On the Steel Breeze

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 fret, 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.

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.

To counteract this, they had packed the lander with liquid water, thereby increasing Icebreaker’s effective mass by a factor of three. Theoretically, it would allow the engine to be run up to maximum capacity without imposing bone-crushing loads on the living crew. The engine would need to run for a hundred hours to bring Icebreaker up to its cruising velocity of one-quarter of the speed of light, and two hundred hours to achieve slowdown around Crucible – more than a week of continual thrust. As soon as they were happy that the engine was working as it should, they could begin to dump the ballast and selectively pressurise the evacuated hull spaces, giving the crew more room to move around when they emerged from skipover.

Once Chiku was satisfied that her volunteers were either strapped down or on their way into skipover, she reviewed the developing situation around Zanzibar.

Already she felt the distance. Space between Chiku and her world, her children, Noah and her work, the good things in her life, her home and its simple pleasures, was dilating itself with spiteful haste, as if it held some deep personal grudge against her. Icebreaker had been on its way for only an hour (an hour that seemed longer than that, it was true) and in that time it had crossed two thirds of a million kilometres – enough distance to wrap the Earth eighteen times, or to ensure that a radio signal took more than four seconds to travel to Zanzibar and back. Already the events she witnessed on Zanzibar were pushed back into her personal past by entire heartbeats, entire moments.

Zanzibar had made no efforts to resist the inspection parties, and now they were docking and boarding, taking turns to use the airlocks. The ships that had veered off to meet the shuttle and Icebreaker had by now returned to the main grouping, standing off until docking slots were available. Meanwhile, the second wave of vehicles was very close to arriving, and more were on the way. More than fifty ships, at the last count, each of which could easily contain a dozen or more constables. Zanzibar’s normal peacekeeping authority, even for a citizenship of millions, numbered much less than a thousand. They had simply never needed a strong police force. It would not take many more arriving ships to place their own constabulary in the minority.

Public eyes showed the new constables emerging from the airlocks and moving out into Zanzibar’s civic spaces. They were not obviously armed or armoured, but some were accompanied by peacekeeping robots, striding black things like long-legged spiders. They unnerved Chiku, and she was momentarily glad of the widening distance. She had seen similar robots during her visits to other holoships, but they had never been considered necessary in Zanzibar.

‘The mood is about as calm as you’d expect,’ Noah reported from a car taking him back to the Assembly Building. ‘We’ve issued general orders to all citizenry and constables – treat the visitors as honoured guests, obey all reasonable requests. It’s too soon to tell if there’ll be trouble – it’ll be hours before they establish a visible presence throughout Zanzibar. People are twitchy and confused. Most of them don’t even know what happened with Icebreaker!’

‘Issue a statement,’ Chiku said. ‘Give the citizenry the facts. Help them understand that what we’ve done could be considered a provocative act.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It’s the only way. If they start feeling the constables have come barging in without justification, someone somewhere is going to do something stupid. Probably involving a shovel and a skull.’

‘We’re already fielding questions. People want to know if this is the start of an occupation.’

‘Just tell them the truth – which is that you don’t know and it isn’t in your power to decide. Say that Zanzibar will comply with the wishes of the Council of Worlds.’

‘Don’t you think our assurances are going to ring a bit hollow given that we’ve already gone against the Council by launching the ship?’

‘They can believe us or not, Noah, but Icebreaker is a fait accompli. We’re on our way now, and there’s no point in punishing those of you left behind. Most of had nothing to do with the expedition in the first place.’

‘I look forward to testing out that line of argument. We’re ahead of the constables now, but they’re moving in on the administrative core. They’ve demanded access to the Assembly Building.’

‘You’d better let them in – they’ll only make you if you don’t.’

‘No kidding. It’s going to be very difficult for the Assembly to have any kind of private discussion to decide on our next move. You’re right to dismiss armed resistance – but we don’t have to let the rest of the ships dock. We could seal off Zanzibar, declare unilateral independence from the Council.’

‘And what about the constables already inside?’

‘The numbers are marginal at the moment – we could take them, if we have to.’

‘And their robots?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s not an option, Noah. We depend on the caravan for so much. We can’t pull up the drawbridge, expect to go it alone. At the very least we’d put our citizens – including my children – through hardships that they don’t deserve. At worst we’d invite a forced occupation. If we won’t give them access to our locks, they’ll tunnel their way in through our skin.’

‘We can’t just… concede.’

‘The work is done. Icebreaker is on its way. In that sense we’ve achieved what we wanted to.’

‘No,’ Noah corrected. ‘We’ve taken the first step, that’s all. Even if the engine works, we still need to scale it up for holoship use. If the Council can’t be made to see that, then perhaps we really do need to declare independence.’ She heard him thump part of the car’s interior in frustration. ‘Fuck! I don’t feel equipped for this. Maybe we have it all wrong, you know? Maybe we should just keep going, forget about Crucible.’

