Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER TWO

In the early spring of the northern hemisphere of Occupied Mars, in the year 2640, on the evening of the day before he died, Kanu Akinya stood at a tall fretted window with his back to Swift. He had his hands behind him but not quite clasped, a slim-stemmed goblet dangling loosely from his fine-webbed fingers. It had been years since he was a true merman, but his anatomy retained traces of that phase of his life. Muscles corded his mountainous neck; his shoulders had a swimmer’s top-heavy broadness. Kanu’s mouth was small, his nose flat, his eyes large and expressive, optimised for light-gathering in conditions of low visibility. Grey now, he still wore his hair long, gathered into a pleated tail that hung halfway down his back.

‘Your move,’ Swift reminded him.

Kanu had been watching the sunset. The sky at his eye level was an extremely deep blue, virtually black at the zenith, shading to purple and then salmon pink as his gaze tracked down to the horizon. This ancient volcanic summit had been the obvious location for the embassy: the closest point to space, and the furthest from the confusion and danger of the forbidden surface.

‘My apologies,’ he said, turning from the window.

Kanu resumed his position at the table facing Swift and set his goblet next to the board. They were playing chess, that most ancient of African games.

‘Troubled?’ Swift asked.

‘Thinking about my brother, actually. Wondering if it wouldn’t hurt the universe for us to swap places, just for a year or two.’

‘Your brother is twenty-nine light-years away. Also, technically speaking, he is not your brother.’

‘Half-brother, then.’

‘Not even that. Your mother died on Earth. Mposi’s mother may or may not be dead, although the balance of probability points in that direction. I’m sorry to belabour these unfortunate facts, Kanu, but I have difficulty enough understanding human affairs without you complicating things.’

‘I’m sorry it’s not simple enough for machine comprehension. I’ll make a note of that for future reference.’

‘Pray do so, your memory being as fallible as it is.’

Swift had adopted scrupulously human anatomy and dress for the purposes of diplomatic relations, his face, outfit and bearing approximating those of a young man of learning of the late eighteenth century. He favoured a frock coat, a white scarf around his neck and pince-nez glasses through which he was inclined to peer with his chin cocked at a high, imperious angle. A head of thick, boyish curls was combed and oiled into some sort of submission.

After a moment, while Kanu continued staring at the board, Swift added, ‘Seriously, though — you would swap places with Mposi, if that were an option?’

‘Why wouldn’t I? A backwater colony, a modest but growing economy, easy relations between humans and machines… no Consolidation breathing down my neck, no great concerns about the Watchkeepers. I bet Mposi even has a room with a view.’

‘I feel obligated to point out that it’s easy to maintain cordial relations between humans and machines when there are hardly any machines. Are you planning to make that move, incidentally, or would you like a few more months to think about it?’

Kanu had evaluated his narrowing options and was about to move his piece. But as he raised his hand towards the board, a chime sounded from across the room.

‘I’d better take that.’

‘If it helps delay the inevitable, be my guest.’

Kanu rose from his chair, walked to the console and angled its screen to address his standing form. The face of Garudi Dalal, one of his three human colleagues on Olympus Mons, appeared before him.

‘Garudi. I’m late for dinner, I know. I’ll be on my way up shortly.’

‘It’s not about dinner, Kanu. I take it you haven’t heard the news?’

‘That Swift is terrible at chess?’

But the normally amiable Dalal — his best friend among the other humans — did not respond in kind. Her face was grave. ‘There’s been a development in the last few minutes.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

‘It may well be. Something’s come in. Slipped right through interdiction.’

Kanu glanced at Swift again. Technically, this information was confidential, a communication between ambassadors. But if something had happened close to Mars or on it, Swift would not be ignorant of it for long.

‘Normally we worry about things leaving Mars.’

‘Not this time. It’s a supply shuttle, inbound from Jupiter. Semi-autonomous. Sometimes they put a crew inside, but not for this run. It wouldn’t have got close to us except it was scheduled to dock with one of the fortresses. Approach clearances all checked out. Then at the last minute it veered off and slipped into the atmosphere.’

