Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  Goma nodded – it was the right thing to do, but even if it did get anywhere near the surface, it would make no difference to Kanu’s chances. On the scale of a solar system, especially a compact one like this, Travertine was no faster than Mposi. It would still need several days to cross the system from its orbit around Orison.

  But what else was a captain to do but give orders that contained the promise of hope?

  ‘Thank you, Gandhari. And thank you for letting Eunice out of those restraints.’

  ‘She isn’t forgiven – not until I work out what exactly she needs to be forgiven for – but I gain nothing by keeping her tied up. She’s clearly smart enough to use us whichever way she sees fit, and for now I’d rather we at least entertain the illusion of cooperation.’

  ‘You can forgive her when you’re ready,’ Ru said.

  Eunice looked unfazed. ‘I don’t need anyone’s forgiveness. I did what needed to be done.’

  ‘What she did was brutal,’ Goma said. ‘No one’s disputing that. But she’s also right that it was the only thing that would help Kanu.’

  ‘And remind me how it helped Kanu, exactly?’ Ru said. ‘Because from where I’m sitting, they’re in just as much trouble as they ever were.’

  ‘He had the choice,’ Goma said. ‘That’s all that mattered. That the choice was his, finally, and he made the only one he could live with.’

  ‘She got to you,’ Ru said, shaking her head in disgust. ‘When you took that bath, in the well, she spread a little of her poison into you. Didn’t you, Eunice?’

  ‘Please,’ Grave said, interceding with raised hands. ‘Everybody – what is done is done. We can either carry our grievances forward and let them weigh us down, or allow them to blow away like dandelion seeds.’

  ‘Why should we listen to a word you have to say?’ Ru asked, without a flicker of anger or accusation. ‘You’re a believer, drowning in your own superstition. You’re the enemy of all that’s rational.’

  ‘I was also wronged. Each of you, in your way, was ready to see the worst in me. But I blame none of you for that, or for the differences of opinion you now share. The truth is that Eunice has a perspective none of us presently understands. She has been here before and she truly grasps the consequences. Until we attain her perspective, we cannot judge her. Nor can we blame ourselves if our sympathies do not always align. Ru – you have the right to feel aggrieved. You were also wronged, and in a terrible way. But Eunice acted on the facts available to her, and from her standpoint it was a perfectly rational decision. Something was hurting her friends, something in your blood. Ask yourself how quick you would have been to look beyond the obvious explanation – that you were a willing agent in the killing of the Risen?’ But Grave did not give her the luxury of dwelling on an answer. ‘Goma is right, and it has nothing to do with Eunice. She’s just seeing things clearly, as we all should. Kanu has done the only human thing possible, as any of us might have under the same circumstances. And if it took the Zanzibar translation to bring us to this moment, this chance of a final reconciliation between humans and the Risen, I think it will have been for the best.’

  ‘You people love your sacrifices,’ Ru said.

  ‘And you people love your certainties. None of us are enemies, Ru – at least, none of us needs to be.’ And he nodded at the blue transected disk of Poseidon, swelling larger in their sky by the minute. ‘Not in the face of that.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Nissa eased her bulky, suited form into the command position aboard the shuttle Noah, quickly familiarising herself with the layout of the instruments and control inputs: they were not too dissimilar from those aboard Fall of Night. Under normal circumstances, the shuttle would have gladly flown itself. But these particular circumstances were anything but normal, and the lander was all too willing to turn to human guidance.

  ‘The poor thing’s confused,’ Nissa said. ‘Like a dog being made to learn a new trick. It can’t find an acceptable entry solution and is wondering why it’s been placed in this position.’

  ‘You mean it knows we’re all going to die and it doesn’t want to be a co-conspirator?’ Kanu asked.

  ‘Think kindly of it,’ Swift said. ‘It’s a simple machine and it’s doing its best. Might I suggest a slightly steeper angle of attack – say, two additional degrees of nose-up elevation?’

