‘If you could,’ Chiku said.
‘Does anyone live here now?’ Pedro asked. ‘At the household, I mean.’
‘Not sure. Haven’t been back in a long while. They won’t have let the place go to ruin, though.’
‘You hope.’
Of course they haven’t let it go to ruin, Chiku thought. But she was misremembering again. She was thinking of the duplicate of the household aboard Zanzibar, the place where Chiku Green went to work.
‘There it is, I think,’ she said, pointing ahead.
Pedro craned forward. They were looking through patches of Gullive’s hull, which it helpfully made transparent depending on the direction of their gaze. ‘Doesn’t look like much.’
‘Never said it was the Taj Mahal.’
The household was shaped like an A, two long wings joined at their apex and a short connecting wing bridging the gap between the two. This A-shaped geometry reiterated itself at increasingly larger scales from the building out to the perimeter wall – in the lawns and formal grounds, the patios, swimming pools and tennis courts, the lay-outs of the airpod parking areas. At first, sweeping overhead, Chiku saw no obvious signs of neglect. The walls were as white as she remembered, the decorative roof tiles gleaming with a blue lustre as it if had recently rained. There was no one about, but in the heat of an African afternoon that was not in itself unusual. Indeed, during her earlier visits, the household had always had a deserted and slightly forbidding feel to it. Sometimes it had just been her, Uncle Geoffrey, one or two caretaker staff and a number of janitor robots.
As Kwami brought them around again on a second pass, she began to have misgivings. The walls were white because they were self-repairing, not because someone had taken the trouble to keep them clean. Same with the roof. Elsewhere, the evidence of decay was unignorable. Weeds had conquered the flower-beds. The swimming pools were drained down to their tiles and covered with a layer of dirt and dead leaves. Overgrowth had begun to encroach through archways and porticos. The place was not a ruin, not yet – it all looked structurally sound – but it did not appear to be lived-in or much loved.
‘I should have come back before this,’ she mouthed, more to herself than anyone else. She had always known that the upkeep of the household was the collective responsibility of all Akinyas, but with that knowledge had come the tacit belief that the upkeep could always be trusted to someone else.
What the hell had they been up to, allowing the place to get like this?
‘I will not risk landing so close to the wall,’ Kwami said, indicating one of the airpod areas. ‘There is a suitable site a little further out. You will not object to a short walk back to the household?’
‘It’ll be good to stretch our legs,’ Chiku said, returning to her seat.
Gulliver had settled into a hover mode, using ducted thrust to keep itself aloft. The trees around the edge of the household cowered in the downdraught. The spacecraft slid sideways, like a puck on ice, then dropped its talon-like undercarriage and began to lower itself towards the ground. Chiku wondered how long they would need to be here. She wanted to be done with all this.
Something shot them out of the sky.
It all happened stupidly quickly. First, an alarm, some kind of imminent collision alert. Then a lurch, bone-breakingly violent, as Gulliver tried to sidestep whatever was about to hit it. Then the impact itself, harder still than the lurch, and the spacecraft was yawing badly, losing vectored thrust on one side of its hull. Multiple alarms joined the first. Kwami, who was still on manual control, did his best to stabilise their hover but the damage had been done. Gulliver, wounded now, could not keep itself aloft. Something else hit them. Gulliver pitched again, the yaw worsened, and then there was the worst impact of all, the one between hull and ground, and they were down, crashed, fallen to Earth.
The alarms kept ringing. The hull was resting at an angle, nearly on its side. It was lucky that Pedro and Chiku had both taken to their seats again for landing or the crash would almost certainly have killed them.
‘What happened?’ Chiku managed, barely able to believe that only a few moments ago her sole concern had been getting in and out of the household.
‘We have been attacked,’ Kwami said, extricating himself from his control seat – like theirs, it had cushioned and padded him during the impact. ‘And now we must leave, because whatever attacked us is still out there.’
‘How? What?’ Pedro was asking.