‘In which case there won’t be much left of it. Do we have an impact point yet?’

‘I’m afraid,’ Swift said, rising from his chair to stand behind him, ‘that you have rather more than an impact point.’

Kanu turned to his friend. ‘What do you know?’

‘The news has just reached me — by somewhat different channels, of course — the ship made it down.’ Swift directed his own face to the screen. ‘Good evening, by the way, Ambassador Dalal.’

Dalal acknowledged Swift with a nod but did not reciprocate the verbal greeting.

‘Swift’s right. Most of it’s still in one piece. The guns hit part of it, and then the atmospheric friction did some more damage, but that’s when things got strange.’

‘Strange? In what way?’ Kanu said.

‘It slowed down. Used thrust after it was in the atmosphere. By the time it hit the surface it was hardly moving at all.’

‘Sounds like a deliberate attempt to land.’

‘That’s the theory,’ she said. ‘Reclamationist sabotage, maybe. If they intercepted and boarded it somewhere between here and Jupiter… ’

‘Do you think Reclamationists were inside it?’

Dalal gave a weary shrug. ‘Who knows. What I do know is that someone’s going to have to find out, even if all they end up doing is recovering corpses. I’m convening the others to discuss how we handle this.’

Kanu nodded — she shared exactly her misgivings over the whole business. ‘Let Korsakov and Lucien know I’m on my way. So where did it come down? Please say it was the other side of Mars, that this doesn’t have to be our problem.’

‘I’m afraid it’s just within range of a flier.’

Kanu closed the console and returned to the chessboard. He moved his piece, setting it down with a decisive clack.

‘More fool me.’

Swift looked puzzled. ‘For what?’

‘Hoping for some drama in my life. This is what you get.’

It was always cold on the landing deck. The dome at the top of the embassy was sealed, the air pressurised to a breathable norm, but it never got warm enough to be comfortable. This was the literal summit of the human presence on Mars — the embassy rising like a small pinnacle of its own from the monstrous upwelling of Olympus Mons.

In the cold it was easy to believe that space was a hop and a skip away.

‘Garudi tells me you allowed Swift to eavesdrop on her conversation yesterday,’ said Korsakov, standing next to Kanu, the two of them with their helmets tucked under their arms.

‘Swift knew about it before we did.’

‘Nonetheless, Kanu. It’s hardly protocol, is it?’ Korsakov spoke slowly, as if each word needed consideration and that the patience of his listeners could be expected. ‘What is it about that one, exactly? What do you see in that machine, compared to the others?’

‘I enjoy Swift’s company. Anyway, why do I have to explain myself? Isn’t that what we’re here for — to communicate with them?’

‘Communication is fine,’ Korsakov said, his fine grey eyes surveying Kanu from beneath an imperious brow, surmounted by a sweep of long grey hair which he wore combed back. ‘But it can’t be more than that. These machines stole Mars from us. It was our world, our inheritance, and they tore it from our control.’

The flier, powered up and ready, was turning on a platform after being serviced.

‘I’m broadly aware of recent history, Yevgeny.’

The tall, stooping Korsakov began: ‘I can’t speak for the United Aquatic Nations—’

‘Then don’t.’

‘But your people have an expectation, Kanu. A tacit understanding that your sympathies, when put to the test, will always fall on the human side of the equation.’

‘Is anyone saying they don’t?’

‘The robot is using you, Kanu. Machines don’t understand friendship. This is leverage, pure and simple.’

Kanu was glad when the other two ambassadors arrived at the landing deck. They were also wearing surface suits, although their outfits hinted at their differing allegiances within the solar system. Kanu wore a blue-green suit pattened with starfish, their arms linked together in a kind of synaptic net. Korsakov, who stood for the United Orbital Nations, wore regolith grey, embossed with a representation of craters. Dalal, the representative for the United Surface Nations, carried the motif of a single tree, its branches hung with birds and fruit.

