Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER FORTY

By the time the women joined him, Kanu had fashioned the parameters of their meeting place. He had needed a lot of help from Swift for that. There was information in his memories and data in Icebreaker’s files, but stitching the two together, forging a place that was simultaneously familiar, neutral and aesthetically satisfying to all parties including the elephants, and doing it in much less than a lifetime, would have been quite beyond his abilities.

He drew on the Akinya household as his template. Swift had direct knowledge of the replica of the building on Zanzibar, and Kanu also carried his own experiences of the real structure, albeit in the faded decay of its later years. From these threads, Swift concocted a three-dimensional environment, programming it directly into Icebreaker with all the embellishments necessary for the time-honoured protocols of ching. He did all this right under Dakota’s nose, puppeteering Kanu — letting her think Kanu was the true architect.

The result was limited in its scope, spartan in its details, and its solid facades hinted at depths it did not contain. It had the shimmering, dreamlike quality of a fondly remembered place rather than an actual location, with dirt and dust and cracks.

It would have to suffice.

Kanu and Nissa both possessed legacy neuromachinery, which Swift was already using to speak to both of them. Dakota was slightly more problematic. The Tantor had no implants, but thankfully her external prosthetic communication aids were easily adapted to meet the needs of the exchange. Her human voice had always been machine-generated, so it was an easy matter to add earphones and goggles to allow her to participate in the environment.

Now Kanu, Nissa and Dakota awaited their guests. They were sitting within the enclosure of the household’s A-shaped geometry, in the triangular courtyard framed by the two main wings and the connecting bar between them. Within the courtyard lay a pond, some fountains, a series of layered terraces, a handful of marble statues. There were small trees and bushes, and the sky above them was the cloudless pink of late afternoon. The two humans sat on stone chairs positioned around a low stone table. The Tantor rested her haunches on a stone pedestal, tail draping the ground, a repose of perfect scholarly contentment.

‘They’re late,’ said the elephant.

‘They warned us there might be technical difficulties,’ Nissa said.

‘We shan’t wait much longer. I already warned you that I have no interest in negotiation.’

‘And I made sure to tell them,’ Kanu said. ‘But it’s also in your interests to convince them to leave us alone. You don’t want a confrontation if you can avoid it, do you?’

‘There would be no confrontation — only the nuisance value of them being close behind us.’ Dakota swivelled her huge tank-turret of a head. In this environment, she carried no prosthetic enhancements and her speaking voice appeared to emanate from her mouth rather than a piece of machinery fixed between her eyes. ‘You did well with this, Kanu — especially given the limited time you had at your disposal. I remember the household well enough to vouch for its accuracy.’

‘It’s a combination of the one aboard Zanzibar and my memories of the one on Earth.’

‘I’m still impressed that you were able to construct this environment as quickly as you did. Are you surprised, Nissa?’

‘It takes a lot to surprise me these days.’

Dakota signalled her agreement, head descending like the nodding counterweight of some huge steam-driven pump. ‘I never doubted your capabilities, Kanu, after all that you have done for me, but this is still a formidable achievement.’

‘Well, I’ve had practice. On Mars we often spent our downtime playing with virtual spaces. The ambassadors were all old enough to carry the requisite neural technology.’

Swift bent over to whisper in Kanu’s ear. ‘Incoming packets — clean and ching-compliant. Best not to answer me — it’s safe for me to talk to you, but this environment is so merrily slapdash I can’t swear that your subvocal intentions won’t be picked up.’

‘Here they are,’ Nissa said, shooting a glare at Swift, who did the decent thing and returned to being one of the statues.

The two women appeared out of thin air on the lowest part of the terrace. One was small, the other not much taller. For a second or two they looked thoroughly unsettled, like two fish that had fallen out of the sky. The smaller of the two was Eunice, Kanu decided instantly — he would have recognised her from Sunday’s emulation were her face not already known to him from a thousand historical records. The other woman he now knew to be Goma — Mposi’s niece. Mposi was his one-third-brother, so what did that make Goma? His one-third-niece-once-removed? Or did the common language of family ties simply collapse in the face of Akinya profligacy?

