Poseidon's Wake

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‘What are you suggesting?’ Vasin asked.

‘Turn around. You gave it your best shot and I think we can both agree there need be no hard feelings. There’s nothing to be gained from debate now — the time for that has passed. We have no option; we’re going in, and we’ll endeavour to be your eyes and ears. I was about to wish you the best in forging ties with Zanzibar, but I keep forgetting that won’t be necessary — it isn’t here any more. Will you be all right? Can you get back to your starship?’

‘Don’t worry about us,’ Vasin said. ‘We have everything we need, and even if we didn’t, there’s still Eunice’s camp on Orison. We’ll return there to help the surviving Tantors — but not until we’ve done all we can for you.’

‘There’s nothing to be done. But Nissa and I appreciate the sentiment.’

‘Let me speak to Swift,’ Eunice said.

‘So that you can talk him into destroying Icebreaker in a moment of glorious self-sacrifice?’ Kanu smiled sadly. ‘As it happens, we’ve already discussed that, and maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. But we’re not quite ready to face total oblivion just yet. Not while there’s a chance to learn something new. It’s the reason we came here, after all — to gather knowledge. And if, collectively, none of us is quite up to the measure of the M-builders — well, then it looks to me as if we’re all doomed anyway. But I’m handing no one my head on a plate.’

‘Tell Swift—’

‘Swift says that he’d welcome the exchange of further views, but for the time being we have a little preparation of our own to be doing. I’ll talk to you all on the other side of the Terror. Wish us well, won’t you?’

The channel was closed, but they could still track Icebreaker clearly enough to observe its progress. They watched it fall deeper, slowing all the while but never enough, and they ran their own simulations for atmospheric insertion assuming a spread of assumptions for the capabilities of Kanu’s ship.

Until Eunice drew their attention to one of the moons, now veering out of its orbit like a marble that had wandered out of a groove.

‘There’s always one,’ she said. ‘The chasing moon. It’ll be on them soon enough. And if Kanu has an ounce of sense — or if he listens to Dakota — he’ll know better than to try to escape.’

‘What will the moon do?’ Goma asked.

‘Swallow them. And cut them open. Crack their spines and read them like books. But don’t worry. It’s less painful than it sounds.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Kanu had been wrong about the moons, but he could be forgiven for that. Even Icebreaker had been confused by them, its sensors registering them only as small, black, mathematically spherical bodies. As one of the objects closed upon them, though, he began to grasp his error. The moon was only spheroidal in the way a spinning coin defines the shape of a sphere. The moon was winding down — turning ever more slowly on its axis. The rotational speed was still almost too fast for the naked eye to interpret, but now at least the ship was having less difficulty.

He stared at the images and overlays on the bridge display — the patchwork of analysis and interpretation the ship was doing its best to offer.

The chasing moon was a thin grey ring of the same diameter as the implicit sphere — about two hundred kilometres across, which in turn made it about the same size as the wheels on Poseidon. The width and thickness of the ring were also in proportion to the wheels. They would have better data as the moon reduced its spin even further, but on the evidence presented so far, Kanu had little doubt that additional information would only confirm the observations to date. He knew nothing of the M-builders, still less of their psychology, but it struck him as profligate in the extreme to create two distinct kinds of thing which were all but identical in their major dimensions.

No — he was sure of it: the moons were identical to the wheels. The wheels were down in the sea and the moons were in space, but they were the same class of object — simply assigned different functions.

‘How much of this,’ he asked, ‘is ringing a bell?’

‘All of it,’ Dakota said. ‘A moon always detached from its orbit and closed on us as we approached. The moons are the basic line of defence — the sentience filter. In a short while, it will sample us.’

‘Am I going to like that?’ Nissa asked.

‘It depends how you feel about terror.’

The moon — or, more accurately, the wheel — continued its approach. Within minutes, its rate of spin had dropped to a few rotations a second. Then — with a surprising abruptness — it locked still, its central axis aligned with Icebreaker. It was closing at a rate that they could never have outrun, even with a fully functioning Chibesa core.

