Poseidon's Wake

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102

Now something changed. The scales were angling apart, allowing more of that light to escape. It fanned out in hard blue arcs, sweeping across Icebreaker. They saw it on screens and sensors — had there been windows, the glare would have been too bright to tolerate.

‘Have we seen this before?’ Nissa asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Kanu said, offering a shrug by way of incomprehension.

‘They will speak to me,’ Dakota said, with sudden decisiveness. ‘Reduce our thrust to zero. I will go out to them.’

‘In Noah?’

‘On my own. I will make dung, then you will assist me with the suit and the airlock. I will not be outside for long.’

They put Icebreaker into a free-fall cruise and followed Dakota to the main airlock, where she had first come aboard. Her suit was waiting there, partially dismantled — its hard, curving sections looked more like the pieces of a small white spacecraft than something meant to be worn. The parts clamped around her and locked together with airtight precision, first the two Easter-egg halves of the body, then the four limb sections, complexly jointed and accordioned, and finally the monstrous trunked helmet with its two blank circular portholes for eyes. There was something horrible about the lifelessness of that helmet, as if a second, exterior skull now enclosed the first. She flexed the trunk, experimenting with its dexterity, while the suit’s life-support system puffed and wheezed and ticked.

Her voice, amplified and resonant, boomed through the suit’s speaking system. ‘The others remain here, Kanu, and they have their orders with regard to Zanzibar. You would not be so unwise as to forget that, would you?’

‘No, I think we understand the situation perfectly.’

‘That is good, because our conversation with Goma gave me some small grounds for concern. It will be good to know that I may put them to rest.’

‘How will you move outside?’ Nissa asked.

‘Let me worry about that. If you wish to witness, no harm will come of it.’

She moved easily into the lock and the cycle was soon complete. Kanu had stopped the engines by then — it would make a small difference to their arrival at Poseidon, but nothing that would seriously complicate their plans — and Dakota was able to drift free of the ship without being left behind.

It turned out that her suit, which they had not been able to inspect in detail, was fitted with a set of steering thrusters arranged for three axes of control. She looked perfectly at ease with this technology, directing it with a tap of her trunk against a control plate fixed between her shoulders. Kanu reminded himself that this extra-vehicular equipment must have been developed during that brief and hopeful period when humans and Tantors had coexisted within Zanzibar. The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world.

Dakota picked up speed. It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit. But to an elephant, a monkey in a suit must have looked no stranger, no more of an affront to the expected order of things. They were both mammals, both creatures who needed air in their lungs.

She diminished, becoming a small white sphere with appendages, then a dot soon lost against the scale of the Watchkeeper. They tracked the electronic signature of her suit with Icebreaker’s instruments, and then quite suddenly she was moving in a way that could not be explained by the capabilities of her suit alone. She began to accelerate along the narrowing length of the alien machine, gathered in some net of invisible force, until at last her signature vanished into the tiny circular aperture at the Watchkeeper’s tip. Tiny only in the most relative of senses, of course — the proportions of things, even at the machine’s extremity, remained mountainous, and Dakota would have been swallowed into the Watchkeeper like a speck of plankton.

As they carried on watching, the platelets — each of which was easily the size of a small land mass — began to close again, eventually shuttering the blue radiation.

The better part of an hour passed.

‘Do you think she’d give the order?’ Nissa asked.

‘To murder the Friends?’ Kanu said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t want to find out the hard way what her limits are. It could be a bluff, but in Zanzibar I had the feeling she might go through with it. If they’ve already committed murder, which we as good as know they have, there’s no reason for them not to do it again.’

She gave him a sidelong, questioning look. ‘Is that you speaking or Swift?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be me?’

‘Because you have every incentive to find a way to back out of this. I’m not sure Swift feels quite the same way.’

‘Swift won’t agree to anything that puts the Friends’ lives at risk.’

‘No — but if there was a chance to turn around, without risking the Friends, would Swift accept that?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because Swift’s agenda and ours aren’t quite the same thing.’

Swift had been silent until then, but this statement was enough to draw him to speak. ‘I do not believe our concerns are all that different, Nissa. Aren’t we all here to gather knowledge — to learn more than we already know?’

‘Some of us didn’t have a lot of choice about being here.’

‘There is truth in that, but you would not have gone to Europa were you not also in the business of seeking knowledge. Curiosity motivates us in different ways, I agree. Kanu has spent his life searching for answers to the oldest of questions: how may I live peacefully with my neighbour? On Earth, he worked to foster good relations between the distinct and troubled factions of modern humanity — between the folk of the land, the folk of the water, the folk of the air. On Mars, he quite literally gave his life for the betterment of human — machine affairs. But Kanu knew that a deeper solution to our differences required answers he could not hope to find within the old solar system. They drove him to travel here.’

‘Did they, Swift? Or did you drive Kanu because you needed a head to travel in?’

‘Please,’ Kanu said. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by this. I know why I’m here, and Swift is part of it but not the only reason. And this discussion changes nothing because we still have to think of the Friends. We can’t forget about them, and we can’t abandon Dakota inside the Watchkeeper and hope there’ll be no consequences. I’m sorry, but going through with her expedition is the only course open to us.’

‘Even if it kills us?’ Nissa asked.

‘Yes. Even if. Because what is the alternative? To take a gamble with thousands of human lives? I’m not suicidal — not any more. But I’d rather die than have their deaths on my conscience. Nothing’s worth that.’

‘She’s coming back,’ Swift said.

They had a lock on her suit signature again and observed as it emerged from the narrowing waterspout-like proboscis at the very limit of the Watchkeeper’s shell, a seed spat out into vacuum. At first she moved with the same implausible speed and agility they had witnessed before, until the Watchkeeper surrendered her to the steering and propulsion of her own suit and she closed the distance back to Icebreaker. As she did so, the Watchkeeper turned on its axis and fell away at an unnerving acceleration.

Whatever business it had with them, it was clearly concluded — for now, at least.

Kanu readied the lock and watched as Dakota slowed her approach before tucking herself back inside the ship. When the lock had begun to cycle, he returned the drive to power and resumed their earlier acceleration. Kanu and Nissa were at the lock when she emerged back into Icebreaker, and — with the aid of the other Risen — set about divesting herself of the suit. As they were removed from her, the pieces gave off a rank pungency. Kanu suspected that the inside of a human spacesuit would not smell all that appealing to an elephant.

‘Are we back on course?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘We didn’t lose too much time — certainly not enough to help Goma. What happened to you inside the Watchkeeper?’

‘The continuation of a process. The continued revelation of that which demands to be revealed. Beyond that, I do not think any answer would satisfy you.’

‘You could try,’ Nissa said.

‘Then I shall. Such doubts as I had have now been set aside. I feel emboldened — confident that this is the right course. The machines have eased my misgivings and reaffirmed my absolute conviction to the cause of knowledge-gathering. Has there been contact from the other ship?’

‘Not since we spoke to them,’ Kanu said.

‘Then you will prepare a transmission. I have no wish to stir up trouble with these people, but they must be made to understand the utter inflexibility of our position. Tell them to turn around. If they go back to Orison, there will be no more difficulties between us and we may yet find common ground. But they must come no closer to Poseidon.’

‘We’ve tried persuading them already,’ Nissa said. ‘Look where it got us.’

‘Words alone will not change their minds.’

Kanu hardly dared ask. ‘So what now?’

‘Tell them about the Friends. If Eunice is who she claims to be, she will validate the fact of the Friends’ existence. She will also convince the others that I am fully capable of destroying each and every human life in the skipover vaults. Tell them that, Kanu. Tell them and make them turn around. We will be watching and waiting.’