On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FIVE

Chiku and Namboze went to the nearest transit point and requested pod conveyance to Kappa. When the pod arrived, it brought four workers who would soon be suiting up and going outside. The workers disembarked and Chiku and Namboze boarded and took opposite facing seats. The pod gathered speed, smooth-bored rock rushing past its airtight canopy.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Chiku told the younger woman.

‘Nor do you.’

‘I’m old enough to take some risks – and some responsibility. How old are you, Gonithi?’

‘Thirty-eight.’

‘In absolute years?’

‘Yes. I was born thirty-eight years ago.’

‘Then you’ve only ever known Zanzibar.’ Chiku shook her head as if this were some strange and miraculous condition, like the ability to part waves or turn base metals into gold. ‘No skipover intervals?’

‘I haven’t applied, and at my age I doubt there’d be any point.’

‘I still can’t get my head around the idea that there are grownup people walking around who’ve never lived anywhere but the holoship.’

Namboze produced a shrug. ‘It’s normal enough to me. This is my world, just as Crucible will be my world when we get there. What was all that about, by the way?’

‘All what?’

‘Well, two things. I wasn’t sure whose side to take when you started talking about Travertine.’

‘Travertine’s a pretty divisive figure. Ve’s a friend of mine – or was, I suppose. When ve was last in trouble, I was one of those who pushed for a lighter punishment. The issue split the assembly – Sou-Chun was among those who felt we needed to make a clearer example of ver, if only to keep the rest of the local caravan happy.’

Namboze brooded on this for a few seconds. ‘Weren’t you and Sou-Chun political allies at one time?’

‘We’re not exactly enemies, even now. I’ve known Sou-Chun for longer than you’ve been alive, and we have a lot in common. Sure, we had our differences over Travertine. And then there was that whole stupid business over what to do with the high-capacity lander – whether we should keep it or dismantle it and make room for something else. But it’s nothing, really.’ In her mind, she added: You’ll see how it is, when you’ve played at politics a little longer. Aloud, she said, ‘I still have a lot of respect for Sou-Chun.’

The pod swerved sharply into a different tunnel and Chiku’s stomach tingled. They were travelling against Zanzibar’s spin, counteracting it to a degree.

‘What if this mess turns out to be something to do with Travertine?’

‘It won’t. Everything that went on in Kappa was under tight control. All the research programmes. Improved energy conversion and storage, better skipover protocols, more efficient recycling and repurification techniques. Rehearsal of methods that will serve us well when we land on Crucible. Agriculture, water management, low-impact terraforming. God, I sound like a politician, don’t I? But that kind of thing, anyway. Even simulations of what we can expect when we start hands-on investigation of Mandala.’

‘Nothing fundamental, then?’

‘After Pemba? Good grief, no. We’re not fools, Gonithi. I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.’

Presently the pod slowed as it approached one of Kappa’s access stations. It was snug in the bedrock out of which the chamber had been hollowed, and provided its automatic pressure seals had closed, there was no further risk of exposure to vacuum.

Chiku and Namboze stepped out of the pod. The atrium was as busy as the docking station, but there was also a sense of subdued resignation, of people going through the motions. And indeed as Chiku looked around, she saw rescue workers, citizen volunteers, medical teams and assembly members. But no one who looked as if they had just been pulled out the rubble, or whatever was left inside Kappa. The triage teams seemed bewildered, at loose ends.

Chiku reminded herself that the incident had really only just happened – less than an hour ago they were still in space, waiting to dock. Why, she wondered, did the brain insist on inducing this time-dilation effect during periods of intense emotional stress? Why could it not bestow equivalent favour during Mposi and Ndege’s birthdays?

Chiku and Namboze found a local coordinator and volunteered their services. They were shown to a staging area where suits were being issued. Some were coming fresh out of storage; others were being recycled as work teams emerged from a stint inside Kappa. Several of the suits came equipped with an extra pair of teleoperable arms, mounted at waist level, for which special operational training was required. More suits were arriving from elsewhere in Zanzibar, riding the pods under autonomous control then offering themselves up for use. They walked around headless, helmets tucked under their arms.

