On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

She followed him to the cockpit. Travertine had drawn the next sleep shift, so Chiku sent Dr Aziba to wake ver.

‘Rockets,’ Namboze said. ‘Coming up fast, from several launch sites. Mostly correlated with those areas of cleared terrain we flagged earlier.’

‘What type of rockets?’

Guochang directed her attention to one of the rising vehicles, which was already out of the atmosphere. ‘Something like a Chibesa engine, the old kind, judging by its emission signature. No surprise, really – that’s one of the core technologies included in their construction files, ready for them to access when they came out of the seed packages. They needed to be able to get into space, to service the satellites and construct the way-stations. The vehicles are small, compared to us, but there are six of them, and we don’t have anywhere near enough fuel to outrun them. I’m not even sure we have enough time to break orbit and attempt a re-entry.’

‘Then we won’t try,’ Chiku said, with a kind of calm fatalism. ‘We have to send our findings back to Zanzibar immediately – we came to see what kind of welcome was waiting for us, and this might be our last chance to report anything useful.’

‘I don’t think they’ll attack us,’ Guochang said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, but I can make some educated assumptions. Another technology included in the seed files was a short-range weapons system designed to defend against space-based threats, such as asteroids. The kinetic cannons were supposed to be up and running by the time the cities were finished.’

‘And your “educated assumptions” aren’t undermined by the fact that they never made any cities?’ Namboze said.

Guochang shrugged. ‘I can’t be sure, that’s true, but the kinetic cannons would have provided a viable basis for more effective weapons. I think we’d be dead by now if destroying us was their intention.’

‘And you didn’t think to mention the possibility that they might be armed before they started shooting at us?’ Chiku asked.

‘And you didn’t mention the true purpose of this mission until it was much too late for any of us to back out,’ Guochang pointed out reasonably.

Dr Aziba and Travertine squeezed themselves into the already crowded cockpit.

‘Ah,’ Travertine said, taking in the schematic of the rockets converging fast on Icebreaker’s position.

‘Perhaps this is their way of saying hello,’ Chiku said, in a doomed attempt to lighten the mood.

She had already composed a self-contained statement about the purpose of Icebreaker’s mission and her fears regarding the Providers, ready to be squirted back to the caravan at a moment’s notice, but they still had a few minutes before the rockets were perilously close. She accessed the earlier statement and began speaking, adding an addendum.

‘Chiku here. We’re currently experiencing first contact with the Providers in the form of some ships closing on us, launched from the surface. There’s been no acknowledgement of our space-to-surface transmissions, friendly or otherwise, so we have no idea whether their intent is hostile or not. Guochang thinks we’d already be dead if they wanted that, so… ’ Here she faltered. ‘It could go either way at this point. If you don’t hear from me again, I suggest you assume the worst. In that event, you’ll have two choices – stay well away from Crucible, or risk engagement with the Providers. Whichever option you choose, you’ll be shouldering a huge responsibility, an obligation not just to our citizenry but to the billions of people we left behind in the solar system. It doesn’t matter if we panic and overreact – we’re just a drop in the ocean – but the truth about the Providers can’t get back to Earth. It would be catastrophic – the collapse of every certainty that defines most of our lives. If people turn against the Providers, they’ll be turning against the Mechanism – and if the Mechanism decides to retaliate, we’re done for. That can’t happen. Whatever you think of me, please believe this one truth: the knowledge about Crucible is simply too dangerous to spread. It has to stay with us – with the caravan – and go no further.’

‘You’d better wrap that up,’ Travertine said quietly. ‘They’ll be on us in about two minutes, maybe less.’

Chiku closed the transmission, offered a silent prayer to fate, and then committed her message to space via a narrow beam aimed at their best guess for the caravan’s coordinates, and also in a broader signal that would allow for a high margin of error in their estimates.

It was done. No force in the universe could catch up with that signal now.

She thought she would feel relieved, having finally unburdened herself of this secret, which could only help her reputation – presuming anyone still cared or indeed was still alive to debate it. But all she felt was an emptiness beyond emptiness, like the phase transition between one state of vacuum and the next. They could absolve her, if they wished, but she had no authority to forgive herself. She had been a fool to think it would be that easy.

She moved to the cockpit window, bracing herself for the arriving ships – or missiles. Two of them were very close now, but they were slowing, not accelerating, and at the last moment they braked hard enough to have killed any human passengers. They came to a halt on either side of the lander, two identical craft about half the size of Icebreaker. They were tapering cylinders, fluted like a wine glass, with a blunt, chisel-like nose. The thick end obviously contained the main engine parts, but apertures and vents elsewhere in the ships’ hulls might have been for steering or retro-rocket functions. They were coloured a slightly lustrous slate grey, and there were no windows or distinguishing markings.

For several minutes they just sat there. Then two more of the ships completed their burn and assumed orientation above and below the lander. Chiku saw nothing to distinguish these from the first two – nor, when the fifth and six had arrived, was there anything to mark these from the first four. The final pair fell into position aft and foreward of Icebreaker, so that the lander was bracketed from all sides. There had never been any prospect of fleeing the vehicles, but it was out of the question now.

