Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

To begin with there was only the fact of the attack and their own immediate survival. Had the Watchkeeper been intact and its offensive capabilities fully functional, there would have been no warning and no conceivable defence — merely an instant in which Kanu existed, followed by an endless succession of instants in which he did not.

But he was breathing, and thinking, and the fabric of the ship — at least judged from the pressurised vantage of the control deck — could not have been too violently disrupted.

But he heard the wail of alarms, saw the red pulse of alert indications, felt in his belly the beginning of an uncontrolled tumble as Icebreaker lost control of its orientation. He looked at Nissa, saw the understanding in her face — no need for either of them to state the obvious.

‘Can you do something?’ she asked.

Kanu’s hands were on the console, trying to force the ship to correct its own tumble, but the systems were not responding. ‘No good. Control lockouts across all steering systems — it’s not allowing itself to fire compensatory thrust. Swift — if you think you can do better than me, now’s your chance.’

He felt Swift assume control of his hands. They began to move across the console with a renewed speed and confidence — the difference between a novice and a concert pianist.

‘One of you had better find a way to make it,’ Nissa said. ‘We don’t want to swing back into the Watchkeeper.’

‘We’re trying,’ Kanu said. ‘Hard to see how bad the damage is — sensors are completely burned out along that whole flank.’

‘What hit us?’

‘Nothing physical — not a missile or anything like that. Must have been an energy pulse, some kind of electromagnetic discharge. I’m not even sure it counted as an attack — more of a playful nip.’

‘It didn’t feel very playful to me,’ Nissa said.

‘It must have been. We’re still here.’

Swift had turned up the console’s visual refresh-rate. Status readouts flickered at hypnagogic speed, too fast for his conscious faculties to absorb.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘I wish I knew. Talk to me, Swift.’

‘It is rather serious,’ Swift answered. ‘We are drifting further from the Watchkeeper, which is encouraging, and there has been no further attack — but equally the evidence points to severely compromised guidance and propulsion capability. I am attempting to persuade the ship to let me stabilise its tumble.’

‘Persuade a bit harder, then.’

‘Do not blame Icebreaker, Kanu — the ship is doing its best. It knows it has been badly damaged and it is wisely protecting us. I will do what I can. I have some thruster channels open to me now — would you mind if I augmented their effect with the selective venting of internal air and water pressure?’

‘And bleed us dry?’

‘Volatile gases can be mined and the reserves replenished once we locate a suitable resource. Besides, only a small percentage will be required — say five to ten, depending on circumstances.’ Swift pushed on, apparently taking Kanu’s consent for granted. ‘There — we are already regaining some control. When we are properly stable, we can think of ways to assess the extent of the damage.’

‘There’s only one quick to way to do that,’ said Kanu. ‘I’ll need to go outside to see how bad things really are.’

‘With the ship caught in this tumble?’ Nissa asked. ‘You’ll be flung into space the moment you make a mistake.’

‘Then I’d better make sure I don’t. I think Swift can help with that, can’t you?’

‘If you will allow me a little more time to do what I can from this position, then we shall attempt it together.’

Slowly the tumble reduced until Kanu felt confident that he could move around inside Icebreaker without immediate injury. He instructed Swift to leave things as they were, then rose from his seat. It would still be a challenge to reach the suit locker, let alone take care of himself in vacuum with the ship still tumbling like a thrown bone, but he had to assess the damage.

‘You’re leaving me here alone?’ Nissa asked.

‘The ship’s programmed to answer to you if something goes wrong. In the meantime, we’ll still be able to talk.’

After he had struggled into the suit — Kanu would never find it a quick or easy process, despite his years on Mars — he cycled through the airlock closest to the damage, which brought him to the brink of space. He pushed his head and upper body out into true vacuum, taking in the view. The hull stretched away on either side of him — sometimes feeling as if it were a ceiling, at other times like a floor or the sheer side of a cliff. Much of it was smooth, but here and there handholds and footholds had been provided, and with some concentration he could plot a route that would take him to the damaged area, which was presently out of sight.

‘Can we do this, Swift?’

‘With care, Kanu. I will let you take the initiative until I feel the need to intervene. Maintain three points of contact at all times, and do not be distracted by the huge planet dominating your field of view.’