Namboze was in her suit, ready to go, needing only trivial adjustments – a glove-and boot-swap, that was all – while Chiku was still struggling to find a torso section that did not feel too tight around the waist or chafe under her armpits. Finally she was done, helmet locked down, the visual field stripping away all unnecessary distractions. The suit’s power-assist made movement effortless.

Chiku and Namboze emerged through a portcullis-like airlock into the ruins of Kappa at the top of a gently sloping ramp leading down to the chamber’s true floor. In the community cores, the pod-terminal ramps were often lined with flagpoles, benches and bright-painted concessions. But not here.

Kappa was now darker than any of the thirty-five other chambers Chiku had visited in Zanzibar. Even at night, when the sky became a bowl of simulated stars, there would still have been lights from buildings and street lamps. Now the entire chamber had been enucleated, gouged clean like an eye socket. She might as well have been staring into the void between galaxies.

The aug dropped a faint overlay across Chiku’s visual field. Compiled from Zanzibar’s own memory of itself, it revealed roads and structures, bridges and underpasses, subsurface tunnels and ducts, possible refuges for survivors. Everything was colour-coded and annotated. The overlay was updating constantly as the other search parties made their own reports and improved the aug’s real-time picture of the chamber.

Chiku was glad of it. She had visited Kappa a few times but did not know it anywhere near as well as the residential and administrative chambers where she spent most of her days.

‘How are your eyes, Gonithi?’ Chiku asked.

‘Fine enough now.’ Namboze paused. ‘Wait a moment. Adjusting my amplification.’

Chiku did likewise. It took an effort of will to remember the subvocal aug commands, so little did she use them. She swept her vision across the blackness and pointed. ‘Some lights over there, moving. Must be the sweep team from the next entrance along.’

They walked down the ramp, the luminous patterning of their own suits casting two moving puddles of light as they descended. Chiku activated her crown-mounted lamp and swept the beam before her. It glanced off the sides of low, rectangular, mostly windowless buildings, reaching away on either side of a narrow thoroughfare. Some of the buildings appeared superficially intact, but many were now ruined: torn apart by the blast and decompression, or crumpled under the debris that had come raining down on them in the moments after the blowout. The thoroughfare was littered with junk: huge, scab-like chunks of wall cladding; mangled machines of unidentifiable origin; the corpses of uprooted and fallen trees; and the rubble and flattened carcasses of destroyed buildings. And nowhere a light or hint of life, save that provided by the rescue parties.

They reached the base of the ramp and began picking their way along the thoroughfare. Chiku’s suit was sniffing the environment for human life-signs, taking care to ignore Namboze and the other searchers. So far, nothing. They pushed on, the thoroughfare connecting with another. They reached one of the buildings on their search list. On the overlay it was outlined in blue, pulsing gently – a white cube with doors and windows on the lowest floor, but otherwise blank. A tree, uprooted from elsewhere, impaled its roof. A mass of house-sized debris had collapsed against the aft-facing wall. Otherwise the building’s integrity looked good.

‘This is Chiku,’ she said, calling back to the search coordinators in the pod terminal. ‘Gonithi and I have reached our first target building. The door’s still closed – doesn’t look as if anyone’s opened it before us. We’re going in.’

‘Tag it on your way out,’ the coordinator told her. ‘And watch your step in there.’

‘We will,’ Chiku replied.

Only a handful of buildings in Kappa were capable of retaining air in the event of decompression, so those were the first to be searched. Most of the damage appeared to have been caused by the blowout rather than the flash that preceded it. Chiku had no intention of voicing theories in the junior politician’s presence, but it was beginning to look unlikely that the blast had originated inside Kappa itself. If the force of an explosion within Kappa had been sufficient to punch right through Zanzibar’s skin – through tens of metres of solid rock – there would be nothing left within the chamber.

Therefore the blast could only have originated in the chamber’s skin.

An airlock protected the building, but it had not retained atmosphere. Chiku and Namboze searched the pitch-black interior – a maze of corridors and bioscience laboratories, judging by the glass-walled rooms they passed – until they found their way to the rear of the structure, where its shell had been pierced by debris. They found bodies on the second floor: a woman slumped in a corridor, still clutching research notes – Chiku imagined the gale tearing the air from her lungs, the life from her body, but somehow she had held on to those notes. Two people were still seated on high stools at their desks – the blast of decompression had shoved their equipment and notes to one end of the table, like a bar being cleared for a brawl, but somehow they remained upright at their posts. On the next floor, a young man lay in a corridor, not far from a lavatory. They found another person sprawled halfway down the connecting staircase, her leg broken.