Chiku and her companions waited. Guochang could offer no protocols for this situation. There was nothing more they could do to announce their presence and signal their willingness to communicate.

Between one moment and the next the cockpit filled with intense red light. At first Chiku squinted. The shutters were lowering on some automatic reflex, but she ordered them to remain open. The light was bright but not blinding. It pulsed and strobed and fell into shifting grids and furrows. Occasionally it achieved a very tight focus, almost too bright to look at. They watched intense little knots of it beetle over the window glass.

‘They’re mapping us,’ Guochang diagnosed, although the others had already reached a similar conclusion. ‘Optical lasers, projected from all six directions. They must be building up a complete three-dimensional image of the ship – laser tomography!’

Chiku realised that his earlier tongue-tied state had been as much the result of enthusiasm as of fear.

‘Surely they already knew what to expect,’ Dr Aziba said. ‘They knew we were coming – they’re the ones who’ve been lying, not us!’

‘Maybe they need to make sure we’re who we appear to be,’ Namboze said.

Chiku found herself nodding. ‘Yes. They can’t be too careful. They’ve had no direct contact with humans before – as far as we know, at least – and we’ve made enough alterations to the lander that it won’t match anything in their files.’

The red lights snapped off abruptly.

Chiku and her crew floated in silence, waiting for something to happen. But the six ships were holding station, mute as rocks. Chiku suspected that the ships were probably specialised robotic devices, self-contained and indivisible, each a kind of Provider in its own right. Guochang had already alerted her to the fact that the machines could assume many forms: the huge, stalking forms they manifested on Earth and Venus shapes not the only anatomy open to them. And given the length of time these machines had been acting without human supervision, it was possible – probable, even – that they had devised many specialised forms that owed nothing to the functional templates in the original seed packages. Adaptative speciation, Guochang said, grinning at the very idea.

‘Something’s happening,’ Travertine said.

But they had all seen it. The ships were closing in, reducing their respective distances from Icebreaker. The motion was not fast enough to look like an attempt to crush the lander, but still Chiku feared the worst. They had no weapons, no defences beyond the hull’s normal integrity. It had been difficult enough selling the concept of an exploratory mission to the Assembly – she doubted even her seasoned diplomacy could have persuaded them to turn the lander into a warship.

But the ships stopped again when they were almost touching Icebreaker’s skin, so close that no easy view was possible from the windows. Chiku called up a mosaic of exterior images grabbed from the lander’s eyes and they watched, fascinated, as the six ships opened portions of their hulls, cunning as Chinese boxes. Long articulations of machinery elbowed out of the holes, quick as striking snakes, angling and swivelling with disarming speed. A node of light brighter than the sun glowed at the end of each arm and shaded from white into violet. Chiku flinched as the shutters descended but did not tell them to stop this time. The articulated arms were cutting through the lander’s hull everywhere the light touched, and a bright-pink smear hyphenated Chiku’s vision.

‘Fusion torches, maybe,’ Travertine said. ‘Or maybe a very compact Chibesa reaction. The clever, clever things.’

‘We should move to the caskets,’ Namboze said, unimpressed with this machine-centric line of thinking. ‘No time to get into suits.’

But the Providers were not trying to cut their way in, Chiku realised. They were trimming the lander’s aerodynamic extremities without compromising its pressurised core. They sliced through wings and fin with surgical speed and precision, then made some other cuts that served no immediately obvious purpose. Finally they packed away their cutting arms, sealing up their hulls with the same swiftness as the arms had been deployed, and a moment after that the six ships moved closer still and clamped on to Icebreaker with some magnetic or mechanical purchase that felt as firm and immovable as solid rock.

And then the Provider rockets applied thrust, much more gently than when they had arrived, and Icebreaker and its imprisoning escort fell out of orbit into the scorch of atmosphere.

Chiku and her crew buckled into acceleration couches, but the robots took care of their human guests, never imposing a load exceeding one and a half gees. Chiku dared to hope that this was more than accidental. Perhaps Guochang’s intuition had been right all along, that the Providers would already have done them harm, had that been their intention.

Icebreaker had been damaged – it could not possibly have entered the atmosphere under its own control – but most of its sensors and positional devices were still functioning. They were descending from equatorial orbit, following an arc that deviated only slightly to the south of their original ground-track. They had been passing over open ocean when the machines had clamped on, and shortly after they had traversed a quilt of islands spanning about twenty degrees of latitude. It was day. They pushed deeper into air, losing speed and altitude. Now they were over open ocean again, about a thousand kilometres east of Mandala. They were now deep enough into the atmosphere that the sky had colour – a deepening pastel blue, horsetailed with clouds. The blue gained intensity as they descended. Through the gauze of air, to her untrained eye, Sixty One Virginis f seemed exactly as colourless and hot as the Lisbon sun, though visibly larger. They could live here, she thought, given half a chance.