‘Thank you,’ Kanu said, with all the false sincerity he could muster.

But it was one thing to see Poseidon on-screen, and quite another to view it with his own eyes. Its lit face was turned to him, wrapped from pole to pole by a smothering deep ocean. As tall as the worldwheels were, they were too narrow in cross section to be visible from this distance. As he watched, a splinter-like sliver moved across the planet’s face with the perfect Newtonian slide of a dead eye cell. It was the remains of a Watchkeeper, perhaps even the one that had attacked them. He felt no anger towards the alien machine, sensing that there had been little or no intent behind the attack.

Kanu brought his whole body out of the lock, nervously grasping for a handhold, then another, until his feet could find purchase. He was not standing so much as spreadeagled on the hull, and the ship’s slow tumble made it feel as if it wanted rid of him as he spidered along. Slowly, adrenalin flooding his veins, his hands trembling with nervous concentration, he began to traverse away from the lock. His first few reaches were awkward, but he forced himself to pick up the pace, to trust to the limbs and senses that had never failed him before. The tumble was not in itself the problem — he was perfectly strong enough to hold on despite it. His real enemy was fear.

As he began to work around the hull’s curve, the lock fell away out of sight. Poseidon swung in and out of view — too large to ignore, since it was always bright and blue in his peripheral vision. He felt the world’s scrutiny on him, as if it were taking a particular interest in his fate.

Ahead was a recess in the hull, a trough a few metres deep. There was no way around it that would not take precious minutes and bring its own hazards. Crossing the trough would require a longer reach than he was used to making, but Kanu saw no practical alternative.

‘Keep your eye on me, Swift — if things go wrong out here, they’ll go wrong fast.’

‘My eye is never not on you, my friend.’

Kanu stretched across the gap, fingers grasping for the handhold on the other side. But as he pushed out into the void, his heart jumped in his chest.

‘Fuck!’

‘What is it?’ Nissa called out sharply.

‘Fuck.’

‘Calm down, Kanu,’ Swift said. ‘Having a seizure will avail neither of us.’

‘Kanu?’ Nissa called, with real concern in her voice.

‘I’m fine. I just wasn’t expecting to find a corpse here.’ He was staring at it, his pulse still racing. It was tucked into the space, sheathed in baroque and cumbersome armour, squatting and compressed as if ready to spring out in ambush. ‘One of the Regals,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know whose side they were on.’

‘A Regal? How in hell did a Regal get here?’

‘They must have been stuck on the side of the ship since before we left Europa. Maybe they were trying to break into the ship, or use it as a hiding space.’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘I doubt they survived more than a few seconds after we broke through the ice. Maybe there are more. We’ll have to search the whole ship at some point, I expect.’ He shivered inside the suit. He had been close to very few corpses in his time and the experience was still unpleasantly novel. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told the dead warrior.

‘Sorry for what?’ Nissa asked.

‘That I did this.’

‘You didn’t make this happen. You heard the Margrave — things were breaking down on Europa before we arrived.’

‘I certainly helped them along.’

‘Then I’ll take my share of the blame, too. I’d have ended up there even if we hadn’t met in Lisbon.’

He left the corpse, having noted its position, and approached the edge of the damage zone. Finally, his confidence improved — the corpse had pushed him over some horizon of fear into a startling sort of calm — and Kanu risked standing upright, with his toes planted firmly into footholds. Overlooking the damage, he was momentarily silent.

Although he kept telling himself that they were lucky to have survived the Watchkeeper attack at all, the impact area was worse than he had feared. It was an open wound dozens of metres long and almost as deep, cut with cruel disregard into the ripe, vital organs of his starship. Gases were venting from numerous ruptured pipes, coiling out in glittering blue-grey nebulae.

‘Can you see this, Nissa?’

‘Yes, I have a feed from your helmet. It’s not pretty. I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s going to be a five-minute repair job.’

‘No, it won’t.’

‘It’s worse than we thought,’ Swift said, then after a moment, he added, ‘We haven’t merely lost propulsion control. That area of the hull also contained your main directional antenna. With the exception of short-range communications, we are now without the means to send or receive transmissions.’

‘I’d say that was a catastrophe,’ Kanu said, ‘but no one was talking to us anyway.’

