Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  Dakota delivered her answer via Kanu. His face, familiar to them all now, bore the stress of recent events. Nissa, his former wife, looked on from the background, her expression no more settled than Kanu’s.

  ‘Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Dakota has sent a command back to Zanzibar to begin selective thawing of one hundred of the Friends. You know what this means. They’ll be raised from skipover too quickly and suffer irreversible damage to their detailed brain structure. The process will take a few hours and you’ll have no independent confirmation of it until the work is done, but I’ve spent enough time with Dakota not to doubt her conviction. The thawing has commenced. You can still turn around, and perhaps the damage won’t be so bad that they can’t be cooled down again and given another shot at revival. But that’s your decision, and your risk. I’ve done what I can – I’ve argued our case to the best of my abilities. I hoped you’d see sense – see that there’s no option but to permit us to continue alone. But you haven’t, and I’m sorry.’

  When he was done, Vasin turned to her little assembly. ‘An idle threat?’

  ‘Not given her history,’ Eunice said.

  ‘Then we can assume those sleepers really are being allowed to thaw?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do we still retain control of the mirrors?’

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘And her efforts to lock us out?’

  ‘Continuing, but as yet unsuccessful. They’ve put up a good fight, but I know the control architecture of those mirrors better than they do, and I had a head start.’

  Vasin nodded solemnly. ‘Then we’ll put that control to the test. Depriving them of power hasn’t been persuasive. I want you to swing the beams back onto Zanzibar, but not directed at the power grids this time. Concentrate the heat on anything that might be vulnerable.’

  ‘This will not make her a happy bunny.’

  ‘We were not the first to move to violence as a negotiating tactic,’ Vasin said.

  ‘We were not,’ Peter Grave said, ‘but we did refuse to listen to any of her earlier pleas, and now we’re going to meet violence with violence.’

  ‘Against physical structures, not human bodies,’ Vasin said.

  Loring steepled vis fingers and gave a sagelike nod. ‘Fair point.’

  ‘Our intention is to debilitate Zanzibar, not to harm the Tantors,’ Vasin went on. ‘If we can hurt their life-support capability, we may force them back from the brink. Reactivate the mirrors, Eunice. Let’s show them that we have teeth.’

  Like vengeful searchlights, the mirrors’ beams tightened their focus and swung back onto Zanzibar.

  Vasin’s knowledge of the former holoship was still predicated on long-range imagery and the gloss of interpretation – reliable or otherwise – offered by Eunice. Doubtless they were wrong or confused about some of the details, but at least the positions of the original solar grids were known with reasonable confidence. They were now directing the foci of the beams away from those designated collector areas onto other parts of the crust. The grids were intended to absorb the incoming energy of solar photons, soaking it into the fluid that would eventually drive the generators inside Zanzibar. They would grow hot – no radiation conversion process was entirely efficient – but that was compensated for in their design. But no such allowance would have been made for any of the other structural installations on the shard’s surface.

  Under the continued assault of three thousand kelvins of temperature, almost any mechanical system was bound to suffer catastrophic damage. Locks would be fused into slag, power ducts ruptured, berthing cradles warped out of function, insulation charred and boiled away, the very skin of Zanzibar turned locally molten. Volatiles trapped in the rocky matrix of the original holoship would geyser into vacuum. These actions would only damage the outer skin of the little world and the consequences might not be immediately fatal for the deeper layers – it was not Vasin’s intention to blast through into the airtight cores, or to bake the inhabitants into submission. But she was hoping to do sufficient swift and severe damage that her opponents would be cowed into renegotiation, for fear of worse to come.

  Even from the distance of Mposi, the effects of their work were soon visible. Wherever the beams touched, warm material began to haze off into the surrounding vacuum. Zanzibar began to resemble the husk of a warming comet stroked by sunlight. These tendrils of gas and ionised matter would eventually curdle into orbit around Paladin.

