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Poseidon's Wake

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When he was done and the message winging its way back to Captain Vasin, Swift moved a rook and offered his sage assessment of things.

‘You would be unwise to totally discount the value of this second Akinya, Kanu. The message specifically summoned one of your esteemed clan. There must have been a reason for that.’

‘She said Goma, not Ndege.’

‘But she mentioned Ndege, which I would suggest is not likely to be coincidence.’ Swift removed his pince-nez glasses and began polishing the lenses against his sleeve. ‘Are you going to make your move or just stare at the board until it suffers a minor quantum fluctuation?’

Kanu pushed a piece from square to square, but with no more care than if he had been blindfolded.

‘A win appears inevitable,’ Swift observed.

‘It doesn’t surprise me. My heart’s not really in the game.’

‘No, I mean that you have placed me in a highly disadvantageous position. There is hope for you yet, Kanu.’

‘Perhaps.’

He contacted Dakota and told her he was ready to activate the drive.

‘A short test,’ he explained to her. ‘Just enough to validate the repairs. Wouldn’t want you thinking I’m trying to make a run for it, would we?’

‘You would not, Kanu, in any case.’

‘Still, we don’t want any misunderstandings.’

‘No, we most certainly do not. Are you ready?’

‘Opening the priming flows as we speak.’ He waited a moment, studying the columns of numbers and shifting diagrams on his console. ‘Flows look good. Levelling out at injection pressure. Tokamaks building field strength. A little slow on three, but it’s correcting. I’m going ahead with plasma injection.’

‘By all means. Proceed with caution, Kanu.’

‘Plasma in and bottled. Approaching ignition in three… two… one. Good. We have fusion. Burn looking clean and stable. Tokamaks holding. Clear to initial Chibesa excitation.’

This was a technological commonplace — in the days before the moratorium, ignition would have been initiated hundreds of thousands of times a day with the utmost dreary reliability. But it was worth remembering that it had taken decades to perfect Chibesa’s discovery into a single workable prototype engine, and decades more before the engines achieved sufficient reliability for widespread use.

But the thrust came in, gently pressing his back into the chair.

‘I see you moving,’ Dakota said.

‘Yes, we have thrust. But I’m stepping things up — I’m going to take us into post-Chibesa energies.’

‘Are you sure you are not being hasty?’

But another voice said, ‘What are you doing? It was never our intention to take things this quickly.’

He told Swift, ‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘You may — but I certainly do not. We have barely satisfied ourselves that the initial process is stable, let alone achieved the confidence to push beyond that—’

‘Shut up.’

He must have spoken aloud, for Dakota asked, ‘Who are you addressing?’

‘Voices in my head,’ he explained. ‘I hear them sometimes. Nothing you need worry about. Commencing post-Chibesa transition.’

Now there was a bump rather than a nudge, and the console lit up with a quilt of red and amber status warnings. Icebreaker was achieving post-Chibesa energies, but in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.

‘Kanu — is all well?’

‘All is well, Dakota. Nothing could be better.’

The console was now a blaze of red and audible warnings had begun to sound from the walls. Under normal conditions, the ship would have intervened to shut down the unstable Chibesa process, but in this test mode the usual safety measures were suspended.

Kanu knew this — indeed, he had made sure it was so.

‘Kanu,’ Dakota said, ‘I have a suspicion — which may be unwarranted — but if you are attempting to destroy or damage the ship to escape your obligation—’

‘Put Nissa on again.’

‘She’s right here. Whatever you have to say to her, you can say to me, too.’

‘Then I’m sorry. I can’t see any other way. This is not Nissa’s fault. You must believe that, Dakota. Nor is it the fault of the Friends. You’ll gain nothing by punishing them now.’

‘Kanu!’ Nissa called out to him, her voice breaking on his name.

‘I must do this,’ he answered. ‘I love you — I’ll always love you — but there is no other way.’

And then — independent of his own volition — his hands moved to the console. He resisted the action but his efforts were useless: Swift now had total control of his nervous system. He might as well have been outside his own body, watching it dance to another’s will.

