Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Well enough. Our paths crossed over the years and I always found him willing to set aside differences, to see beyond ideology.’

  ‘Ideology is all there is.’

  ‘Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.’ He glanced out of the window at the monotonous and arid terrain over which they were now circling. ‘Shall I tell you a story?’

  ‘If you must.’

  A whirr signalled the deployment of the landing gear. It whined into place and locked with a series of metallic thuds.

  ‘I was gravely ill, once – a bad reaction to one of the local organisms on Crucible. Mposi and I were political adversaries, but he still found time to arrange help for my wife and children, and to come and see me when I was well enough for visitors. He did a great deal for me and mine, although he always downplayed it – said it was a small favour, nothing more. I never forgot that gesture, and I always made sure Mposi knew it.’

  ‘You fought like cats.’

  ‘We argued our positions when much was at stake, but nothing interfered with our basic respect for each other as human beings. And I regret very much that we have lost Mposi’s stabilising influence. He was an ally to us all.’

  She could have left it at that, but something in his manner had undermined her instinctive dislike of him. She thought back to a conversation with Mposi, when he mentioned the ‘small favour’. It accorded with Karayan’s account of the same kindness.

  ‘Did you really not know Peter Grave before the expedition?’

  ‘I wish I had known him better. Unfortunately, there was very little contact between us until shortly before the ship left. Perhaps if there had been more time . . .’

  At the risk of putting words into his mouth, she said, ‘You’d have realised what he was, what he was capable of?’

  ‘I’m tempted to think so, but in practice, I’m not sure I am that good a judge of character. During his time with us, I certainly sensed that he was an outsider, or rather an outlier. Call him an extremist, if you will.’

  ‘Then why did you put up with him?’

  ‘Our movement encompasses a spectrum of viewpoints. I could hardly criticise Peter Grave for believing in certain things more forcefully than some of the rest of us.’

  He was speaking in a low voice now, barely audible above the dull roar of the lander’s motors and life-support system. Again, Goma recalled Mposi telling her that Karayan was obliged to project a blustering self-image in order to unite the disparate groups of Second Chancers. Here, now, perhaps he felt able to express more moderate sentiments.

  ‘Of course, we always agreed on the essentials,’ he said, as if that affirmation were necessary.

  ‘Of course,’ Goma said. But they were playing a game now, each understanding what the other really meant.

  ‘Be glad that Peter Grave is where he is,’ Karayan said. ‘There may have been one bad apple among us, but I do not think there will be a second.’

  She nodded, wishing desperately to believe things were as simple as that. Grave the conspirator, Grave the murderer, and Grave now safely on ice for the rest of the expedition.

  They were on final vertical descent now, the blast of the lander’s motors beginning to pick up dust and small pieces of surface debris, sending them scurrying away in surging concentric waves. They were not far from the encampment – Goma could easily make out the silver crest of the nearest dome. Vasin called out altitudes: one hundred metres, fifty, then down in increments of ten. The salmon-coloured dust rose and swallowed the view. Finally Goma felt the soft compression of the landing gear touch down and heard the motors stop. The lander rocked slightly, then was still.

  ‘Engines off. Stable and secured for return to orbit,’ Vasin declared, not without a measure of pride.

  It did not take long to prepare for the surface. All six of them exited through the lander’s high-capacity lock and then climbed one at a time down the ladder which had deployed upon touchdown. They wore lightweight spacesuits, silver-white to begin with, but which selected their own visually distinct colour-coding as soon as the party assembled below the lander. Goma had received just enough training not to feel encumbered by the suit.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked Ru, concerned that her breathing sounded laboured.

  ‘Stop fretting,’ Ru said, in a firm but friendly tone.

  They moved away from the lander and joined the trail heading back to the encampment. They had touched down in an area of low, gentle hills, reaching away under a mauve sky that darkened to purple-black at the zenith. There were a few clouds, laddered wisps of high-altitude vapour, and enough of a breeze to stir dust around their feet, but the air was a thousand times thinner than the atmosphere aboard their ship. They could see stars, and other worlds in this solar system. The trail had been cleared of debris, but a treacherous scree of small stones and pebbles littered the surrounding terrain. The colours of this planet were all mauves and fawns and shades of pale rust. It was relentless and depressing, not a hint of a living organism anywhere to be seen.

  The encampment looked further away now they were down. Surrounding it, but thinning out with distance, was a junkyard of failed or abandoned technologies. There were transmitter aerials, sagging where their guylines had snapped. There were radio dishes, jammed into the dirt and now half-filled with dust. There were boxes of electronics, gutted and exposed to the elements. Where electrical or data cables were still strung from pole to pole, they had been hung with tattered, fluttering pieces of metal foil, like bunting. A drum fixed to an axle like a wheel appeared to turn lazily of its own volition.

  Nearer the camp, the air of decrepitude lessened. Projecting above the small cluster of domes was a skeletal tower surmounted by a set of transmitters and receivers of differing function. Though it had clearly been repaired and patched up over the years, it still looked operable, with various steerable dishes and antennas, plus the tubes of what Goma guessed to be optical telescopes or ranging devices.