Lucien, the recently appointed ambassador for the Consolidation — everything out to the Oort Cloud that was not Earth, the Moon or Mars — wore a suit threaded with a ripple-like design of complex interlocking orbits.

‘Swift will be joining us?’ Dalal asked of Kanu.

‘Yes. He should be here in a moment.’

‘I don’t care for this arrangement,’ Lucien confessed. ‘We should be free to conduct our inspection without having a robot along for the ride.’

‘It’s what’s been agreed,’ Kanu answered, just as Swift appeared from a door leading onto the deck. ‘Transparency. Cooperation. It’s bound to help.’

‘Them, or us?’ Korsakov muttered, stooping to avoid scraping his head on the underside of the vehicle.

Once the flier was sealed, the air was pumped out of the deck and the dome opened to the sky. The passengers took lounge seats and tucked their helmets between their feet. By consent Garudi Dalal took the controls. She vectored them east, maintaining altitude at the agreed value. In the cabin, a soft automatic voice reeled off indices of airspeed, temperature and pressure. Kanu turned around in his lounge seat to view the receeding spire of the embassy, the dome clam-shelling tight once they were gone.

The embassy was a dark fluted spire with broad, rootlike foundations. It corkscrewed a kilometre and a half from the summit of Olympus Mons, a unicorn’s horn jammed into Mars. With the four ambassadors now aboard the flier, the place was completely devoid of human inhabitation. In fact, since the ambassadors were in the sky, there was now no human presence on the surface of Mars at all.

They had been under way for an hour when Dalal raised her voice, though without any particular urgency. ‘Something coming up. Three envoys, standard approach formation.’

Korsakov moved to look over her shoulder, studying the console displays. ‘Weapons readiness?’

‘Nominal,’ Dalal answered.

The flier itself carried no armaments — that would have been an express violation of the terms of the embassy settlement — but they were under constant surveillance and cover from the orbital fortresses. Kanu had been expecting the escorts, though. They were a normal feature of their occasional inspection flights.

‘They won’t harm us,’ he said. ‘Not with Swift as a hostage.’

Swift looked affronted. ‘I trust that is meant as a joke.’

‘You’d make a very poor hostage given what you’ve always told me about your massively distributed nature.’

Swift touched a hand to his frock-coated chest. ‘I am still very attached to this body. It would be a nuisance to have to make a new one.’

Korsakov scowled in annoyance.

The three flying things were smaller than the ambassadorial vehicle, each a bronze ellipsoid with blue and red lights glowing through from within. How they flew was open to conjecture. Once, humans would have harvested their technological cleverness for profit, but those days were long behind them. The three machines enclosed the flier in a triangular formation.

‘You are free to descend,’ Swift said.

Dalal took them down to an altitude of only two kilometres above the mean surface level, close enough that the robots’ workings were in plain view. At periodic intervals, the machines had built towering diamond-faceted citadels on the face of Mars. They studded the surface like anthills, beehives or ice-cream cornets. They were huge, candy-coloured, aglow with secret purpose. Tentacular tubes linked them, hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometres long. Glowing corpuscular things shot along these tubes, or occasionally moved through the air between the citadels.

Undoubtedly there was much more going on beneath the crust, beyond the easy scrutiny of orbital sensors.

‘Coming up on the impact site,’ Dalal announced. ‘Twenty kilometres dead ahead. Visual on it now. Dropping speed to minimum. Swift — please remind your friends of our agreed intentions?’

‘All is in hand,’ Swift said.

Still accompanied by their machine escort, the ambassadors made a slow approach to the object of their interest. It was bigger than Kanu had expected — skyscraper-sized. An ugly squared-off thing never designed to move through air, it resembled a grey metal filing cabinet and was jammed into a sand dune like a surrealist art installation. He thought of his grandmother’s sculptures, and wondered whether Sunday would have appreciated the comparison.

