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Poseidon's Wake

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110

‘I hope you haven’t left it too late,’ Nissa said.

‘I haven’t. Now for the second issue. The Risen are no longer the commanding authority aboard this vehicle. Kanu and Nissa are in control, and any challenge to their status will be met with immediate punishment. I can make this ship do things to itself that would be uncomfortable for a primate but most certainly fatal for an elephant. Is that understood?’

‘Does he really have control?’ Dakota asked.

‘If he does,’ Kanu answered, ‘I have no idea how. But I don’t think he’s lying.’

‘I’m not. The moment is nearly upon us. Dakota — you may remain here, if you desire, but I would strongly recommend using one of the restraint couches.’

‘Whoever you are, however you are speaking to us,’ Dakota said, ‘this ship will continue to operate under my command. The loss of Zanzibar is shocking, and there will be consequences, but it must not distract us from our purpose. Kanu — resume our planned trajectory. Do not deviate. Our projected course remains valid.’

Swift did something that jammed the centrifuge to a violent halt, forcing an emergency braking system to engage equally violently. Kanu was thrown off his feet, Nissa likewise. He paddled madly and grabbed the nearest console, then reached out a hand to Nissa.

The Risen were not so fortunate. They had begun to drift again — paddling their feet and swinging their trunks in a vain effort to gain some traction. Air-swimming was barely effective for humans; for elephants it was entirely useless.

Nissa grabbed the back of her own chair and released herself from Kanu’s grip.

‘I can keep doing this indefinitely,’ Swift said, ‘but I hope the point is made. Force and strength will not help you now, Dakota. When I restore the gravity, you will secure yourselves in the restraining couches. Nissa — might I ask where you are going?’

‘To fetch something.’

She moved quickly and confidently even though gravity had not yet returned. A minute passed, maybe two — long enough for her to reach any number of adjoining rooms. Kanu swallowed hard, trying to ease the tightness in his throat.

‘I hope you’ve thought this through, Swift. Why did you have to shut down the ship?’

‘I installed an avatar of myself in Icebreaker’s control architecture. It needed a total shutdown to gain the necessary authority across all functions — without it I’d only have partial control. Besides, it’s rather helped to make my point.’

‘If making your point involved scaring me half to death, consider your work done.’

Nissa pushed her way back into the bridge holding something long and thin in her right hand and tucked into the crook of her right elbow. Kanu stared at it for a second before recognising it as the harpoon gun they had found on the dead Regal.

Nissa braced herself into a stable position next to one of the chairs and settled the harpoon into both hands like a rifle. It was a nasty, complex thing, with gas canisters and a gristle of pressure lines, the ugly barb of its tip a promise of the damage it could do to flesh.

She aimed it first at Kanu, thought for a moment, and then shifted the aim onto Dakota.

‘You appear to be in two minds,’ the matriarch said.

‘I was. Now do what Swift said.’

The gravity returned and the Risen took their positions in the acceleration couches, Nissa aiming the harpoon as if she was more than willing to use it. But the Risen had accepted the practicalities of their situation and offered no resistance to this change of status.

‘Will you kill us, Kanu?’ Dakota asked. ‘Is that your plan?’

He considered offering her glib reassurance, that he had no intention of harming them, but in truth he had not thought it through. Perhaps it would indeed come to killing. He hoped not, but this was not the time for empty promises.

‘We’ll see how we fare,’ he answered.

As soon as the drive was ready, Swift applied power in increasing increments, winding down the centrifuge as the thrust ramped up to half a gee and beyond. Kanu returned to his seat and Nissa to hers, where she cradled the harpoon in her lap.

‘You realise that would only have stopped one of them,’ he said. ‘And even that wasn’t certain.’

‘After what she did to the Friends, I’ll take what I can get.’

The drive climbed through one gee, then beyond. At one-point-five gees, Kanu sensed that he would struggle to lift himself from his seat and move around. At two gees, his own weight pressing against his bones, he decided it would be beyond his capacities. Nissa, lither and stronger, might still have been able to move around with care. But the Risen were now effectively prisoners of their couches. Their musculoskeletal structures were already operating at the limit under terrestrial gravity; now they weighed twice as much.

