Kanu stared at the image, conscious that once again he had more questions than answers. How had this come to be? Who had put this thing in orbit around Paladin?
Who – if anyone – still made use of it?
‘I felt a little discretion was called for,’ Swift said quietly, ‘but I am very glad that you have been missing me.’
There he was now, standing off to their right, hands clasped before him like a patiently waiting servant. It was more as if Kanu had managed not to notice his presence until that moment, implying some deep and skilful doctoring of his attentive faculties.
‘I wondered if you’d got lost in skipover,’ Kanu said.
‘After enduring it once? No – there was no danger of that. I will say this, though – it’s a very odd thing not to be conscious. To be – to all intents and purposes – dead. Neither gathering nor generating information, as cold and changeless as eternity. How do you humans live with the thought of that hanging over every moment of your pitifully short existences?’
‘We don’t,’ Kanu said. ‘We just get on with it.’
Nissa spooned grapefruit into her mouth and then used the spoon as a pointer. ‘Speaking of getting on with things – do you want to hazard a guess as to why they aren’t sending?’
‘Maybe they were sending, and now they’re not,’ Swift ventured.
‘Is that the best you’ve got?’
‘For the moment, Nissa.’
‘Those mirrors haven’t wandered off-course,’ Kanu said.
‘A good control system, then,’ said Swift. ‘Or there are occupants, but they are simply not particularly talkative.’
‘Could they be machines like you?’ Nissa asked.
‘I doubt it. For a start, look at the mess they’ve made of the place. It’s untidy – ramshackle. Not the robot way. I fear you will only find the answers you seek by going inside.’
‘Those look like standard docking systems to me – locks that will match ours,’ Kanu said. ‘We shouldn’t have any trouble coupling on.’ He grinned, finally shrugging off the cloud of bad feelings that had dogged him since their revival. ‘My god! I wasn’t expecting this. How the hell did anyone get here ahead of us?’
‘We knew someone was here,’ Swift said.
‘Yes – but our assumptions were all wrong. We thought it could only be Eunice, transported here by the Watchkeepers – we weren’t expecting some ship, some expedition that no one knows about. But they haven’t answered our hails or shown any sign of acknowledging our arrival.’
‘You think they might be dead?’ Nissa asked.
‘It’s possible. But their equipment and supplies may still be of use to us. We’ll need to bring Icebreaker in closer, but for now I’d sooner keep some distance.’
‘We can take Fall of Night. It’ll dock with anything down there, and at least I trust my own ship not to malfunction on us. Any objections, Swift?’
The figment bowed its head. ‘You appear to have matters adequately in hand.’
They closed distance to the shard until Paladin swallowed half the sky, the new Mandala turning its cryptic geometric gaze on them as the world swung past below. They were careful not to slip into the mirrors’ beams, for such a concentrated heat source could have inflicted severe damage on their already crippled vehicle.
They held off at one hundred kilometres, then went out in Nissa’s ship. They made a couple of circuits of the shard, scanning and mapping, then transmitting the composited data back to Icebreaker for safekeeping. It was eighteen kilometres across at its longest point, about eleven wide. At first glance, it appeared to be a small asteroid, or perhaps the husk of a comet. The more Kanu looked at it, though, the more he found himself wondering about the depression at one end. At first glance he had taken it for a natural feature, the lingering blemish of a deep impact or collision. Now they were closer, however, it looked much too symmetrical for that. Its circumference was perfectly circular and its interior face, as it sloped down into the shard, had the smooth-bored regularity of something carefully excavated. At its narrowing base was a flat surface like a wall, spanning the throat of a shaft that went deeper into the shard.
Nissa had picked out a landing point about a third of the way in from the start of the depression. She synchronised Fall of Night to the shard’s spin, then brought them in at steadily decreasing speed until they were almost at a walking pace. At the last moment, she rotated Fall of Night to align its ventral docking port with the equivalent structure on the rock and then used lateral thrust to complete the mating. Automatic clamps locked them into place and the status lights on her console indicated that the docking was secure. The shard’s rotation now subjected Fall of Night to centrifugal effects, meaning that it would fall away from the dock should the clamps fail – they felt like a fly hanging upside down on a ceiling. But if anything were to fail, Nissa said, it would not be the systems on her ship, and the structure to which they had docked looked adequately anchored into the surrounding rock and unlikely to tear itself away under the increased load.
They completed their spacesuit checks, locking down helmets, reviewing visor readouts, confirming that they could both see and address Swift, then went to the lock. They were under half a gee now and had to clamber up into it, but there were ladders and handholds in abundance. The lock was large enough to take both of them.
‘Air on the other side, if you believe that,’ Nissa said, directing his attention to the airlock’s status panel. ‘We’ll treat it as suspicious until proven otherwise.’
Kanu agreed wholeheartedly. He was uncomfortable, and for a moment could not pin down the precise origin of his disquiet. Then he remembered the airlock on the wrecked ship on Mars, the necessity for them to pass through it one at a time and the trap they had found inside.