‘An hour is an insult,’ Korsakov said, tapping life-support instructions into his suit cuff.

‘We’ll make the best of it,’ Kanu answered.

‘Always the optimist, merman.’

‘I try, Yevgeny. There are worse habits.’

They could not land on or dock with the tilted, damaged wreck, but orbital surveillance had identified a possible entrance just above the point where the ship met the ground. It was a tiny airlock, but it would have to suffice. They circled once, verifying that the lock was as it had appeared from space, and then settled down about fifty metres from the wreck.

All in hand, as Swift had said.

When the flier was down, Dalal pumped the air out of the cockpit and lowered the boarding ramp. Korsakov and Lucien were the first to exit, followed by Kanu, then Swift — Swift, of course, had no need of a spacesuit — and finally Dalal, once she had secured the flier. The ramp folded up behind her, but the little vehicle was ready and waiting for their return.

‘Sixty minutes and counting,’ Lucien said. The youngest member of the diplomatic team by a margin of decades, ve represented the Consolidation — a coalition of political and economic interests which essentially included everything in the solar system beyond the old power structures of the Earth and the Moon.

‘Fifty-six minutes,’ Swift said, almost apologetically. ‘I am sorry to insist on a point of diplomacy, but the agreed time began the moment your skids touched our soil.’

They made a beeline for the side of the wreck — a shadowed slab, dense with machinery. The side where the entrance point had been identified curved back over their heads. Kanu had the dizzy sensation that it was in a constant slow topple, about to bury the ambassadorial party.

‘That lock is tiny!’ Dalal said.

‘Emergency egress only,’ Lucien said. ‘The cargo locks are buried, or much too high up for us to reach in the time we have.’

Even the emergency lock was some distance above their heads, and they had to scramble up to it one at a time using pipes and handholds projecting from the wrecked hull. There was a narrow ledge beneath the lock and extending to one side of it. Korsakov was the first to reach the ledge, its width just taking his feet. He traversed sideways, one hand reaching to his left, the other hanging on to a rail over his head.

Dalal and Lucien went next, and then Kanu. Swift monkeyed up alongside them with dismaying agility, pausing only to scuff dust from the collar of his coat.

‘Lock power is still active,’ Korsakov announced. ‘I am going to try and open it.’ Continuing to brace himself with his right hand, he folded aside an armoured panel to access a bank of controls.

‘Well?’ Lucien asked.

‘Cycling,’ Korsakov said. ‘But this is, as Dalal said, a very small lock. I doubt it will hold more than one of us at a time.’

‘We’ll see you on the other side,’ Kanu said. ‘It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.’

‘Under the terms of our arrangement,’ Swift said, ‘I must not be the last to enter.’

‘We weren’t about to forget you,’ Lucien muttered.

Korsakov was soon inside the lock with the outer door sealed and the chamber pressurising. His voice sounded as clear as before. ‘The lock is reaching normal pressure. I will not, of course, be so foolish as to remove my helmet, and I advise the rest of you to follow my example.’

‘Tell us when the inner door opens,’ Dalal said.

‘It is doing just that, Garudi. I am stepping through into the ship. There is heat and power and emergency lighting, but no immediate sign of life.’

‘Garudi is next, then Lucien,’ Kanu said. ‘I’ll allow Swift to enter before me. Is that arrangement acceptable to all parties?’

There was no dissent, and so Dalal cycled through the lock next. She joined Korsakov on the other side, confirming his initial observations. ‘Much less structural damage than I was expecting. Everything looks straight and there’s still power, as Yevgeny says. The lower levels must have absorbed a lot of the impact.’

‘Bad news for anyone down there,’ Lucien said.

Kanu waited for the Consolidation ambassador to pass through the lock. Save for himself, the breathing members of the party were now all inside the wreck. It was just Kanu and the robot, alone under the sky of Mars.

‘Now your turn,’ he told Swift.