‘Some kind of weapon. Please, young sir,’ Kwami was already at the nearest airlock, equalising pressure, ‘make all haste. There is no safety here, if we can be shot out of the sky.’
‘A weapon,’ Pedro repeated dutifully, as if this was some kind of memory game. ‘There are no weapons, Imris. Nothing like that here.’
‘Nonetheless, we have just been shot down.’
‘I think he means it,’ Chiku said, though her own head was fizzing with the frank impossibility of this. An anti-spaceship weapon, something powerful enough to disable Gulliver – you might find something like that out around Hyperion, but this was Earth, for pity’s sake. You could not raise a fist to someone on Earth, much less fire an antispaceship weapon at them.
The airlock gasped open, inner and outer doors sliding back simultaneously, and although she was still within the hull, the heat of the day hit Chiku with an almost belligerent forcefulness. Kwami scrambled through and hopped to the ground, keeping his long frame bent and eyeing their surroundings with sharp suspicion. ‘Something is out there,’ he said. ‘We cannot remain in the open. Perhaps we can make it to the household.’
‘Perhaps?’ asked Pedro.
Chiku hauled herself up and through the tilted airlock, hands on the rim of the outer door. The hull, still hot from hypersonic flight, burnt her fingertips. She bit down on the pain and squeezed out into blazing daylight. Kwami helped her descend – it was a longer drop than he had made it look. She hit the dust, knees buckling, and Kwami urged her to stoop lower. ‘Quickly, young sir.’
Pedro came out, face flushed, eyes wide with fear and incomprehension.
‘This can’t be happening, Imris. Venus was bad enough, but to be shot at here—’
‘We must move,’ Kwami said.
‘What do you think it is?’ Chiku asked, as the three of them began to make a stooping run in the direction of the household’s perimeter wall. ‘Didn’t anything show up as you came in?’
‘This is Earth, young miss. One cannot go jumping at every shadow.’
Chiku looked back at the downed spacecraft. Two ugly craters marred the exposed underside. Some energy pulse or projectile had punched all the way through the hull into the tender gristle of subsystems beneath its skin.
‘Gulliver found many concealed objects in the area, buried beneath the surface. The underground workings of your household, the course of the ballistic launcher . . . many relics and items of unknown origin. People have been living here for thousands of years. Under the circumstances, Gulliver could not easily discriminate between the innocent and the hostile.’ He paused to catch his breath. They were still only a third of the way to the wall. ‘Nor could it employ its own defences. We were much too close to the ground – our own counter-strike would have risked damaging us.’
‘Risked,’ Pedro said. ‘I’ll take risked any day.’
‘We can’t blame Imris,’ Chiku said. ‘There was no time to think.’ As she spoke, her foot slipped into a depression, twisting her ankle and sending her sprawling into the hot dirt. The impact turned her around, facing back towards the ship. Beyond it, where a line of scrub marked the transition to thicker bush, she saw movement. Something was dragging itself into daylight.
It was a machine the colour of sand, like a crab with a squat, turretlike body and rows of jointed legs. The thing was half-shrouded in dirt and vegetation, as if it had just climbed out of a hole in the ground.
‘What’s that?’ Pedro asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Chiku answered.
‘I think so.’ The twist hurt, but she could still put weight on the ankle. ‘What do you mean, an artilect? Eunice is an artilect. So is Arachne. They’re nothing like that thing.’
‘It is a war robot, a military artilect.’
She forced herself to keep moving, eyes on the wall, anywhere but on the thing coming out of the scrub. ‘Nothing like that would be allowed here,’ she said, voice raw.
‘It has probably been here for several centuries,’ Kwami said. ‘There were many of these things at one time. They ran amok during the Resource and Relocation crises. There were many unpleasantnesses. Then they were outlawed. Please, let us make haste.’
Chiku was fine with making haste. Running was beyond her, but her lop-sided stagger was still covering ground. Half-lost in vegetation, an arched portico offered a way through the wall. Not far to go now.
