Poseidon's Wake

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‘If you must.’

A whirr signalled the deployment of the landing gear. It whined into place and locked with a series of metallic thuds.

‘I was gravely ill, once — a bad reaction to one of the local organisms on Crucible. Mposi and I were political adversaries, but he still found time to arrange help for my wife and children, and to come and see me when I was well enough for visitors. He did a great deal for me and mine, although he always downplayed it — said it was a small favour, nothing more. I never forgot that gesture, and I always made sure Mposi knew it.’

‘You fought like cats.’

‘We argued our positions when much was at stake, but nothing interfered with our basic respect for each other as human beings. And I regret very much that we have lost Mposi’s stabilising influence. He was an ally to us all.’

She could have left it at that, but something in his manner had undermined her instinctive dislike of him. She thought back to a conversation with Mposi, when he mentioned the ‘small favour’. It accorded with Karayan’s account of the same kindness.

‘Did you really not know Peter Grave before the expedition?’

‘I wish I had known him better. Unfortunately, there was very little contact between us until shortly before the ship left. Perhaps if there had been more time…’

At the risk of putting words into his mouth, she said, ‘You’d have realised what he was, what he was capable of?’

‘I’m tempted to think so, but in practice, I’m not sure I am that good a judge of character. During his time with us, I certainly sensed that he was an outsider, or rather an outlier. Call him an extremist, if you will.’

‘Then why did you put up with him?’

‘Our movement encompasses a spectrum of viewpoints. I could hardly criticise Peter Grave for believing in certain things more forcefully than some of the rest of us.’

He was speaking in a low voice now, barely audible above the dull roar of the lander’s motors and life-support system. Again, Goma recalled Mposi telling her that Karayan was obliged to project a blustering self-image in order to unite the disparate groups of Second Chancers. Here, now, perhaps he felt able to express more moderate sentiments.

‘Of course, we always agreed on the essentials,’ he said, as if that affirmation were necessary.

‘Of course,’ Goma said. But they were playing a game now, each understanding what the other really meant.

‘Be glad that Peter Grave is where he is,’ Karayan said. ‘There may have been one bad apple among us, but I do not think there will be a second.’

She nodded, wishing desperately to believe things were as simple as that. Grave the conspirator, Grave the murderer, and Grave now safely on ice for the rest of the expedition.

They were on final vertical descent now, the blast of the lander’s motors beginning to pick up dust and small pieces of surface debris, sending them scurrying away in surging concentric waves. They were not far from the encampment — Goma could easily make out the silver crest of the nearest dome. Vasin called out altitudes: one hundred metres, fifty, then down in increments of ten. The salmon-coloured dust rose and swallowed the view. Finally Goma felt the soft compression of the landing gear touch down and heard the motors stop. The lander rocked slightly, then was still.

‘Engines off. Stable and secured for return to orbit,’ Vasin declared, not without a measure of pride.

It did not take long to prepare for the surface. All six of them exited through the lander’s high-capacity lock and then climbed one at a time down the ladder which had deployed upon touchdown. They wore lightweight spacesuits, silver-white to begin with, but which selected their own visually distinct colour-coding as soon as the party assembled below the lander. Goma had received just enough training not to feel encumbered by the suit.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked Ru, concerned that her breathing sounded laboured.

‘Stop fretting,’ Ru said, in a firm but friendly tone.

They moved away from the lander and joined the trail heading back to the encampment. They had touched down in an area of low, gentle hills, reaching away under a mauve sky that darkened to purple-black at the zenith. There were a few clouds, laddered wisps of high-altitude vapour, and enough of a breeze to stir dust around their feet, but the air was a thousand times thinner than the atmosphere aboard their ship. They could see stars, and other worlds in this solar system. The trail had been cleared of debris, but a treacherous scree of small stones and pebbles littered the surrounding terrain. The colours of this planet were all mauves and fawns and shades of pale rust. It was relentless and depressing, not a hint of a living organism anywhere to be seen.