Besides, Dakota was clear: it would have been perfectly futile to run. The moons allowed nothing to evade their scrutiny. If they veered from the reach of this one, the remaining moons would simply mesh their orbits tighter. And if by chance there had been some trajectory which allowed them to slip beyond the moons, Icebreaker would simply be destroyed with long-range weaponry as a precautionary measure.

‘They allowed us through once,’ Kanu said.

‘Your course was oblique to Poseidon. The moons determined that you had no intention of slowing or landing. Do not think of that as clemency — it isn’t. The moons simply determined that you were neither a threat nor of interest to them. They guard their energy carefully — nothing is without cost, even to the M-builders. But you still did very well to survive after your entanglement with the Watchkeeper. Be glad you never went deeper.’

‘I’d be glad if weren’t going deeper now,’ Nissa said.

‘For years — decades — I lived for this.’ But after a silence Dakota added: ‘Now I am not so sure.’

They watched as a silver filament formed a cord between two parts of the moon’s inner arc. The filament lengthened until it spanned the diameter, like a single hubless spoke. They had seen nothing of how the filament was generated, or any suggestion of how it was sustained.

‘What is it?’ Kanu asked.

‘The means by which we shall be sampled,’ said Dakota. ‘It is a physical scanning process — a kind of examination by touch. But do not be alarmed. This is not the thing that will harm us.’

The moon had begun to rotate again, but now the axis of rotation was at right angles to its previous orientation. The spin accelerated quickly, drawing the single silver spoke into a flat silver disc. The disc was slightly translucent, stars and planets still visible through it. Now the wheel began to gain on Icebreaker until the silver surface was only a few hundred metres aft of the vessel.

‘The first time,’ Dakota said, ‘we thought this must be a weapon. We believed we were going to die. In hindsight, though, it would have made a very clumsy tool of execution. We should have understood that it was a learning machine, not a weapon.’

Kanu studied the bridge display. The schematic outline of the ship showed a sketchy, barely apprehended surface closing in from behind, like a fog bank.

‘What will happen when it touches us? Will it pass through the hull?’

‘The sampling surface will not be interrupted. It will pass through every system of Icebreaker — including the Chibesa core.’

‘And us?’

‘From the perspective of the M-builders, we are all just systems of the ship.’

The silver wall had begun to consume the ship from the tail end. But there were no emergency warnings, no sense of any damage or impairment to the propulsion systems beyond that which they had already sustained. Icebreaker was aware of the surface passing around it but had no perception of any more significant violation of its integrity.

‘I want to see this,’ Nissa said. ‘For real, with my own eyes.’

‘You will, soon enough.’

‘I mean while there’s time to compose some last thoughts. Will it matter if we move around?’

‘Nothing you think, say or do will make the slightest difference now,’ Dakota assured her. ‘This is the price of your forgiveness, in sparing us.’

‘Would you rather we hadn’t?’

‘I suspect you will come to believe so.’

‘Such gratitude,’ Nissa said.

‘Oh, I am grateful. You had the means to escape and we were safely unconscious. You could hardly have been blamed had you put yourselves before the Risen. I still wonder why you did not. You had everything to gain, and now you have nothing.’

‘But I can still look myself in the eye in a mirror,’ Kanu said.

He followed Nissa. Instead of going directly to the central shaft, she stopped at the spacesuit locker and began donning layers as quickly as she could. For a moment Kanu merely watched, wondering how she thought a spacesuit was going to help her when the silver surface arrived. But the impulse to do something was inarguable, as human as the reflex to raise a hand against a striking knife. He began to put on his own spacesuit, skipping the usual safety checks for the sake of urgency.

‘I know this won’t make much difference,’ Nissa said, ‘but if the ship breaks up around us, I don’t want to die with vacuum in my lungs. I’ll take oxygen starvation over decompression any time.’

‘I’ve never been keen on drowning,’ Kanu confessed. ‘I imagine the two scenarios aren’t all that different.’