Judging by their postures none of these people had been trying to get to safety. Chiku doubted that there had been more than a couple of seconds of awareness before the air roared out. Unconsciousness would have followed very swiftly, followed by death. She doubted that there had been time for fear.

Just surprise.

Chiku and Namboze tagged the bodies’ locations. Dedicated medical teams would arrive in time to preserve the corpses in vacuum with immense and loving care. Non-invasive methods would be used to assess neural damage. If there was even the slightest possibility of resurrection, the bodies would be shipped downstream to one of the holoships with sufficiently advanced medical techniques to carry out the process.

They tagged the airlock as they exited and moved on.

Their route to the next building brought them fearfully close to the wound in the world. A block ahead, the thoroughfare and its lines of flanking research buildings simply ended. The ground wrenched down, cracked and fissured, arcing and steepening to vertical. The wound was circular, maybe four hundred metres across. They climbed a ramp to get a better view, and looked right down into a circle of stars and blackness.

Shafts and tunnels and service ducts threaded Zanzibar’s skin. They glowed in different colours on the overlay, coded for function and annotated for age, origin and destination. Many were disused or mothballed. Some were still weeping air or fluid – white or ghost-blue secretions cataracting into darkness. A tiny, trifling amount compared to the total resource load of the holoship, but it pained Chiku as much as the sight of her own blood would have.

Crucible was still a very long way off.

‘What was here?’ Namboze asked, indicating the missing terrain with a sweep of her lit-up arm.

Chiku knew. She had already consulted the suit’s map. ‘Various things. But the main one was Travertine’s physics lab.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.’

Namboze was uncowed by Chiku’s testy tone. ‘The explosion, whatever it was, must have started down in that bedrock, don’t you think?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘There’d be a lot more damage to the surface structures, if it had begun above ground.’

Namboze’s conclusion matched Chiku’s, but that didn’t make her like it any better.

‘We’ll leave the explanation to the specialists, Gonithi,’ she said firmly. ‘Our job’s to look for survivors.’

She was glad that their search assignment took them no closer to the edge. They located and searched another building a few blocks from the first, standing on its own in what would have been an area of gently stepped wooded parkland, had most of the trees not been plucked from the ground. The building’s peeled-back roof had allowed atmosphere to vent from most of its levels, and they found no survivors on any of the airless floors. The basement – which had maintained pressure despite the loss of the roof – contained only a mindless floor-scrubbing machine still going about its duties.

The day had already brought more bodies, more evidence of human mortality, than Chiku had confronted in her entire life. But on some numb level she knew they had been lucky. Many of Kappa’s laboratories and research facilities required only a skeleton staff. Some of them, judging by the reports coming in from the other search parties, had been running on a purely automated basis. Experiments in plant nutrition, soil hydration and so on, once established, could be set to run unsupervised.

Yet the scale of destruction here was still almost unthinkable, and the loss of life might tally in the high hundreds or even low thousands once all the buildings had been searched. By any measure, this was a tragedy. But it could have been so much worse, had it happened in one of the densely populated chambers. Tens of thousands, easily. A civic catastrophe to equal almost anything that had happened since departure.

So they had been fortunate. But it was something in Kappa that had made this happen in the first place. And Travertine’s research complex had been precisely at the epicentre.

Chiku felt a coiled apprehension deep inside her. She knew this was not going to end well.

For any of them.

‘Where’s the next structure?’ Namboze asked.

‘Over that way,’ she said. ‘Those two linked domes. I’d best check in with the coordinators, though – we’re already a little behind schedule, so they may decide to pull us back in before we get too tired.’

‘It’s an emergency, Representative Akinya – won’t they be expecting us to show some initiative?’

