On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  The train had brought them close to Zanzibar’s central axis, so they had much less than their usual weight when they disembarked. Constables and Assembly staff were on hand to assist them to the boarding lock, beyond which the shuttle was waiting. The rest of her volunteers were already aboard, the shuttle primed for immediate departure as soon as she joined them.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m going through with this,’ she said to Noah, her voice trembling. ‘It feels like I’m about to put my head in a guillotine or something.’

  ‘It’s not too late to change your mind. We could still call Icebreaker back.’

  ‘That won’t make any difference at this point – as far as the Council’s concerned, the crime’s already been committed just by launching the ship. Travertine’s punishment for going against Pemba was harsh, and ve was just one person, working on vis own. Can you imagine what they’d do to our entire administration?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be pretty.’

  ‘Show trials, mass executions – why not? I can easily believe they’d go that far.’

  ‘We won’t allow it,’ Noah said, with a firmness that surprised her. ‘Even if we have to declare complete independence from the rest of the caravan. We’d do it.’

  ‘Tread carefully, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Now put your brave face on. They’re bringing in Mposi and Ndege.’

  ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when it’s time.’

  They came in, accompanied by constables, and she felt her spirits dip to depths she had never experienced. All of a sudden they looked much younger than their years – Ndege no longer the self-assured nineteen year old she had grown into, but the twelve year old who had entered skipover. Mposi looked like the little boy who made bubbles in their garden.

  Their expressions were full of fear and doubt – small wonder, she supposed, given that they had been ripped from their normal routine by constables and then brought to this strange and unfamiliar part of the holoship, far from the normal gravity of the community cores. Mposi and Ndege had never left Zanzibar, so had no experience of weightlessness or near-weightlessness.

  ‘Thank you,’ Chiku told Noah and the constables. They nodded and retreated, leaving her alone with her children.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said.

  From the look in their eyes it was clear that they did not understand. ‘For how long?’ Mposi asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Ndege said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know?’

  ‘All I know,’ Chiku offered, ‘is that it’ll be at least eight years, possibly quite a bit longer.’

  Eight years. Her words impacted them like a slap. Eight years was an eternity to an eighteen year old – nearly half the time Mposi had been alive.

  ‘Why?’ Ndege asked. ‘Why do you have to do this stupid, pointless thing?’

  ‘There’s an important job that needs to be done so that we can all arrive safely on Crucible, like you’ve been promised since you were small. I’m doing this for you, first and foremost, but I’m also doing this for everyone aboard Zanzibar, everyone in the local caravan.’ Feeling that this was insufficient, she added: ‘I need to make sure that everything the Providers have built for us is the way we want it, so we can be happy when we arrive, about ten years later.’

  ‘But why do you have to do that?’ Ndege asked.

  ‘Because . . . because I have to. Because it would be wrong to ask someone else to do it in my place. We all have to be brave about that – not just me, but you as well. Both of you.’

  ‘You can’t go,’ Mposi said, on the edge of tears – she could tell – but keeping them in check.

  More in anger than distress his sister added, ‘You never asked us how we’d feel about this.’

  ‘I couldn’t. And I really have no choice, not if I’m going to be a good citizen. But you mustn’t worry. Noah . . . your father . . . will take care of you, and if you want, you can spend some of the time in skipover, the way we did before.’

  ‘The way we did,’ Mposi corrected her. ‘You were awake, even though you said you wouldn’t be.’

  ‘I was awake some of the time, but I only ever wanted to do the best I could for all of us.’ She glanced at Noah, certain her time must be up, but he nodded for her to continue. ‘I know my choices and actions have been difficult for you to understand, but know that I have always loved you. Always. And I won’t stop loving you after I get on the other ship. I don’t want to go, but sometimes we have to do things we would rather not, and this is one of those times.’

  ‘We can come with you,’ Ndege said suddenly. ‘Me, Mposi – Father. You can make room for us, can’t you?’

