They were nearly at the building now. Her thoughts flashed back to the original household in Africa, after which the Assembly Building aboard Zanzibar was fashioned. She wondered if it still stood. She imagined its white walls surrendering to the bush, the whole property turning into an outline on the ground, a map of itself you could only see from the air. I want to be back in Africa now, she thought, back in that body, not in this one. Under an honest sky, panthers or no panthers.
‘How are you feeling?’ Noah asked as they jogged up the steps.
‘Nervous. For about a million reasons.’
‘I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion.’
She slowed before they were fully inside the building, glaring at the duty constables until they moved back from their stations and allowed her some privacy.
‘Noah, before I announce my resignation . . . I’m going to do what I should have done all those years ago. You said I should have trusted you, and you’re right. I can’t make amends for that – I can’t give you back the years I stole from our marriage, or make our children suddenly understand what I’ve done to them. I realise it’s much too late for that. But there’s something I’d like you to have. Do you remember when we visited her, when I left Ndege’s companion with her?’
After a moment, he nodded.
‘It gave her a way to reach us, and vice versa. It’s not perfect, and you’ll need to use it sparingly, but there’s a ching bind and a proxy at the other end. It’ll place you in her presence.’
‘I’d need the coordinates.’
‘I memorised them years ago. I’ll send them to your private account, during the session.’
‘How safe is this ching bind? Is it traceable?’
‘She’s been very good at covering our tracks, but as I said, you shouldn’t use it too often. My last visit was . . . I was going to say months ago, but it’s probably longer than that. She’s not totally in the dark – she has access to the public nets, and to some of the private areas, but I’m sure she’d like to hear from you. Help her to stay up to date, if you can.’
‘I’ll . . . keep an eye out for those coordinates.’ After a moment, he said, ‘Thank you. For whatever reason, I appreciate it.’
‘I think we’d better get to work,’ Chiku said. ‘We don’t want people thinking something’s afoot, do we?’
‘There is?’
She smiled at Noah.
Soon they were taking their seats in the Assembly – Noah near the front in the main fan of seats, Chiku in the Chair’s position, facing her democractic legislature.
The plan was simple enough – barely a plan at all, truth be told. They would all go through the motions of a normal day’s business. If her enemies had planted spies or eavesdropping devices anywhere in the Assembly, they would report nothing of note – not until it was already much too late to react.
The morning’s business was going well – she was only paying it the bare minimum of attention – when the constables thrust open the doors and allowed an aide to enter the room. The current speaker fell silent and stood demurely at the lectern while this interruption played out. The aide approached Chiku and whispered.
She listened and felt her core body temperature drop by several degrees.
She asked a couple of questions, nodded, and then indicated to the speaker that he should return to his seat.
Chiku stood. ‘I have some news,’ she said. ‘We hoped today’s developments would come as a surprise to Zanzibar and the rest of the local caravan, but it seems there’s been a leak.’
Noah was the first to speak. ‘What’s happening?’
‘The Council of Worlds has issued a statement – more of a demand, in fact – ordering Zanzibar to suspend all extravehicular movements and submit to an immediate inspection. We’re forbidden from launching or receiving ships and personnel, except on Council authority.’ Chiku was gripping the lectern like a shipwrecked survivor in a storm. ‘Delegations are on their way to us from six holoships in the local caravan.’
‘We didn’t see this coming?’ asked the person next to Noah, a Sou-Chun loyalist.
‘Unfortunately not,’ said Chiku. ‘The launches were coordinated and simultaneous, and no advance warning was given. This was meant to take us by surprise.’ Chiku turned back to the aide and instructed him to project a real-time visualisation of the local caravan with the new ship movements plotted and extrapolated – bright curving tentacles of light, originating from different points in space but all converging on Zanzibar. ‘They’re closing at maximum civilian burn,’ she said as the numbers and predictions stabilised. ‘Eighteen ships, mostly shuttles and cargo craft, a few high-capacity taxis. The first of them will begin to arrive in about ninety minutes, sooner if they push the margins. Indications suggest that a second wave is being prepared for launch, which will include vessels from more than just the six holoships contributing to the initial wave.’