Privately Chiku agreed. According to the schematic, they were looking at one of the oldest structures in Kappa, dating all the way back to the years before departure. Two domes, linked together – she thought of the soap bubbles that Mposi and Ndege liked to make. From their present angle, it appeared that the building had sustained damage to only one of the two domes, where a piece of the chamber’s ceiling had dropped onto it, cracking it like an eggshell. There would be airtight doors inside it, if the building was as old as the schematic claimed – they were a common feature in the older buildings, constructed when there was still a strong psychological need to defend against cavern blowout. In recent years, codes had been relaxed. The newer buildings rehearsed the architectural principles that would make sense on Crucible, rather than within a hollowed-out rock light-years from any sun.

They found a door and cycled through. There was pressure on the other side, at seven-tenths of normal atmospheric. Chiku studied the reading carefully, until it was beyond doubt that the air was slowly draining away. A rough calculation told her that the building would not be capable of supporting life for much more than twenty minutes.

‘Seems unlikely that there are going to be survivors,’ she said, ‘but we’ll look anyway. The air pressure’s dropping quickly, though, so we’ll need to be quick about it.’

‘Can I make a suggestion, Chiku?’

‘Of course, Gonithi.’

‘It’ll be much quicker if we search different areas. Our suits will remain in contact, so we’ll know if either of us runs into trouble. We’ll be able to get to each other quickly enough if there’s a problem.’

‘I’m not sure we should split up.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

Debating the point further would only waste more precious time, so they quickly agreed on a division of effort: Namboze would search the upper levels of the intact dome, Chiku the lower levels.

The building was very obviously another laboratory, and although the aug remained mute as to its precise function, they had clearly been conducting some kind of physics or chemistry experiments. The high-ceilinged rooms were full of hulking, kettle-shaped machines, fed with pipes and conduits of impressive thickness. With the right queries, Chiku’s suit could probably have dug out the relevant information, but she did not need to know for her current purposes. Even in fundamental physics, there were few avenues of research that came anywhere near those prohibited by the Pemba Accord.

Besides, this was not where the trouble had begun.

She completed her search of the lower levels without incident. There were no survivors, nor any bodies. She checked her suit readings. Air pressure was now nudging below forty per cent.

‘I’ve found someone,’ Namboze said, grunting as she shifted position. ‘Still alive, but barely conscious. I’m going to get them into the portable preserver.’ Her voice was husky, on the edge of breathlessness.

‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ Chiku said.

‘It’s all right – I’ve got it under control. We could use another party to help us ferry the survivor back out through the chamber, though.’ Namboze paused, her breathing heavy. ‘Once this one’s stabilised, I’ll complete my search of the upper floors. We missed this one’s life-signs – maybe there are more survivors.’

‘I’ll call for help. Don’t take any risks, Gonithi – you’ve done well as it is.’

‘Did you find anyone?’

‘Empty down here so far. Pressure’s still falling, though, so pretty soon it won’t matter who we find. I’m going to take a look in the other dome, just in case there’s an air pocket. Call me if you find any more survivors.’

The map showed Chiku a ground-floor entry point into the secondary dome, protected by a sturdy internal airlock of antique but foolproof design. The lock admitted her. Beyond was hard vacuum. She shone her light around, trying to make sense of mangled architecture. The ceiling fragment had daggered its way to the ground, crushing and buckling interior floors and partitions, and come to rest at a sharp angle. She moved around it cautiously, not sure how firmly it was embedded. Judging by the absence of machines and equipment, this part of the complex had likely been reserved for administration and supervision. There were chairs and tables, bent and squashed beyond easy recognition. A small refectory, unoccupied at the time of the accident. No survivors or bodies anywhere, as far as she could tell.

‘How are you doing, Gonithi?’

The other woman sounded much more confident now. ‘Got the survivor bagged and stable. I’ve tagged the location and am completing my search. What about you?’

‘I don’t think there’s anyone here, but I want to make absolutely sure before we tag it as searched.’

Chiku had swept the basement of the other dome, but it had not connected through to this one. She could see into the lower level at the point where the ceiling fragment had penetrated the floor. A staircase existed, but it was now buried under the rubble of the dome’s collapsed roof. The ceiling fragment itself offered a kind of makeshift ramp, if she dared trust it not to shift or collapse. The quilt of illumination elements studding the panel’s uppermost face – it had flipped over at some point after falling from the ceiling – promised enough traction to enable her to climb or scramble down.

