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Poseidon's Wake

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‘That does appear to be the consensus opinion. Well done for subscribing to it.’

‘Shut up.’ She grabbed a lock of his hair, twisted it hard from his scalp, not caring how much it hurt him. ‘Shut the fuck up, you piece of believer piss. I saw Mposi. I saw what was left of him. Whoever did that, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to them. Nothing so fucking vile that I wouldn’t consider it. And I do think you did it. But I can’t be sure. Not totally.’

She still had his hair in her hand. Grave made a guttural sort of noise, not quite a yelp, but it left her in no doubt as to the discomfort she was inflicting. Yet he made no effort to fight her, his own hands resting at his sides.

‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘You’re going on ice. Three hundred years, Gandhari says. No one will speak to you until we get back home. But if there’s one thing I should know, one thing you think might make a difference to our chances, I want to know it now.’

‘For the sake of that tiny chink of doubt?’

She dug her nails into his scalp. ‘Fuck you. I think there’s about one chance in a thousand that you didn’t kill Mposi. That’s not a doubt, that’s an outlier. But I still want to know. One thing. Whatever you’ve got.’

‘Tantors,’ he said.

It was enough to slacken her hold on him. She withdrew her hand, allowed his head to slump back onto his pillow.

‘Tell me more.’

‘That’s the fear, Goma, the reason for a sabotage effort. There are some on the extreme edge of the movement who share your suspicions.’

‘My suspicions about what?’

‘That the Tantors might have survived, somewhere beyond Crucible. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Be honest — it isn’t to heed the call of a dear dead ancestor. It’s to find talking elephants.’

‘What do you know about Tantors?’

‘The same as everyone else. And one extra thing. If there was a sabotage plan, destroying Travertine would only have been a side effect of the real intention. They mean to murder your elephants, Goma.’

‘You told me you hate the sin of what they are, not the elephants themselves.’

‘That was true.’

‘And now?’

‘I think it would still be wrong to harm them.’

‘The captain found the explosives. If there are more, she’ll find them.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But explosives aren’t the only weapon, are they?’

‘What else?’

‘I have no idea. If I were allowed my liberty, I might have a chance of finding out.’

‘Gandhari shouldn’t stop at you,’ Goma said. ‘She should put all of you on ice.’

‘We’re a fifty-three-strong expedition. That would still leave forty-one other candidates.’

‘It’s not one of the rest of us. You’re the fanatics, not us.’

‘I hope for your sake that you are right. Truth is, Goma, I never wanted us to be at odds. Whatever you think of me — and you have made your feelings abundantly clear — I did not hurt your uncle. Someone else killed Mposi — someone still at liberty aboard this ship. I know this, but of course I cannot make you see it for yourself. Nonetheless, I can encourage you to keep it in mind. Do you think you will find Tantors, after all this time?’

Goma felt a flush of shame for the physical hurt she had inflicted on Grave. It was beneath her, beneath the dignity of her name, beneath the memory of Mposi. The anger had been genuine and justified, but she had allowed it to use her rather than the other way around.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you hope you will.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then be wise, Goma Akinya. Be very wise, and very vigilant. Because when the snake shows itself, I won’t be around to help you.’

Grave’s entry into skipover followed shortly afterwards, conducted without ceremony and with no apparent resistance from the subject. Goma was allowed to be present in the skipover vault with a small party of witnesses and technicians, including Ru, Maslin Karayan and a select number of other Second Chancers.

Grave had already been sedated and was only minimally conscious by the time the skipover casket was closed and the transition to suspended animation initiated. After their public dispute, Vasin and Nhamedjo appeared to have come to some grudging agreement regarding Grave’s committal to skipover. Saturnin handled the medical aspects, though with a conspicuous absence of enthusiasm.

Goma watched it all with a vague foreboding, knowing that she would soon be entering one of these sleek grey caskets and trusting her fate to a medical technology that was reliable but not foolproof, and which she did not pretend to understand. The assembly watched in silence as the status readouts marked Grave’s slide into medical hibernation, the gradual arresting of all cellular processes. Finally his brain gave its final surrendering flicker of neural activity, and all was still.