‘Thank you, Kanu. It’s rather irksome that I must use the lock in the first place, but there’s no avoiding it.’

‘When robots build ships, you can show us how it’s done.’

‘We shan’t build ships, Kanu. We shall become them.’

He waited on the ledge until Swift had gone through, and then counted the long seconds until the lock was ready to admit him. He cursed himself for forgetting to zero his suit clock the moment they landed on Mars.

‘How long have we been here?’ he asked Dalal when he finally joined the others.

‘Thirteen minutes just to get this far. And we’ll need to allow the same amount of time to get out.’

Kanu nodded within his helmet. Panels and signs were still aglow, and dim yellow service lighting offered glimpses into adjoining passageways and compartments.

‘We’ll never sweep the whole thing,’ he said, ‘so we won’t try. For a start, I think we can rule out survivors in the lower levels. But we should be able to reach the control core easily enough.’

‘It would be unwise to raise your hopes,’ Lucien said.

‘I’m not.’

‘Regardless, Kanu is correct,’ Dalal said. ‘For the sake of making our governments look good, we must go through the motions.’

‘Steady with talk like that,’ Kanu said. ‘They’ll hang you for honesty.’

Dalal grinned back at him through her faceplate. ‘Being hanged is the least of my present worries.’

The slope of the floor made progress tricky, but they found their way to the central trunk elevator without too much trouble.

Korsakov found the control panel and punched the big manual button to summon their ride. It came rattling and groaning along its shaft, squealing and protesting. Kanu supposed that they were lucky the elevator was working at all, after the impact the craft had sustained. But he would have welcomed any excuse to abandon the search and return to the flier.

The ambassadors entered the elevator, followed by Swift, and the car began to ascend, bucking and jerking as it hit some obstruction.

‘It is not easy to see what these Reclamationists were hoping to achieve,’ Swift said, as if he felt an obligation to make conversation.

‘It might be a symbolic gesture,’ Kanu said. ‘Reclaiming a piece of Mars, if only for a few days.’

‘With their corpses?’ Swift asked.

‘Maybe they hoped to survive long enough to issue some kind of statement, a declaration of sovereignty or suchlike.’

‘I still fail to see the logic. What use is this dry, airless world to you?’

‘No practical use at all,’ Kanu said as the elevator halted and the doors opened. ‘But we can’t bear the thought of someone else having it.’

The control deck was a semicircular room with passages branching off it and a wide armoured window occupying one arc of the curved wall. Some of the console displays were still active, and Korsakov was confident enough to start flipping the heavy manual control switches. With a clunk and whine, the window’s armoured shuttering began to retract.

They were higher on Mars now than when they landed, a good twenty levels up, and from this elevation — surveying the oddly tilted landscape — Kanu could easily make out the luminous, pastel-shaded anthills of three distant robot cities. Even closer, one of their connecting tentacles formed a distinct glowing ridge-line, like the spine of a half-buried sea-monster. He watched, partly mesmerised, as lights raced along the spine with the speed of shooting stars.

‘Do those cities have names, Swift?’

‘I am not sure you would perceive them as “cities”, Kanu. “Nodes” or “hubs” would be more accurate. Functional modules, like your own brain compartmentalisation. But yes, they do have distinct signifiers. Although again, “name” may be stretching things a little—’

‘When you’re done chatting,’ Korsakov said, ‘we could begin searching the ship with these internal sensors.’ He was bending over a console, tapping keys. Displays were coming online, showing blueprints and cross sections, and he drew their attention to a couple of them. ‘These areas appear to contain air, and these are where the ship seems to have lost pressure.’

‘Given the lack of time available to us,’ Dalal said, ‘it’ll be a token search. But at least we can go home saying we did the best we could.’

‘Should my compatriots find organic material,’ Swift said, ‘we would treat it with the utmost respect.’

‘Thank you, Swift,’ Kanu said, ‘but I’m not sure being shredded and incorporated into your neural-logic networks is the fate we’d want for our loved ones. Even if you did it respectfully.’

