Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It turned out that more than one Watchkeeper had died around Poseidon. There were dozens, at least. Once they found the first corpse, it was as if their eyes — their sensors and instruments and analysis tools — had become attuned to the task of finding more.

The dead machines had all been caught up inside the thresh of moons circling Poseidon. Their orbits were irregular, and their sizes varied from fragments only a few kilometres across to one corpse that — given what they already knew of Watchkeepers — was almost whole. Almost intact, save that it was also dead, adrift and dark and absolutely inert. The space around Poseidon was a graveyard and its gatekeepers were the forty-five moons.

Gatekeepers or executioners — presuming there was a distinction.

‘Where have you brought us?’ Nissa asked.

‘Somewhere we shouldn’t be.’ But they were still inside the moons’ domain, still following their course around Poseidon, and they were not dead. Yet. They were moving without thrust on a trajectory that ought not to be mistaken for an attempt to fall into orbit or land on Poseidon. ‘Whatever happened here,’ Kanu went on, ‘it may have been a very long time ago. Something did that to the Watchkeepers, but we don’t appear to be attracting its attention.’

‘We might, at any moment,’ said Nissa. ‘We don’t know what those Watchkeepers were doing, or how close to the surface they got. For all we know we’re just about to cross some threshold.’

She was seated next to him on the control deck, the ship having furnished a second chair while they were on the long approach from the system’s edge. It had happened without either of them asking, rising out of some buried concealment in the floor.

‘I know, and I agree,’ Kanu said. ‘But we can only slow or change course by using our engines, and that may be the one thing that makes us conspicuous. I think the safest option may be to carry on as we are until we come out the other side.’

‘Another eight hours.’

‘I don’t like it either.’

‘And what does Swift think?’

Swift’s figment stood to the left of Kanu, hands on hips, conveying fretful agitation. He kept taking off his pince-nez, polishing them, returning them to the tip of his nose. ‘As a matter of fact, I agree with Nissa — we may be about to sail into difficulty. Equally, I have some sympathy with your position, Kanu. It could be a mistake to use thrust.’

‘He’s a fat lot of use. Swift says we’re both right.’

‘Then ignore Swift. We still have to do something.’

‘I’ve felt this same indecision once before, near our old household in Africa. I was out in the grass, not more than an hour’s stroll from the gates, and I noticed a large black snake moving through the grass near me. I’d not had much experience with snakes and was so terrified I couldn’t move. My brain said: if you almost didn’t notice that snake, there might be one there as well, and there, and there.’

‘And were you surrounded by snakes?’

‘I have no idea. The big snake passed me by. It wasn’t interested in me at all — I’m not even sure whether it sensed me or not. But my point is, that’s how I feel now. I don’t want to make a move, to do one thing that might bring disaster. But we have to act.’

‘Full drive,’ Nissa said. ‘Empty the tanks if we have to. Ditch the escape pods to save mass. Sacrifice Fall of Night, if we must. But we get out of here as quickly as we can.’

‘There’s another way,’ Swift said quietly, as if to speak were an impertinence.

‘Go on,’ Kanu said.

‘Go on what?’ asked Nissa.

‘Swift has an idea.’ But there was a sense of words forming in his throat, sounds pushing out of his mouth. ‘You must excuse me taking this liberty,’ he said, or rather was compelled to say, an invisible hand squeezing speech out of his larynx. ‘It is simpler, Nissa, if I speak directly to you both. The Watchkeepers have been killed, but their remains are tolerated, allowed to follow their orbits.’

Nissa regarded Kanu from her seat, making no effort to hide her appalled revulsion. But there was fascination, too, of a clinical kind.

‘What have you done to him?’

