Poseidon's Wake

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114

No memory of anything will endure. No single experience of any living organism will be preserved. Nothing learned or discovered or made will survive. No art, no science, no history, no deed, no kindness, no fond thought, not a single moment of human happiness.

Nothing will last.

Nothing will matter.

Nothing has ever mattered.

When the sampling was done, when the silver wall had passed through them all, the moon spun its filament down to a clean silver spoke and then withdrew it back into the rim. For a moment it hung ahead of them, a moving ring keeping pace with Icebreaker. Perhaps their fate was still in the balance, still being ajudicated.

The moon retreated further still. It began to turn on its polar axis, blurring into a hard silver sphere. Then it veered off, returning to the orbit it had vacated during the chase. There were further layers of moons below, but they showed no interest in the ship. Kanu had just enough power to avoid coming too close to any of these moons, but not enough to stop Icebreaker’s fall towards the top of the atmosphere.

His head rang like a bell. It was still full of the Terror. Not so much the emotion of terror, he now knew, but rather a very specific sort of terrifying knowledge engraved in his consciousness with the indelible force of truth. He could still feel its argument, sounding out like an after-chime. He looked at his own hand, marvelling at it as if seeing it for the first time. He knew it for what it was: the instrument of a directed intelligence, an extension of himself, the means by which a being such as himself might do anything. Move earth, move water, move the stars, numberless multitudes of them, feel a glittery cascade of them run between his fingers like little grains of diamond sand.

And knew that all of it was futile, that no action had ultimate consequence, that the best and the worst he could be would all be forgotten; that in the white moment of forgetting, even the fact that he had existed, the fact that he had left the tiniest mark on creation, would be lost.

As would everything else.

He was still with Nissa. As they passed one of Icebreaker’s airlocks, wordlessly and with no prior exchange, they both slowed and looked at the lock, thinking of the void beyond it, the promise of immediate nullification. He could toss his helmet aside, step into that lock, release the air and life from his lungs.

He had tried to kill himself on Icebreaker once before, but that attempted suicide had been born out of desperation, of seeing his death as the only thing that would stop Dakota and at the same time not endanger the sleepers. He had reached the decision to kill himself only as the culmination of a bleak calculus, not because he had wearied of life or sought any kind of release in death. Life had not stopped surprising him; he was not yet ready to surrender it without good reason.

It was different now. His death would have little impact on their chances, and certainly would not improve them. Equally, he had no immediate and pressing external reason for killing himself.

Except that the Terror had reached inside him and negated every conceivable argument for his continued existence. It was purposeless, a life’s ledger of futile acts that was itself doomed to be erased. Nothing would ever matter. Nothing would ever change that single fact, nothing would ever make it more tolerable. How could the M-builders ever have borne such knowledge?

More to the point, how could Kanu Akinya?

Nissa held his gloved hand.

‘No,’ she said.

And he understood.

No.

Not yet.

‘I saw it,’ he stated, filled with a shivering horror. ‘The Terror. I understood it. It’s in me — filling me like a black poison. It’ll always be in me.’

‘I saw it, too,’ Nissa answered. ‘It’s in me as well. For the moment it’s all I can think of. I want to put my hands over my ears and shut it out. It’s like a shriek of despair coming from every cell in my body. But we have to be stronger than the Terror. It will pass. It must. Chiku endured it.’

‘I’m not as strong as Chiku.’

‘Nor am I. But there are two of us. I need you back from the edge, merman. And you need me. Remember, we’re married now.’

Kanu forced a nod. He did not feel as if there was strength enough in the universe to push aside that soul-swallowing negation he now felt inside himself. But he would have to try.

For both their sakes.

From the bridge he ran the simulations over and over. There was no flaw in them, only a choice of deaths — various angles by which they would hit the air too steeply. Icebreaker had been armoured against the crush of the Europan ocean, but that was an entirely different proposition from the aerodynamics of transatmospheric flight.

