On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The three of them were in the cockpit. The physician appeared to be taking recent developments with remarkable stoicism, as if this was merely the latest in a line of disagreeable surprises the universe had sprung on him. He nodded as Chiku and Travertine took turns to explain his predicament, bouncing his attention from one to the other. Occasionally he scratched at the white atoll of his tonsure. His expression was quietly sceptical, but he appeared not to doubt the essential veracity of their story.

‘She’s not lying,’ Travertine said, more than once. ‘She hasn’t just pulled this out of a hat. I’ve been watching Chiku for years – I’ve always known she was up to something.’

‘I’m very sorry it was necessary to lie to you,’ Chiku said. ‘Or at least, not give you the full picture.’

‘Let’s stick with lie,’ Doctor Aziba said, with a pleasant lack of rancour.

‘All right – it was a big fat lie.’ Chiku shrugged. ‘But it was fabricated in the interests of Zanzibar. The citizenry, the people. Ten million of them, just on our own holoship, plus the rest of the local caravan, and the holoships following on behind us. They all think there’s a paradise in waiting here, tended by machines of loving grace.’

‘They’re in for a bit of a let down,’ Travertine added.

‘When I came out of skipover,’ Chiku said, ‘Sou-Chun had sold out to Teslenko and the other hard-liners. There was too much was at stake for me to speak candidly – they’d have silenced me, one way or another.’ She looked away for a moment. ‘I know I got things wrong. If I could turn the clock back, maybe I’d trust Utomi to do the right thing. But maybe not. Everything looks easier with hindsight.’

‘So what are you hoping to achieve with this mission?’ Aziba asked.

‘Diplomacy. An alternative to annihilation when the main caravan arrives.’

‘Perhaps it won’t. If the slowdown problem isn’t solved—’

Travertine said sharply: ‘Solve it or not, there are thousands of people who still want to reach Crucible. Now all they have to do is build copies of Icebreaker, and they can do that easily enough.’

He laughed at them. ‘This ship carries twenty people.’

‘But it could carry more, and they can build as many copies as our industrial base will support. Hundreds across the local caravan – thousands, even. Not enough to bring tens of millions of settlers to Crucible, I agree – but those who don’t want to land can always emigrate to the holoships that don’t plan on stopping. Chiku’s right on this one: something has to be done. Even if all we do is meet the Providers and get cut to shreds. At least they’ll know what to expect, back on Zanzibar.’

Travertine’s statement of solidarity sent a weird shiver through Chiku. ‘I hope we can do something more constructive than being cut to shreds. Bottom line, though, Travertine’s right – if all we do is provide concrete proof that the machines are hostile, we’ll have still helped Zanzibar.’

‘What about my fellow volunteers? Are we all expected to meekly fall in line with this suicide mission?’

‘If I’d had my way,’ Chiku said, not really caring whether the physician believed her or not, ‘this would have been a much smaller expedition, and you’d all have known the stakes up front. But let’s not pretend that the mission you volunteered for was without risk.’

Aziba had returned his attention to the projected representation of Crucible, with its twenty-two attendant sentinels. He stared with troubled fascination, like a man seeing demons in fire.

‘How could we not have known about these… things?’

‘Because we put our faith in Arachne and saw no reason to doubt what she told us,’ Chiku said. ‘Because we made simple human mistakes. Not because we were stupid, but because we were fallible. Clever, but not clever enough.’

‘I don’t mind admitting that I’m little frightened.’

‘If you weren’t,’ Chiku said, ‘I might start wondering about your sanity.’

Chiku told the robot to delay waking Gonithi Namboze and Guochang for a couple of hours. She was drained, taxed by the emotional demands already placed on her by Travertine and the physician.

She also had a new concern about Zanzibar that she needed to resolve before talking to anyone else.

In the first few hours following her revival, she had given little thought to home, being more immediately concerned with the condition of the ship, the reality of Crucible and the delicate task of waking her fellows. True, her thoughts had returned to Ndege and Mposi, but only fleet-ingly – whatever had happened to them since her departure, she would find out soon enough, and any news from Zanzibar was going to be years out of date whether she got to it first or last.