‘I remember . . .’ she said, forcing out the words between ragged breaths. ‘My mother, back when she still told stories. Something happened to her when she was small. I think it was near here.’
‘It’s coming after us,’ Pedro said. ‘Why doesn’t it just shoot?’
‘Perhaps the weapon it used against Gulliver only has ground-to-air capability,’ Kwami said. ‘Maybe it has exhausted that particular type of ammunition.’
Pedro nodded. ‘I think it still wants to kill us.’
‘I concur with your assessment.’
The ground between them and the gap in the wall appeared to be dilating, stretching out the way spacetime did between galaxies, plumped by an infusion of dark energy. Chiku had been lost in dreams like this – running from something, unable to cover ground. The air quickening to something like aspic, jellying her into immobility.
‘This has to be Arachne’s doing,’ she said.
‘Again, I concur. If the artilect has been here for centuries, dormant, undetected, it provided her with another way to act without drawing direct attention to herself. All she had to do was infiltrate its dormant systems and rouse it from cybernetic slumber.’
‘Imris,’ Pedro said. ‘Would you do me a favour and stop talking as if all this is happening to someone else, on another planet?’
‘My apologies, young sir. I fear it has become something of a survival mechanism.’ A rattling sound came from behind them. Ahead, a line of holes appeared in the wall, to the right of the gate. ‘It is shooting at us now,’ Kwami said, ‘but its aim appears to be compromised.’
The machine fired again, then stopped. Chiku glanced back. It was limping across the open ground where Gulliver had fallen, two of its articulated limbs dragging uselessly. An unearthed horror that should have stayed buried. Something like this machine had tried to kill her mother, when she was very small. Or at least turn Sunday into something it could use. Chiku remembered the story now: the thing in the hole, speaking inside her mother’s head before it was taken away to be neutralised.
Kwami pushed through a tangle of undergrowth, opening the way through the gate. Chiku and Pedro followed him through into the household’s outer enclosure.
‘I do not know if this wall will hold it, but there must be deeper levels of the house that it will not be able to reach.’
Chiku was still having trouble with her ankle, but for now adrenalin was doing its job. They moved along dusty flower-beds, weed-choked and ruined, and skirted fountains that had not seen water in decades. In the shaded corner of one swimming pool, a snake insinuated itself into a burrow of leaves and dirt. Then they were through a second wall, into the inner courtyards. More empty swimming pools, overgrown ornamental gardens, dried-up ponds. ‘This way, I think,’ she said, leading them around the flank of the leftmost wing. ‘Imris – could there be another one of those things waiting for us in here?’
‘The Cognition Police were very efficient when they rounded up and neutralised the military artilects,’ Kwami said. ‘I doubt they left many behind for Arachne to find. Besides, when we flew over the house, I think we would have seen the damage if one had already forced its way through the wall.’
‘Could one of them have tunnelled under the perimeter?’ Pedro asked.
Kwami reflected for a moment. ‘I suppose that is a possibility.’
‘I’m sorry I asked.’
They were coming around to the front of the household now. Chiku had given no thought as to how they would enter the building if the way were barred. The doors had always been open when she visited before, even when it was just Uncle Geoffrey and a handful of maintenance staff in residence. But then there had never been much reason to lock doors. One step at a time – if worst came to worst, they could return to Gulliver, perhaps, to fetch tools.
But the doors were open. They were ajar, hinged inwards. It was difficult to tell whether they had been forced or not, but it did not look as if a powerful machine had broken through them.
They all heard it at the same time: a crunch, metal on masonry. It was coming from around the side of the property, where they had passed through the wall.
‘It is still trying,’ Kwami said.
‘The place shouldn’t be this abandoned,’ Chiku said. ‘There should be watchdogs, robots . . . even if there’s nobody living here.’
‘If Arachne can infiltrate and commandeer an artilect, perhaps it is for the best that there are no robots within the compound,’ Kwami said.
