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Poseidon's Wake

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111

‘It’s too long. Reduce the thrust now.’

Swift made a quick tooth-sucking sound. ‘I would gladly do so, Kanu, were this course correction not already critical. We can make it — but only if we hold our present output.’

‘Then we can’t make it.’

‘Kanu — I do not think you properly grasp the implications.’

‘No,’ Nissa said. ‘He grasps them, and so do I — it’s us or the Risen. We can survive this, but they probably won’t.’

‘Given recent events,’ Swift said, ‘I would venture that is not such an unthinkable trade-off.’

‘Only in your world,’ Kanu answered. ‘Not in mine. While there’s a chance to save them, I won’t have their deaths on my conscience.’

‘Let me be completely clear: unless we complete this burn, we will not avoid entering Poseidon’s influence. Do I need to define the word “not”?’

‘No, you don’t. And yes, I understand exactly what’s at stake.’

‘And once we do approach Poseidon, we will not have sufficient time to prevent ourselves reaching the atmosphere.’

‘I understand that as well.’

‘Where we may very well die, since this ship was never engineered for atmospheric entry.’

‘We have Noah,’ Nissa said.

‘Noah will do well to survive entry at the speed we will be travelling.’

‘We understand,’ Kanu affirmed. ‘It changes nothing. Reduce the thrust, Swift.’

‘I could disobey you, I suppose.’

‘But you won’t, because you want my friendship and respect as much I want yours. You’ve admitted one breach of our trust, Swift. Don’t make things worse.’

A moment later, Kanu heard the engine noise die down and felt his weight easing. It was not a complete shift to weightlessness, but enough of a transition that it felt just as welcome.

‘One gee,’ Swift said. ‘We’ll try and lose as much speed as we can. And if this doesn’t suit the Risen, then god help us all.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Nissa said.

‘Oh, I’m sure I did.’ Swift prodded his pince-nez glasses higher up the fine profile of his nose. ‘Even if it means the end of us, which may well be the case. But at least this will be interesting.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

From Mposi they had witnessed the total shutdown of Icebreaker and the gradual return of the ship’s systems. Although they were still too distant to image any salient details of the other vessel, they had a clear lock on its thermal signature. The dimming and reactivation of the Chibesa drive — even with the thrust directed away from them, towards Poseidon — were impossible to miss.

Besides, they had the benefit of Eunice’s insider knowledge.

‘You asked me about Swift,’ she said, with a certain primness of tone. ‘The truth is, I don’t entirely know what Swift is, or what Swift wants. Swift is some kind of artificial intelligence, that’s clear enough — he’s an artilect consciousness, much as I used to be. But unless I’m hugely mistaken — and frankly the likelihood of that isn’t worth mentioning — Swift is running on an entirely neural substrate. That’s how Swift was able to communicate with me at all. He’s inside Kanu’s skull.’

‘Like some sort of parasite?’ Dr Andisa asked.

‘I think we may presume that the relationship is mutually consensual and to the benefit of both host and symbiote. That Kanu has willingly allowed Swift to co-opt part of his neural network. What do we know of Kanu? He was an ambassador to the machines on Mars. I do not think these two facts are unrelated.’

‘Then who — or what — is Kanu acting for?’ Goma asked.

Eunice wriggled in her restraints. ‘Are you going to let me out of this chair any time soon?’

‘No,’ Vasin said. ‘You acted without authorisation. You took a foolhardly gamble with thousands of lives, both human and Tantor.’

‘I took a gamble to stop someone else taking a worse one. I gave Kanu an opportunity to challenge Dakota, with Swift’s reassurance that he had the means to take control of Icebreaker. Swift explained that there would be some kind of restart of Icebreaker’s systems, which is what we’ve just witnessed. Clearly, the humans are back in charge. That’s why the ship is making such a concerted effort to reverse course.’

‘So you’ve succeeded,’ Ru said.

‘It’s starting to look that way. A little closer to the bone than I’d like, but what are nerves for, if not to be frayed?’

‘You haven’t even considered the lives on Zanzibar. The Friends, the Tantors — they’re not even a part of your thinking any more. You’ve moved them off the board and forgotten about them. We were all wrong about you.’

She looked at Ru with an expression of pleasant interest. ‘Were you, my dear?’

‘You’re still a fucking machine.’

