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Poseidon's Wake

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Something eclipsed the wavering sunlight. It was another kind of darkness, more concentrated than the general absence of illumination below him. It had a distinct core, like a negative shadow of the sun itself, and radiating from that core were wavering beams of darkness. It was swelling, stealing more and more of the precious light.

One of the wavering beams reached out towards him, stretching down to arrest his fall. He surrendered to it, allowing the dark limb to coil its padded extremity around his midriff.

‘Leviathan,’ Kanu said. And felt a surge of joy that his old friend had come back to him.

He remembered nothing of the return journey to Icebreaker. It was only later that he came to an understanding of what had happened to him — an explosion from the rupture point, the blast damaging his suit and sending him falling away from the ship, back towards Poseidon.

Nissa had chased him aboard Fall of Night, willingly placing herself at risk of another stinging attack from the Watchkeeper — knowing full well that her own ship was much less capable of surviving such an assault.

‘I caught you,’ she said. ‘Swung in sideways, matched speed, allowed you to drift into my lock. You were nearly dead. Even when I brought you in, got you out of the suit, I didn’t know if you were going to make it.’

‘I remember nothing.’

‘I’m not surprised. You were out cold. Swift was doing all the talking.’

‘Swift?’

‘Yes. Your other half.’

For a moment he had forgotten. He was still thinking of his old friend the kraken, the happiness he had felt knowing that Leviathan had again found a purpose in life.

‘Thank you for saving me,’ Kanu said, hesitantly, for there was something in her manner that left him disquietened. ‘Thank you for placing yourself in harm’s way for me.’

‘Self-interest played its part,’ Nissa replied, her tone businesslike. ‘I’d rather not have to fix and operate this starship on my own.’

‘Regardless of why you did it, I’m still grateful. But why can’t I move?’

‘Because you’re fixed to a surgical unit.’

He was lying on his back. He nodded slowly, stiffly, at last recognising his surroundings. She must have brought him to the medical bay, removed the outer layer of his suit and placed him on one of the auto-surgical platforms.

‘That can’t have been easy.’

‘I had some assistance. I explained to Swift what I was trying to do, and he helped. You were unconscious, but Swift could still move your body around.’

‘I see.’ There was a drift to this conversation that was not quite to his liking. He did not feel injured. Exhausted, confused, but not injured. Was there more wrong with him than he realised?

‘I put a gun to your head. Actually, more like a harpoon. I retrieved it from that body you found outside, the Regal. Do you remember the Regal?’

‘I do now.’

‘I brought the harpoon thing back inside with me. I don’t know whether it works or not, but that’s not really the point. Swift didn’t know either, and he wasn’t going to take a chance and find out. I needed a bargaining position, you see. Does that make sense to you?’

‘Perfect sense.’

‘It wasn’t my intention to kill you — if it had been, I could have just let you fall away from the ship — but we do need to change our working relationship.’

‘In what way?’ Kanu asked, with a forced levity.

‘I accept the situation. I accept that Swift got inside your skull and dragged us across interstellar space. Nothing’s going to change that. And now that we’re here, I’m not about to turn my back on these discoveries. I want answers, too — and I want to survive, and to fix this ship. Swift says we can reach Paladin in about a year, if Fall of Night shoves Icebreaker into the right transfer orbit. I did suggest we take Fall of Night instead, get there quicker, but Swift argued me out of that — we need this ship to return to Earth, and I accept that. But everything else? We do things as equals from now on.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, we’ve been on equal terms since we reached this system.’

‘Fine words, Kanu, but from my position things look a little asymmetric. There’s the small matter of Swift. Now, I’m not so naive as to think I can cut him out of your head like a disease — nor would I want to.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘You and Swift got us into this; it’ll take both of you to get us out of it. But as I said, things have to change. Swift and I have been talking, and we’ve come to a mutually acceptable solution. The auto-surgeon is going to put a small implant into your head — a very simple device, nothing complicated. It will address your visual and auditory centres, in effect eavesdropping on your private conversations.’