‘I am sorry I could not give you more,’ Vasin said to Goma, when the witnesses were beginning to disperse. ‘Some sense of justice having been done, rather than put on hold.’

‘Mposi wouldn’t have expected anything more.’

‘Perhaps not. But I admit that I felt the need for retribution — some sense that the punishment should fit the crime.’

Goma thought back to her night-time visit to Grave’s locked room. To the best of her knowledge it had gone unwitnessed and unreported. If Grave had mentioned it to anyone, there had been no consequences.

She thought of her fingernails, gouging little crescent-shaped wounds into his scalp.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted retribution.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kanu prepared chai and knelt by Nissa’s skipover casket until with a gasp of pressure the lid opened and slid back. She lay there, alive but not yet awake. He allowed that to happen in its own time, still kneeling, until the awkwardness of his posture became almost too much to bear. Still he waited. At last she stirred, her throat moving, her eyes opening to slits. Again he allowed her silence, although he was certain she felt his presence, breathing next to her.

Eventually she swallowed and said, ‘Where are we?’

‘Our destination,’ Kanu answered. ‘The Gliese 163 system.’ He spoke slowly, calmly, with as much gentleness as the words allowed. ‘We’re about six light-hours out — close enough for a good look at all the planets. I felt you should be awake for this.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s your right.’

After a silence, she said, ‘I haven’t got any rights, Kanu. I stopped having rights when I was kidnapped. I’m a hostage. A prisoner. Baggage.’

‘I’m sorry things happened the way they did.’

‘Then that makes it all better, doesn’t it.’

‘I mean it. I mean it more than you can know.’ Kanu searched his thoughts, wishing there was a way to make her see his good intentions, the vastness of his regret. ‘I wronged you, we both know that.’

‘Do you?’

‘I lied to you and I used you. My not being aware of it… that was never an excuse. Not when I planned it all in the first place, certain of how it would play out — us meeting, you having the ship, getting me to Europa, then going our separate ways.’

Her voice was a rasp. He remembered how dry his own throat had been, coming out of skipover only a few hours earlier.

‘And next you’ll say you had no choice, that it had to be done.’

He ran a hand across the cold skin of his scalp, shaved before skipover. ‘If I said as much, it would still be no excuse. I should have found another way — another means of reaching Europa. It was just that you presented the least risk of detection, and—’

‘There you go again.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘This is your way, Kanu. You’ll always have a justification, an excuse. There’s no action you can’t explain away. It’s always necessary, always the only thing you could have done.’

‘I will try to do better.’

‘It’s a little late for that, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘I will hold my hands up and say that everything I led you to believe after Lisbon was wrong. But this was never my intention. I didn’t want you on the ship.’

‘Out of sight, out of mind? You’d use me, but at least I wouldn’t be hanging around afterwards, reminding you of the fact?’

‘If that’s how it feels to you, I apologise. Do you remember much of what we talked about before skipover? This was the Margrave’s doing. He wanted to protect you, and I told him to do whatever was necessary. I didn’t think that meant capturing you and your ship and smuggling them aboard my own!’

‘Give me back my ship.’

‘It’s yours, whenever you want it. But we’re fifty light-years from Earth. Fall of Night would be lucky to make it to the edge of this solar system, let alone get you home.’

‘Then I’ll die trying. Better that than this.’

‘It’s normal to be a little fatalistic after skipover. You’ll start to feel differently when you’ve been up and about for a bit.’

‘Don’t tell me how I’ll feel, Kanu.’ A notch of suspicion formed on her brow. ‘Why are you awake before me, anyway? You promised we’d come out together.’

He nodded. ‘I did, and I’m sorry that promise was broken. Swift… thought it might be better this way.’

‘That’s useful, then. Blame everything on Swift.’

‘I regret that, like so many other things. But I’m not sorry that you’re here, that you’re with me.’ He shifted on his old, old knees. ‘It’s something marvellous, Nissa — something that eclipses anything that happened to me in my old life. I want you to see it, to share in the discovery — to be a part of this.’ He paused. ‘We’ve found… well, you really should see it for yourself.’