‘Nothing has been done to him; nothing will be done. He is my friend. Now might we speak of the Watchkeepers? We would be well advised to get out of here, but we dare not make too much of a show of ourselves doing so. On the other hand, none of us wishes to spend another eight hours trusting to our luck. Therefore, a compromise. If we maintain our present heading, we will soon pass very close to one of those fragments. It’s moving slower than us, but with a short, sharp burst of thrust we can match velocities. We park ourselves next to the fragment — on or inside it, if necessary — and let it carry us beyond the orbit of the outermost moon. When the fragment reaches its apogee, we depart — and cross everything we have for luck.’

‘Or we could just cut and run,’ Nissa said.

Swift relinquished his control of Kanu’s larynx, Kanu letting out a small involuntary gasp in the process. ‘I’m back,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry, but I don’t like Swift’s idea. It’s still too risky, given how little we know.’

‘So we do nothing, is that your plan?’

‘I didn’t say that. Continuing with our present course of action is still doing something.’

‘Well, if we keep talking about it long enough, those eight hours will just fly by,’ Nissa said, rolling her eyes with heavy irony.

‘We’re on edge,’ Kanu said. ‘It’s natural — we’d be fools if we weren’t. And there are no rules for this situation, no precedents. None of the ideas is bad. But if the thing we’re doing hasn’t harmed us—’

Swift walked over to Kanu, ghosted through the console and lowered himself into the same volume of space occupied by Kanu’s body.

‘I am sorry, Kanu, but I think this is necessary.’

Kanu could neither speak nor control his body. Swift was puppeteering him again, working the levers inside his skull. He had done it once, with Kanu’s consent, but this time there had been no invitation, not even tacit permission.

Kanu rose from his seat, pushing aside the console. He moved to face Nissa, still seated in her chair, and sank until he rested on his haunches.

‘The choice must be yours,’ Swift said. ‘Kanu is right — there are no precedents. Equally, you did not ask to be placed in this position, whereas Kanu and I embarked on our enterprise in the full and certain knowledge that there would be grave unknowns. So, as I said, the choice is yours. Whatever you decide, that is what we will do.’

‘Why?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion of a trick.

‘Because I would very much like you to begin trusting me, and this looks like an excellent place to start. Whatever you say, that is what we will do. I will implement your decision.’

‘Then… get us out of here as quickly as possible.’

‘Very well.’ As Swift moved Kanu’s body back to his seat, he added, ‘Normal structural and accelerational safeguards will be suspended. That seat should protect you, but I would strongly advise bracing in readiness for the load. In a moment I will disengage spin-generated gravity and align the control deck for the new vector.’

‘Wait,’ Nissa said.

‘Yes?’

‘It is a risk.’

‘Indeed. But there are no risk-free options.’

‘All the same… no. We don’t cut and run. Your option — is that still valid?’

‘For the moment.’

‘Then do it. Get us close to that fragment, like you said. There are forty-five moons — I presume they can’t all see us at the same time?’

‘If sight lines are relevant, then we are presently within the range of visibility of thirteen moons, although the number will fluctuate as we continue our course.’

‘Are you clever, Swift? As clever as Kanu thinks you are?’

‘I doubt anyone is that clever.’

‘Then here’s a test for you. When the drive comes on, make sure we’re as invisible as we can be. Use that fragment to its maximum advantage.’

‘You are presenting me with a somewhat challenging N-body problem.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s challenging, Swift — being dragged fifty fucking light-years across the galaxy without my consent. So rise to the occasion. You said the choice was mine — this is my choice.’

‘And you could not have put it more eloquently, Nissa. Well, I do appreciate a challenge, and I shall apply myself to the matter with alacrity. This will take a few moments… fortunately, we can already draw on Icebreaker’s detailed model of the moons to minimise our visibility.’

When Swift returned to his console, Kanu again had the strange experience of seeing his hands whip across the controls, his vision blurring with the speed of his eyes’ jolting attentional shifts. It felt strange to him; it must look monstrous to Nissa.

But necessary. As resentful as he felt — it was not remotely pleasant to be usurped from control of his own body — he understood why Swift had done it. To surrender before Nissa, to give her not just a say in her fate but absolute control — it was the only thing that might prompt her to see Swift as an ally rather than a parasite.