  Noah came over from where he had been waiting and put a hand on Ndege’s shoulder while also meeting Chiku’s despairing gaze. ‘It’s time. I’m sorry, but they’re almost here and you need to be clear of Zanzibar before they arrive.’ Then he drew Mposi and Ndege close, daughter on one side, son on the other, and said, ‘Kiss your mother goodbye. Be brave and tell her you understand that she has to go away, that you love her very much, and that you can’t wait for her to come home.’

  ‘Why?’ Mposi asked, as if this was all some trick.

  ‘Because if you don’t, you’ll regret it for every waking moment of the next eight years of your life.’

  And they did as he said, in their own fashion, and then Noah kissed her and wished her luck, and the courage to face whatever was ahead. Mposi and Ndege were crying by then – confusion and denial had given way, perhaps temporarily, to a provisional acceptance that there was nothing they could do to change their mother’s mind. They looked upset now, rather than angry at the world for forcing this situation on them.

  Chiku found that her own anger also had no individual focus: she could not blame anyone for this, not even long-dead Eunice and still-living Lin Wei for the things they had brought into being. They had not known what the consequences would be. No one could have known. She could not even hate Arachne for being what she was – it would be as futile as hating a snake for being a snake, or the weather for being capricious.

  ‘Farewell,’ Noah whispered, when the moment of parting finally came. ‘And return.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  The moment she was in the shuttle, the doors closed and the docking clamps released, and the shuttle shifted into Zanzibar’s bright central shaft, the spinal void that had once contained the bulk of the partly disassembled CP drive. Chiku manoeuvred herself silently to one of the acceleration couches and buckled in. The other occupants were quiet, and she had no words for them.

  The shuttle had been authorised to light its engine while still inside Zanzibar. Through the windows the surrounding shaft sped past at ever increasing speed. They were moving fast by the time they emerged into clear space, but were heading in the wrong direction relative to Icebreaker. The shuttle rolled and commenced a hard turn, squeezing Chiku even deeper into her couch than during the launch. She watched stars wheel dizzyingly for a few moments and then Zanzibar came back into view, still huge but offset now by the diameter of the turning arc the shuttle had just completed. And still they were accelerating.

  The shuttle was flying itself – neither Chiku nor any of her volunteers were pilots, and the shuttle could fly itself more competently than its current human crew. She voked a three-dimensional map of the surrounding space, centred on the moving focus of the shuttle. They were sliding past Zanzibar now, about thirty kilometres from the hull. The shuttle was still accelerating relative to Icebreaker, and Chiku was relieved when the distance between the two vessels started decreasing rather than increasing. She let out a breath she had not known she was holding – Icebreaker was still within reach.

  Then the outer boundary of the projection volume was pricked by the vectors of the inspection party’s ships. They were coming in very fast, delaying deceleration as late as possible. Of the eighteen vehicles in the first wave,
twelve remained on course for Zanzibar, while six had peeled away to attempt rendezvous with Icebreaker. Of those six, two now made a late course adjustment, moving as a tightly coordinated pair in an attempt to close in on the shuttle.

  What are they hoping to achieve, Chiku thought, beyond intimidation? They were moving much too quickly to dock or grapple on, if that was their intention.

  ‘This is Noah. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ she answered.

  ‘We’ve been issued with a general ultimatum – pull in all our ships or face sanctioned force, whatever that means. They want you to slow down, show that you’re giving up the chase – I assume you’re not about to have a sudden change of heart?’

  ‘We’ve come too far for that. Politically, we’ve already handed them the noose, so we might as well see this through to the end.’

  ‘It could be a bitter one.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re actually going to try attacking us, do you? Surely they wouldn’t escalate so much, so quickly?’

  ‘If it suits them, and they think we’re not going to be expecting it – well, I wouldn’t bet against it.’

