Poseidon's Wake

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‘I suppose she would,’ Kanu said. ‘But the Watchkeeper came to Chiku, not the other way round.’

It was a long seven minutes — time enough for doubts and second-guessing. But their nerve held, and at the appointed moment, Icebreaker commenced its course change. It was as hard and sudden as Swift had warned, an assault to the frailty of the human body, but they were ready for it and the shock was bearable. Kanu sensed himself on the verge of blacking out, but unconsciousness never quite came and his thoughts remained lucid. The course correction continued for several minutes, a succession of nerve-rattling instants, any one of which could have seen some dreadful reprisal from the moons. But no attack came. Perhaps they were too small to draw the moons’ attention, or Swift had timed their course change accurately enough to avoid drawing down their fire. Or perhaps, Kanu mused, all this destruction was the work of millions of years ago, and they had never been in harm’s way.

When the engine stopped, they had arrived within a whisker of the broken Watchkeeper. Icebreaker was less than the width of its own hull from the skin of the alien machine. There had been no sign of life — of activation — from a distance, and there was none now they were closer. The drifting hulk was warm on one side, cool on the other, but only because it kept one side turned to Gliese 163.

It was the middle section of a Watchkeeper, severed at both ends — a snipped-off cone — and with a long, deep, lateral gouge running the length of its warm side. They decided to chance another small thrust correction to place Icebreaker inside the thermal concealment of that gouge. Although they were floating next to part of a Watchkeeper, the ruin of the alien machine was still hundreds of times larger than Kanu’s ship, and the gouge was deep enough to hide them completely.

They came to a halt, holding station in their improvised hideaway. The walls and floor of the wound offered glimpses of the Watchkeeper’s secret interior — a puzzle of vast and silent mechanisms packed as tightly as intestines — but only a glimpse. They could see no deeper than the outermost viscera, and no blue glow shone from the depths to elucidate the overlying structures.

A living Watchkeeper was awesome enough, Kanu thought. But a dead one was something more because it testified to a greater power — something with the capability to kill a robot as large as a moon.

‘We should be safe now,’ he said, ‘but just to be certain we’ll power down everything we don’t need and sit here as quietly as we can. Swift — can you compute an optimum escape profile for us?’

‘Consider it done, Kanu. And thereafter? Resume a higher orbit, beyond the moons? It won’t cost us much more energy.’

‘No — we’re not ready for this place just yet. I’ll admit it — I’m a little spooked.’

‘Entirely understandable. Imagine how I feel — another machine intelligence, witnessing butchery on this scale. So where should we go next?’

‘I think it’s obvious,’ Kanu said. ‘Paladin. And hope there are no nasty surprises waiting for us there.’

‘There are no nasty surprises,’ Swift said, ‘only degrees of unpreparedness.’

Swift’s plan had them waiting ten hours as the fragment’s orbit carried it beyond the diameter of the orbit of the outermost moon. It transpired that the Watchkeeper had a measurable gravitational field — strong enough that they had to resist its pull with a whisper of micro-thrust, as if they were moored next to an asteroid. There should have been no surprise in that, but in no other context had the mass of a Watchkeeper ever been detected. It was as if — being dead — some cloaking or mass-negation effect had now ceased to function.

To control gravity, to make mass vanish like a palmed card — here were implicit technological secrets which, suitably unravelled, might spur a thousand industrial revolutions. But Kanu and his companions could only content themselves with the gathering of data. The understanding — the exploitation — would have to be left to other minds, in other solar systems, if it could be done at all.

Still, here was another solid discovery to add to the puzzles they had already found. A new Mandala, wheels taller than the sky and a glimpse into the physics of the Watchkeepers. If Kanu did nothing else with his life, these findings would be achievement enough. The very thought of it — the idea of contributing something this big to the sum of human knowledge — brought him solace. It was good to have done something useful, and to have survived until now.

At no point could Kanu say he felt totally calm — there were still too many unknowns for that — but there was an easing in his mood, a sense that at least one challenge had been met. He realised, quite suddenly, that he was ravenously hungry. It would be good to eat, not knowing what lay ahead or when they might have the chance again.