‘This feels like war,’ Noah said.
‘It’s not war,’ Chiku said firmly, as if the word itself was a curse that needed to be revoked before it took root. ‘This is a legal inspection . . . unusually coordinated, yes, but fully within the provisions of normal inter-holoship governmental cooperation.’
‘What are they planning to do – ram their way in?’ asked the representative from October chamber.
‘They’ll be expecting us to comply fully with their requirements,’ Chiku said. ‘Clear all locks and prepare to receive inspection parties.’
‘Eighteen ships!’ said another. ‘We don’t even have eighteen independent locks! What are they thinking?’
‘I don’t know,’ Chiku said, and it was true. ‘But it’s bad, and it puts us in a pinch. If hundreds of inspection parties are suddenly let loose in Zanzibar and go combing through our secrets, they’re bound to find Icebreaker.’ There – it was out. ‘Then we’re finished. They’ll tear it apart, dismantle the research programmeme, put Zanzibar under the yoke – years of work undone. We can’t permit that to happen, not after we’ve invested so much. But our only option, short of armed resistance, is to launch immediately. I mean now, as soon as possible, before the first wave arrives.’
‘What, exactly,’ asked the Sou-Chun loyalist, one of the Assembly members not cleared for full disclosure, ‘is Icebreaker?’
‘That will take a little explaining,’ said Chiku, ‘but I’m sure my colleagues will be more than happy to answer your questions.’ Then she gripped the lectern tighter and swallowed hard. ‘In the meantime, I, Chiku Akinya, Chair of the Zanzibar Assembly, hereby announce my immediate and unconditional resignation.’
In five minutes she was in the government car, racing away from the Assembly Building.
‘I don’t envy you,’ she told Noah. He was sitting next to her in the rear compartment as the car beetled up the steep slope to the transit station. ‘I always knew there’d be trouble after the departure, but I’m afraid it’s going to come much sooner than I expected. Do you think you can keep order?’
‘Why are you asking me? I’m not the new Chair, nor anywhere close to becoming it.’
‘You have influence, though, and you might end up Chair after they’ve sorted through the mess I’m about to leave you. You’ve managed not to end up totally tainted by association with me, and I know you have at least as many friends as enemies. Your voice will count – you’re not me, for one thing.’
‘We can’t afford to resist the inspection teams. If a drop of blood is spilt on either side, they’ll send reinforcements. Constables, delegates, whatever it takes to impose external authority. We’d be finished.’
‘There mustn’t be blood – you’re right about that. But you’ve got to do everything in your power to protect the new technology. Give anything but that.’
‘You might be asking the impossible.’
She nodded gravely. ‘If the worst comes to the worse, we’ll still have the duplicate files aboard Icebreaker – how to make a Post-Chibesa engine in ten easy steps. If we c
hoose, we can easily transmit the blueprints back to Zanzibar or the rest of the caravan. Our governments are going to try to suppress the information we’ll be sending back from Crucible, or simply fail to act on it. You have to prevent that. You have to be strong, Noah. You’ve seen how the game is played. Make enemies of your friends, piss people off. Get used to being hated in service to a noble cause. You have it in you.’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
‘You’re not alone. You have an ally in Eunice. Don’t forget the ching coordinates.’
‘You think she can dig us out of this hole?’
‘If anyone – or anything – can, it’s her.’
An empty train was ready and waiting for them, flanked by constables. They were ushered from the car to a forward compartment and the train accelerated out of the chamber. Chiku could only sit and wait and hope everything went according to plan. The arrangements she had put in place were all predicated on her authority as Chair, and now she was just a member of the citizenry again, with no executive privileges. She could be arrested and detained on the flimsiest pretext.
