On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Arachne had been playing her violin. Chiku had never cared for violin music, with its syrupy glissades. She much preferred the discrete, chiming intervals of the kora.

‘I’ve been thinking about your proposal,’ Chiku announced, ‘for the holoships to pass us by.’

Arachne lowered the violin and bow. Her expression conveyed measured hopefulness.

‘You see that it’s for the best?’

‘I see that it serves your immediate needs, which isn’t quite the same thing.’ Chiku watched Arachne’s expression harden. Her mimicry of human gestures was definitely improving with her continued exposure to Chiku and her companions. ‘I’ve spoken to the others,’ Chiku went on, ‘and we’re all of the same opinion.’

‘Which is?’

‘You’ll only be delaying a confrontation a few years or decades down the line – by which time both sides will be better equipped than they are now. Mutual deterrence isn’t a solution, Arachne – we can’t build cooperation on a basis of fear and the possibility of imminent destruction. There has to be a better way – a foundation we can build on for centuries.’

‘Stirring words,’ Arachne said. ‘I almost believe you meant them. The truth is, though, if you had the means of neutralising me, you’d do so without a moment’s hesitation.’ She tucked the violin under her chin, as if preparing to play again, but then she lowered the bow disconsolately. ‘I don’t see the point of discussing this further. If you won’t speak to the caravan, I will do so on your behalf, with words of my choosing.’ She lifted her chin sharply. ‘Which would you prefer?’

‘Whether it’s you or me, they’ll disregard the transmission and do what they were intending to anyway.’

‘From a strictly logical standpoint, then, you have nothing to lose by fulfilling my request.’

And the girl drew the bow across the strings of her violin.

Namboze was the first to notice the alteration in the sky, which began after a long period of cloudlessness. At first Chiku assumed that the change heralded some seasonal variation – dust storms blowing in from another land mass, perhaps, or the arrival of a prolonged period of monsoon-like rains. The skies, usually lilac at twilight, were now a deepening pink, and over the course of a few days – in so far as the progression of time was measurable – the pink ruddied to a vivid, shimmering crimson. During the day, the skies grew fawny and the sunlight took on a sullen, greyed-out quality, as if the world were veiling itself behind layers of gauze. The canopy had dulled into blacks and drabs. Even the sunsets became less colourful as the blanketing effect increased.

It was dust, Namboze and Travertine both agreed, but not blown off some desert – this aerial suspension was much too heavy for that. This was planetary crust, megatonnes of it sucked into the stratosphere.

‘There’s a lot more asteroidal and cometary material in this system than there is back home,’ Namboze said, ‘so planetary impacts are probably much more frequent here than on Earth. A Tunguska event, a once-in-a-century impact by Earth standards, might happen once a decade here, and a dinosaur-killer every five million years, rather than every fifty million. I’d bet money on the fauna having adapted various survival responses for coping with prolonged declines in the incident sunlight. That’s another reason why I want to get out into that forest – with microscopes and sequencers!’

Chiku and Namboze were alone. Arachne still had not allowed more than two people to meet at a time.

‘So maybe Crucible just took a hit,’ Chiku said. ‘If your hypothesis is correct, it was bound to happen sooner or later.’

‘Once in a million years, maybe, rather than once in ten million on Earth. But so soon after we arrived? The timing’s a bit unlikely, don’t you think? She may be messing with our perception of time but I think we can take it as read that we haven’t been here for centuries.’

‘A volcano, then. We mapped volcanoes from orbit and some of them were obviously active. One of them must have blown.’

‘Again, a super-eruption would be unlikely to happen so soon after we got here. It could be a smaller eruption nearby, but that’s still unlikely. Anyway, this has all the characteristics of a world-blanketing event – what Sei-gun would have called a “nuclear winter”.’

Chiku did not press her on the identity of this Sei-gun. ‘So we’re back to square one. Something did hit us.’

‘Yes, but not a piece of rock or ice. I’ve discussed it with Travertine, and we’re in agreement.’

‘About that?’

‘That this was caused by a weapon.’

‘Not possible. We’ve all seen those exhaust signatures – the holoships are still a long way out.’

‘Look, this is so obvious that I’m kicking myself for not seeing it sooner. We’ve all been busy speculating about the kinds of weapons Arachne might use against the holoships – kinetic cannons, seeding rocks along their flight paths – using their kinetic energy against them. But it cuts both ways. From their reference frame, we’re the big object moving through space at several per cent of the speed of light!’

Chiku saw it all then. Frames of reference. Kinetically boosted energies. Entities whose future trajectories could be predicted with numbing accuracy.

Like planets.

‘Twelve per cent,’ she said. ‘Nearly thirteen. That’s how fast the holoships were going before they started slowdown. All they needed to do was throw matter ahead of them, aimed at us.’

‘It wouldn’t have to be a large mass, either. Think of the harm a little asteroid could do, travelling at a few kilometres per second. This impactor was moving at hundreds of thousands of kilometres per second!’

‘Could they aim it that accurately from so far out?’

‘Travertine’s still calculating the probabilities. Let’s suppose they launched a spread of impactors, just to cover their bets. Spatially, they may have had a margin of error. Temporally, their aim may have been much better.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘They knew how fast they were travelling. That’s an easy calculation – you just measure the redshift of a sample of stars and back-compute, then corroborate your calculations with the cosmic microwave background and the radio tick of a few thousand pulsars. They also knew how far their impactor had to travel, and how long it would take to arrive – to within seconds, I’d imagine. The point is, they could choose when to make the impactor hit us. But when equals where. They could also select the spot it would impact by simply delaying its arrival by a few hours – long enough for a different part of Crucible to rotate into view.’

‘Dear god, I hope we’re wrong about this.’

‘I didn’t like it either, but Guochang and Travertine have reached the same conclusion – this atmospheric dust must have been generated by a deliberate act. There’s no way for us to work out exactly where it hit, although it can’t have been too nearby or we’d have felt the impact.’

‘Assuming we didn’t. Would any of us have noticed, up in these towers? Would she have allowed us to notice?’

‘The fact that the sky turned pink makes me inclined to believe that this is the real world,’ Namboze said. ‘It’s a detail you’d never bother with in a simulation. Arachne made no effort to hide it from us, either. She either wants us to know, or doesn’t care – or she has no idea what’s just happened. That thing would have come in fast – if her defences are geared to detect natural impactors, it might have slipped right through without setting off an alarm.’

‘They’ve started the war,’ Chiku said. ‘That’s what this means, doesn’t it? Before we even tried to negotiate. It’s already begun.’