Both were thin, hair cut short, their clothing modest but casual — black or ash-grey trousers, loosely belted slash-necked tunics, low-heeled slip-on shoes. Neither wore conspicuous ornamentation or jewellery, although he noticed a ring on the younger woman’s fingers.

He raised a hand in greeting. ‘Welcome aboard Icebreaker. A few words of explanation before we go on — this environment will do its best to eliminate time lag by anticipating our responses and stalling our conscious processes while signals pass between our two vehicles. But the less strain we place on it, the easier it will be for Dakota — she’ll be experiencing everything in strict real-time. I suggest we consider our interruptions very carefully and try to speak as clearly and unambiguously as we can?’

‘We’ll do our best,’ Eunice said. She nodded at the other woman and they made their way up the terrace steps to the area where their hosts were already seated. Eunice and Goma took their places on the other side of the low stone table. Both of them sat with their backs straight, heads held high.

‘You have to stop what you’re doing,’ Goma said.

Kanu smiled, charmed by her bluntness. It cut across a life’s worth of diplomatic training to state her position so nakedly, so early in the process. He continued smiling, assuming there would be some elaboration.

But after a few moments’ silence, he concluded she had said all she meant to say.

‘Goma is correct,’ Eunice said, patting the other woman’s knee by way of mutual support. ‘You’re on the wrong course, Dakota — and you, Kanu, have been very unwise to get yourself tangled up in her plans. Who are you, by the way?’ She was looking at Nissa now. ‘I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.’

‘Nissa Mbaye. I was married to Kanu, once upon a time. Things happened to us and now we’re here. But you’re wrong about us. Or rather, if anyone’s to blame for this, it’s you. We came in response to your message — your summons. And if you’d warned us in time, we wouldn’t have run into trouble around Poseidon.’

‘Trouble you are about to repeat,’ Goma said.

‘We’re better equipped this time,’ Kanu answered. ‘It wasn’t Poseidon that damaged us, it was the remains of a Watchkeeper. All we have to do is steer clear of their corpses and it won’t happen again.’

‘I admire an optimist,’ Eunice said. ‘My guess, though, is that you haven’t been properly informed about the stakes. Dakota and I both know what’s involved, don’t we? We both experienced the Terror.’

‘A deterrent,’ Dakota said. ‘A keep-out sign, nothing more. But if we heeded all the keep-out signs, where would we be?’

‘Safe,’ Goma said.

‘Tell that to your ancestor. She never did a safe thing in her life. How are you, by the way, Eunice? You look well, rested. Orison has been kind to you. I knew I did the right thing by not killing you.’

‘I might be about to change your mind on that one.’

‘Well, we do have some bridges to build, do we not? I presume you supplied the technical expertise to gain control of my mirrors, for the little good it did you? But, Goma — I’m equally intrigued by what you said. You mentioned Tantors to Kanu. We call ourselves the Risen, but I shan’t split hairs over a matter of definition. Have you met my kind before?’

‘I met Sadalmelik, Achernar and the others on Orison. But none of them was like you.’

‘You find me distinct?’

‘You’re smarter. There’s no point in denying it. Or perhaps you’re more like us. Either way, you’re something new.’ Goma held up a hand before Dakota could interject — she was not done. ‘But not in a good way. My mother knew you on Crucible and you were not like this.’

‘You fear me because I am something outside your immediate experience? Because I have dared to escape from your control — to achieve true autonomy?’

‘That would be wonderful if you’d done it on your own. But whatever you’ve become, it’s because the Watchkeepers want you this way. You’re not their slave, you’re not even their puppet — even I can tell that you have some sort of free will. But they’ve seeded a very bad idea in you, and you’re so close to it you can’t see how bad it really is.’

‘You would frame mere curiosity as an unhealthy, even dangerous impulse?’