The encampment looked further away now they were down. Surrounding it, but thinning out with distance, was a junkyard of failed or abandoned technologies. There were transmitter aerials, sagging where their guylines had snapped. There were radio dishes, jammed into the dirt and now half-filled with dust. There were boxes of electronics, gutted and exposed to the elements. Where electrical or data cables were still strung from pole to pole, they had been hung with tattered, fluttering pieces of metal foil, like bunting. A drum fixed to an axle like a wheel appeared to turn lazily of its own volition.

Nearer the camp, the air of decrepitude lessened. Projecting above the small cluster of domes was a skeletal tower surmounted by a set of transmitters and receivers of differing function. Though it had clearly been repaired and patched up over the years, it still looked operable, with various steerable dishes and antennas, plus the tubes of what Goma guessed to be optical telescopes or ranging devices.

Of a spaceship, even a short-range vehicle, even something to cross the ground, no trace existed.

They halted as one, noticing movement. To one side of the camp was a low cliff, perhaps three or four storeys high. The cliff face was nearly sheer, but a figure was nonetheless clinging about halfway up it with spiderlike tenacity, feet planted on the narrowest of ledges, one hand grasping a rocky protrusion, the other wielding a cutting tool. All along the face, to both sides of where the figure worked, was a dense patterning of angular inscriptions. The cutting tool had a sun-bright tip, a glaring flicker. Where it touched the cliff, the rock breezed off in a constant curling ribbon of grey dust.

‘It’s her,’ Goma said.

They had made no sound in the near vacuum of Orison, but the figure nonetheless turned off the cutting tool and slipped it back into a pouch on a utility belt. With disarming speed — and an equally disarming lack of concern for their own safety — the figure appeared to descend the crag in a series of perilous backward hops.

On reaching the ground, the figure looked back up at the cliff, as if inspecting the day’s work, then turned to address the landing party. The figure was small and slight in stature, clad in an older, clumsier model of spacesuit than those worn by the landing party.

The figure raised a hand. For a moment nothing was said, the figure and the landing party facing each other in silence, nothing moving except the dust and the flapping flags and the idly turning wheel.

‘Eunice Akinya?’ asked Vasin.

A voice buzzed across their communications channel. It was a woman’s, speaking Swahili with a curiously old-fashioned, fussy diction.

‘No, Laika the space dog. Who else were you expecting?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

To begin with there was only the fact of the attack and their own immediate survival. Had the Watchkeeper been intact and its offensive capabilities fully functional, there would have been no warning and no conceivable defence — merely an instant in which Kanu existed, followed by an endless succession of instants in which he did not.

But he was breathing, and thinking, and the fabric of the ship — at least judged from the pressurised vantage of the control deck — could not have been too violently disrupted.

But he heard the wail of alarms, saw the red pulse of alert indications, felt in his belly the beginning of an uncontrolled tumble as Icebreaker lost control of its orientation. He looked at Nissa, saw the understanding in her face — no need for either of them to state the obvious.

‘Can you do something?’ she asked.

Kanu’s hands were on the console, trying to force the ship to correct its own tumble, but the systems were not responding. ‘No good. Control lockouts across all steering systems — it’s not allowing itself to fire compensatory thrust. Swift — if you think you can do better than me, now’s your chance.’

He felt Swift assume control of his hands. They began to move across the console with a renewed speed and confidence — the difference between a novice and a concert pianist.

‘One of you had better find a way to make it,’ Nissa said. ‘We don’t want to swing back into the Watchkeeper.’

‘We’re trying,’ Kanu said. ‘Hard to see how bad the damage is — sensors are completely burned out along that whole flank.’

‘What hit us?’

‘Nothing physical — not a missile or anything like that. Must have been an energy pulse, some kind of electromagnetic discharge. I’m not even sure it counted as an attack — more of a playful nip.’

‘It didn’t feel very playful to me,’ Nissa said.

‘It must have been. We’re still here.’

Swift had turned up the console’s visual refresh-rate. Status readouts flickered at hypnagogic speed, too fast for his conscious faculties to absorb.