On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FIFTY

Her three living companions were already prepared to leave when she joined them. Travertine, Namboze and Dr Aziba were standing next to an assortment of silver containers: clasp-locked cases with rounded edges and many colourful symbols and dense-printed instructional notices embossed on their sides. Some of the cases were hinged open, revealing padded interiors or ranks of cleverly packaged sliding compartments. Items of equipment ranging from breathing masks to medical supplies had been pulled out of the cases and placed in loose piles on the ground. The cases represented only a tiny proportion of the items they had brought with them on Icebreaker. Then again, four people had modest needs.

Travertine was shrugging vis way into a backpack. ‘What happened? We’ve been ready for an hour, waiting for you. Arachne kept saying you were coming, but we started to wonder.’

‘We should get moving,’ Namboze said. ‘There’s enough here to keep us alive out there for fifteen, maybe twenty days, provided we don’t run into anything really nasty. We’ve been through the boxes and we think we know what we need and what we can’t afford to carry. I can help you sort out a basic kit.’

‘Is something the matter?’ Dr Aziba asked as he adjusted the straps on the bright plastic breather mask currently dangling around his neck. The concentration pushed his features into a chimp-like mask. ‘Where were you, anyway?’

‘You say you’ve been here an hour?’ Chiku asked.

‘Ready for an hour,’ Travertine said. ‘Hard to tell, but it can’t have been far off local dawn when she set us down here, and it must be mid-morning by now. We’ll need to keep track of the time somehow to use our rations properly.’

‘Do you remember being aboard Zanzibar?’

‘Why wouldn’t we?’ Travertine asked, grimacing as ve took the weight of the backpack. ‘When the ship arrives, they can transpond off our implants, home in on us from space. All we have to do is get as far away from Arachne’s installations as possible.’

‘Every kilometre will help,’ Namboze agreed. She was kneeling down, rummaging through the compartments of one of the medical boxes, pulling out colour-coded vials and hypodermic packages. ‘And even if it doesn’t make any difference to our chances, psychologically I’d far rather be moving than sitting still. We all feel that way.’

‘I’ll ask again,’ Dr Aziba said placidly. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘Quite a lot. Something happened. I made something happen. I need to talk about it.’

She had joined her companions in a place she did not recognise from direct experience. It was a domed enclosure, totally transparent, but rather than being set at the top of one of the towers, this one nestled at the base of a tower, down in the forest. The dome’s walls curved under them to form a floor of flexible transparency. Beyond the walls, pressing against it in places, was an abundance of vegetation. The colours were only dimly apparent: muted greens and blues and turquoises, suggesting shades and textures and degrees of glossiness. Chiku saw all manner of architectures of leaf and bloom, of trunk and root and vine and tendril, from the slender and daggerlike to the veinous and synaptic, to the columnar and the elephantine and the grotesque. Even on the brightest of cloudless days, the over-arching layers of canopy would have robbed the sunlight of much of its effect by the time it penetrated to these depths. With the ash cover, the illumination was as meagre as the last gleaming of twilight.

And yet there were openings in the vegetation – artificial tracks or accidental alignments of clearer growth – through which four people might, with difficulty, be able to make some progress. She wondered what her companions expected. A few tens of kilometres a day felt optimistic. But Namboze was right – it was better to be moving than sitting idle, waiting for the next impactor to fall.

A corridor threaded through the dome, and Chiku recalled Namboze’s description of visiting something similar. In one direction it stretched as far as back as Chiku could discern before gloom swallowed her vision. In the other direction, it ran only a short distance before terminating in a flat circular wall. Beyond the disc-like termination she made out an area of clear growth – what she would describe as a glade, had there been sunlight to dapple it.

‘We should get moving,’ Travertine said. But even as ve spoke, ve dropped the backpack. ‘Something’s not right, is it? What is it you know, Chiku?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘Fine, but let’s not make it a long conversation.’

‘I don’t want it to be, but we still need to talk. I think it’s important. Can we sit down for a minute?’

Reluctantly at first, the party convened some of the packing cases into a quartet of makeshift stools.