They crossed the threshold. The house had been well designed for the local climate, cool within even on the hottest day. Chiku pushed the doors shut behind them. They would not be any kind of barrier to the artilect, but closing them made her feel better. Not safer, just better.
‘How long before help arrives?’ Pedro asked.
‘In what manner?’ Kwami asked, with perfect pleasantness, as they moved along one of the corridors, shoes squeaking on black and white marble.
‘Where the hell is the Mechanism?’ Pedro demanded. ‘We’re hurt. We’re being attacked! Shouldn’t some kind of intervention be under way?’
‘I fear, young sir, that matters may not be that straightforward.’
‘You think she’s in the Mechanism as well,’ Chiku said.
‘It was something June always feared. Arachne’s control cannot be absolute or she would have used direct neural intervention to incapacitate or euthanise us. But it may well be within her means to block and confuse the Mechanism’s scrutiny.’
‘Probably doesn’t help matters that my family went out of their way to keep the Mech from penetrating the household,’ Chiku said waspishly. ‘They didn’t want the eyes and ears of the world stealing their precious commercial secrets.’
They descended steps. It was a blessing that it was daytime as there were no lights anywhere in the building, although some of the illumination cascading through the big windows above ground was filtering down to the lower floor. Chiku’s eyes began to amp up in response, making the best of the available photons. The prevailing colours sickened to grey-green as they went down another flight of stairs.
‘What we’re looking for is on this level, if Arethusa was right,’ Chiku said. ‘I never came down here much. I only ever visited to talk to Uncle Geoffrey, and he never had any reason to bring me downstairs.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Pedro said. ‘We should be running from that thing outside, not boxing ourselves in.’
‘If we abandon the household,’ Kwami explained patiently, ‘the artilect may smash it to pieces before anyone can stop it.’
‘And this is a problem because . . . ?’ Pedro asked.
‘With the house turned to rubble, you would stand little chance of recovering the Crucible imagery. I trust this remains of interest?’
‘It does,’ Chiku said, although it was much easier to say this than feel it.
She opened some of the doors as they moved along the corridor. One room contained about twenty identical black statues of Masai warriors, individually shrouded in plastic
film, waiting to be given away as corporate gifts. Another contained a small private library. In a third was a stuffed lion, caged behind glass.
They had come to a point where the corridor met two others at an angle – echoing, Chiku presumed, the above-ground geometry. For a moment, she was disorientated, uncertain which way to go. They had been in too much of a rush to get inside for her to find her bearings accurately.
‘Which way?’ Pedro asked.
‘That one.’ But she immediately undermined her authority. ‘I think.’
Pedro was looking along the other corridor, with its ranks of doors. Some were open, some shut. It was much gloomier now, even their amped eyes struggling. ‘I think I saw something down there,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Something crossing between two of those doors. Fast. Like a shadow.’ He added: ‘Maybe I imagined it.’
‘The artilect can’t have got down here,’ Chiku said.
‘Maybe they’re not all as big as that one.’
‘We would know it, were one here,’ Kwami said. ‘Those that have survived are powerful and dangerous, but the military ones cannot move silently, or in such a confined area. I do not think what you saw was an artilect.’
After a moment, Chiku said, ‘I don’t think it’s this way after all.’ Now she was pointing down the corridor where Pedro thought he had seen something move.
‘We should have brought a torch,’ he was saying. ‘We have been to Saturn and back and we didn’t bring a torch.’
They went down three steps and started along the corridor. Chiku pushed open one of the closed doors, poised to spring back if there was something waiting inside. In the semi-darkness she made out more statues like the ones they had already passed. She was about to move on when she realised that these were not corporate gifts. They were proxies, waiting to be chinged by a remote client. Spear-thin, stick-figure sketches of people, their faces polished blank ovoids.
‘If she accessed one of them, could she harm us?’ Chiku wondered aloud.
‘One would be unlikely to pose a threat,’ Kwami said.
On the Steel Breeze Page 24