‘I can, nonetheless, assist with your search.’

The ambassadors looked at each other. Korsakov started to say something, but Kanu raised a hand.

‘No, it makes sense. One of him can do the work of four of us in about a thousandth of the time.’

‘I would not go quite that far,’ Swift said, ‘but I can certainly make a difference, given the time you have remaining.’

‘Yevgeny,’ said Dalal, ‘can you call up the sensor search on different consoles?’

‘It’s done. Five consoles — four for us and one for the machine. I’m already running a visual and infrared search on decks twelve to eighteen — don’t bother duplicating my efforts.’

‘We won’t,’ Kanu said.

The consoles were simple to use, and it did not take long to run at least a cursory search on each deck. They were looking for the obvious: survivors or bodies, in plain view. If people were hidden away in lockers, out of the reach of the sensors, there was nothing the ambassadors could do about it.

‘In ten minutes we’ll need to be on our way back down,’ Dalal announced. ‘And that’s assuming we cut our margins to the bone.’

‘Our margin is still good,’ Kanu said. He had searched half of his allotted area of the ship, seeing only empty corridors and service shafts, plus the occasional vault-like cargo bay. Since some of the bays retained pressure, there might be survivors hidden among the ranks of cargo pallets. But unless they made themselves known, they were going to remain there.

‘Wait,’ Lucien said, stepping back from vis console, vis gloved fingers spread wide. ‘I’ve just been locked out.’

After a moment, Dalal said, ‘And me.’

‘The fault has spread to my console as well,’ Swift said, his hands becoming a blur on the controls.

Kanu was also unable to continue his search, and he noticed Korsakov suffering the same problem. The schematics had vanished. All the displays were showing the same thing: a block of Swahili, appearing and disappearing over and over.

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY WE RECLAIM THIS WORLD FOR PEOPLE! LET THIS BE THE FIRST LIGHT OF A NEW MARTIAN DAWN! LET FIRE CLEANSE THE FACE OF MARS IN READINESS FOR THE RECLAMATION!

‘The message was almost certainly meant to be read by robots, rather than humans,’ Swift said. ‘They would have been counting on us reaching the wreck in advance of any diplomatic party. Had you not arrived first, we would have triggered exactly this response.’

‘We’re leaving,’ Dalal said. ‘This instant.’

‘For once,’ Kanu said, ‘I think you’ll find the four of us in unanimous agreement.’

The elevator returned them to the level where they had boarded. They still had to pass through the airlock, but for the first time Kanu allowed himself to hope they might yet make it our alive.

‘Lucien is the newest ambassador,’ Dalal said. ‘Ve should go first. It’s only fair.’

‘Agreed,’ Kanu said. ‘It’s settled. Lucien first. Then you, Garudi. Yevgeny next, then me. Strict order of hierarchy, and save the arguing for later.’

Korsakov said, ‘You mean to be last, Kanu?’

‘Makes sense — I’ve been on Mars the longest.’

‘I won’t leave this ship with a robot still inside it, free to do what it likes with a human asset.’

Kanu had to stop himself seizing the other man by the shoulders. ‘Get some perspective, Yev. We were about to hand it over to the machines anyway.’

The lock was ready to receive Lucien. As the door closed, Dalal said, ‘Don’t wait for us outside. Get back to the flier and prepare to leave.’

Lucien gave a nod through vis visor as the door closed. Kanu watched the airlock indicators crawl through their automatic cycle.

‘I’m clear,’ Lucien said, after what felt like an eternity. ‘Jumping off.’ There was a thump, an intake of breath. ‘Down and moving. Flier is intact.’

‘Lock’s cycling for Garudi,’ Kanu said.

‘I could attempt to force the mechanism to open both doors at the same time,’ Swift said.

‘And risk jamming it completely?’ Korsakov said. ‘No. We’ll leave the way we came in.’