‘Well, thank you for that considered opinion. Shall I be equally candid, then? I don’t care. I expected to die. I expected to be torn limb from limb or stuffed into the nearest airlock. I expected that and I knew I had to act anyway — that nothing else was going to work. So spare me your lofty human sanctimony, because until you’ve been through the Terror, you have no idea what’s at stake. And if you had an idea, even the tiniest grain of an inkling, you’d know full well that my actions were not only necessary but the very least that needed to be done. If I could have destroyed Icebreaker, do you think I’d have hesitated?’

‘No,’ Ru said. ‘I don’t suppose you would have.’

‘Then we’re getting somewhere.’

But Vasin said quietly, ‘You say the humans should be back in charge by now.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then explain this.’

Over the next few hours they watched Kanu’s ship fall into the barricade of moons. The course correction had been going well, the engine signature reading clean and steady, no cause for concern even as Icebreaker topped out at a crushing three gees of reverse thrust. Then it dropped down to a single gee even though Icebreaker still had far too much residual motion in the direction of Poseidon. Their first guess was some kind of engine failure, but nothing in the data hinted at anything other than a smooth, controlled reduction of power — a deliberate change of plans.

They waited to see if this was a temporary adjustment, soon to be corrected. Eunice was as bothered about it as the rest of them — her confidence in both herself and Swift severely damaged. More than anything, that was the deciding moment when Goma put aside the last trace of doubt that they were dealing with a human being. No matter what Ru thought, no machine would have shown such consternation at this change in circumstances. A robot would have absorbed the altered parameters without the slightest sense of betrayal or personal failure.

Soon they had the confirmation they had been dreading.

‘This is Kanu. I hope you can read me. Shall I begin with the good news or the bad?’

They were close enough for real-time communications again. His face loomed large, but now the effects of gravity made him look drawn and fatigued, older and wiser by many years.

‘Go ahead, Kanu,’ said Captain Vasin.

‘Nissa and I have complete control of Icebreaker. Tell Eunice — if she isn’t already listening in — that she and Swift did a very good job with their scheme for Zanzibar. They can be proud of their achievement. That doesn’t mean I approve. Right now I’m not certain what approval would say about any of us. Was it an act of kindness or cruelty? I’m not exactly sure.’

‘Nor are we,’ Vasin said. ‘Horrified, and awed — there’s no doubt about that. But was it the right thing to do? I’d say it was, if we couldn’t see you continuing to Poseidon.’

‘We ran into a local complication which neither Swift nor Eunice anticipated. We had the means to turn Icebreaker around and were in the process of doing so, but it was too hard on the Tantors. They couldn’t take the gee-load. If we’d carried on, we are fairly sure they would have died.’

‘Just a second,’ Eunice said, now free of her chair but still shackled at the wrists. ‘You can turn around, but you’re not going to?’

‘We won’t murder them. That’s what it would have been. You can see that, can’t you?’

‘You owe them nothing,’ Eunice snapped back. ‘Especially not Dakota. You’re not dealing with an elephant, Kanu, or even a Tantor — you’re dealing with an alien intelligence that just happens to be using her body.’

‘I can understand why you feel that way. But if there’s a shred of humanity left in any of us, we can’t place our own lives over theirs.’

‘That’s very noble of you, but it’s not just your lives on the table here. Turn your ship around.’

‘It’s too late for that now, Eunice — you know that as well as we do. We’re committed to Poseidon now, for better or for worse. It’s going to be hard, in more ways than one.’

‘Not just hard,’ she said. ‘Suicidal.’

Kanu’s gravity-strained face managed a weak smile. ‘Yes. I’m aware of that. And believe me, I don’t like it for a second. But we’re not totally out of chances. We’ll see how we weather the moons. Even if we survive passage through them, we’ll still have the problem of atmospheric entry. We’re moving a little too quickly for safe planetfall, and Icebreaker certainly isn’t designed to cope with the stresses. But we have our lander, Noah. It’s large enough to accommodate all of us, and once we’re through the moons it might get us down to the surface, and maybe we can reach one of those wheels, see what we make of it. But we’re under no illusions about getting back out again. Since we’re going in, though, we may as well make the best of it. We’ll be gathering all the information we can and doing our best to share it with you. But you’ve done your part now.’