A risk. But as Swift had said, there were no risk-free options.

After a few minutes, Swift said, ‘It’s done. I’m relinquishing Kanu. We’ll make our course change in a completely automated fashion, beginning in about seven minutes. It can be revoked at any point. Once we start, though, I would strongly suggest we continue.’

Kanu had to take a deep breath as he returned to himself — Swift had drawn deeply from the well of his energies.

‘Remind me not to let him do that too often.’

Nissa looked at him through guarded eyes. ‘Do you have a choice?’

‘I thought I did.’

‘He could take you over completely, couldn’t he? If he can lock you out at that level, what’s to stop him?’

‘Nothing,’ Kanu said. ‘Except his respect for the trust I had in him.’

‘And is that trust still intact?’

‘Battered, but it will heal. I think he did the right thing.’

‘Good. But I take it this is the point where you start trying to argue me out of my decision?’

‘No,’ Kanu said, after a moment of reflection. ‘I don’t know which of us is right. But Swift had an idea, and you’ve chosen it, and that’s good enough for me. Whatever happens, it should be interesting — you realise no one has ever come as close to a Watchkeeper as we’re about to?’

‘Dead Watchkeepers don’t count. Anyway, your mother… one of your mothers — she’d say differently, wouldn’t she?’

‘I suppose she would,’ Kanu said. ‘But the Watchkeeper came to Chiku, not the other way round.’

It was a long seven minutes — time enough for doubts and second-guessing. But their nerve held, and at the appointed moment, Icebreaker commenced its course change. It was as hard and sudden as Swift had warned, an assault to the frailty of the human body, but they were ready for it and the shock was bearable. Kanu sensed himself on the verge of blacking out, but unconsciousness never quite came and his thoughts remained lucid. The course correction continued for several minutes, a succession of nerve-rattling instants, any one of which could have seen some dreadful reprisal from the moons. But no attack came. Perhaps they were too small to draw the moons’ attention, or Swift had timed their course change accurately enough to avoid drawing down their fire. Or perhaps, Kanu mused, all this destruction was the work of millions of years ago, and they had never been in harm’s way.

When the engine stopped, they had arrived within a whisker of the broken Watchkeeper. Icebreaker was less than the width of its own hull from the skin of the alien machine. There had been no sign of life — of activation — from a distance, and there was none now they were closer. The drifting hulk was warm on one side, cool on the other, but only because it kept one side turned to Gliese 163.

It was the middle section of a Watchkeeper, severed at both ends — a snipped-off cone — and with a long, deep, lateral gouge running the length of its warm side. They decided to chance another small thrust correction to place Icebreaker inside the thermal concealment of that gouge. Although they were floating next to part of a Watchkeeper, the ruin of the alien machine was still hundreds of times larger than Kanu’s ship, and the gouge was deep enough to hide them completely.

They came to a halt, holding station in their improvised hideaway. The walls and floor of the wound offered glimpses of the Watchkeeper’s secret interior — a puzzle of vast and silent mechanisms packed as tightly as intestines — but only a glimpse. They could see no deeper than the outermost viscera, and no blue glow shone from the depths to elucidate the overlying structures.

A living Watchkeeper was awesome enough, Kanu thought. But a dead one was something more because it testified to a greater power — something with the capability to kill a robot as large as a moon.

‘We should be safe now,’ he said, ‘but just to be certain we’ll power down everything we don’t need and sit here as quietly as we can. Swift — can you compute an optimum escape profile for us?’

‘Consider it done, Kanu. And thereafter? Resume a higher orbit, beyond the moons? It won’t cost us much more energy.’

‘No — we’re not ready for this place just yet. I’ll admit it — I’m a little spooked.’

‘Entirely understandable. Imagine how I feel — another machine intelligence, witnessing butchery on this scale. So where should we go next?’

‘I think it’s obvious,’ Kanu said. ‘Paladin. And hope there are no nasty surprises waiting for us there.’