A vibration found its way through the fabric of the ship. It built in strength, the evidence of wildly varying drive stresses, too haphazard to be neutralised. And then there was a single violent shudder, as if Icebreaker had been struck by some larger object, and the vibrations died away to stillness. The alarms continued to sound, the console still a blaze of emergency notifications.

But the Chibesa engine had shut itself down.

The hold on him lingered, and then it was absent.

He gasped a powerful involuntary breath, as if he had just surfaced from deep, cold waters.

‘You traitor, Swift.’

‘I saved your life — again. Is it too much to expect a little gratitude?’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Travertine maintained its orbit around Orison. Next to it, tracing the same orbit and very nearly ready for independent flight, the lander remained the focus of intense human and machine activity.

In the forward sphere of the larger ship, the part spun to simulate gravity, a woman and a man sat opposite each other at table in the main public galley. The woman drank chai; the man cradled a mug of scented coffee. Around them, the spaces of the ship hummed with news and rumour.

‘Something went wrong,’ Goma said. ‘That’s what Gandhari says. Or nearly went wrong — as if the ship came very close to blowing up, and then the malfunction was damped down just in time.’

‘I’m no physicist,’ Peter Grave said, ‘but I would imagine there are a great many things that can go wrong with a Chibesa drive. The captain made contact with the other ship?’

‘Momentarily. There was a reply to Nasim’s automated transmission and then a direct response to Gandhari’s. She played it back for me — he claims to be another Akinya!’

‘This is either startling news, or almost inevitable.’ Grave looked up from his drink, smiled at her to disarm her natural defensiveness. ‘Another Akinya. Do you believe him?’

‘He says he’s Kanu. There is a Kanu in my lineage, so it’s possible, but it’s… complicated.’

‘Nothing about your family would be considered uncomplicated, Goma. Still — is this good or bad? Does his being an Akinya improve our situation or worsen it?’

‘You mean, can he be expected to do the right thing?’

Grave scratched at his almost hairless scalp. Goma could not help but notice the crescent-sized impressions where her fingernails had gouged his skin, still preserved despite decades of skipover.

‘I suppose,’ Grave said.

‘That presupposes there is a “right thing” to be done. Kanu didn’t threaten us; he didn’t tell us to back off or say he’d do terrible things to us if we didn’t comply. He just urged us not to get involved and advised us to be cautious.’

‘And yet he is still acting in a way Eunice deems hazardous — conspiring with Dakota in this expedition.’

‘If he knew what was at stake, he wouldn’t go along with it.’

‘Unless he felt he had no choice,’ Grave said. ‘Have you looked into his history?’

‘As much as I can find. Kanu was a significant figure in the United Aquatic Nations — a Panspermian, an advocate of the philosophy of the Green Efflorescence.’

‘I’ve studied that movement. They were regarded as cranks and cultists for a while, weren’t they?’ There was a playful, gently mocking tone in his voice. ‘True believers.’

‘I don’t think it’s quite the same thing as the Second Chancers,’ Goma answered, meeting his answer with a smile of her own. ‘They wanted to turn the galaxy green. You’d be content if we crawled back under a rock and forgot about the stars completely.’

‘A very slight mischaracterisation, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘All right, I’ll allow you that one.’ Goma could not help but smile back at Grave, seeing that no offence had been taken. ‘Anyway, that’s only part of Kanu’s story. Eventually he ended up being an ambassador to the robots on Mars — the Evolvarium.’

‘I’ve studied my early space age history. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Eunice have something to do with all that?’

‘Do you mean the real Eunice, as opposed to the one aboard with us now?’

Grave shrugged. ‘If we’re going to insist on a distinction.’

‘Wait a minute, Peter. If either of us was going to insist they’re not the same, I’d expect it to be you.’

‘Because of my belief system?’

‘Why else? One’s a human being who lived and died, the other’s a cybernetic simulation that began as a conceptual art project long after the real woman was dead and gone.’

‘And yet — she is flesh and blood. And she has the real woman’s memories.’

‘Gathered from public records.’