  ‘This is Kanu,’ he said, when news of the attack reached Icebreaker. ‘I confess I’m surprised by the haste of your actions. Under any other circumstances we’d call this a declaration of war.’

  The time lag for round-trip communications was down to ninety seconds – not quite short enough for a fluent conversation, but sufficient for real-time negotiations.

  ‘Call it what you will, Kanu,’ said Vasin. ‘Dakota was the one who began murdering innocent hostages, not us. So far we’ve not touched a single life – Tantor or human. You can still back down, provided you convince Dakota to give up on this expedition.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you? You’re damaging Zanzibar, but that won’t make any difference to Dakota. You can’t touch Icebreaker, and whatever harm you do to Zanzibar’s outer structures won’t have any real consequences for the Risen inside. They’ll ride this out, then repair and rebuild. It’s what they do – what they’ve always done. And in the meantime, you’ve only given her additional incentive to carry on warming the Friends.’

  ‘They say you were a diplomat.’

  ‘In another life.’

  ‘Were you good at diplomacy, Kanu Akinya? Were you good at finding a solution where none appeared evident?’

  ‘No better or worse than the rest of my colleagues.’

  ‘And what became of them?’

  ‘Most of them died. We were trying to keep a peace. I don’t even know if it was worth the effort.’

  ‘It’s always worth it. Our argument isn’t with you, Kanu – we understand that you are acting contrary to your better judgement. But that doesn’t mean you have to surrender to Dakota. Tell her I am ready to withdraw the mirrors the moment she changes course. Tell her that, in the event of a peaceful resolution, I’ll commit all our resources to repairing the damage we’ve done. Total amnesty, no recriminations. But you must do your part, too. She’s sailing into calamity, whatever you may believe to the contrary. If there’s a way to stop her, you must do it.’

  ‘You forget,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen the Friends. I know they are real, and that they are viable for restoration to life. That changes everything, Captain Vasin. To you, they’re just a number – some hypothetical dead people who may or may not get to live again. But I’ve glimpsed their faces. I’ve read their names, their histories. Seen the families among them – the mothers and fathers, the children they committed to a better future. The love they had for each other, the love they had for the Tantors. I cannot abandon them. I won’t.’

  ‘You have my admiration, Kanu. You appear to be a good man. It’s a pity we find ourselves at odds.’

  ‘We don’t need to be. Turn off the mirrors.’

  ‘Turn around.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And no again.’

  That was the end of diplomacy.

  The dispersing of the bodies began soon after. They saw it on video, imaged aboard Zanzibar, transmitted to Icebreaker, bounced to Mposi. They could doubt the veracity of it, if they cared to, but Goma was minded to believe it was as real as it looked. There had not been time to prepare a plausible fiction, and something about the process itself – the unplanned, marginally shambolic means by which it was executed – spoke eloquently of its authenticity.

  The elephants began bringing bodies to the external locks. They were the thawed dead, or perhaps not even fully thawed – it was difficult to be sure. They had been removed from
their skipover caskets, the caskets too heavy and bulky to be easily moved into the locks. Upon contact with vacuum, the bodies would have quickly refrozen. Zanzibar’s spin meant that they fell away quickly, soon escaping beyond the immediate effects of the mirrors.

  They came out in ones and twos, threes and fours – as many as could be stuffed into the locks at the same time. They tumbled out, glittering mummies, glistening starfish, the exact moment of their committal determining the trajectory they followed. They were all still in orbit around Paladin, but those orbits were fully independent of Zanzibar now, and some of them would, inevitably, intersect with Paladin’s surface, or skirt the scorching edge of its whisper of an atmosphere, close enough to flash into a comet-tail of incandescence. They were dead already as far as their hopes of revival went, but what became of their bodies would now depend on acute contingencies of physics and timing. Some would become ash, others would spend half an eternity as ice.

  They counted close to a hundred, although it was impossible to verify the exact number.

  Then the dispersal stopped. There were more sleepers aboard Zanzibar, Eunice said – many thousands more. Dakota had made her point and must have been hoping it would prove sufficient.