But she had set enormous bureaucratic wheels turning, and they had a stony, grinding momentum of their own. The world was still happy to treat her as if she was running the place.
In the compartment, Chiku voked a visualisation of Zanzibar and its approaching visitors. She and Noah stared at it wordlessly for a few moments.
‘You were right,’ Noah said finally. ‘Ninety minutes was optimistic. They’re pushing harder – could be on-dock in fifty, maybe less. How long do you actually need to complete the launch sequence?’
‘We assumed we’d have hours, but we only need enough time to get clear – they won’t actually shoot at us, will they? We don’t put guns on spaceships!’
‘No,’ Noah conceded. ‘But we do put lots of things on spaceships that could be used as weapons, if you’re that way inclined. I’d want a margin of error – a good few thousand kilometres of clear space. Can you get that far away, before the first ships arrive?’
‘We’ll have to. And light the PCP earlier than we were planning, if it comes to it.’ She felt a profound urge to curl up and bury her face in her hands, walling out the universe and its woes. ‘Fuck! We’ve been preparing for this for years! How the hell did they find out? And why wait until now, the very last day, to call us on it?’
‘That’s exactly why they’ve waited: there’ll be no plausible denials now. Twelve of your top specialists are already aboard the ship in skip-over! How would you ever explain that?’
She felt as if some cunning ratchet-like thing in her head, a piece of neatly fashioned metal, had just disengaged itself with a solid clock-like tock, allowing a marvel of gears and pulleys and weights to whirr into life. A decision, becoming manifest.
‘We have to launch now, even though we’re not all aboard. Those who are ready can board now – including Travertine, even if ve suddenly decides ve’s changed vis mind. Then we blow the chamber and get Icebreaker into clear space. That’s the most critical part, and we can’t afford to delay.’
‘What about the rest of you?’
‘We’ll need a shuttle, something fast – can we make that happen?’
‘Launching a shuttle will be in direct contravention of the Council’s terms.’
‘Somehow, I don’t think it’ll make our position much worse. I’m going to order one released for take-off immediately.’
Noah looked doubtful. ‘Can you order anything?’
‘Recommend in the strongest possible terms, then – good enough for you?’
As the train sped on, she voked back to one of her trusted colleagues in the Assembly and requested an immediate summary of Icebreaker’s state of readiness. The loading of provisions and fuel had been completed days ago and the major support systems and umbilicals retracted. But securing clamps and docking tunnels were still in place, ready to receive the last of the crew, and with a certain inevitability technicians were still inside, fussing over last-minute headaches.
‘Pull them out,’ Chiku said. ‘Whatever the problem, just pull them out. I want Icebreaker clear of Zanzibar within thirty minutes.’
They protested, as she had expected, because this turn of events was not in their plans or covered by any of their contingencies. It should never have come down to this mad scramble. But she reminded them of that old adage of war about plans never surviving the first contact with the enemy.
Although this was not war, not precisely.
Not yet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It took ten minutes to pull the technical staff out of Icebreaker and load those volunteers who were able to board immediately. Travertine, to Chiku’s immense relief, put up no last-minute objections. It took another five minutes to seal all skin locks and retract the cumbersome docking bridges. Chiku watched via a number of secure eyes dotted around the inside of the berthing chamber – to her relief, the necessary privileges had not yet been removed. Nothing she had done so far had contravened the Council’s no-fly instructions, but her next act was as irrevocable as it was necessary. The illusion of propriety would be well and truly destroyed.
‘Blow hull,’ Chiku stated, as casually as if she were ordering chai. The time for hesitation and second thoughts was long past.