Chiku moved to the edge of the gap in the floor and stood with her toes on the very brink. It was four, maybe five metres down to a scree of rubble piled up on the basement’s floor. To reach the steep slope of the ceiling fragment, she would have to leap across a good metre of clear space, and then hope that she maintained her footing. Hesitating, she bent down and scooped up a chunk of debris as large as her helmet. She hurled it at the ceiling fragment, the suit amplifying the power of her swing. The chunk shattered in a silent eruption, blooming into a blue-grey cloud. The fragment had absorbed the impact without a hint of movement. It appeared to be solidly fixed.

Chiku took a couple of paces back, then leapt across the threshold. She landed roughly, one foot slipping into empty space, but her other found a purchase. She grabbed hold of a pair of lighting elements and stabilised herself. The jump would not have fazed even Ndege or Mposi under normal circumstances, but she was alone, in a dangerous place, with only a spacesuit between her and vacuum, and for a few moments her heart surged on a rush of adrenalin and relief.

Chiku descended carefully, spidering down the quilt of lighting elements until her feet touched debris. The ground crunched, then supported her. She stepped gingerly off the ramp and turned around slowly, sweeping the beam over the jumbled and unwelcoming surroundings. Even the dust kicked up as she moved curtained back down with indecent haste.

‘Chiku,’ came Namboze’s voice. ‘I’m done here. There’s no one else alive so I’m heading outside. I think I can manage the preserver on my own.’

‘Good work,’ Chiku said. ‘I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’

Leaning around a buckled metal pillar, she took cautious steps deeper into the basement. It had been subdivided into two large rooms, but the intervening wall had collapsed when the ceiling fragment came down. She stepped over and around chunks of knee-high rubble, watching where she placed her feet.

Namboze asked, ‘Where are you?’

‘Just completing a sweep of the secondary basement. It’s open to vacuum, but I wanted to be sure. Doesn’t look like there’s anything down here, though.’

Chiku fell silent, heart jamming her throat. She had been about to put her foot down into what looked at first glance to be a shadowy space between two chunks of debris. An instant before committing herself, she realised it was a void, not shadow.

There was a hole in the floor.

Namboze must have heard her draw breath. ‘Chiku?’

‘Still here. Nearly lost my balance.’

Chiku steadied herself. She poked at one of the boulders on the edge of the void. It teetered and fell in, increasing the diameter of the void. It had been big enough to swallow her foot to begin with. Now it was big enough to swallow Chiku.

If the boulder landed on anything below, it did so without a hint of impact. She found the void troubling in a way that felt monstrously disproportionate to its size. According to the aug, no sub-levels or infrastructure pipes lay beneath this laboratory, even allowing for decades of disuse or abandonment. The overlay had proven accurate so far.

Chiku was greatly unnerved by this sudden discrepancy. Zanzibar’s memory was as limitless and infallible as a person’s was cramped and unreliable. Zanzibar was meant to know every wrinkle and pore of itself.

But it did not know about this hole.

Chiku took another deep, steadying breath. What was more likely: that a hole had been present where none was charted; or that the accident, the violence of the collapsing ceiling, had shifted the structural foundations beneath the laboratory and revealed the opening? This rift could only have opened up today, when Kappa blew out. Given the scale of destruction Chiku had already witnessed – that four-hundred-metre-wide hole punched clean through Zanzibar’s skin to space – a lack of additional structural shifts elsewhere within the chamber would have been more remarkable than finding this one.

But then she risked leaning far enough over the edge to allow her helmet light to spill into the void, and saw that whatever this might have been, it was not another rift.

This hole was the entrance to a shaft, and the shaft’s walls were not only smoothly bored but set with recessed handholds. It curved away beneath her, out of sight and into darkness. And Chiku shivered, because such a thing had no business existing on Zanzibar.

A secret passage.

She looked around and her gaze chanced upon a sheet of lightweight walling material that must have come loose when the overlying floor collapsed. Moving carefully – what little faith she had had in the integrity of the floor beneath her had vanished the moment she found the void – Chiku grasped the blade-shaped fragment and levered it free. She positioned the fragment over the hole, adjusting it until she was satisfied that she had concealed her discovery as best she could. The hole’s dark mouth was still visible under the fragment’s edges, but to the unsuspecting eye it looked like shadow.

There was no need to tag the location.