‘How did you get here?’ Chiku asked, perching on two of the cases.

‘We weren’t here, and then we were,’ Dr Aziba said, ‘just like every other time Arachne’s moved us around.’

‘Have you seen her?’

‘No, but the intention looks pretty self-explanatory,’ Namboze said. ‘These supplies were recovered from Icebreaker…’ She stopped speaking and stared at Chiku. ‘Why are you looking like that? What’s bothering you?’

‘I don’t know, Gonithi.’

‘You could start by telling us what happened,’ Travertine said.

‘Three of the holoships are gone.’ Chiku had to swallow hard before continuing. ‘Ukerewe, Netrani and Sriharikota. She used her weapons against them. As far as I can tell, they were totally destroyed.’

The others absorbed this news with the weary resignation she had been expecting, their expressions grim, but fully accepting the truth of what she was saying. They looked at each other, nodded in mutual understanding.

‘I can’t condone it,’ Dr Aziba said finally. ‘The loss of a single life must always be regretted. But they were given a chance to act differently. After what they started doing to this planet – to us! – I’m afraid my loyalties are with Zanzibar.’

‘They were prepared to poison an entire world,’ Namboze said. ‘The punishment’s harsh, true, but if one of those rocks had landed on Mandala… that would’ve been the single most irresponsible act in the entire history of our species! They had to be stopped.’

‘Stockholm syndrome,’ Travertine said. ‘That’s what this is. We’ve been her hostages for so long, we’ve begun to sympathise with her viewpoint. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t change my opinion. Namboze and Doctor Aziba are right – the bombardment had to be stopped. If it took this appalling act to stop it, that’s still less of a crime than allowing it to continue.’

Chiku could barely look at their faces. ‘You don’t know the whole story yet. She deliberately destroyed only three of the five – she’d run her calculations and concluded that blowing up three ships would be enough to make her point.’

‘And?’ Travertine asked, leaning in to meet Chiku’s gaze.

‘She asked me which two should be saved. She said that if I didn’t give her two names, she’d make the decision herself.’

Dr Aziba said, ‘You can’t blame yourself for her actions, Chiku. She put you in an impossible position – that’s a choice no one should ever be asked to make.’

‘How was she expecting you to choose, anyway?’ Namboze asked. ‘You’re not the machine. You can’t make that sort of decision – none of us could. The holoships were our homes! We might have travelled in Zanzibar, but all of us felt affection for the other ships. Even when they started making life hard for us, we still had friends and loved ones spread across the caravan.’

‘It shows how little she really understands us,’ Dr Aziba said, shaking his head sadly.

‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘It’s you who don’t understand.’ She lifted her chin and met each of her companions’ gazes in turn. ‘She gave me the power to make that choice and I took it. I told her to spare Malabar and Majuli. I made that decision.’

‘You did what?’ Namboze asked.

‘It was the right thing to do. I didn’t want a fucking machine to decide who lived and died. If it’s a crime, let it be my crime.’

‘You had no right to make that decision,’ Namboze said.

Chiku pushed herself up from the cases. ‘I was there. You weren’t. She asked me to choose, and I chose. I couldn’t leave that decision to her, so I told her that Malabar and Majuli could live. And you know what? I’d make that choice again. There are elephants on those holoships. I put them there. They’re depending on me for their survival.’

‘Elephants,’ Dr Aziba repeated, as if he had not heard her correctly the first time.

‘Independent populations split off from Zanzibar’s herds. Majuli took the first group, and I was negotiating for Malabar to take some more when Kappa happened…’ Her voice was on the point of breaking. ‘When all this began.’

‘Elephants,’ Dr Aziba said again. ‘Just to be clear – because I hope very much that I’m misunderstanding something here – you chose elephants over human lives? You didn’t consider saving the holoships with the largest populations, or the ones carrying the greatest quantities of the specialised technologies that we’ll need to live on this world? You based your decision on the fate of some elephants?’

‘You’ve seen the Tantors,’ Chiku said.

‘But these weren’t Tantors,’ Namboze said. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? These were just animals.’

