of the cabin, back onto the tunnel floor. After a few seconds, sensing her egress, the door slid back into place. The outline pulsed purple and then faded into seamlessness.

  Chiku remained intrigued. It would be an interesting exercise to see where the pod ended up, if it was in fact capable of moving. But one thing was clear. Wherever the pod thought it was supposed to go, it could not possibly be Chamber Thirty-Seven.

  Because there was and never had been any such place. There had only ever been thirty-six chambers aboard Zanzibar.

  Even a child knew that.

  ‘You had me worried sick,’ Noah said. He was at the school gates, leaning on the low white wall with his arms folded on top of it.

  ‘I promised I wouldn’t do anything foolish.’

  ‘Foolish or not, you took a big risk. Was it worth it?’

  ‘I think so.’ Chiku paused for a moment, then added, ‘Actually, I’m not certain. Part of me thinks I should go back, but a bigger part is telling me that might be a bad idea.’

  They had arrived separately, before Ndege and Mposi were allowed out of their lessons. Chiku watched a teacher walk along a covered passage between two of the school blocks. Ve carried a potted plant, cradling the bowl while the plant tickled vis chin.

  ‘It’d be a really bad idea to keep this a secret,’ Noah said.

  ‘I haven’t decided one way or the other yet – I need to do a bit more digging before I decide. I want all the facts at my disposal before I bring this to the Assembly’s attention. It’s not that I don’t trust them, but they don’t always make the right decisions.’

  ‘That sounds exactly like not trusting the Assembly to me.’

  ‘You know what I mean. And in my position, you’d be doing exactly the same things.’

  Noah made the low, equivocal noise she had come to recognise as grudging agreement. ‘So tell me what you found.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to know?’

  ‘You started this, wife. The time for keeping me in the dark has passed.’

  ‘I found a hole under one of the buildings I searched yesterday. It’s actually a shaft, but it’s not on any of the construction documents.’

  ‘So you did what any normal, cautious-minded person with family and responsibilities would have done. You definitely did not climb down this shaft to see what was at the bottom of it.’

  ‘I only went down a little way. It looked safe and I made sure I’d be able to climb out again. And at the bottom I found . . . well, more tunnels, for a start. And a pod.’

  ‘A pod.’

  ‘Just sitting there on rails, all powered up and ready to go somewhere. Travertine told me there was something down there I’d find interesting.’

  ‘Travertine’s mixed up in this as well?’ Noah tried to make light of it, but the dismay behind his smile was obvious to Chiku. ‘I can’t tell you how much that gladdens my heart.’

  ‘Travertine’s a minor detail in this. Ve never got further than the pod. It wouldn’t work for ver – it’s got a genetic lock.’

  ‘Couldn’t Travertine have walked down the tunnel?’

  ‘Ve lost interest in the pod when ve couldn’t activate it. At that point it became a distraction, only useful as a potential bargaining chip.’

  ‘What did ve put you up to?’

  ‘I didn’t make any promises to Travertine, and Travertine didn’t tell me much beyond that. So on balance, I think I’ve got to go back.’

  ‘This genetic lock won’t be a problem?’

  ‘Not if it’s waiting for someone like me. An Akinya, I mean.’

  ‘Not everything in the known universe has to revolve around that name of yours.’

  ‘Given the significant role my family played in making the holoships, we were in a good position to put something inside Zanzibar that isn’t on the maps.’

  Chiku wasn’t sure whether Noah was humouring her, or whether his own curiosity had got the better of him. ‘Have you any idea where the pod might go?’

  ‘Somewhere that doesn’t exist – Chamber Thirty-Seven. Obviously, there’s no such place.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Noah affirmed.

  ‘But I’d still like to find out where it goes.’

  ‘Surely this is a matter for the Assembly now, Chiku.’

  She took her time answering. ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ Noah said. ‘You’ve made your preliminary investigation and found something much more significant than a hole in the ground. You can’t keep this to yourself any longer.’

  She forced a conciliatory smile, hoping it would placate him. ‘I’m sharing it with you, aren’t I?’

  Children were coming out of the school. Normally they would have spilt out in an exuberant mass, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to leave the classrooms. Today they were earnest in their solemnity, as if they had all suffered a collective scolding. They would have been told more about what had happened yesterday, including the fact that more than two hundred people had died in the accident.

  It was probably the first time most of these children had been confronted with the notion of human mortality. Animals died, machines very occasionally malfunctioned or broke down – this they understood. But most of the time, people just kept on living. Of the citizens aboard Zanzibar upon departure, remarkably few had died, and over such a long span of time that most of these children would have missed it.

  Today, though, they had been touched by death, and it would take up permanent residence in their psyches. Chiku did not envy the teachers the supremely difficult questions they would have been faced with. It was not as if the teachers had much experience of death themselves.

  She spotted their children near the back of the exodus.

  ‘You’re not going down there again,’ Noah said. He paused a beat before adding, ‘Not without me, anyway.’

  She shook her head in flat refusal. ‘Out of the question.’

  ‘And that response tells me it might not be as safe as you’re implying. The truth, now, Chiku – is it risky or not?’

  ‘I can’t guess what’s a
t the end of the tunnel, so yes, there is risk involved – but it’s a small one. Plus in spite of all your misgivings, I know you’re almost as curious as I am to find out where the pod wants to take me.’ She glanced over the wall and lowered her voice when she saw that Ndege and Mposi were almost within earshot. ‘For their sakes, we can’t both go down there. It has to be one or the other. And since I’m the Akinya—’

  ‘When?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Tomorrow, if I can.’

  ‘Then promise me something. When you come back, you either hand this over to the Assembly, or we never speak of it again. And you never go back to the shaft. Not now, not in a hundred years.’

  ‘That sounds reasonable,’ Chiku said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The following day, work took Chiku beyond Zanzibar. She was summoned to accompany a delegation of Assembly members and constables to escort Travertine to the Council of Worlds. She wanted to tell Travertine that this outing had not been her idea, but she could think of no way of saying it that would not sound as if she were shifting the blame onto her colleagues.

  They went out in a high-capacity shuttle and made a slow orbit around their own holoship before powering up for deeper space. The breach slid into view: a gash on the holoship’s side that widened to a yawning void. Construction teams hemmed the wound’s edge, defining it with the blue-white blaze of floodlights and the yellow glow of temporary living modules and equipment shacks. Small ships and robots hovered ‘below’ the wound from Chiku’s perspective, holding station with thrust or impact-tethers. More evidence of consolidation and repair was visible through the rupture itself. False stars spangled back from the distant concavity of Kappa’s sky.