  ‘Am I flying this or are you?’

  ‘My abject apologies. Under the circumstances, you are doing a most creditable job.’

  But Nissa altered their approach angle anyway and consented to allow Swift to offer such advice as he deemed useful. The fact was, even Swift could not be expected to work miracles.

  ‘If it’s the last thing we do,’ Kanu said, ‘it would be a shame not to see one of the wheels up close. Can you find us an entry profile that gets us within visual range of a suitable wheel?’

  ‘Already done,’ Nissa said. ‘And it’s not just out of curiosity, either. Those wheels are the closest thing we’re going to find to dry land. I know this ship’s supposed to float but I’d sooner not stake my life on it.’

  ‘It’s a good plan,’ Kanu said.

  But they both knew it was barely a plan at all. They would have no choice but to land in open water, for Noah had no means of setting down on the wheels even if there had been a suitable hard landing surface. For a few minutes they deliberated about attempting a controlled descent onto one of the floating biomasses, but all the evidence suggested that the living rafts were too tenuous to bear the lander’s weight, let alone absorb the shock of impact without rupturing. And then they would be back in water again, except this time choked in from all directions. Besides, none of the biomasses came within five thousand kilometres of any of the wheels.

  With the lander still under thrust, Kanu made his way back from the command position to the Risen. They were in support hammocks identical to the ones on the larger ship. He braced a hand against the ceiling and leaned in to Dakota.

  ‘We’ll be hitting air in a few minutes. Nissa’s going to find us the smoothest way down, and we’ll try to hold our deceleration at a manageable level. I can’t promise it’ll be easy, though.’

  ‘Nor can we expect the impossible of you,’ Dakota said.

  ‘Of any of us. But before things get tough, we need to think ahead. You had years to plan this expedition. Is this ship well stocked with equipment?’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Whatever we need to survive on the surface. We’ll float, while we’re able. But you knew this was a waterworld, and that the wheels are the only solid surfaces. How were you hoping this would play out?’

  ‘A close visual inspection of the wheels. The analysis of the encoded patterns – the understanding of their context.’

  ‘From the air?’

  ‘Most certainly. Your ship could have coped with atmospheric insertion had our approach speed been low enough. What can be learned from the tiny parts of the wheels at the ocean’s surface?’

  ‘Right now I’m more concerned with not dying.’ He would have smiled at his own remark had the black toxin of the Terror not still been within him. The absence of hope, the absence of purpose, the inability to see a point to any act, the realisation of the supreme and total futility of existence – he could not begin to imagine how it would be possible to live with this hollow, howling void inside him, sucking the hope out of every moment.

  And yet Nissa said there had to be a way. She was feeling it, too – so surely were the Tantors. And yet, as Nissa had pointed out, Chiku must eventually have come to an accommodation with the facts of the Terror. Life could go on – purpose found again. Presently Kanu saw no way through his present despair, but for Nissa’s sake he would trust her judgement – trust that there was a path, a way of living, that would make this bearable. That the void would close.

  ‘We can use one of the wh
eels as a safe haven,’ he continued. ‘Those inscriptions, the ones we saw from space – they’re deep, cut into the wheel like ledges. If we can get onto one of those ledges—’

  ‘Then what, Kanu?’ Dakota asked, with an edge of desperation.

  ‘Mposi isn’t far behind us. I’ve told Goma to turn around, but if there’s a shred of Akinya in her, I might as well have been whistling in the wind.’

  ‘It will not help.’

  ‘I’m not just going to drown, Dakota. Or let you drown, for that matter. If the lander’s in poor shape, we need a survival plan. None of us is going to cope well with Poseidon’s heat even if we can breathe the atmosphere for a while. Let’s start with the basics. Can we cross water?’

  ‘There are powered rafts. They can be deployed and inflated when we are down.’

  ‘I hope they’re big.’