‘Are you all right, Kanu?’ Nissa asked. ‘You’re breathing a little fast. Is your air supply normalised?’
He made a show of checking his cuff readout, with its blocky histograms of gas ratios. ‘All good.’
Swift, who was presently invisible, said, ‘I can adjust your anxiety, if that would assist matters. It’s well within my capabilities.’
Kanu shivered. ‘I’d rather not know that.’
‘And rather him in your skull than mine,’ Nissa said. ‘At least I know my feelings are real.’
The ship’s airlock cycled and they entered the corresponding part of the shard. Since the exterior elements of the lock had looked familiar enough, it did not surprise Kanu to find the interior provisions just as recognisable. It was neither strikingly modern nor particularly antique or alien. The technical readouts were even labelled in Swahili and Chinese, as they were on almost every ship he had been aboard.
‘Suit confirms that the air is good,’ Nissa said, ‘but we’ll take nothing for granted.’
‘Agreed,’ Kanu said.
There was power to operate the lock and illuminate the chamber and its readouts, but since locks usually carried independent power, that told them nothing about the rest of the shard. Still, Kanu drew some encouragement from the fact that the lock was operable and had not fused into useless immobility.
There was a lateral door, so they did not need to climb any further. Beyond the door was a service area equipped with some storage lockers and control panels, again of unremarkable design. An angled, armoured window looked down through the floor, out into space, allowing them a view of the still-docked Fall of Night. Low-level lighting was in evidence and some of the consoles still had active readouts, but Kanu did not know what to conclude from that. Perhaps the power had come on when the lock was activated and was even now draining the last drops of energy from nearby storage cells.
A set of stairs led up and away from the service area alongside a heavy-duty elevator. They opted for the stairs – their suits lacked power-assist, but in half a gee, Kanu did not think the ascent would be too
arduous.
‘Why haven’t we heard about this place before?’ Nissa asked as they began their ascent, walking side by side up the short flight of stairs before reversing direction. ‘To organise and fund an interstellar expedition of this size – there’s no way it wouldn’t be in the public record. No matter how secretive you wanted to be, you couldn’t hide the departure of a starship.’
‘We haven’t even seen a starship. Maybe this rock is the starship.’
‘Like a holoship?’
‘Perhaps,’ Kanu said, ‘but they were slower than anything we have now, and they needed the economy of an entire solar system to build them. Whichever way you cut it, it’s hard to see how anyone did this. And why come here in the first place?’
‘Maybe they discovered the second Mandala ahead of everyone else and wanted to exploit it?’
‘To what end, though?’ said Kanu. ‘If there was something about the Mandalas you could exploit, wouldn’t the people on Crucible already have a head start?’
They must have ascended a hundred metres, doubling back over and over again, before the stairwell reached another room. It was larger than the one they had passed through below and more sparsely provisioned. Low-level illumination picked out the edges of its walls and ceiling. No control panels or lockers here, no windows – but there was a door, set into the wall opposite the stairwell. Twice as tall as Kanu, it was impressively braced and armoured, doubtless designed for emergency pressure containment. It looked as if it was meant to slide up into the ceiling, but there were no controls on this side.
Kanu walked to it, grasped one of the brace pieces and tried forcing the entire door to slide up. The gesture was as futile as he had expected. It must have weighed several tonnes.
‘Any ideas, Swift?’ he asked. ‘We have cutting gear aboard Icebreaker, if need be.’
Swift was conversing with them now but had still not manifested as a visible figment. ‘We could undock and scout around for another airlock, perhaps? There was no shortage of options.’
Nissa was standing next to Kanu, hands on her hips. ‘Hello?’ she called, using her suit’s speaker. ‘Is there anyone here?’
‘I worry that the place is dead after all,’ Kanu said, his earlier enthusiasm beginning to ebb.
‘I don’t know,’ Nissa said. ‘It feels a little less dead the further inside we go. It would take life-support systems to keep air warm and breathable. I swear I can hear something, too.’
All Kanu could hear was his own breathing, too fast and ragged for his liking. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Try increasing your auditory pickup. Shall I show you how to do it?’
‘No, I’m fine.’
But he followed her lead, amplifying the suit’s pickup as far as it would go. There it was: a distant mechanical process, the hum of mechanisms. It could have been anything – generators, pumps, air scrubbers – but it meant there was more than stored power providing the signs of animation they had already witnessed. Machines were running; had perhaps been running since long before their arrival.
‘There’s something else,’ Nissa said. ‘Do you hear it?’
A steadily rising component now overlaid the low-level hum, as if some heavy thing were advancing slowly towards the room. It consisted of a repeating series of bass thuds, falling into a sort of haphazard rhythm – like the slow, ominous beating, Kanu thought, of some tremendous war drum. The slight irregularity of it contrasted with the continuous drone of the background machines. This was not something mechanical, and on a primal level he found it invoked a specific but nameless dread. If only they could see what was coming. But that huge door was windowless.