The hull was blackened in a wide area beyond the obvious limits of the wound itself, suggestive of a massive concentration of energy. He risked stepping nearer to the edge of the damaged section. Gas was still geysering out from multiple locations. It aggrieved Kanu to see any kind of pressure loss. Darkly, he began to wonder if this sort of damage was even repairable at all.

‘I need to take a closer look,’ Kanu said.

He bent down, preparing to resume his spidering progress, when something flashed white. There was no pain, and barely enough of an interval of lucidity before the coming of unconsciousness for him to register one simple truth.

He was no longer attached to anything.

He was falling into ever-darkening waters, each layer colder and heavier and stiller than the last. He was on his back, his face turned to the receding surface. He could still see some evidence of the sun, its radiance chopped into pieces by the waves, its light further diminished by the oppressive mass of water that now lay between him and the air. He reached out, trying to claw his way back to the light, but for all his slow thrashing he could not arrest his descent. He knew how to swim; that was not the problem. He was simply too heavy now, and the pull of the deep layers too powerful. He glanced beneath him, but could see nothing below except steadily mounting blackness. A little daylight still found its way to him now, but soon he would be down to a few struggling photons, feeble as glow-worms, and after that there would be nothing but darkness. An endless succession of moments in which he did not figure.

Something eclipsed the wavering sunlight. It was another kind of darkness, more concentrated than the general absence of illumination below him. It had a distinct core, like a negative shadow of the sun itself, and radiating from that core were wavering beams of darkness. It was swelling, stealing more and more of the precious light.

One of the wavering beams reached out towards him, stretching down to arrest his fall. He surrendered to it, allowing the dark limb to coil its padded extremity around his midriff.

‘Leviathan,’ Kanu said. And felt a surge of joy that his old friend had come back to him.

He remembered nothing of the return journey to Icebreaker. It was only later that he came to an understanding of what had happened to him — an explosion from the rupture point, the blast damaging his suit and sending him falling away from the ship, back towards Poseidon.

Nissa had chased him aboard Fall of Night, willingly placing herself at risk of another stinging attack from the Watchkeeper — knowing full well that her own ship was much less capable of surviving such an assault.

‘I caught you,’ she said. ‘Swung in sideways, matched speed, allowed you to drift into my lock. You were nearly dead. Even when I brought you in, got you out of the suit, I didn’t know if you were going to make it.’

‘I remember nothing.’

‘I’m not surprised. You were out cold. Swift was doing all the talking.’

‘Swift?’

‘Yes. Your other half.’

For a moment he had forgotten. He was still thinking of his old friend the kraken, the happiness he had felt knowing that Leviathan had again found a purpose in life.

‘Thank you for saving me,’ Kanu said, hesitantly, for there was something in her manner that left him disquietened. ‘Thank you for placing yourself in harm’s way for me.’

‘Self-interest played its part,’ Nissa replied, her tone businesslike. ‘I’d rather not have to fix and operate this starship on my own.’

‘Regardless of why you did it, I’m still grateful. But why can’t I move?’

‘Because you’re fixed to a surgical unit.’

He was lying on his back. He nodded slowly, stiffly, at last recognising his surroundings. She must have brought him to the medical bay, removed the outer layer of his suit and placed him on one of the auto-surgical platforms.

‘That can’t have been easy.’

‘I had some assistance. I explained to Swift what I was trying to do, and he helped. You were unconscious, but Swift could still move your body around.’

‘I see.’ There was a drift to this conversation that was not quite to his liking. He did not feel injured. Exhausted, confused, but not injured. Was there more wrong with him than he realised?

‘I put a gun to your head. Actually, more like a harpoon. I retrieved it from that body you found outside, the Regal. Do you remember the Regal?’

‘I do now.’

‘I brought the harpoon thing back inside with me. I don’t know whether it works or not, but that’s not really the point. Swift didn’t know either, and he wasn’t going to take a chance and find out. I needed a bargaining position, you see. Does that make sense to you?’

‘Perfect sense.’

‘It wasn’t my intention to kill you — if it had been, I could have just let you fall away from the ship — but we do need to change our working relationship.’

‘In what way?’ Kanu asked, with a forced levity.