‘We can’t pick and choose. The Tantors came from elephants. I owed them—’

‘You owed them nothing!’ Dr Aziba said, spitting through his teeth. ‘What did she do to you, Chiku?’ And then he was up and grabbing Chiku’s forearms, hard enough that she felt his nails dig into her skin through the fabric of her clothing. ‘You should never have gone along with this! From the moment you woke me on Icebreaker and told me I’d been lied to, I made a decision to trust you, believing that you’d been forced by circumstance into making hard choices for the good of the caravan.’ Aziba shoved her, hard. Chiku lost her balance and fell backwards, legs buckling over the supply cases she had been sitting on. She thumped hard on the upper part of her back, snapping her neck and jarring the air from her lungs.

Physical violence had never been part of her world. For a moment, it was more than she could process.

‘You should have refused,’ Namboze said, looming over Chiku. ‘Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you demand our help in making the decision?’

‘Would that have made it more acceptable to you both?’ Travertine asked.

Chiku tried to push herself from the ground.

‘We should have been party to it,’ the doctor said, planting a foot squarely on Chiku’s belly to keep her on the floor. ‘We should have been consulted!’

‘And what if we all came up with different pairs of names?’ Travertine asked. ‘Would voting on it democratically have made the decision any less repugnant?’

Namboze dived aside – she was kneeling by one of the boxes, digging into it as if looking for something. Chiku tried to get up again, but Aziba increased the pressure of his foot.

‘You agree with us then, Travertine – it was repugnant.’

‘What was repugnant is that she was asked to choose – that was the crime, not the fact that she did as she was asked.’ Ue leaned over and met Chiku’s gaze again. ‘How long did she give you to think about it?’

Chiku coughed. Aziba’s foot pressing on her belly was making it difficult for her winded lungs to recover. ‘Five… five minutes. Three hundred seconds.’

‘So you didn’t have the luxury of being able to weigh all the options,’ Travertine said, ‘or consider all the ethical ramifications.’ Ve paused for a beat. ‘Doctor Aziba – would you mind taking your foot off my friend?’

‘She was our leader on Zanzibar,’ the physician said, steadfastly keeping his foot exactly where it was, ‘but she resigned. And yet, ever since our arrival in this system she’s continued to act as if she has the mandate of leadership! Perhaps some good can come out of this travesty. It gives us the chance we needed to reassess our chain of command!’

‘I did ask you nicely,’ Travertine said.

In the instant of the action, it looked to Chiku as if Travertine had misjudged the swing of vis punch. Unsurprising given that ve had probably never initiated a violent act against another person in vis entire life.

But Travertine’s aim was truer than it looked. Ve had swung with vis right arm, and while Travertine’s fist failed to connect with Aziba’s jaw, vis bracelet did not. Chiku winced at the sound of the impact.

Dr Aziba dropped instantly, clattering into three of the cases. He landed on his back, spreadeagled, one leg hooked over a case, and remained perfectly still.

Relieved of the pressure of the physician’s foot, Chiku pushed herself to standing. She wondered if Dr Aziba might be dead, murdered by a single punch. But Travertine had other, more immediate concerns. Namboze was still digging through one of the medical supply cases, tossing hypodermics and vials aside to form a happy little jumble of different colours, like the contents of a box of crayons. Travertine stomped down hard on the lid, crushing it onto Namboze’s fingers. She yelped, hissed and toppled back onto her haunches, her hand still stuck in the box.

‘What are you looking for?’ Travertine asked. ‘Something to knock Chiku out? Something to put her into a coma?’

‘Surely you can’t be defending her!’ Namboze snarled. ‘She’s done bad things to all of us, but she did the worst to you! She turned you into a monster that children have nightmares about! How can you possibly side with her?’

‘I’m not siding with anyone – I don’t do “siding”.’ But the angry Namboze was not the focus of Travertine’s attention. Ve knelt by the unmoving physician and peeled back his eyelids.

‘Is he dead?’ Chiku asked.

‘Just out cold – I think. He’s the doctor.’

‘You hit him pretty hard.’

‘It felt like the proportionate response under the circumstances.’ Travertine rubbed at vis forearm, squeezing the muscles with a sort of surprised admiration.