They had only just entered the shard, and now Kanu’s sole instinct was to return the way they had come, back down the staircase. But he could not turn. It was not simply the fear of running from one threat only to stumble into another. If they could not negotiate with the occupants of the shard, they were as good as dead anyway.
‘Do you know what that sound is, Swift?’
‘I’ve never encountered anything like it. You may have, but it will take some time to search your memories.’
The thudding slowed and stopped. Kanu had the impression that the origin of the sounds was now only a few metres from him on the other side of the huge door. An ominous reverberation, so low as to be almost subsonic, throbbed through the armour plating. It was a living sound, not the product of something mechanical.
‘I don’t think you need bother searching my memories,’ Kanu said.
A loud clunk signalled the rise of the door. It began to haul itself into the ceiling, a widening brightness at its base. Kanu and Nissa stood back in unison. His fear was all-consuming now, but to run would be futile, he knew. He allowed his hand to reach for hers. If she spurned that contact, so be it, but he could not bear to face this alone.
Her hand hesitated in his, then her fingers closed slightly. Glove to glove, barely a touch at all. But it was more than he had dared hope for.
Beyond the door was a blazing brightness that rammed around and through and between the giant forms standing on the other side. There were three of them. In the first dazzled instant of his viewing, before the door had risen fully into the ceiling, he thought he had been mistaken, that these were machines of some kind after all. They stood on massive, tree-like legs – four legs to each form. And in those first few glances, they looked mechanical, or at least shrouded in armour.
But no, these were indeed living creatures, and he recognised them for what they were.
Elephants.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was cold in the long, sloping corridor. It came from deeper within the camp, a whispering planetary chill that felt as if it had travelled all the way from Orison’s dead core, clawing through shivering layers of rock and crust and dusty permafrost. It cut through their clothes, through their skin, and into their bones. Goma thought she could take a few minutes of it at most.
‘Let’s get a few things straight from the outset.’ Eunice was looking back at the party as she led the way into the deeper layers of her camp, her breath visible in the cold. ‘They are Tantors and only Tantors. Never elephants – that offends them terribly.’
‘How many?’ Goma asked, excited despite the cold.
‘Six.’
‘Six!’ Ru exclaimed.
‘My dear girl, you’ll have to make allowances for me – I can’t tell if you’re elated or disappointed.’
‘We’re delighted that Tantors still live,’ Goma said, presuming to speak for both of them. ‘On Crucible, the numbers weren’t sufficient to sustain them as a distinct subspecies. They had to breed back into the baseline elephant population, and in the process we’ve slowly lost whatever it was that made them special. Six is wonderful, of course, but we were hoping for a self-sustaining breeding group.’
‘You may still have one. There are six here with me, but hundreds – thousands – more in Zanzibar.’
‘Thousands!’ Goma exclaimed.
‘You might need to dial down your hopes a little. Zanzibar is where all our problems began – where I got on the wrong side of Dakota, and why I ended up here.’
‘You said Zanzibar,’ said Dr Nhamedjo. ‘Do you seriously mean—’
‘You haven’t figured that out yet, have you? Well, we’ll come to Zanzibar in due course – that’s a whole other can of mealworms. The important point for now is that the six Tantors who live with me are what you’d call defectors. They sided with me when the others stuck with Dakota, and for that they were also banished. Actually, there were more than six, and these are the children of the original defectors. In truth, we all got off lightly. There were many who’d have been glad to see us killed, but Dakota had just enough residual respect for me to offer exile rather than execution. So they used one of their last long-range vehicles to drop us here, me and the Tantors,
with sufficient equipment to build our happy little home. They stayed long enough to make sure we weren’t going to die and then abandoned us. And here we’ve been ever since.’
‘Were you here when you sent the original signal?’ Goma asked.
‘Yes – it was almost the first thing I did after setting up home. They didn’t want me to have any kind of transmitter, certainly nothing capable of squirting a signal across interstellar distances. Still, I’ve always been good at improvising – make do and mend. Eventually I patched something together that just about functioned, aimed it at Sixty-One Virginis, pressed “send” and here you are.’
‘Two centuries later,’ Goma said.
‘Yes, damn that Mr Einstein and his unreasonable insistence on causality and the inviolability of the speed of light. I still thought you’d get here a little quicker.’
‘We came as soon as we could,’ Goma answered.
‘You mentioned someone coming here ahead of us,’ Vasin said. ‘What did you mean by that?’
‘The other ship.’
‘There isn’t one,’ Vasin answered. ‘I would know. We’ve come alone, the sole expedition sent by our government. Even if Crucible launched the second starship after our departure, it could never have overtaken us.’
‘That answers one question, anyway. I tracked the point of origin of this other ship for a while before I lost a fix on it.’ Eunice was striding on, fit as a fiddle, apparently oblivious to the cold. ‘It was hard to be sure, but it didn’t look as if it came from your quadrant of the sky. Earth, maybe, although there were some other possibilities.’
Poseidon's Wake Page 34