Finally the lock was ready to accept Dalal. She stepped inside, turned away from the door and initiated the cycle. The door sealed and the interminable process recommenced. Air out, door open, air in again. Kanu cursed the intransigent stupidity of the airlock for not understanding their deeper predicament.

‘I’m out,’ Dalal said. ‘Crossing ground. Lucien is at the flier. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, we’re fine. Yevgeny’s next.’

It could only have taken as long for Korsakov to cycle through the lock as the other two, but to Kanu it felt like at least twice as much time. Now there was so little to lose, he wondered if perhaps Swift ought to force the lock after all.

But the air was pumping back in now. Korsakov was outside.

‘Are you clear, Yev?’

‘I see the flier. Lucien and Garudi are aboard. She should have moved it by now — why is she delaying?’

‘Out of some misplaced concern for your well-being, perhaps?’

‘You should be next,’ Swift said.

‘No,’ Kanu answered. ‘You’re a witness to this and I want you to survive. If and when you make it back to your friends, they need to know that this was a terrorist act.’

‘My friends already know, Kanu.’

‘Maybe they do. But for my peace of mind, you’re still going first.’

Swift gave a perfunctory nod. ‘If you insist.’

‘I do.’

The lock was ready to accept Swift. He was on the verge of entering it when there came a sudden sharp blur of motion and Swift was on the other side of Kanu, the airlock vacant, and Kanu was being pushed — shoved was closer to the truth — into the waiting aperture.

‘Swift, no!’

‘It is within my capability to help you, Kanu. Therefore I have no option.’

Before he could act, Swift had pushed enough of himself into the lock to be able to activate the automatic sequence. It was a snakelike striking motion, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Kanu barely had time to register what had happened, let alone abort the lock sequence. Swift withdrew, the door sealed and the exchangers began to drag air out of the chamber.

‘The terms of our inspection visit are still in force, Swift! We have our one hour! It has not expired!’

‘Which is precisely why I will be joining you on the other side the moment the lock allows it.’

When the door opened, Kanu had to stop himself toppling out. He had climbed up on the way in but now he chanced a jump, hingeing his legs to absorb the impact and trusting that the reduced gravity of Mars would spare him any injury. He hit the dirt and sprawled, nearly burying his visor in the soil. He grunted, gathered air into his lungs and pushed himself to his feet. He was still alive, and Korsakov was just vanishing into the belly of the flier. ‘I’m clear!’ he called. ‘But Swift is still coming through.’

Korsakov and the others would have heard something of the exchange between Kanu and the robot, even if its meaning were unclear. ‘Why did you allow—’

‘I didn’t!’

Kanu set about crossing the ground to the flier. It really was not very far, but after a dozen paces he felt compelled to turn back, anxious to see Swift appear in the open lock. He wanted Swift to be true to his word, to be the sincere and honest friend he had always believed in.

The ship blew up.

It was not a nuclear blast or metallic-hydrogen phase change; it was not the flare-up of a runaway Chibesa motor. It was not the swallowing whiteness of an unbound post-Chibesa process, the kind of catastrophic event that had destroyed entire holoships.

It was still an explosion.

The detonation tore through the ship about a third of the way up the exposed part of the vessel. Above the blast zone, the already leaning edifice started buckling over. Kanu had thought it on the verge of toppling before; now it was fulfilling that promise. Debris, flung in all directions by the detonation, began to rain down around Kanu.

‘Kanu!’ someone shouted.

‘Take the flier!’ someone shouted in return, and it was only when the words were out that he recognised his own voice.

Kanu started running, or what passed for running in the soft, slipping dust under his feet. In the distance, the flier was taking off. The boarding ramp was still lowered, dragging across the ground, and the flier was turning to meet him.

‘No, Garudi,’ Kanu called. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

Kanu glanced back again. A lengthening shadow loomed over him now. The wreck was coming down, bowing to meet him. He could see no sign of Swift, and with an exquisite clarity he knew he stood no chance of reaching the flier.