The berthing chamber had never been pressurised, and its outer skin, which sealed it from true space, was intentionally much thinner than the skin around the habitation cores – mere metres of rock, rather than tens of metres. Quilted into this skin on a precisely calculated three-dimensional grid were several hundred shaped-charge devices containing slugs of metastable metallic hydrogen. Chiku’s order detonated the charges in a precise sequenced fashion, as deftly orchestrated as any card trick, the effect of which was not so much to rip away the berthing chamber’s skin as to carefully and elegantly peel it back, the charges going off in a spiralling wave, flinging matter exactly away from the lander, centrifugal force doing the rest, so that not a single damaging pebble came back the wrong way and impacted the lander. It was everything that the Kappa event had not been – not an accident but a deliberate and surgical repurposing of part of Zanzibar’s fabric. Chiku felt nothing as the charges went off – not a murmur of it reached her in the train, although she wondered if she might have felt something on firmer ground, closer to the event.
She switched to external public eyes, selecting a viewpoint near the hole. Already most of the debris had fallen out of shot, and since the chamber had never been pressurised there was no outgassing of air, volatiles and debris to confuse the picture. The aperture, opened in the skin, was neatly rectangular, and easily large enough for the lander to fit through. In the changes they had made to Icebreaker that had always been of paramount concern: it must still be able to fit through the original exit hole.
Time had scarcely been on her side before the eruption, but now Chiku sensed that every second counted, rather than every minute. It took a distressingly long time for the safety systems to verify that the aperture was clear and nothing need hinder Icebreaker’s emergence. Finally, the securing clamps were released and Icebreaker, no longer compelled to move in a circular motion around Zanzibar’s axis, fell along a precise tangent to its velocity at the last instant of capture. It was free-falling now – moving through space on its own course. Viewed against the rotating frame of the berthing chamber, the ship appeared to be pulled sharply down, as if sliding along an invisible bicycle spoke. Chiku realised she was holding her breath as Icebreaker cleared the aperture with what looked like millimetres to spare, and then the ship was free, dropping further and further away from Zanzibar until a ghost of thrust from its steering rockets arrested its radial motion and held it at a fixed distance from the holoship, a tiny new black and white fish shadowing a wrinkled-skinned leviathan.
The lander had never been properly weightless until this moment and there were yet more systems tests to be performed – long minutes of waiting while Chiku could do nothing except fre
t, and console herself that none of these system check-outs were frivolous or inessential. Finally, the normal CP drive was deemed safe to engage – this alone unleashing structural loads and thermal stresses which would easily have wrecked the lander without due precaution. The CP engine spooled up to one gee of thrust, much less than it was capable of, and already the lander was pulling ahead, starting to outrace Zanzibar. Chiku’s viewpoint hopscotched between public eyes to keep up, until she had no option but to watch Icebreaker diminishing ahead of them, riding the bright spike of its engine. The lander could accelerate no harder if she were to stand a chance of catching up with it in one of the shuttles.
‘Tell me,’ she asked Noah, who was monitoring developments around the local caravan. ‘Has all hell just broken loose?’
‘Not yet – I don’t think any of them expected you to be this ready. Oh, wait – something’s coming in now. Priority transmission, maximum urgency.’ Noah’s voice deepened as he recited the statement. ‘“On order of the Council of Worlds, holoship Zanzibar is instructed to abort launch event and recall the unidentified vehicle immediately. This action is in express contravention of the terms of the inspection” – and so on.’
‘Do they seriously think we’ll recall Icebreaker now?’ said Chiku.
‘I suppose they have to look as if they’re still in control of the situation.’
She felt the tug in her belly as the train decelerated sharply and drew to a stop at their destination.
‘I don’t know which order to ask these questions in, but is there a shuttle ready for me, and are Mposi and Ndege at the airlock?’
‘Yes and nearly yes, but we’ll be cutting it fine. Given Icebreaker’s current acceleration, you have about ten minutes before it’s going to be difficult to make rendezvous and have enough fuel left in the shuttle to allow it to return– any longer than that, and we’ll need to hold Icebreaker back or consider the shuttle expendable.’
She turned her attention to the visualisation of the incoming vehicles. Twenty minutes, according to the estimates, before they would be at Zanzibar – based on the assumption that none of them had accelerated since Icebreaker launched.
On the Steel Breeze Page 37