Chiku pinched the bridge of her nose and screwed up her eyes. She had a dreadful hammer-pounding-anvil headache. ‘I thought we were better than this.’

‘We’re human. Be thankful we’ve moved on from clubbing each other’s brains out every five minutes.’

Namboze had extricated her hand from the medical case. She tested her fingers one by one. Lines of fury notched her forehead, so neat and regular they might have been scribed into place. ‘This isn’t right.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Travertine agreed. ‘It’s massively wrong, all of it. It’s wrong that we’re hostages of an artificial intelligence, wrong that Guochang is dead, wrong that there are twenty-two mysterious alien machines hovering over us right now, wrong that Chiku was put in a position where she had to make that sick abomination of a decision. And yes, it was wrong of her to take it! But she had three hundred fucking seconds, Namboze. Can you honestly say you’d have done any better? Can any of us?’

Dr Aziba murmured something that shaped itself into a powerful groan as he came around. He reached up to examine the area of his jaw where Travertine’s impact had already begun to draw a vivid purplish discolouration.

‘What just happened?’

‘Democracy,’ Travertine said. ‘Now can we please get on with the day? We have a long walk ahead of us.’

Namboze, still massaging her bruised fingers, knelt down next to the physician.

‘Do it your way, then, Travertine. We’ll move out in two parties. Aziba and I can travel alone.’

‘No,’ Chiku said. ‘We do this together or not at all. You’re right to be angry with me. Travertine said it best: it’s all wrong, all of it. I don’t regret my decision – what would be the point? But she should never have let me make it, and I shouldn’t have allowed her to convince me it was for the best. But I did what I did, and now we’re here, and we need each other – even more so now that Guochang’s gone.’

‘I don’t need anything you’ve got left to offer,’ Namboze said, with a dismissive shake of her head.

‘Think about it rationally for a moment, Gonithi,’ Chiku persisted. ‘We each have a unique skill set. You know the ecology better than the rest of us. Aziba’s the only one who can keep the four of us alive – god alone knows what’ll get into our bloodstreams if we so much as scratch ourselves out there. And Travertine, well… ve’s Travertine. We need ver.’

‘And you?’ Doctor Aziba asked. ‘What do you bring to our merry party, exactly?’

‘I’m going to see us through this. There’s a ship on its way. I want to be there when it lands.’

‘That’s all?’ Namboze asked.

‘She gave you your answer,’ Travertine said, stooping to pick up vis backpack.

Another voice said: ‘It’s good that you’re ready. I must inform you, though, that there’s been a development.’

As one they turned to face Arachne. She was standing at the threshold of the long glass corridor as if she had been there the whole time, watching their little kerfuffle.

‘What kept you?’ Travertine asked.

‘I was otherwise occupied. I also sensed that my presence might have been more of a hindrance than a benefit, at least while you worked through your differences.’

‘What could possibly occupy all of you?’ Namboze asked. ‘You’re an artilect – you can be anywhere you wish – in more than one place at the same time, if you like.’

‘Have you noticed,’ Arachne asked, ‘that it’s become much darker than it was only half an hour ago?’

A glance through the glass wall of the tunnel confirmed her words, although the change had come upon them so gradually that Chiku had barely noticed it. Perhaps Travertine had been wrong about it being dawn when the three of them had been brought here, and the sun had only just dipped below the horizon. Perhaps another bombardment had increased the thickness of the dust blanketing the planet.

But Chiku sensed that it was neither of these things.

‘What’s happened now?’

‘It’ll be much easier if you see it for yourselves. We should have a clear view of the sky a little way from here. Are you prepared for exposure to Crucible’s atmosphere?’

‘Came twenty-eight light-years to live in it,’ Travertine said. ‘Might as well start getting used to it.’

Ve reached down for a breather mask and tossed it to Chiku.

They ran through the basic safety tests in five minutes, and then Arachne led them to the flat circular cap at the end of the short corridor. Chiku had assumed it was made of the same glasslike material as the walls, but as Arachne pushed her hand against it, the material neither buckled nor resisted, but permitted her hand to travel through into the air beyond.