  ‘But we’d know if they’d equipped a whole squadron of shuttles with weapons. Wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Maybe not. We’ve been quite successful at protecting our own secrets, haven’t we?’ Noah was silent for a moment, then added: ‘We have long-range imagery on the inspection craft, including the two closing in on you. They look like normal shuttles – we’re not seeing any hull-mounted guns or energy devices . . . That’s interesting, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of them has an open airlock, as if they’re preparing to EVA.’

  ‘Just the one?’

  ‘We only have a clear view of one shuttle. There’s a suited person at the airlock now, which is pointed at the second ship, but we can’t see the back of the second ship from here.’ Noah sounded distracted, fielding too many questions at once. ‘Just a moment, Chiku – we’re trying to lock on to imagery from Icebreaker – it might give us the angle we need.’

  ‘They’re moving too fast to attempt a forced boarding.’ She was studying the schematic, forcing it to skip forward in time. The mathematics told the story, cut in stone. There was nothing she could do to alter the shuttle’s own vector if she still wanted to rendezvous with Icebreaker. ‘They’re going to ram us, Noah. Could they be minimally crewed? Would they consider two whole ships expendable?’

  ‘Surely not – that would be a massive escalation.’

  ‘They can’t slow down now. They’re going to be on me in about thirty seconds!’

  ‘Hold your vector.’

  ‘They’re peeling off,’ Chiku said, surprised and suspicious. ‘Opposite vectors – they’ll pass either side of me.’

  ‘I think I know what they’re up to. Assume full manual control, Chiku – do you have it?’

  ‘Y-yes,’ she stammered, hands trembling as she took the helm, her seat offering her a selection of basic control inputs – thrust, steering, hull orientation. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Remain on course. When I give the word, do something. Anything. But only when I give the word.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I’ll explain in about fifteen seconds. Are you ready? Make whatever evasive manoeuvre you can – there’s nothing you can do that the shuttle can’t undo. Here it comes. Now, Chiku. Now.’

  As if she needed to be told twice.

  She yanked the controls. There was nothing expert or considered about her inputs – a child could have achieved the same finesse. But the shuttle responded, dutifully obeying its heavy-handed mistress, and through the windows the stars jerked and tumbled, over and over. Alarms sounded. Unsecured items crashed around in storage bins. An arm flapped out like a salute, hinged with bruising force back into the side of its body.

  ‘Release authority,’ Noah said. ‘Let the shuttle sort itself out. You did well.’

  ‘Thanks. Be even better if I knew what I just did.’

  ‘We think they’d stretched something between the two locks – a tether or grappling line, or maybe some kind of monomolecular filament, like spiderfibre. That was why they were moving as a pair. We didn’t get a good view of the second shuttle, but we think there was probably a man in each lock, ready to release the line as the two ships pulled further apart.’

  The shuttle had corrected the damage she had done, silencing its alarms, restabilising itself and resuming the original vector.

  ‘Our relative speed would have been pretty high, wouldn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes – kilometres per second. More than sufficient.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Let’s assume there were weights at either end of the line, to give it some tension as it started cutting. It would have gone through you like a laser. Nice piece of improvised space weaponry.’

  ‘Could you possibly sound a bit less warmly appreciative?’

  ‘Sorry. But you did well – once the tether was released, they couldn’t alter its course. You threw enough randomness into your trajectory to avoid being sliced.’

  ‘Why did we have to wait until the last moment?’

  ‘Couldn’t be sure when they’d release. Seemed safer not to give them any warning that you had a trick up your sleeve.’

  ‘It was up your sleeve, not mine. Are we safe now? What about Icebreaker?’

  ‘Transmitting warnings now – they have more delta vee to play with than you, so they should be able to give those shuttles the run-around.’

  ‘Just as long as I can still catch up. Do you think they’ll try the same thing twice?’

  ‘I think that was their one shot – they’d have to come almost close enough together to dock to stretch out another line between them, and that’d cost them time, which is as much of a problem for them as it is for us. They appear to be pulling back towards Zanzibar now – our problem, not yours.’

  ‘Thank you, Noah.’ But if he intended his comment to elevate her spirits, it had exactly the opposite effect. Whatever happened to Zanzibar, Ndege and Mposi would be part of it. She hoped for their sakes that diplomacy would find a solution, a path that avoided bloodshed. Collectively they had come so far, done so much – the holoships were a triumph of cooperation and common purpose, emblems of a better way of being human. Whatever differences now existed, whatever enmities and grudges, it would be unforgivable to throw away so much that was good. ‘Let them in, if they insist,’ she said. ‘Roll out the red carpets, make them feel at home. We’ll gain nothing by fighting them, not if they want to take control by force. Most of our citizens had no knowledge of Icebreaker – we can’t punish our own people by turning this into a civil war.’

  ‘There’ll be no armed resistance,’ Noah avowed. ‘They’ve committed the first violent act, even if it didn’t succeed. We won’t stoop to their level.’

  ‘It’s easy to say that now. But we have to hold to it, no matter how difficult it becomes—’

  ‘I know that,’ Noah said, talking over her. ‘But you have to let us go now, Chiku – let us face this alone. You have your own challenges. Leave Zanzibar to the rest of us. We’ll rise to the occasion.’

  ‘You’re not alone. Remember that.’

  ‘I shall,’ Noah said.

  After the failed attack, the rest of the crossing was almost anticlimactic. The shuttle made rendevous with Icebreaker and they transferred aboard the much larger vehicle without fuss. The shuttle was nearly out of fuel, so the best they could do was abandon it. Someone might decide it was worth the bother of reclaiming as it drifted further and further ahead of the holoship. It was certainly of no use to the expedition, adding dead mass where none was needed.

  Plans months in the drafting argued over to the last detail lay in tatters. There had never been any possibility of performing a full test of the Post-Chibesa engine within Zanzibar, not if secrecy were to be upheld. So they had tested components of it at near capacity,
and the whole only at a very low energy regime, where the physics scarcely deviated from the standard Chibesa model. Enough to verify that things should work, but hardly enough to satisfy all qualms. They had intended, once Icebreaker was clear, to run a suite of tests at steadily higher energies. It was true that there had always been the expectation of other ships being launched from nearby holoships, but Chiku’s planners had never guessed that the launches would happen even before Icebreaker was released from Zanzibar, squeezing the margins down to minutes instead of hours.

  All of a sudden, though, it struck Chiku that caution was now her enemy. If the PCP engine did not work exactly as predicted, they were all doomed anyway. Better to find that out now, in one clean gamble, then submit to a pointless agony of expectation.

  She met with Travertine, expecting an argument.

  ‘No, I agree totally. You’ve staked everything on this, and so have I.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’ve staked personally,’ Chiku said.

  ‘Only my entire reputation. Kappa dented my pride. I made an error, allowed my experiment to run beyond my immediate control. I’ve lived with my mistake, and with the ignominy of being paraded as an example to others, but I refuse to live with a second dose of failure. If the PCP engine doesn’t work, it probably won’t just stop. I think we’ll be looking at something much more . . .’

  ‘Catastrophic?’

  ‘I was going to say glorious, but catastrophic works just as well. If I’m wrong, we won’t live long enough to realise it, and I think I prefer it that way. We’ll make a very bright splash, whatever happens.’

  ‘Run the engine to maximum power. When we’re satisfied that we have a stable burn, we’ll dump the ballast.’

  ‘Make sure everyone’s strapped in, then – even with the ballast, it’s going to be a bit of a bumpy ride.’

  Chiku checked on the rest of the crew as she returned to her seat. Most of them had remained in their sturdy acceleration couches after launch with the exception of those destined for skipover. The huge lander was already maintaining a gee of steady thrust, but if their simulations were on the mark, the PCP engine was capable of exceeding this acceleration by a factor of ten – more than a human body could tolerate over an extended period of time, even in a couch.