‘The point here isn’t for you to talk us out of anything,’ Kanu told the visitors. ‘Our mission is fixed — we cannot and will not abandon it. But you can spare yourselves pointless aggravation and risk by turning away from your interception course. You will not catch us — we both have a good grasp of our mutual capabilities — so why waste time going through the motions? There’s far too much at stake. Back off, continue your remote investigations, restore external power to Zanzibar and let us conduct our exploration of Poseidon. Later, we can discuss terms for cooperative exploration of the whole system — but only after we’ve returned from Poseidon.’

‘Something’s really put a bee in your bonnet, hasn’t it?’ said Eunice.

‘He’s being coerced,’ Goma said. ‘We guessed as much. Why don’t you just admit it, Kanu? And you, Nissa — what have you got to lose?’

‘There is no coercion,’ Kanu stated.

‘In your earlier message to us,’ Goma said, ‘you warned us that lives are at stake. You said you have “no choice” but to comply.’

‘Your lives will be at stake if you place yourselves at risk of collision, or stray too close to Poseidon without a proper understanding of the consequences,’ Kanu answered.

‘That’s not what you meant,’ Eunice said.

‘There is no point in debating this further,’ Dakota said. ‘Our objective is simple: scientific truth-gathering. If it takes a human — Risen cooperative expedition to unlock some of the secrets of the M-builders, so be it. We can’t spend the rest of history failing to understand the Mandalas and what they meant to their makers. We’ve both been through the Terror, Eunice and I — both of us sensed larger truths, almost glimpsed, leaking through into the prison of animal consciousnesses. The collapse of the vacuum? The fluctuation that ends everything, that negates every act, every thought? How can we bear not to know how the M-builders addressed that truth? Besides, we may also learn something of the Watchkeepers — and hopefully find out what they want of us.’

‘No one disputes any of that,’ Goma said. ‘We’re all here because of the quest for deeper understanding. But rushing into it is as bad as burying your head in the sand. We’ve barely begun to map this system, let alone poke our noses into it deepest secrets.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Dakota said. ‘Some of us have been here for centuries.’

‘So have I,’ Eunice said, ‘and I’m still inclined to be cautious. We could easily spend another century here, gathering information, before attempting close exploration of Poseidon.’

‘And be no more confident of success after all that time,’ the Tantor said.

Eunice leaned forward. ‘You sound very confident of your position, Dakota. I’m pleased. Confidence is a marker for intelligence — it shows that you have sufficient self-awareness to model the parameters of your environment. But it’s also a hazard. There’s far too much that we don’t know about our surroundings.’ Her eyes narrowed to a sharp, inquisitorial focus. ‘The variations in the second Mandala — have you been studying them?’

‘I could hardly be unaware of them, Eunice.’

‘Your interpretation, then?’

‘The changes were precipitated by the arrival of Zanzibar. Beyond that, we have no basis for further speculation.’

‘I do,’ Eunice said.

‘Anyone could make such a claim,’ Dakota answered.

Kanu nodded. ‘You’ll have to give us more than that, Eunice.’

‘I shall. The way I was left on Orison made it very difficult for me to conduct long-range studies of anything, let alone the Mandala on Paladin. But Goma’s ship — Travertine — has the sensor capability I lacked. They’ve been tracking the Mandala variations since their arrival. The exact meaning of the individual states isn’t clear to us — yet — but at least we understand the timing of the variations. Mandala is an eye, sweeping across the heavens. Once in a while, its gaze chances upon another star.’

‘Mandala is at a fixed latitude,’ Dakota said, ‘and Paladin’s angular tilt only changes on timescales of tens of thousands of years. At best, this eye can only ever sweep a narrow track.’

‘That’s true, to a point. But the state changes appear to be related to an alteration in the direction of the eye’s gaze. It’s like a radio telescope built into the bowl of a valley. You can’t move the primary mirror, but you can adjust the position of the antenna. We think that’s how the Mandala works. It can sweep a broader swathe of sky, direct its gaze onto objects that aren’t along its precise line of sight.’

‘That’s supposition,’ Dakota said.

‘I had two of Travertine’s technical experts take a close look at the timing of the state changes and their corresponding angular projection onto the sky. Within a fixed error margin, the focus is always another star of a broadly similar spectral type to Gliese 163, within a distance of a few hundred light-years.’

