On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER NINE

The pod was such an anomaly that it would not have surprised her to find it gone, vanished back into the tunnel in the two days since she had last seen it. But there it was, still waiting, pinned in the wavering light of her helmet. As before, the door opened obligingly and she stepped apprehensively into the plush interior. Everything was the way she remembered it. The system map still hung under the glossy surface of the console in its three-dimensional complexity. And the pod was still offering to convey her to Chamber Thirty-Seven.

Submit for familial genetic verification.

She had come this far. There was no going back.

She touched the console with her gloved hand, wondering as before if that might be sufficient to establish her genetic credentials. But instead of moving, the pod’s door slid closed behind her and her suit registered an inrush of air. As soon as the air pressure equalised, she removed her glove and pressed her hand against the glass. Something prickled against her palm, like static electricity.

Genetic verification complete. Journey commencing.

Chiku put her glove back on.

The pod lurched gently, levitating away from its induction rails, and began to move, accelerating as smoothly and surely as if it was only moments since it had last carried a passenger. Chiku eased into the forward-facing seat as well as her suit allowed. Speed built up quickly, then levelled out. The pod had no forward lights, but periodically an illuminated ring of red interrupted the tunnel’s smooth bore, probably demarking some maintenance hatch or service duct. For a long while the red circles were perfectly concentric, but then the tunnel began to bend, gently at first, and then more sharply. Where was it taking her? Forward, according to the suit’s inertial compass – closer to the leading cone of Zanzibar’s elongated profile. The suit estimated that their velocity was somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred kilometres per hour. No point trying to make herself more comfortable, in that case. Wherever they were going, they would arrive soon enough.

Fear spiked. If the tunnel came to an abrupt end, would the pod actually stop? At the speed they were racing, Chiku would only have a few moments to react. She stiffened involuntarily and braced a hand against the console.

But the pod sped on, and there was no dead-end. Chiku forced herself to relax again, trusting to fate. The tunnel curved and straightened, hair-pinned and kinked, then straightened again. The red hoops rushed by. And after fifteen minutes of travel she felt the pod commencing a smooth, unhurried deceleration.

It came to a halt. On the console it read:

Chamber Thirty Seven. Arrived. Please stand by for environment exchange.

The air returned to its reservoir. When vacuum had again been reached, the door opened. Chiku extracted herself from the seat and disembarked from the pod.

It had indeed reached the limit of travel. Ahead, the three rails terminated in angled blocks, as they had under Kappa. As in Kappa, the tunnel was wider here, to allow movement around all sides of the pod. Needing reassurance that she had a ride home, Chiku walked to the other end of the pod. She opened the door and climbed in. An identical arrangement of seats and console awaited her.

The console read:

Chamber Kappa. Proceed?

She was almost ready to touch it. Perhaps she had done enough for today. But she stilled her hand and exited the compartment. Reviewing her suit systems again – all functioning optimally, reserves all close to their maximum values – she set off into the tunnel beyond the pod, glancing back every few dozen paces to assure herself that the pod was still there.

She walked along the gently curving tunnel for a hundred paces, at which point it widened further. Blue lights shone from the floor, strips of pale green higher up the walls. Chiku searched for foot-or handprints, evidence that someone else had been this way, but the surfaces were flawless.

Ahead, outlined in green on one wall, stood the upright rectangle of a door. At Chiku’s touch, the green lines pulsed and brightened as the door sank back into its recess and slid aside. A soft amber glow greeted her. Stairs, as sharp edged as if recently lasered from marble, climbed away. Continuing down the tunnel felt by far the less risky option, but Chiku had to know where the stairs led.

She climbed. The staircase was a gentle spiral. She counted three complete turns before she reached a rectangular enclosure at the top, about the size of a small bathroom. Another door was set into one of the walls. Confidence rising, Chiku opened it and stepped through into the narrow little space beyond.

She was in an airlock.

After the door behind her had sealed, air began to flood the chamber. The lock soon completed its work, and she stepped through the outer door at the one end of a short, rough-hewn rock-walled corridor. Beyond was a curtain of greenery penetrated by a hard blue light.

Chiku walked forwards, leaning and stooping to avoid damaging her suit against the rock’s sharp edges. The tunnel’s floor was compacted dirt or soil, and vegetation flourished abundantly all around her. She brushed aside the loose-hanging curtain – a tangle of branches and leaves that had grown across the opening – and stepped out into the full glory of daylight.

She did not know this place.

That was wrong, and impossible, but there it was. She was not just seeing an existing chamber from a novel vantage point. This was somewhere she had never been before.

The chamber was not particularly large by Zanzibar standards, but it was by no means small by any human measure – it was still an easy two or three kilometres to the other side of the the steep-sloped valley rift she was now overlooking. The chamber was considerably longer than it was wide and the ceiling was a curving surface sewn with facets of false sky. Patches of squared-off darkness signified where bits of the sky had stopped working or fallen to the ground.