  Meanwhile, the mirrors continued beaming their energy onto Zanzibar’s surface. From the plumes of gas and their compositional spectra – the distinct tang of rare, artificially refined metals – it was clear they were inflicting significant damage to the external structures.

  ‘Turn them off,’ Vasin said.

  Eunice withdrew her hands from the console. ‘I don’t need to. She just found her way into the mirrors’ control architecture.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As of a couple of seconds ago. She’s busy finding her way around – closing loopholes, sealing me out. In a minute or two she’ll have complete control.’

  ‘You told us she couldn’t beat you,’ Goma said, affronted by this sudden development.

  ‘I was wrong. She must have remembered more about the architecture than I assumed.’

  ‘So fight back,’ Vasin said. ‘Those mirrors are the only hold we have over her.’

  ‘Excuse me, Captain, but you just told me to turn them off.’

  ‘Only while we consider our options.’

  ‘I’ll lay out our options,’ Eunice said, joining her hands in her lap. ‘There aren’t any. We’re royally fucked. The mirrors didn’t persuade Dakota to turn around or stop her throwing those sleepers out into space. How much more damage would we have to do before she has a change of heart? My guess is she’d just carry on until the skipover vaults were empty.’

  ‘She could never be that ruthless,’ Ru said.

  ‘You’re still thinking of her as an elephant, or a Tantor – something you can relate to. So was I, for a little while. I hoped she’d show restraint, clemency. But whatever part of her was capable of that is long gone. The Watchkeepers scooped it out and replaced it with this single overriding compulsion. Nothing will stop her. If you want proof of that, just look at those bodies.’

  ‘Then we’ve failed,’ Vasin said.

  ‘We can’t reach Icebreaker, and reasoned argument hasn’t worked. Now she’s gained control of the only instrument that stood a chance of persuading her. I’m sorry. We did our best.’

  ‘You’re taking this very well,’ Goma said.

  Eunice gave a semi-shrug. ‘Experience. You can fight the odds up to a point, but sooner or later you have to face reality. The universe doesn’t care about temper tantrums or pity. This was our chance, and we blew it. Captain Vasin – will you turn us around?’

  Vasin nodded slowly. ‘I don’t want to – not after we’ve come this far. But I won’t have more deaths on my conscience.’

  ‘It’s the right decision,’ Eunice said, as if offering sympathy to the bereaved. ‘Hard, I know – but it’s the only course open to us now. If you change our vector, Kanu will see it – there’s no need to make a formal announcement.’

  ‘I’d like to, all the same, just so there’s no confusion.’

  ‘If you think that’s for the best,’ Eunice said.

  Vasin made her statement. It was short, to the point. She said that there must be no more deaths. To this end, Mposi was abandoning its effort to reach Poseidon. As they peeled away from their present course, they would consider their options – whether to return to Orison or attempt to make diplomatic contact with the Risen on Zanzibar. If Dakota had an opinion, Vasin was ready to hear it.

  They did not have long to wait for an answer. It was the elephant this time rather than Kanu.

  ‘Thank you for seeing sense, Captain Vasin. I am sorry that I had to make my point so forcefully, but I think we can both agree that it was necessary to demonstrate the extent of our convictions. No, there will be no more deaths. If you wish to return to Orison, please do so. If you wish to visit Zanzibar, or are compelled to do so by reason of fuel or life-support demands, you will be treated well. But it will not be diplomatic contact. You have taken action against us, attempted to harm our world, and you will be regarded as prisoners of war. You have my word, though, that you will not be harmed. It was a serious tactical mistake to imagine that you could gain control of our mirrors and retain that control. Be grateful I have decided not to take punitive action for your error of judgement. Such an act would be unfair, though – the Friends cannot be blamed for your short-sightedness.’

  The transmission ended. Even as it played, Mposi had begun to change its course, opening up the distance to Icebreaker. The engine was at full output, sending the clearest possible signal to Kanu and Dakota.