But there was no news. When Icebreaker tried to pick up a transmission from the holoship, there was nothing. Perhaps there was an error in the positional estimate – the caravan might have adjusted its course, putting Zanzibar in a slightly different part of the sky as seen from 61 Virginis f. Chiku swivelled the antenna in a search pattern, allowing for this possible parallax error.

Still there was nothing.

At that point, she reconvened with Travertine and Doctor Aziba, watching the latter closely.

‘I don’t suppose it’s totally unexpected,’ Chiku said, fighting to keep the fear out of her voice. ‘When we left, the constables were in the process of imposing external authority aboard Zanzibar. The hard-liners didn’t approve of this expedition, so they might have enforced a ban on all transmissions directed ahead of the caravan to cut contact with Icebreaker.’

‘Or they’re not there any more,’ Travertine said.

Chiku was grateful for that. It spared her from voicing that almost unspeakable possibility.

‘No accident could have disrupted the entire caravan,’ Aziba answered levelly. ‘We might lose a whole holoship – more than one, if we’re unlucky – to interstellar collision, or a repeat of Pemba. Military action, perhaps. But not dozens, not the whole caravan. Someone would still be out there.’

‘So why the silence?’ Travertine asked.

‘It must be politically imposed,’ Chiku said. ‘That’s the only explanation. The doctor’s right – there’s no way the whole caravan could have been destroyed, and it’s equally unlikely that it’s drifted so far from its predicted position that we can’t pick it up again. All the same, I’m going to widen the sweep – it doesn’t cost us anything.’

‘We don’t need them, anyway,’ Travertine said. ‘They need us – the information we provide – but we’re not dependent on them at all.’

‘I’d still like to know the news from home,’ Chiku replied.

Doctor Aziba nodded. ‘Yes, of course. We all would. You should keep searching. Have you considered waking one of the other specialists? I forget all our backgrounds, but there’s bound to be someone who knows something about deep-space communications.’

‘We know enough between us,’ Travertine said. ‘And if we don’t, Guochang will plug the gaps.’

‘What about our own transmissions?’ Aziba asked. ‘Are we still sending them?’

‘Back to Zanzibar, yes,’ Chiku told him, ‘although we can’t expect a reply to anything we send for two years. Ahead, towards Crucible, we’re transmitting standard handshake protocols for Provider communications, both directly at the planet and into the relay satellite network. There’s been no acknowledgement, but we’re still intercepting the Provider upstream transmissions, the same lying horsepiss they’ve been sending to Zanzibar for decades.’

Aziba said, ‘Perhaps a more direct approach is warranted?’

‘Falling into orbit should do it, I think,’ Chiku said. ‘And if that doesn’t get their attention, we land.’

Chiku had now been awake for six hours. The stiffness had exited her bones and muscles. She was warmer now and free of nausea. Her thought processes felt sharp, racing through possibilities with nervous threshing efficiency. She could have done with a bit less of that.

Crucible had grown visibly larger in that time – her eye alone was now able to make out the greens and blues of the planet’s surface features, as well as the black circles and hyphens caused by the orbiting structures. She could not have told what they were, or that they were hovering in space, but the uncanny regularity of their spacing was enough to signal a distinct and lingering wrongness – the imposition of order and symmetry where none was expected. Icebreaker had already made a small course adjustment, to slide close to one of the pine cones as it curved in for orbit. They had simply chosen the one that required the least expenditure of fuel, judging that the twenty-two forms were essentially identical, at least in their gross details.