‘I accept the situation. I accept that Swift got inside your skull and dragged us across interstellar space. Nothing’s going to change that. And now that we’re here, I’m not about to turn my back on these discoveries. I want answers, too — and I want to survive, and to fix this ship. Swift says we can reach Paladin in about a year, if Fall of Night shoves Icebreaker into the right transfer orbit. I did suggest we take Fall of Night instead, get there quicker, but Swift argued me out of that — we need this ship to return to Earth, and I accept that. But everything else? We do things as equals from now on.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, we’ve been on equal terms since we reached this system.’

‘Fine words, Kanu, but from my position things look a little asymmetric. There’s the small matter of Swift. Now, I’m not so naive as to think I can cut him out of your head like a disease — nor would I want to.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘You and Swift got us into this; it’ll take both of you to get us out of it. But as I said, things have to change. Swift and I have been talking, and we’ve come to a mutually acceptable solution. The auto-surgeon is going to put a small implant into your head — a very simple device, nothing complicated. It will address your visual and auditory centres, in effect eavesdropping on your private conversations.’

‘Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure. And here’s the clever part. When it’s done with you, the surgeon will reactivate some of my own latent neuromachinery, the stuff I’ve been carrying around in my head since the fall of the Mechanism. It’ll establish a communications protocol between the two sets of implants. Do you understand what that means?’

Kanu did not need to think about it for long. ‘You’ll be able to see and hear Swift.’

‘More than that — I’ll be able to talk to Swift just as easily as you can, at least when we’re in close proximity. Equals at last — or as equal as I want to be. Does that strike you as an acceptable arrangement?’

Kanu considered his options — try and talk her out of it, or accept that allowing Swift to be visible to both of them might be a path to forgiveness, or at least a step along the way.

‘I suppose it does.’

‘I’m glad. Although, to be fair, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me either way. I’d still be doing it.’

After a silence, Kanu said, ‘Do you hate me?’

‘Hate you? No, I don’t even dislike you. Why would I? We were married, and then we were lovers again. You’re all over me like a chemical stain.’

‘That’s a flattering way of putting it.’

‘You’ve been flattered enough. Things change now.’ She leaned over as if to kiss him, but instead she was merely activating the surgeon. ‘Now sleep. When you wake up, we’ll talk about our options. The three of us, as one happy family.’

The surgeon’s sterile hood whirred over him and he heard the hiss of anaesthetic gas.

‘Did you agree to this?’ he asked Swift.

‘I had to. You’d be surprised how persuasive a harpoon gun can be.’

The three of them were sitting on the bridge, the evidence of Kanu’s surgery visible as tiny clots of blood on either side of his temples.

‘So basically there are no good choices,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you’re telling us?’

‘We haven’t escaped Poseidon’s gravity well,’ Swift said, ‘and left to itself, Icebreaker doesn’t have the capability to do so. The damage to the propulsion system is simply too extensive. Equally, we aren’t in immediate peril. We’ll simply orbit and orbit, and hope we don’t attract the attention of either those moons or any more almost-dead Watchkeepers. Power isn’t our problem — we can easily return to skipover and await rescue.’

‘From where?’ Kanu asked.

‘Given that no one will be able to reply to our transmission until we repair our antennas, that is an exceptionally good question. At the moment our effective communicational range is no more than light-seconds, perhaps less. Sooner or later another ship will reach this system, and perhaps they will find a way to signal us, but we might have wait many decades for that to happen.’

Kanu and Nissa were in their control chairs; Swift’s figment was seated before them in a chair of his own imagining. He had one leg hooked over the other, an elbow on the armrest, chin resting in his hand, pince-nez glasses dangling from his fingers, the very model of urbane relaxation. Kanu thought back to their many chess games and wished that nothing more was at stake now than his own intellectual pride.

‘That’s no good,’ Nissa said.

‘Which is why we must consider Paladin,’ Swift said. ‘Fall of Night is much smaller than Icebreaker, but it has the capability to shove both ships out of Poseidon’s gravity well and into a transfer orbit for Paladin. When we reach Paladin, Fall of Night can steer us into a rendezvous with the orbiting shard.’

‘How long will that take?’ Kanu said.