‘What does that prove?’ Nissa asked. ‘Look hard enough, you’ll find any alignment you want. It’s like drawing lines between pyramids.’

‘But the statistical odds against these alignments being chance is actually rather high according to our experts — about one in twenty thousand, if I understand the analysis. Shall I tell you what I think is happening?’ But she glanced quickly at Goma. ‘What we think?’

‘We may as well hear it, as you’re here,’ Kanu said.

‘The Mandala on Paladin is communicating with other Mandalas in other solar systems. It is sending them wake-up signals — telling them to begin rebooting.’

‘Rebooting,’ Nissa said. ‘I don’t know that term.’

‘Old spacefaring terminology. It means to put your boots on — to start getting ready for business.’

‘I see,’ she said, nodding doubtfully. ‘And what exactly is it that is “rebooting”?’

‘It’s a machine,’ Goma said. ‘A machine hundreds, maybe thousands of light-years across. It’s been dead, dormant, for longer than we can imagine, thousands, millions of years, at least. But my mother restarted it. Crucible was a peripheral branch of the Mandala network — an outlying system, a dead end. Ndege’s Mandala sent its wake-up signal to this one and transported Zanzibar here during the same event, probably because Zanzibar just happened to get caught up in the initial reactivation process. But this system isn’t a dead end. It’s a node, a hub, in some wider network. There may be others, but this must be the closest one to our part of the galaxy. It’s what the Watchkeepers have been drawn to all this time. They know it’s significant — they just can’t advance their knowledge beyond that.’

‘A machine wouldn’t take this long to start up,’ Kanu said.

‘It could if its basic components are still light-limited,’ Eunice replied. ‘Depending on how far out the furthest parts of the network are, it might take tens of thousands of years for the whole thing to come back online. Signals whispering across the void — start-up instructions, error correction, status reporting. A process longer than the span of recorded history. But that’s what’s happening. And on a local scale, it may already be partly operable.’

‘Operable,’ Kanu said, almost laughing. ‘As if it’s a thing we might use?’

‘Why not?’ Eunice said. ‘The Risen are here because of it. Instead of barging to Poseidon, we should be consolidating our efforts, trying to understand how to make safe use of the Mandala network. We know from the survivors that the Zanzibar translation was instantaneous within their reference frame, which means they must have been travelling at only a whisker below the speed of light. Consequently, any other part of the network is also only a blink away in subjective terms. Deep exploration of the galaxy is within our grasp — and you’re risking all that for the agenda of a bunch of mindless alien robots?’

‘Why do you say mindless?’ Dakota asked.

‘We all felt it,’ Eunice replied, ‘from the moment the Trinity made direct contact with the Watchkeepers. There’s nothing inside them. They’re hollow — scooped out like an ice-cream cone. They’ve forgotten how to be conscious. Or are you in some sort of denial about this? Does it not worry you that you might be the willing servant of a zombie machine intelligence?’

‘They’ve passed the Gupta — Wing threshold,’ Nissa said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘At least one of you has a grasp on things,’ Eunice said, miming applause. ‘Perhaps I should be addressing you, Nissa — are you the one I should be reaching out to?’

‘I am afraid we must curtail this discussion,’ Dakota said, rising from her seat — more nimble than any elephant had a right to be. ‘The time lag has consumed valuable hours.’

‘We’ve barely begun!’ Goma said.

‘It’s been six hours,’ Kanu said. ‘I’m sorry, but I think we’ve said all we can. We’re not adversaries, any of us, but we are on different paths. You have your concerns, we have ours — but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together when we returned from Poseidon.’

‘It’s going to kill you,’ Eunice said. ‘Dakota knows that — whether she admits it to herself or not. If you have a chance of turning away from this, I strongly recommend that you do so.’

She might have been on the point of saying something else, but before she had a chance her figment vanished from the environment. Goma was gone as well, their stone seats vacated.

Kanu expected to be snapped back into the normal time-flow of Icebreaker, no longer in ching. But Dakota turned her huge broad forehead to face him. ