Poseidon's Wake

by Alastair Reynolds

  The hull was blackened in a wide area beyond the obvious limits of the wound itself, suggestive of a massive concentration of energy. He risked stepping nearer to the edge of the damaged section. Gas was still geysering out from multiple locations. It aggrieved Kanu to see any kind of pressure loss. Darkly, he began to wonder if this sort of damage was even repairable at all.

  ‘I need to take a closer look,’ Kanu said.

  He bent down, preparing to resume his spidering progress, when something flashed white. There was no pain, and barely enough of an interval of lucidity before the coming of unconsciousness for him to register one simple truth.

  He was no longer attached to anything.

  He was falling into ever-darkening waters, each layer colder and heavier and stiller than the last. He was on his back, his face turned to the receding surface. He could still see some evidence of the sun, its radiance chopped into pieces by the waves, its light further diminished by the oppressive mass of water that now lay between him and the air. He reached out, trying to claw his way back to the light, but for all his slow thrashing he could not arrest his descent. He knew how to swim; that was not the problem. He was simply too heavy now, and the pull of the deep layers too powerful. He glanced beneath him, but could see nothing below except steadily mounting blackness. A little daylight still found its way to him now, but soon he would be down to a few struggling photons, feeble as glow-worms, and after that there would be nothing but darkness. An endless succession of moments in which he did not figure.

  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.’

&n
bsp; 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?’

  ‘You did say there were no good options – I suppose sleeping is as good a way to pass the time as any other. But you’ll be asleep as well, won’t you, Swift?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Skipover will suppress all Kanu’s higher brain functions, including those useful to me. But we need not worry. Icebreaker already has a high level of autonomy. It will wake us if there is a development.’

  ‘Such as what?’ Nissa said.

  ‘I have no idea,’ the figment answered. ‘I can tie our systems into Fall of Night’s and continue transmitting our recognition signal via Nissa’s ship. It will be less powerful, and less capable of detecting a weak return signal, but we will lose nothing by trying.’

  ‘Nothing will answer us,’ Kanu said, struck by a sudden gloomy fatalism. ‘If they meant to, it would already have happened.’

  ‘Nonetheless, we may as well keep trying. Nissa: I will provide you with a range of solutions for the transfer orbit – each will put a different strain on Fall of Night. I will leave it to you to make the final selection and handle the operation itself.’

  ‘That’s very good of you, Swift,’ Nissa said, drenching her answer in sarcasm.

  Swift gave an obliging smile. ‘One tries.’

  Nissa was easily capable of using her ship as a tug. They agreed on an option which provided for rendezvous with Paladin in just over eleven months, with fuel in reserve for the corresponding orbital correction at the other end of the manoeuvre. Not that it really mattered if they used up all of Nissa’s fuel: if they could not replenish Icebreaker’s initialising tanks, they would be going nowhere anyway.

  Inside the larger ship, it was hard to believe there had been any course correction at all. Such was the difference in the masses of the two ships that even with its drive at maximum output, Fall of Night could provide only the gentlest of accelerations. But the push was sustained over several hours, and when it was done, Swift confirmed that they were on course.

  Kanu spent a restless couple of days making sure the repair systems were working as intended. When that was not on his mind, he kept transmitting his recognition signal, this time sending it via Fall of Night’s much smaller antenna. He had announced his arrival to every obvious body in the solar system; now he was ready to consider anything larger than a pebble. But still the signal went unanswered. He was starting to imagine something in that silence: not the simple absence of an answer, but something more sinister, a kind of purposeful withholding. A decision not to speak, a deliberate and calculated refusal to acknowledge his presence.

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be so surprised,’ Nissa said as his mood began to darken again. ‘The message wasn’t meant for you and Swift in the first place.’

  ‘They could at least do us the courtesy of answering, after all the distance we’ve travelled.’

  ‘It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.’

  After that, there was nothing to do but sleep.

  Kanu reviewed the orbital transfer again and programmed their caskets for an interval a few days short of the end of the crossing. It would give them time to adjust to their surroundings, make renewed efforts at contact and generally recover from skipover before they arrived at their destination.

  He put Nissa to sleep, watched her casket seal itself over her body, monitored the medical readouts for the smooth transition to unconsciousness, and then observed her gradual decline into cryogenic suspension. He touched a hand to the casket’s cool side, feeling an intense protectiveness for her. He loved her and wanted to make amends for the wrongs he had done her, from the failings of their marriage to the recent deceits concerning his intentions for Europa and beyond. It would please him very much if Nissa Mbaye were to start seeing him as a good man again.

  Perhaps there was still time.

  Almost without thought, he programmed the same sleep interval into his own casket. They would awaken together. Whatever the shard held for them, they would face it as partners.

  And so Kanu submitted himself to the cold once more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The airlock was set into the side of the largest dome, near the transmission tower. It was a high-capacity lock with a lofty ceiling, large enough to take a big vehicle. The chevroned door opened and they all passed through at the same time, Goma studying Eunice’s mirrored visor, trying to glimpse the face behind the glass.

  Beyond the lock was a gently sloping corridor leading to lower levels. Eunice guided the party a short distance along it until they reached a secondary door set into the corridor’s wall. It was not an airlock, but was clearly capable of holding pressure in the event of a blow-out. She opened the door and invited them to step through.

  They entered some kind of accommodation area with metal-lined walls and several passages leadin
g off in various directions. There was a table and a set of chairs, although not nearly enough for all of them. Around the metal walls were shelves and cabinets, and various utensils and implements set upon the shelves.

  Eunice lowered herself into the grandest chair at the table, then bid the others to take such chairs as were available.

  ‘We don’t need to sit down,’ Vasin said. ‘Not yet. We’ve come a long way and what we’d like first is an explanation.’

  ‘It’s rude not to sit,’ the spacesuited form said. ‘But look at me! Calling you rude and I haven’t even had the common courtesy to remove my helmet.’

  She reached up with both hands, undid some latching mechanism on the neck ring and lifted the helmet free of her head. She placed it before her on the table and beamed at them over its crown.

  Goma should not have been surprised – she had seen this woman’s face in the earlier transmission, after all – but a transmission could easily be faked or doctored. Yet here was the unmistakable face of Eunice Akinya, a figment from history, strikingly real and human-looking down to the last details.

  ‘There. Fresh air. I hate suit air. Always have, ever since I took that long trek on the Moon. Well, what about the rest of you? Are you going to stand there like fools?’

  Nhamedjo was glancing down at his cuff readout. ‘The air looks good. Perfectly breathable, in fact – no trace toxins, according to the filters. I think we are safe to remove our helmets.’

  ‘No,’ Vasin said.

  ‘Oh, but I insist,’ Eunice said. ‘No – really. I insist. You want answers from me, meet me on my terms. Take off your helmets. I want to know who I’m dealing with.’

  ‘Worried we might be robots?’ Goma asked. But she had already taken a leap of faith and was reaching up to undo her own helmet.

  ‘Goma!’ Vasin said. ‘Don’t do it!’

  ‘You heard her. I want answers. If this is what it takes, so be it. I don’t think she’d drag us seventy light-years just to play a nasty trick with poison gases.’