‘About a year. I’m afraid that’s orbital transfer mechanics for you. The damage to our ship has effectively catapulted us back into the early rocket age. Now we move at the speed of comets, of asteroids.’

‘We could be there a lot quicker if we just took Fall of Night,’ Nissa said. ‘It can talk to other ships, too, if anyone’s listening.’

‘But then we would be abandoning our only hope of return,’ Swift answered patiently. ‘And we would still need to drag Icebreaker across the system to get it repaired and refuelled. At least this way we arrive with our ship.’

‘But all that time!’ Nissa said.

‘It won’t be wasted,’ Swift said. ‘Kanu’s ship can begin to repair some of the damage now — rebuild steering control and communications. That will give us a valuable head start.’

‘Then we go back into skipover,’ Kanu said.

‘Unless you would rather be awake for the entire transfer. Is this acceptable to you, Nissa?’

‘You did say there were no good options — I suppose sleeping is as good a way to pass the time as any other. But you’ll be asleep as well, won’t you, Swift?’

‘I’m afraid so. Skipover will suppress all Kanu’s higher brain functions, including those useful to me. But we need not worry. Icebreaker already has a high level of autonomy. It will wake us if there is a development.’

‘Such as what?’ Nissa said.

‘I have no idea,’ the figment answered. ‘I can tie our systems into Fall of Night’s and continue transmitting our recognition signal via Nissa’s ship. It will be less powerful, and less capable of detecting a weak return signal, but we will lose nothing by trying.’

‘Nothing will answer us,’ Kanu said, struck by a sudden gloomy fatalism. ‘If they meant to, it would already have happened.’

‘Nonetheless, we may as well keep trying. Nissa: I will provide you with a range of solutions for the transfer orbit — each will put a different strain on Fall of Night. I will leave it to you to make the final selection and handle the operation itself.’

‘That’s very good of you, Swift,’ Nissa said, drenching her answer in sarcasm.

Swift gave an obliging smile. ‘One tries.’

Nissa was easily capable of using her ship as a tug. They agreed on an option which provided for rendezvous with Paladin in just over eleven months, with fuel in reserve for the corresponding orbital correction at the other end of the manoeuvre. Not that it really mattered if they used up all of Nissa’s fuel: if they could not replenish Icebreaker’s initialising tanks, they would be going nowhere anyway.

Inside the larger ship, it was hard to believe there had been any course correction at all. Such was the difference in the masses of the two ships that even with its drive at maximum output, Fall of Night could provide only the gentlest of accelerations. But the push was sustained over several hours, and when it was done, Swift confirmed that they were on course.

Kanu spent a restless couple of days making sure the repair systems were working as intended. When that was not on his mind, he kept transmitting his recognition signal, this time sending it via Fall of Night’s much smaller antenna. He had announced his arrival to every obvious body in the solar system; now he was ready to consider anything larger than a pebble. But still the signal went unanswered. He was starting to imagine something in that silence: not the simple absence of an answer, but something more sinister, a kind of purposeful withholding. A decision not to speak, a deliberate and calculated refusal to acknowledge his presence.

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be so surprised,’ Nissa said as his mood began to darken again. ‘The message wasn’t meant for you and Swift in the first place.’

‘They could at least do us the courtesy of answering, after all the distance we’ve travelled.’

‘It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.’

After that, there was nothing to do but sleep.

Kanu reviewed the orbital transfer again and programmed their caskets for an interval a few days short of the end of the crossing. It would give them time to adjust to their surroundings, make renewed efforts at contact and generally recover from skipover before they arrived at their destination.

He put Nissa to sleep, watched her casket seal itself over her body, monitored the medical readouts for the smooth transition to unconsciousness, and then observed her gradual decline into cryogenic suspension. He touched a hand to the casket’s cool side, feeling an intense protectiveness for her. He loved her and wanted to make amends for the wrongs he had done her, from the failings of their marriage to the recent deceits concerning his intentions for Europa and beyond. It would please him very much if Nissa Mbaye were to start seeing him as a good man again.

Perhaps there was still time.

Almost without thought, he programmed the same sleep interval into his own casket. They would awaken together. Whatever the shard held for them, they would face it as partners.

And so Kanu submitted himself to the cold once more.