‘We must reach Crucible, Noah,’ she said. ‘Don’t start doubting that now.’

‘It was just a thought.’

‘Good – keep it that way. Look, we both know this is going to be difficult, but I trust you to make the right decisions – to hold the line, to do the right thing by our people.’

‘I’m nearly at the Assembly. The constables won’t be more than half an hour behind, if we’re lucky. I’m going to speak to Eunice.’ She smiled as he spoke the name – a daring thing, even now. ‘She needs to know what’s going on.’

‘I doubt she’s in the dark, but you’re right – talk to her now, before it gets more difficult. And tell the children not to worry. It’s all going to be all right.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘I want to,’ she said. ‘Very badly. And I think if we all try our hardest not to do anything stupid, all of us – you, me, her, the rest of the caravan – we might have a chance.’

‘Just a chance?’

‘It’s better than no chance at all. We’re in a mess, Noah – cleverness got us into it, and more cleverness will have to dig us out of it. We have to be wise, like Eunice said, rise above ourselves.’

‘I’m all ears if you have any bright ideas you’d like to share.’

‘Take care, Noah. We’re going to light the PCP engine very soon. I hope we’ll have a chance to talk again, but there are no guarantees.’

‘Do you want me to tell Mposi and Ndege?’

‘Not until it’s done. Whatever happens.’

‘I will.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘Well, we’re here, and we’ll just have to weather it. I don’t suppose your family had the foresight to make this place defensible?’

‘I suspect not.’

‘Tell them to try harder next time. Good luck, Chiku. I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Regardless of all the stuff that’s gone on between us, I hope we speak again.’

‘So do I,’ she said.

When she was done, Travertine informed her that they were ready to push to full power.

‘I suppose it’s occurred to you,’ Travertine said, ‘that all of this could just be a form of suicidal revenge on my behalf? That I know the engine won’t work, but I’ll have the satisfaction of seeing you give the order to start it up?’

‘Actually, that had not occurred to me.’

‘As satisfaction goes, it would be pretty fleeting, I’d guess. Anyway, I’m not the avenging type – strikes me as a fairly futile use of one’s energies. Shall we do this?’

‘It will work,’ Chiku said firmly, as if her conviction alone was enough to guarantee success.

‘I know,’ Travertine agreed. ‘But it would be a kindness to you if it didn’t, wouldn’t it? Take that burden of worry off your shoulders. I’m feeling years younger, by the way. You should try it sometime: nothing puts a spring in your step like a commuted death sentence.’

They pushed the engine into uncharted physics. Even with the ballast to deaden the acceleration, the shift from one to three gees was still a shock, for there was almost no transition, just a steplike increase in power. Travertine gave very little away as ve studied the numbers and curves, matching them against vis mental predictions. Ve pursed vis lips and squinted, and made odd little catlike noises, the meaning of which was lost on Chiku.

‘We can take it to ten,’ Travertine announced finally, but there was nothing triumphant in vis tone. ‘That’ll get us away from Zanzibar the fastest and out of reach of the caravan. But you’ll want to be in skipover before we disperse all the ballast. After that, there’s no going back.’

‘I’m done with second thoughts.’

‘I thought so, but best to check rather than assume. How does it feel, to be leaving everything behind?’

‘I suspect you feel much the same way. Anyway, we’re not leaving Zanzibar for good.’

‘You don’t strike me as someone entirely convinced she’ll ever see her home again. There’s a kind of grey deadness in your eyes, as if little shutters have come down. I hope you do get back, of course, for your children’s sake. Have you told Noah the whole story – what we’ll really be facing when we arrive at Crucible?’

‘We should sleep now,’ Chiku said bluntly, effectively ending the conversation.

Travertine could not resist having the last word. ‘Well, whenever you feel like sharing…’

Chiku and Travertine were the last to enter skipover. Doctor Aziba was already sleeping, so they were left in the care of the surgical robot. The robot fussed over them, blundering through its routines. Travertine had to fight to stop it removing vis bracelet. Ve was quite intent on keeping it where it was.

Even at three gees, there was no realistic prospect of the caravan’s ships catching up with Icebreaker – not if they wanted a chance of getting back home. So Chiku had the surgical robot delay administering the knock-out drugs until she had taken one last look at the news from Zanzibar. Noah had enough business to keep him occupied now, so she did not disturb him for an update. Instead she wandered the holoship’s civic spaces, tapping into public eyes, haunting the world she had once walked. The new constables were almost everywhere now and more were cycling in through the available locks by the hour. Their numbers were still small, but they would soon be able to impose effective authority. To their credit, her citizens – her citizens, as if she was still in charge – were handling the situation with dignity and composure. So far there had been no real trouble, but something would give in the end, she knew. Such was the way of things. Pressure had to be released.

Be wise, she prayed, directing her wish to her own people and the occupying force alike. Be wise, be tolerant, be human. Because against the truth of Crucible, none of this will matter in the slightest.

And then the robot pushed the drugs into her and she fell into skipover.