  Of a spaceship, even a short-range vehicle, even something to cross the ground, no trace existed.

  They halted as one, noticing movement. To one side of the camp was a low cliff, perhaps three or four storeys high. The cliff face was nearly sheer, but a figure was nonetheless clinging about halfway up it with spiderlike tenacity, feet planted on the narrowest of ledges, one hand grasping a rocky protrusion, the other wielding a cutting tool. All along the face, to both sides of where the figure worked, was a dense patterning of angular inscriptions. The cutting tool had a sun-bright tip, a glaring flicker. Where it touched the cliff, the rock breezed off in a constant curling ribbon of grey dust.

  ‘It’s her,’ Goma said.

  They had made no sound in the near vacuum of Orison, but the figure nonetheless turned off the cutting tool and slipped it back into a pouch on a utility belt. With disarming speed – and an equally disarming lack of concern for their own safety – the figure appeared to descend the crag in a series of perilous backward hops.

  On reaching the ground, the figure looked back up at the cliff, as if inspecting the day’s work, then turned to address the landing party. The figure was small and slight in stature, clad in an older, clumsier model of spacesuit than those worn by the landing party.

  The figure raised a hand. For a moment nothing was said, the figure and the landing party facing each other in silence, nothing moving except the dust and the flapping flags and the idly turning wheel.

  ‘Eunice Akinya?’ asked Vasin.

  A voice buzzed across their communications channel. It was a woman’s, speaking Swahili with a curiously old-fashioned, fussy diction.

  ‘No, Laika the space dog. Who else were you expecting?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

 
To begin with there was only the fact of the attack and their own immediate survival. Had the Watchkeeper been intact and its offensive capabilities fully functional, there would have been no warning and no conceivable defence – merely an instant in which Kanu existed, followed by an endless succession of instants in which he did not.

  But he was breathing, and thinking, and the fabric of the ship – at least judged from the pressurised vantage of the control deck – could not have been too violently disrupted.

  But he heard the wail of alarms, saw the red pulse of alert indications, felt in his belly the beginning of an uncontrolled tumble as Icebreaker lost control of its orientation. He looked at Nissa, saw the understanding in her face – no need for either of them to state the obvious.

  ‘Can you do something?’ she asked.

  Kanu’s hands were on the console, trying to force the ship to correct its own tumble, but the systems were not responding. ‘No good. Control lockouts across all steering systems – it’s not allowing itself to fire compensatory thrust. Swift – if you think you can do better than me, now’s your chance.’

  He felt Swift assume control of his hands. They began to move across the console with a renewed speed and confidence – the difference between a novice and a concert pianist.

  ‘One of you had better find a way to make it,’ Nissa said. ‘We don’t want to swing back into the Watchkeeper.’

  ‘We’re trying,’ Kanu said. ‘Hard to see how bad the damage is – sensors are completely burned out along that whole flank.’

  ‘What hit us?’

  ‘Nothing physical – not a missile or anything like that. Must have been an energy pulse, some kind of electromagnetic discharge. I’m not even sure it counted as an attack – more of a playful nip.’

  ‘It didn’t feel very playful to me,’ Nissa said.

  ‘It must have been. We’re still here.’

  Swift had turned up the console’s visual refresh-rate. Status readouts flickered at hypnagogic speed, too fast for his conscious faculties to absorb.

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘I wish I knew. Talk to me, Swift.’

  ‘It is rather serious,’ Swift answered. ‘We are drifting further from the Watchkeeper, which is encouraging, and there has been no further attack – but equally the evidence points to severely compromised guidance and propulsion capability. I am attempting to persuade the ship to let me stabilise its tumble.’

  ‘Persuade a bit harder, then.’

  ‘Do not blame Icebreaker, Kanu – the ship is doing its best. It knows it has been badly damaged and it is wisely protecting us. I will do what I can. I have some thruster channels open to me now – would you mind if I augmented their effect with the selective venting of internal air and water pressure?’

  ‘And bleed us dry?’

  ‘Volatile gases can be mined and the reserves replenished once we locate a suitable resource. Besides, only a small percentage will be required – say five to ten, depending on circumstances.’ Swift pushed on, apparently taking Kanu’s consent for granted. ‘There – we are already regaining some control. When we are properly stable, we can think of ways to assess the extent of the damage.’

  ‘There’s only one quick to way to do that,’ said Kanu. ‘I’ll need to go outside to see how bad things really are.’

  ‘With the ship caught in this tumble?’ Nissa asked. ‘You’ll be flung into space the moment you make a mistake.’

  ‘Then I’d better make sure I don’t. I think Swift can help with that, can’t you?’

  ‘If you will allow me a little more time to do what I can from this position, then we shall attempt it together.’

  Slowly the tumble reduced until Kanu felt confident that he could move around inside Icebreaker without immediate injury. He instructed Swift to leave things as they were, then rose from his seat. It would still be a challenge to reach the suit locker, let alone take care of himself in vacuum with the ship still tumbling like a thrown bone, but he had to assess the damage.