‘Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure. And here’s the clever part. When it’s done with you, the surgeon will reactivate some of my own latent neuromachinery, the stuff I’ve been carrying around in my head since the fall of the Mechanism. It’ll establish a communications protocol between the two sets of implants. Do you understand what that means?’

Kanu did not need to think about it for long. ‘You’ll be able to see and hear Swift.’

‘More than that — I’ll be able to talk to Swift just as easily as you can, at least when we’re in close proximity. Equals at last — or as equal as I want to be. Does that strike you as an acceptable arrangement?’

Kanu considered his options — try and talk her out of it, or accept that allowing Swift to be visible to both of them might be a path to forgiveness, or at least a step along the way.

‘I suppose it does.’

‘I’m glad. Although, to be fair, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me either way. I’d still be doing it.’

After a silence, Kanu said, ‘Do you hate me?’

‘Hate you? No, I don’t even dislike you. Why would I? We were married, and then we were lovers again. You’re all over me like a chemical stain.’

‘That’s a flattering way of putting it.’

‘You’ve been flattered enough. Things change now.’ She leaned over as if to kiss him, but instead she was merely activating the surgeon. ‘Now sleep. When you wake up, we’ll talk about our options. The three of us, as one happy family.’

The surgeon’s sterile hood whirred over him and he heard the hiss of anaesthetic gas.

‘Did you agree to this?’ he asked Swift.

‘I had to. You’d be surprised how persuasive a harpoon gun can be.’

The three of them were sitting on the bridge, the evidence of Kanu’s surgery visible as tiny clots of blood on either side of his temples.

‘So basically there are no good choices,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you’re telling us?’

‘We haven’t escaped Poseidon’s gravity well,’ Swift said, ‘and left to itself, Icebreaker doesn’t have the capability to do so. The damage to the propulsion system is simply too extensive. Equally, we aren’t in immediate peril. We’ll simply orbit and orbit, and hope we don’t attract the attention of either those moons or any more almost-dead Watchkeepers. Power isn’t our problem — we can easily return to skipover and await rescue.’

‘From where?’ Kanu asked.

‘Given that no one will be able to reply to our transmission until we repair our antennas, that is an exceptionally good question. At the moment our effective communicational range is no more than light-seconds, perhaps less. Sooner or later another ship will reach this system, and perhaps they will find a way to signal us, but we might have wait many decades for that to happen.’

Kanu and Nissa were in their control chairs; Swift’s figment was seated before them in a chair of his own imagining. He had one leg hooked over the other, an elbow on the armrest, chin resting in his hand, pince-nez glasses dangling from his fingers, the very model of urbane relaxation. Kanu thought back to their many chess games and wished that nothing more was at stake now than his own intellectual pride.

‘That’s no good,’ Nissa said.

‘Which is why we must consider Paladin,’ Swift said. ‘Fall of Night is much smaller than Icebreaker, but it has the capability to shove both ships out of Poseidon’s gravity well and into a transfer orbit for Paladin. When we reach Paladin, Fall of Night can steer us into a rendezvous with the orbiting shard.’

‘How long will that take?’ Kanu said.

‘About a year. I’m afraid that’s orbital transfer mechanics for you. The damage to our ship has effectively catapulted us back into the early rocket age. Now we move at the speed of comets, of asteroids.’

‘We could be there a lot quicker if we just took Fall of Night,’ Nissa said. ‘It can talk to other ships, too, if anyone’s listening.’

‘But then we would be abandoning our only hope of return,’ Swift answered patiently. ‘And we would still need to drag Icebreaker across the system to get it repaired and refuelled. At least this way we arrive with our ship.’

‘But all that time!’ Nissa said.

‘It won’t be wasted,’ Swift said. ‘Kanu’s ship can begin to repair some of the damage now — rebuild steering control and communications. That will give us a valuable head start.’

‘Then we go back into skipover,’ Kanu said.

‘Unless you would rather be awake for the entire transfer. Is this acceptable to you, Nissa?’