  ‘Do you think we would forget what we are, Kanu?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He scratched his glove through his bristle of white hair. ‘What about exposure to the atmosphere – do you have suits aboard Noah as well?’

  ‘There are emergency suits. They are not as capable as the one I wore to visit the Watchkeepers, but they will function.’

  ‘Can you get into them once we’re down?’

  ‘We shall try. As for the rafts, they are in the external compartments. They cannot be reached from here.’

  ‘As long as we can access them when we’re down.’ Something in him made him a place a hand on Dakota. ‘We’re not done yet. Not while there’s breath in our lungs.’

  ‘Do you believe that, Kanu?’

  ‘I’m trying to.’

  It was a performance, a mental tightrope act. One foot before the next and never look down. Think only of the present moment, and perhaps the moment to come. Kanu wondered how long he could sustain it.

  ‘Kanu,’ Nissa shouted. ‘You’d better see this.’

  While they were decelerating, Icebreaker had carried on ahead, meeting the atmosphere first and at a sharper angle. Now it was encountering significant friction, beginning to shroud itself in a cocoon of plasma. Kanu stared at it with a sort of horrified wonder, finding it hard to imagine that they had been inside that doomed ship less than an hour ago. It looked tiny now – a thing of utter insignificance against the larger backdrop of Poseidon.

  ‘Starting to tumble,’ he said, noticing that the hull was sliding in at an oblique angle, cats’-tails of plasma bannering out from the leading surface, the brightness of which was still turned away from them.

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ Swift said.

  ‘Are you still in contact with the image of yourself?’ Kanu asked.

  ‘We made our peace. But I am sorry for your ship. It did well to get us this far.’

  ‘Good job there’s another ship to take us out of this system,’ Nissa said.

  Kanu nodded, glad to endorse the sentiment, although they both knew their chances of leaving this world, let alone this system, were diminishing rapidly.

  He felt a bump, then a shudder.

  ‘Strap in,’ Nissa said. ‘Now it’s our turn.’

  Noah’s engine had done the best it could; now aerobraking was the only thing that stood between them and a rapid crash into the sea. Kanu had offered Dakota the best assurance he could, but the projections of their entry profile gave him no great confidence. Depending on minute and subtle factors of aerodynamics and tropospheric physics, their peak gee-load could be anywhere between two and five gees. Even the upper limit might be tolerated by the Risen if it was short in duration, but he could make no promises.

  Icebreaker was pinwheeling now, about fifty kilometres deeper into the atmosphere and throwing off molten pieces of itself like the arms of a spiral galaxy. Nissa’s entry profile had to take that into consideration as well – the last thing they wanted was to ram into debris from the larger ship or the turbulence stirred up by its passage. But she dared not steer too far off their plotted course or they might end up tens of thousands of kilometres from the closest wheel.

  Kanu was surprised that the towering structures were not more obvious now they were sliding into the atmosphere’s thickening depths. But the wheels were much narrower than they were tall, and what was clear to long-range sensors was anything but distinct to the human eye. One wheel lay dead ahead of them, but it was edge on – no more than a pale scratch rising from the blue, which Kanu easily lost track of if he allowed his gaze to slip to either side of it. Besides, the air outside was beginning to glow, taking on a rosy flicker as Noah started to pick up its own cocoon of ionised atoms. When the brightness reached a certain level, the windows shuttered automatically.

  As the air resistance increased, so the deceleration forces mounted. The load exceeded one gee, reached one and a half – the force they would experience on Poseidon’s surface, hard but bearable – and then climbed to two gees. Kanu dared hope that it would level out there, sparing the Risen more difficulties, but the needle was still creeping up. Two and a half, then three.

  He twisted back in his seat to address them. ‘It can’t last too long. Hold out as best you can.’

  ‘Still climbing,’ Nissa said.