‘Unless I’m missing something—’

‘You’re not,’ Swift said. ‘Noah is our only option. It might get us down through that atmosphere.’

‘Might?’

‘Our approach speed is still very high. Noah was built to shuttle between the low orbit of Zanzibar and the surface of Crucible, not to cope with a velocity in excess of eighty kilometres per second.’

‘Can it get us back into clear space?’ Nissa asked.

‘Not at this speed. We’d still be too deep into the gravity well. At best, we can use Noah’s remaining delta-vee to ease our atmospheric entry and trust that aerodynamic braking will do the rest.’

Kanu nodded — it was pointless hoping for any more certainty than that. In truth, as he had told the crew of Mposi, he was already committed to their fate. He touched a glove to the control pedestal, feeling as if he were about to commit a loyal and dependable workhorse to the slaughterhouse. ‘It’s just a machine, but I almost feel as if I’m betraying it.’

‘That’s Swift, bleeding over,’ Nissa said.

‘What about you, Swift? The image of you inside Icebreaker — can you transfer it to Noah?’

‘I hesitate to say. What’s your estimate for the time left to us?’

Kanu glanced at the display, squinting at the confusion of vectors and orbits — it looked like a wrestling match between many-tentacled sea-monsters. ‘It depends on the point of separation. Too early and the moons may mistake Noah for a second expedition — or even interpret it as a threat. In any case, I don’t want to go through the Terror again quite so soon. Too late and we won’t have sufficient time to decelerate. Either way, we’re looking at less then fifteen minutes.’

Swift removed his pince-nez and studied the lenses. ‘Then I would say we are short of time by approximately three weeks minus, of course, those valuable fifteen minutes, since that is how long it would take me to transfer a secondary image to Noah.’

‘Then you’re in trouble,’ Nissa said.

‘The image has served its purpose. The version of me inside Kanu still has a chance. If it helps, do not think of one as being distinct from and independent of the other.’

‘I’m calling Goma,’ Kanu said, making sure they still had a communications lock on the other ship. ‘They need to know what’s happening. Once we hit the atmosphere, we may not be able to get a signal through.’ He turned to the matriarch, swivelling his head in the neck ring of his suit. ‘Dakota — can you move in these conditions?’

‘You would have me confined somewhere else while you complete the evacuation?’

‘No, I would have you aboard Noah — Hector and Lucas, too. This much I’m sure of — none of us passed that test as individuals. It was something in the entirety of us that tipped the scales. Human, Risen, machine. Together. A Trinity, like the first. For that reason alone we’re staying together.’

‘After all our differences? After the threats, the deaths?’

‘Recriminations can wait. Right now my main concern is that none of us dies a horrible fiery death. Does that sound like a plan to you?’

‘If I were you,’ Nissa said, ‘I’d listen to my husband.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

On Mposi they watched and listened as Kanu informed them that his crew had survived the Terror but were now about to abandon ship. This was no great surprise — he had already mentioned the lander — but privately they had all hoped for some new last-minute opportunity, something that might yet give Kanu a chance of avoiding direct contact with Poseidon.

It was not to be. The larger ship was now within one thousand kilometres of the top of Poseidon’s atmosphere and still travelling far too quickly to survive contact with the air. Finally the drive shut down, Icebreaker entering terminal free-fall, and the lander detached itself. They could see it with their sensors at maximum magnification: it was a tenth the size of the starship, a plump deltoid with a stubby tail fin. Goma had seen similar vehicles in the civic museums in Guochang and Namboze, preserved since the early days of Crucible’s settlement. She knew very well that they had not been designed for the gruelling environment of a sweltering superterran world such as Poseidon.

The lander fired its control thrusters and opened up the distance from its mother craft. Once it had achieved a kilometre of separation, Noah’s own engine started up, trying to whittle down yet more residual velocity before it met the friction of the upper atmosphere. From Mposi’s point of view, Poseidon’s visible face was half in day and half in night, with the two ships tiny bright points against the darkening line of the terminator.