‘A containment membrane,’ she said. ‘There would have been interfaces like this at all the city gates, allowing easy passage in and out. I don’t suppose it really matters now if Crucible’s airs and microorganisms infiltrate this space, but we may as well leave it in place and pass through as intended. Follow me. I’ll be waiting on the other side.’

‘No,’ Chiku said, resting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Gonithi should go first.’

‘She’s probably been out there many times already, so I won’t really be the first,’ Namboze said.

‘Even so,’ Chiku said, nodding, ‘she’s a robot and so she doesn’t really count. This is the world you’ve waited for all these years – be the first human to set foot on it, Gonithi.’

‘What are you waiting for, woman?’ Travertine said. ‘It really is the opportunity of a lifetime – don’t waste it.’

Namboze hesitated, as if she considered it a point of principle to argue against Chiku, but something in her relented. She mouthed a word Chiku did not catch, eased the breather mask fully into place and pushed a hand and a leg through the containment membrane. The material oozed around her with gluey intelligence as she pushed her face and body through, then snapped back to an unbroken membrane with an audible pop. Namboze was on the other side now.

She knelt down and touched the mossy green surface under her feet. Her hands were gloved, but Chiku knew that the fine, translucent fabric was wired for the same kind of haptic feedback built into spacesuits. She would be feeling every nuance of texture and temperature.

Wordlessly, Namboze stood and walked a few paces towards one of the larger plants. Its broad leaves were fat with a lateral groove and a kind of leathery dimpling, the whole leaf drooling like some huge salacious tongue. Namboze stroked it, first with her fingers and then with the back of her hand.

‘The stupid thing,’ she said, voice only slightly muffled by the mask and the intervening containment membrane, ‘would be to remove my gloves. But they’re not picking up anything obviously toxic.’

‘Doctor Aziba,’ Chiku said. ‘Would you like to go next?’

He was still nursing the liverish bulge along the line of his jaw, trying to find a way to settle the mask over the bruise without chafing it too much, but he nodded and pushed through, more confidently and quickly than Namboze had. She had already moved on to the next plant and was fingering a spray of shark-mouthed flowers, or flower analogues. One of them snapped suddenly, Namboze only just withdrawing her fingers in time.

‘I didn’t imagine those insects I saw a while back,’ she commented, beckoning the physician over to her side. ‘Fly-traps don’t evolve unless there are flies to eat.’

Travertine was the next through. The ecology of this world, Chiku guessed, fascinated ver much less than the mere fact of being here. Geology had shaped Crucible, and biology had greened it, but physics had brought Travertine across twenty-eight light-years to stand on its surface. Ve stood apart from the other two, hands at vis side, as if in private communion with some force Chiku could not see.

Chiku was reluctant to break the moment.

‘You should go through,’ Arachne said.

So she joined them on the other side, and while she waited for the girl to join them, she reached down and scooped up a fistful of olive mulch and squeezed it until it bled moisture. She opened her hand and watched the smear of alien soil avalanche off her self-cleaning glove.

‘We should press on,’ Arachne said. ‘There’s an area of open ground a little way from here that’ll give us the best view.’

‘The best view of what, exactly?’ Dr Aziba asked, sweat already prickling his scalp. It was as hot and humid as Chiku had expected, and they had barely begun to move.

‘I took the liberty of repeating your transmission to the holoships, Chiku. That plus the demonstration of my capabilities appears to have had some effect at last. Malabar and Majuli have disengaged their slowdown engines, and the frequency of impactors has dropped sharply. I find both gestures encouraging.’

‘Will you allow them free passage?’ Namboze asked.

‘If they don’t make any more violent overtures.’

‘We can do better than that,’ Chiku said, picking her way through a tangle of python-thick roots. ‘Re-establish dialogue, negotiate terms for a full slowdown once they’ve passed through the system and out the other side. I won’t abandon them to interstellar space. Or Zanzibar, for that matter. We’ll find a way to bring the citizens back to the system, even if we have to do it a shuttle at a time.’

‘For the moment,’ Arachne said, ‘there’s a more pressing consideration.’