  ‘We took his name for the ship,’ Goma said, ‘and we screwed it up. We didn’t act wisely at all.’

  ‘This is the wise act,’ Grave said, his tone gently reproving. ‘This is the thing Mposi would have been proud of – that we have the sense to know when the battle is lost. No, we haven’t succeeded in the way we hoped. But we could only do our best under very difficult circumstances.’

  ‘People died,’ Goma said. ‘Using the mirrors ruined any chance of a peaceful discussion. How is that not a disaster?’

  ‘Mposi would have understood that we went into this with an incomplete understanding of the facts. We had to test Dakota to see how ruthless she was prepared to be. We know that now, whereas before it was just supposition. The mirrors were a mistake – but even I dared hope we might have gained the upper hand by those means.’

  ‘Then we’re all fallible. Even Eunice.’

  ‘Even her,’ Eunice said.

  ‘Eunice thought she was cleverer,’ Grave said, directing a sympathetic glance at her as she spoke. ‘It’s excusable. Most of her existence, that’s exactly what she’s been. But she forgot that being human comes with some limitations.’

  ‘Most of us have already worked that one out,’ Goma said.

  ‘Be patient with her,’ Grave answered. ‘She’s new to this.’

  The crew of Mposi convened around the well, squeezed into the tight, knee-scraping spaces between its rim and the enclosing walls. It had reverted to its former function now, offering a three-dimensional view of the entire system from Paladin’s orbit inwards. They were debating their options while also plotting Kanu’s trajectory.

  He was nearly at the outer margin of Poseidon’s moons. Unchecked, he had made excellent progress and was now engaged in a steady deceleration burn. The well showed a fist of bright, curving lines worming through and around the orbits of the planet’s moons, eventually terminating at some point close to Poseidon’s surface. Aboard Icebreaker, Kanu must have been faced with a similar spread of possibilities, only now able to refine them down to a set of possible choices. Given the uncertainty in his total journey time from Zanzibar, there would have been nothing gained by planning this stage of the expedition in too much detail ahead of time.

  ‘Six hours to the limit of the
outer moon,’ Vasin said, dipping a finger into the well. ‘After that, guesswork is all we have. We still don’t know the detailed capabilities of that ship – whether the plan is to orbit and send down a secondary vehicle, or whether the whole thing can handle Poseidon’s atmosphere. It’s a pretty compact-looking ship, so maybe it can.’

  ‘Where would they land, if they make it down?’ Loring said. ‘Other than those wheels, there’s nothing but water.’

  ‘Maybe the ship can float,’ Vasin answered. ‘Maybe they intend to remain in the atmosphere. Those wheels are huge, after all – there’s presumably a lot to learn just by observing them from close proximity. If they’re content to just study the tops of the wheels, they don’t even have to enter the atmosphere.’

  ‘If they get that far,’ Goma said. ‘Eunice – you said the Terror always made you turn back – what’s to say they won’t run up against the same thing?’

  ‘They will if they go deep enough. The moons don’t allow anything to get that close to the surface without being sampled, examined, deemed worthy of further interest. That’s the test the Watchkeepers keep failing – they ring like empty bottles, and the moons don’t like that at all.’

  ‘And Kanu’s crew?’

  ‘I think they will pass the test. We always passed. It was the courage to continue that failed us.’

  ‘And now?’ Goma pressed.

  ‘I’d still be shit-scared, dear. But that’s because I’m a sane and sensible organism with a ready appreciation of the risks. Dakota is an instrument – a meat probe. The Watchkeepers have turned her into what they can’t be themselves. If she feels the fear, it’s screwed down so tight she can’t act on it.’

  ‘But Kanu will feel it. And Nissa.’

  ‘Yes. Pity them. Would you do me a small favour, Captain Vasin?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘Zoom in on Paladin for a moment.’

  Vasin looked puzzled, and then a little troubled. ‘Our concern is Poseidon, Eunice.’