Zanzibar had to be out there, she told herself. It could not simply have disappeared, let alone all the other holoships. Even if they had started conducting large-scale PCP experiments, they could not all have suffered a Pemba event at the same time. Not every holoship would have been running the same experiment, or been close enough to another to be wiped out in the same accident. But there were other possibilities, and Chiku felt her mind beginning to run out of control, anxiety fuelling her worst-case scenarios. What about contagion, for a start? Constables moving en masse from world to world would have increased the likelihood of disease propagation. If a large enough percentage of the citizenry were infected, the holoships’ social organisations would begin to collapse, leading to a breakdown of control. Survivors might manage to eke out some miserable kind of subsistence in the darkened social cores, but they wouldn’t have the means to keep up the transmissions. She thought of her children, grubbing around for scraps, slowly turning feral as the holoships sailed on past Crucible, bearing cargoes of savagery to the stars…

But the caravans had been travelling for two centuries without significant loss of life to widespread disease, and the few small outbreaks had been quickly contained, with very few casualties. Coincidences happened, she knew, but it was highly unlikely that a dire contagion had been lurking all that time, only to spring out once Icebreaker was already on its way.

No, the silence could only be political.

But that was good news only in the narrowest of senses, in that it did not preclude the survival of her loved ones. It also meant that things must have taken a sharply authoritarian turn. Noah and the other Assembly members would never have allowed that, not if they were still in some kind of control.

So that was not good at all, either.

Stomach knotted with apprehension, Chiku summoned Travertine and Aziba. ‘It’s time to wake Gonithi and Guochan. I don’t want to throw them into this at the last minute.’

Travertine glanced at Aziba. ‘Both of them at the same time?’

‘Yes. Doctor, are you with me?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because I’ve lied to you, and put you in a significantly more dangerous situation than you were expecting. I’m really sorry it had to happen this way, but it did, and it’s crunch time. If I sense you have any intention of jeopardising our mission, for whatever reason, I’ll have no choice but to stop you. And I really, really, don’t want to have to do that.’

‘How far would you go to stop me?’ Aziba mused.

‘I’ll kill you, if I have to. Or try to, anyway. Yes, I’m capable of it, and there are tools on this ship I could use. It wouldn’t be difficult, especially this far from authority. But I’d really rather not. I like you, and I think you’re going to be very useful to us down the line, so please, please, don’t force my hand. Gonithi and Guochan are going to be just as bewildered and frightened as you were, but we need them on our side just as much as we need you. I’ve lied, yes, but only ever in the best interests of the caravan. Do you care about your people, Doctor Aziba?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘As do I. Passionately. Please believe me when I say that nothing is more important to the continuing welfare of our citizens than the success of this mission. We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba.’

‘That sounds… compelling,’ the physician allowed.

‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Travertine said. ‘You might talk Namboze and Guochan into taking this ship from Chiku and me, but you know what? You’ll still be in exactly the same mess you are now – only there’ll be two fewer brains and bodies to throw at the problem. We need every single one of us to have a hope in hell’s chance of dealing with what’s coming.’

‘Let’s wake them,’ Chiku said.

Aziba said, ‘I can do it. We don’t all need to be here.’

Travertine said sceptically, ‘Leave you alone with Namboze and Guochan?’

‘If you trust me, yes. I give you my word that I’ll state our position to them very honestly. I’ll explain that they’ve been lied to, but that killing you now won’t help their chances of survival.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. If you don’t trust me now, you’ll be looking over your shoulder for ever.’

‘You’re right,’ Chiku said, sighing heavily. ‘It’s either complete trust or nothing at all. Wake them up and give them the good news.’ But after a pause, she said: ‘I still owe them an explanation, face to face.’

‘Go and attend to your work. I’ll call you when Namboze and Guochan have been briefed.’ Chiku opened her mouth to speak, but he raised a silencing finger. ‘I don’t like this situation at all. I’d much rather not be here, and I won’t pretend that I harbour no resentment about the manner in which I was manipulated. But I’m also a physician, and you are all within my duty of care. I believe I’m capable of putting my personal feelings aside and doing my job.’

Chiku nodded. Further talk was superfluous. She realised that she’d chosen well in this man. His ability to speak plainly about his resentment rather than pretend there was none actually made her feel more comfortable. She felt certain he would do as he promised.

‘I have an idea,’ Travertine said.