Nissa agreed with him.

‘Thank you for allowing me to make that decision,’ she said when they were seated at their table. ‘Even if the idea was Swift’s.’

‘It was right to do something. My plan wasn’t a plan at all.’

‘You never told me that story about the snakes before.’

He thought back to the happy, golden bliss of their short few weeks together since Lisbon, before the reality of his mission came between them. ‘There hasn’t really been time.’

‘I mean during all the years we were married. I’m sure I’d remember.’

‘Really?’

‘The old Kanu was a good man. He told a lot of stories, but most of them were designed to put him in a good light. Subtly, I’ll admit, but admitting to weakness definitely wasn’t one of his strengths.’

‘I admitted to a weakness?’

‘Indecision is a poor quality, especially in a politician, a mover and shaker.’

‘Although sometimes it can be better than making the wrong decision in haste.’

‘Sometimes,’ Nissa conceded. And in a gesture that was outwardly small but which conveyed magnitudes, she allowed herself to add a measure of wine to Kanu’s glass. ‘But not always.’

He was not forgiven, he knew that. Perhaps there could be no forgiveness after the catalogue of injustices he had inflicted on her, from betrayal to outright kidnapping. But independently of forgiveness there was an unconditional kindness, a generosity of spirit, which she had always possessed, and for which he now thanked his stars.

‘I have said it before,’ he told her, ‘but I cannot say it too often. I am sorry.’

‘We saw the worldwheels,’ Nissa said. ‘No one else has. That doesn’t excuse what you did to me. But in this moment, after what we just survived? I’m glad to be here. And I want to go back, to find out what those worldwheels have to tell us.’

‘They frighten me,’ Kanu admitted.

‘And me. But I won’t rest until we’ve confronted them. Snakes everywhere, Kanu Akinya, no matter where you look. But sometimes you just have to step into the grass.’

Kanu lifted his glass and sipped his wine. It was as delicious as any vintage he could remember.

They left on a ghost of thrust, emerging from the Watchkeeper’s wound at a few tens of metres per second, more than enough to break the pull of its gravitational field, and for several minutes all was well. They had seen nothing of Poseidon for the ten hours of their concealment, but now the planet was visibly smaller and they were safely outside the weave of its moons. Swift made another course correction, lining them up for the transit out to Paladin. Kanu allowed himself to believe they had beaten the odds on this one, and for that he was grateful. Whatever they encountered around Paladin, they would take much more care not to stumble into danger a second time.

But that was when the Watchkeeper struck.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

On its approach to Orison, Travertine directed the full bore of its mapping sensors at the little world’s surface. The instruments clarified a picture of a virtually airless planet, its grey-pink surface lavishly cratered, its magnetosphere extinguished, its atmosphere no more than a thin, attenuated relic slowly leaking into space. Nothing orbited Orison, no moons or stations or ships, and the planet showed no obvious signs of large-scale settlement. There were a handful of metallic features scattered within several hundred kilometres of each other, but few of them were large enough to be independent camps. Somewhere in the middle of these scattered signatures was a larger, concentrated cluster of objects and power sources, and this coincided with the origin of the most recent burst of transmissions.

They studied it at maximum magnification, picking out a small hamlet of domes and locks and connecting tubes, with hints of deeper structures buried underground. Even from orbit, it had a makeshift, unplanned look to it, as if thrown together in haste using whatever components were available. Scratchy trails led away from the camp, aimed in the rough direction of the other metallic features far over the camp’s horizon.

A surface expedition was soon made ready and a scouting party selected to go down in the heavy lander. Vasin would lead it, accompanied by Goma, Loring, Karayan and Dr Nhamedjo.

‘And Ru,’ Goma said.

‘She isn’t well enough,’ Vasin said. ‘I watched her stumbling around only a few hours ago.’

‘We’re all stumbling around, Gandhari. Ru’s no worse than the rest of us. Anyway — why the hell does Maslin Karayan get to come along if Ru can’t?’