There was no sign of civilisation: no towns, hamlets or roads. But there was a kind of rough, meandering path zigzagging down from the covered entrance through thickets of trees and overgrowth toward the valley floor some two or three hundred metres below.

After checking her suit functions again – all was well – Chiku began to pick her way down the path, watching her footing all the while. There was a steep drop to her left.

The patches of missing sky – cryptic daytime constellations – suggested decay, but most of the sky was still functioning, and there were trees in this chamber. Rain must still fall occasionally, misting down from the fine grid of ceiling ducts. The mere fact that there was a ecosystem here proved that temperatures could not become uncomfortably cold or warm. It was a marvel of both robust design philosophies and the basic tenacity of living organisms. That this place endured was a tribute to both human skill and the natural resilience of trees and plants and soil ecologies.

A few paces ahead, where the path kinked around a small rocky outcropping, something exploded from the ground. The shock of it had her teetering, wheeling her arms for balance as her heart thundered in her chest. Then she began to laugh. The thing had been a bird, breaking cover. Regaining her balance, her footing secure again, she watched it wheel against the black-patterned sky. Some kind of plump ground-nesting thing.

So the ecology in Chamber Thirty-Seven went beyond plants and trees. Many birds were insectivores, of course. She wondered how isolated this place really was; whether it had been hermetically sealed since departure.

Her composure regained, Chiku resumed a cautious descent as the bird gyred overhead. Though the valley floor was densely forested, there were also clearings and wider tracts of open ground. As her angle of view changed, she glimpsed the muddy mirror of a small lake or pond, hemmed by trees. Further away, she could see an odd, slightly unnatural-looking conjunction of semicircular clearing and sheer rock face, the rock as smooth and flat-faced as a tombstone. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something vanishing into the cover of trees.

Slow and ponderous and grey, like a boulder on legs.

She blinked. There was no doubt in her mind. She had seen an elephant.

Chiku grinned, shaking her head in both wonder and disbelief.

‘Really, though, you shouldn’t have bothered,’ she said aloud in a delighted half-whisper. ‘We already have more elephants than we know what to do with.’

Chiku made a decision. The presence of an elephant proved that the air was breathable. She wanted to taste it, gulp it into her lungs, compare it with the air she had been breathing since departure. She reached up and released the equalisation valve on the side of her neck ring. There was a hiss, followed by a painless pop in one ear. Chiku lifted the helmet free of the ring and inhaled greedy breaths.

The air tasted disappointingly normal.

She tucked the helmet under her arm and continued her descent. But she had not gone more than a few dozen paces further down the trail when she became aware of a thin, artificial keening. It was at the limit of hearing – she would never have heard it with the helmet on.

Chiku halted. The bird was now long gone, but the sound appeared to be coming from the air. She turned around slowly, trying to localise the noise. It had turned from an insect sound to a steady electric buzz, fixed in pitch but raising in amplitude.

Then she saw it. Skimming along the side of the valley to her right, a small flying machine, silver or white, approaching rapidly. She watched it with misgivings. There were few flying machines anywhere in Zanzibar. She wondered if this one was a drone or toy, abandoned to circle this chamber in purposeless circuits.

She got a better look at the craft when it tilted to steer around a bluff. It had one large pair of wings near the front, a smaller pair near the rear, and an upright fin, a vicious whirring mechanism at the front.

Chiku could not move. It was not fear so much as paralysing indecision. Bushes and trees whipped aside as the machine gusted past, wing almost touching the valley’s side. Snapping out of her immobility, she stepped back as the machine shot by. It continued up the valley, then turned sharply to the right, curving out over the forest floor. Then it executed a steep turn and came right back at her.

Chiku raised a hand – offering surrender or greeting, depending on how it was interpreted. The machine snarled as it approached, its whisking mechanism throwing back bright chips of reflected sky. Chiku squatted down, presenting the smallest possible target.

In her haste to get low, she lost her footing. She recovered, but only at the expense of dropping her helmet. It hit the dirt and bounced down the path, clattering off a stone and disappearing into bushes. The machine sculled past, close enough now that its wing really did cleave through the undergrowth. And in the moment of its passing, Chiku saw a figure, looking at her through the dark glass of a cockpit tucked beneath the shadow of the wing.

The machine sped up the valley, peeled left, made another sharp turn. It was coming back. Chiku staggered to her feet. A little further along the track, an overhanging boulder offered shelter. She scrambled towards it, wondering if there would be time to find the helmet as well.

She had not managed to reach the overhang when the ground gave way under her feet. Her leg twisted, and in an instant she was tumbling through bushes, the incline steepening as she fell. There was no hope of slowing herself. As her view wheeled, she caught one final glimpse of the returning machine. And then there was nothing.