‘Can you still breathe, Dakota?’

‘We are not so weak as you imagine, Kanu. Our strength has carried us this far — it will serve us a little longer.’

But he could see the effect of the acceleration for himself — the muscles of her face being dragged down, the skin around her eye slipping to reveal the pink enclosure of her eyeball. Her trunk sagged listlessly.

Two gees, then two and a half. Warning messages had begun to sound again, but these were of no evident concern to Swift. Kanu did not need to speak — he could have subvocalised easily enough — but for the sake of the Risen he made the effort.

‘Tell me how you did this, Swift.’ His voice was strained and he had to fight for breath between words. ‘I understand how you found a way to communicate with Eunice, but you couldn’t have put all this in place since then. There’s no way you’d have time to install any kind of avatar, or whatever you want to call it.’

‘I must confess there has been a degree of deception on my part, but I hope you will not hold it against me.’

‘What did you do?’ Nissa asked.

‘When you were sleeping, after the Watchkeeper attack, but before the arrival at Zanzibar, I saw it as an opportunity to put certain provisions in place… and therefore I took it.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Nissa said. ‘We were both in skipover. I was with Kanu when we went under.’

The engine had topped out at three gees. Kanu could hear as well as feel it, like an endless thundering storm front.

‘She’s right,’ Kanu said. ‘I programmed the sleep intervals myself.’

‘You think you did,’ Swift replied, with a trace of bashfulness. ‘The truth is, I intervened. The sleep interval you programmed was not the one you intended. And when you emerged from skipover, I held you in a state of borderline unconsciousness while I made use of your body.’

‘Fow how long? Hours, days?’

Swift equivocated. ‘Rather more than days, Kanu. Weeks and months would be more truthful.’ He paused to fiddle with his sleeve, as if a button had come adrift. ‘There was a lot to be done, even operating at the limit of your capacity. Getting the ship to obey me wasn’t the hard part — it already thought I was you. But installing a useful part of me in the architecture with only the tactile and expressive channels available via the use of your body… that was supremely challenging.’

‘You duplicated yourself?’ Nissa asked.

‘No. There was never time for that. It took every resource available to the Evolvarium to stuff me inside Kanu’s head — I had nothing to guide me, and nothing to work with but your own flesh and blood. What I created was an image, a kind of shadow of myself. I gave it the ability to make some autonomous decisions, but primarily its job was to conceal itself and eventually respond to my commands. The implant protocol Nissa suggested? That was helpful — it gave me a direct channel into Icebreaker’s neuro-medical surgical suite, which in turn offered me a window into the larger operating architecture. But it was still daunting work!’

‘I dreamed of wandering the ship,’ Kanu said. ‘Haunting it like a ghost, passing through empty, cold corridors. It felt like a nightmare — a horrible, endless fever dream. But that wasn’t a dream at all, was it? That was you, using me.’

‘Some small component of the experience must have slipped through to conscious recollection. I can only apologise for that.’

‘You don’t sound in the least bit apologetic.’

‘Forgive me, in any case.’

‘Swift,’ Nissa said. ‘The Risen. They’re unconscious. They can’t endure this the way we can.’

Kanu had shifted his attention from Dakota to Swift, but now he saw that her eye was closed and her breathing unusually sluggish and laboured. ‘You said it yourself, Swift — what’s hard on us might be fatal for them. You have to reduce the thrust.’

‘In a little while I will do just that. But we must sustain this output if we are to correct our course.’

‘How long?’ Nissa asked, groaning out the question.

‘Another thousand seconds, give or take.’

Kanu looked at Lucas and Hector, then back at their leader. He knew nothing about elephant anatomy, still less regarding their chances of surviving another thousand seconds. He imagined their hearts, slow at the best of times, now being pushed to the limit of their strength — each beat a triumph of muscle over fluid mechanics. Only an evolutionary eyeblink separated Kanu from the savannah, and that was just as true for the Risen. Their minds might be fixed on the stars, but their bodies were only a footstep from the dust and heat of Amboseli.