‘There are no nasty surprises,’ Swift said, ‘only degrees of unpreparedness.’

Swift’s plan had them waiting ten hours as the fragment’s orbit carried it beyond the diameter of the orbit of the outermost moon. It transpired that the Watchkeeper had a measurable gravitational field — strong enough that they had to resist its pull with a whisper of micro-thrust, as if they were moored next to an asteroid. There should have been no surprise in that, but in no other context had the mass of a Watchkeeper ever been detected. It was as if — being dead — some cloaking or mass-negation effect had now ceased to function.

To control gravity, to make mass vanish like a palmed card — here were implicit technological secrets which, suitably unravelled, might spur a thousand industrial revolutions. But Kanu and his companions could only content themselves with the gathering of data. The understanding — the exploitation — would have to be left to other minds, in other solar systems, if it could be done at all.

Still, here was another solid discovery to add to the puzzles they had already found. A new Mandala, wheels taller than the sky and a glimpse into the physics of the Watchkeepers. If Kanu did nothing else with his life, these findings would be achievement enough. The very thought of it — the idea of contributing something this big to the sum of human knowledge — brought him solace. It was good to have done something useful, and to have survived until now.

At no point could Kanu say he felt totally calm — there were still too many unknowns for that — but there was an easing in his mood, a sense that at least one challenge had been met. He realised, quite suddenly, that he was ravenously hungry. It would be good to eat, not knowing what lay ahead or when they might have the chance again.

Nissa agreed with him.

‘Thank you for allowing me to make that decision,’ she said when they were seated at their table. ‘Even if the idea was Swift’s.’

‘It was right to do something. My plan wasn’t a plan at all.’

‘You never told me that story about the snakes before.’

He thought back to the happy, golden bliss of their short few weeks together since Lisbon, before the reality of his mission came between them. ‘There hasn’t really been time.’

‘I mean during all the years we were married. I’m sure I’d remember.’

‘Really?’

‘The old Kanu was a good man. He told a lot of stories, but most of them were designed to put him in a good light. Subtly, I’ll admit, but admitting to weakness definitely wasn’t one of his strengths.’

‘I admitted to a weakness?’

‘Indecision is a poor quality, especially in a politician, a mover and shaker.’

‘Although sometimes it can be better than making the wrong decision in haste.’

‘Sometimes,’ Nissa conceded. And in a gesture that was outwardly small but which conveyed magnitudes, she allowed herself to add a measure of wine to Kanu’s glass. ‘But not always.’

He was not forgiven, he knew that. Perhaps there could be no forgiveness after the catalogue of injustices he had inflicted on her, from betrayal to outright kidnapping. But independently of forgiveness there was an unconditional kindness, a generosity of spirit, which she had always possessed, and for which he now thanked his stars.

‘I have said it before,’ he told her, ‘but I cannot say it too often. I am sorry.’

‘We saw the worldwheels,’ Nissa said. ‘No one else has. That doesn’t excuse what you did to me. But in this moment, after what we just survived? I’m glad to be here. And I want to go back, to find out what those worldwheels have to tell us.’

‘They frighten me,’ Kanu admitted.

‘And me. But I won’t rest until we’ve confronted them. Snakes everywhere, Kanu Akinya, no matter where you look. But sometimes you just have to step into the grass.’

Kanu lifted his glass and sipped his wine. It was as delicious as any vintage he could remember.

They left on a ghost of thrust, emerging from the Watchkeeper’s wound at a few tens of metres per second, more than enough to break the pull of its gravitational field, and for several minutes all was well. They had seen nothing of Poseidon for the ten hours of their concealment, but now the planet was visibly smaller and they were safely outside the weave of its moons. Swift made another course correction, lining them up for the transit out to Paladin. Kanu allowed himself to believe they had beaten the odds on this one, and for that he was grateful. Whatever they encountered around Paladin, they would take much more care not to stumble into danger a second time.

But that was when the Watchkeeper struck.