  ‘You’re leaving me here alone?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘The ship’s programmed to answer to you if something goes wrong. In the meantime, we’ll still be able to talk.’

  After he had struggled into the suit – Kanu would never find it a quick or easy process, despite his years on Mars – he cycled through the airlock closest to the damage, which brought him to the brink of space. He pushed his head and upper body out into true vacuum, taking in the view. The hull stretched away on either side of him – sometimes feeling as if it were a ceiling, at other times like a floor or the sheer side of a cliff. Much of it was smooth, but here and there handholds and footholds had been provided, and with some concentration he could plot a route that would take him to the damaged area, which was presently out of sight.

  ‘Can we do this, Swift?’

  ‘With care, Kanu. I will let you take the initiative until I feel the need to intervene. Maintain three points of contact at all times, and do not be distracted by the huge planet dominating your field of view.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kanu said, with all the false sincerity he could muster.

  But it was one thing to see Poseidon on-screen, and quite another to view it with his own eyes. Its lit face was turned to him, wrapped from pole to pole by a smothering deep ocean. As tall as the worldwheels were, they were too narrow in cross section to be visible from this distance. As he watched, a splinter-like sliver moved across the planet’s face with the perfect Newtonian slide of a dead eye cell. It was the remains of a Watchkeeper, perhaps even the one that had attacked them. He felt no anger towards the alien machine, sensing that there had been little or no intent behind the attack.

  Kanu brought his whole body out of the lock, nervously grasping for a handhold, then another, until his feet could find purchase. He was not standing so much as spreadeagled on the hull, and the ship’s slow tumble made it feel as if it wanted rid of him as he spidered along. Slowly, adrenalin flooding his veins, his hands trembling with nervous concentration, he began to traverse away from the lock. His first few reaches were awkward, but he forced himself to pick up the pace, to trust to the limbs and senses that had never failed him before. The tumble was not in itself the problem – he was perfectly strong enough to hold on despite it. His real enemy was fear.

  As he began to work around the hull’s curve, the lock fell away out of sight. Poseidon swung in and out of view – too large to ignore, since it was always bright and blue in his peripheral vision. He felt the world’s scrutiny on him, as if it were taking a particular interest in his fate.

  Ahead was a recess in the hull, a trough a few metres deep. There was no way around it that would not take precious minutes and bring its own hazards. Crossing the trough would require a longer reach than he was used to making, but Kanu saw no practical alternative.

  ‘Keep your eye on me, Swift – if things go wrong out here, they’ll go wrong fast.’

  ‘My eye is never not on you, my friend.’

  Kanu stretched across the gap, fingers grasping for the handhold on the other side. But as he pushed out into the void, his heart jumped in his chest.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘What is it?’ Nissa called out sharply.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Calm down, Kanu,’ Swift said. ‘Having a seizure will avail neither of us.’

  ‘Kanu?’ Nissa called, with real concern in her voice.

  ‘I’m fine. I just wasn’t expecting to find a corpse here.’ He was staring at it, his pulse still racing. It was tucked into the space, sheathed in baroque and cumbersome armour, squatting and compressed as if ready to spring out in ambush. ‘One of the Regals,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know whose side they were on.’

  ‘A Regal? How in hell did a Regal get here?’

  ‘They must have been stuck on the side of the ship since before we left Europa. Ma
ybe they were trying to break into the ship, or use it as a hiding space.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘I doubt they survived more than a few seconds after we broke through the ice. Maybe there are more. We’ll have to search the whole ship at some point, I expect.’ He shivered inside the suit. He had been close to very few corpses in his time and the experience was still unpleasantly novel. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told the dead warrior.

  ‘Sorry for what?’ Nissa asked.

  ‘That I did this.’

  ‘You didn’t make this happen. You heard the Margrave – things were breaking down on Europa before we arrived.’

  ‘I certainly helped them along.’

  ‘Then I’ll take my share of the blame, too. I’d have ended up there even if we hadn’t met in Lisbon.’

  He left the corpse, having noted its position, and approached the edge of the damage zone. Finally, his confidence improved – the corpse had pushed him over some horizon of fear into a startling sort of calm – and Kanu risked standing upright, with his toes planted firmly into footholds. Overlooking the damage, he was momentarily silent.

  Although he kept telling himself that they were lucky to have survived the Watchkeeper attack at all, the impact area was worse than he had feared. It was an open wound dozens of metres long and almost as deep, cut with cruel disregard into the ripe, vital organs of his starship. Gases were venting from numerous ruptured pipes, coiling out in glittering blue-grey nebulae.

  ‘Can you see this, Nissa?’

  ‘Yes, I have a feed from your helmet. It’s not pretty. I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s going to be a five-minute repair job.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  ‘It’s worse than we thought,’ Swift said, then after a moment, he added, ‘We haven’t merely lost propulsion control. That area of the hull also contained your main directional antenna. With the exception of short-range communications, we are now without the means to send or receive transmissions.’

  ‘I’d say that was a catastrophe,’ Kanu said, ‘but no one was talking to us anyway.’