The ocean had looked glass-flat from space and leathery from high altitude, like an expensive blue textile stretched across the globe. They were much lower now, and Chiku made out the swell and chop of heavy seas. It was unmistakably liquid now, something you could drown in. Much bigger than this little wounded ship. The foam on the swell was white, shading into a faint pistachio green – it made her think of flavours of whipped ice-cream, and ice-cream made her think of Belém and seagulls and Pedro Braga, the life and times of Chiku Yellow. The water itself was much greener than blue, a kind of salty turquoise veined with opals and ultramarines. The algal load was much higher than it had ever been in Earth’s seas. The waters of Crucible were a brimming matrix of floating organisms, as dense as soup and as layered as a Martian canyon.

They cruised lower still. Reefs chiselled through shallowing seas, edged with long lines of breakers. Here and there, sharp-sided islands pierced the ocean like green pyramids. Chiku even saw a partially active volcano near the horizon, burping out a Morse message of muddy-brown clouds.

And then there were Providers rising from the sea, four of them, easily as big as those she had seen on Earth. They stood at the points of an invisible cross, bending their mantis-bodies into the sky so that seawater came off them in thunderous curtains. The rockets slowed and stopped, hovering in the middle of the four Providers, and then completed their descent to the water. Only at the last moment was Icebreaker released and allowed to splash the rest of the way down. The rockets broke formation and peeled away on six independent arcs.

Icebreaker had been designed to float and the changes imposed on it in space had not affected its seaworthiness, so the lander bobbed easily on the swell. Chiku extricated herself from the acceleration couch, steadying herself as a wave tilted the floor. Water blurred the windows. This was not how she had imagined their arrival.

‘I wish they’d say something,’ Dr Aziba said. ‘Anything – it doesn’t matter what.’

‘Maybe they’ve forgotten how to talk,’ Travertine said.

They were tripping over each other, racing from one watery window to the next. A large percentage of the hull was submerged, but Chiku did not think they were taking on enough water to cause difficulties.

‘They’re moving,’ Namboze said. ‘Guochang – are we still transmitting those handshake protocols?’

‘Yes – for all the good it’s doing!’

‘These aren’t really Providers,’ Chiku said. ‘They look like them, but they’re under Arachne’s control. We should assume she’s here, puppetting everything.’

‘Then perhaps we should ask Arachne what she wants!’ Aziba said, and his voice had a mildly hysterical edge.

Something clanged against the hull, followed immediately by a ghastly scraping sound, metal on metal, as if an anchor were being dragged along the outside of the lander. Chiku hopped between the lander’s public eyes until she had a satisfactory view of proceedings. One of the towering Providers had extended a tentacle tipped with a heavy circular fitting that looked like an electromagnet. The Provider was sliding it up and down the hull like a physician’s stethoscope.

The tentacle halted sharply. There was silence for a moment as the cabin rocked and pitched. They were all breathing much too fast.

Chiku was weighing the likelihood that the tentacle was holding a listening device when the circular thing started drilling. The hideous, tooth-grinding sound intensified and rose in pitch as the drill spun ever faster. Sparks catherine-wheeled into the sea and the lander shuddered under the assault. Chiku glanced at her companions. She had nothing to offer, no reassurances or suggestions. She had brought them to this, and now she was powerless to protect them.

‘We could still return to the caskets,’ Namboze said.

‘We could play charades,’ Travertine said. ‘It’ll achieve as much.’

The drilling continued. Once or twice the machine stopped, and when it started up again the pitch was different, as if it had switched cutting tools. Chiku agreed with Travertine – they could go into the caskets or don their suits, but it would only delay the inevitable, whatever that turned out to be. In bleak despair, she thought of suicide pills. They should have brought something like that, or devised a protocol authorising the medical robot to euthanise them quickly and painlessly should the need arise.

When the machine finally broke through the hull, it did so with a much smaller cutting tool than Chiku had been expecting. A circle of the inner hull about the circumference of her thigh gained a sparking rim and then dropped smoking to the floor. Immediately machinery began to bustle through the still-glowing aperture. Chiku’s crew backed away from the point of entry, squeezing against walls and bulkheads on the opposite side of the cockpit. The thing protruding from the hole was an arm with a flowerlike appendage on the end, finely perforated. It swung around, apparently locking on to each of them in turn.

A hissing sound issued from the nozzles, accompanied by some kind of colourless, odourless gas.

‘The masks,’ Chiku said, already knowing it was too late for that. The masks were one feature of their sketchy contingency plan for surface exposure, in the event that the Providers had not built anything that could be pressurised for human habitation. They were tucked in a locker somewhere at the back of the habitation volume, too far away to be of any use now. She was already feeling thick-headed. Part of her wanted to fight the gas, but another part did not think it mattered. The gas would get them anyway, regardless of what they did.

She slipped into unconsciousness watching the flower wave back and forth, spraying its contents into the air.