  At four gees it was all Kanu could do to breathe. His view of the instruments and readouts blurred as darkness stole in around the edges of his vision. Even through the layers of his suit, the chair felt as if it was made of knives.

  A minute of that, maybe two, and he sensed an easing. The ride smoothed out and the gee-load dropped smoothly down to one and a half. Without warning the automatic shutters raised again and the blue light of an alien world pushed its way into Kanu’s eyes. They were in the lower layers of the atmosphere now, still descending but under some aerodynamic control. The upper half of the sky remained very dark, a purple that inked to a starless velvet black, but it was gaining in blue opacity with each kilometre they dropped. Poseidon was a huge world compared to Earth, or indeed any planet in Kanu’s direct experience. Huge and hot, despite the coolness of its sun. That surface warmth made its atmosphere swell like a loaf of bread, puffing higher into space. But its surface gravity was higher as well, jealously tugging the atmosphere closer to the ground, acting against the effect of the increased temperature. The net result was that the atmosphere thinned out with height in close similarity with the air on Earth, with almost all of it was squeezed into a layer less than a hundred kilometres thick.

  They were in the lower quarter of that layer now and Noah’s wings were becoming increasingly effective. They were flying, nearly. Kanu knew that their difficulties were far from over but it was a blessing to have made it this far, and he vowed not to be ungrateful for it.

  ‘Nice job.’

  ‘Thank you. But we’ve taken a fair battering.’ Nissa directed his attention to the many warning symbols on the console. ‘We came in harder and hotter than anyone ever intended.’

  Kanu was certain that the air in the cabin was warmer than it had been before they hit the atmosphere.

  ‘But we’re still here, so the damage can’t be too great, can it?’

  ‘I think the hull got pretty chewed up in places. You say this thing is meant to float?’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘Then let’s hope we’re not full of holes.’

  The ride was smooth now, the gee-load coming from Poseidon rather than their own deceleration. He unbuckled, anxious to check on the Tantors. He moved cautiously, feeling like he was carrying at least his own body weight on his back.

  In an instant his world turned white, a white that shaded to pink at the edges where it rammed through the lander’s windows. Now the forms of the windows were precise negatives of themselves, burned across his retinas like brands.

  ‘What—’ he started to say.

  ‘Icebreaker,’ Swift said, with disarming coolness. ‘The Chibesa core must have detonated.’

 
‘Did you know that was coming?’

  ‘It was always a possibility.’

  ‘Then you might have mentioned it!’ Kanu pulled himself further along the cabin. His vision was clearing slowly, the after-images fading – they had not been exposed to the full and direct effect of the blast, but it had been bad enough. Reaching a window, he stared at the curve of the sea below, so smooth and flawless that it might have been machined from an ingot of hard blue metal. He watched a line slide across that flawlessness, a demarcation, travelling impossibly quickly, turning the shining sea to a leathery texture where it had passed.

  ‘Nissa! Shock wave! Bank hard. Put our belly to the blast. When that wave hits—’

  She had already begun to turn them, anticipating exactly that, and Kanu grabbed for a ceiling rail as Noah pitched steeply. He watched the Risen swing in their hammocks, elephant-masses providing a demonstration of pure Newtonian mechanics.

  The shock wave hit. Kanu had braced for it, but still he was jolted from his feet and sent tumbling against the opposite wall. His suit absorbed the worst of it but the impact was still hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. He was too stunned to know whether he had hurt himself or not. But however unpleasant it had been for him, it must have been worse for the Risen. Their hammocks were meant to absorb continuous loads, not sudden shocks.

  ‘Nissa?’ he called.

  ‘Levelling off. Guessing we’re through the worst of it.’

  ‘Any damage?’

  ‘How long have you got, merman? Whatever was wrong with us before, that didn’t help.’

  ‘But we’re still flying.’

  ‘On a steady descent, about five hundred metres per minute. We should have brought Fall of Night, not this barely flyable brick.’

  ‘Can we still make it close to that wheel?’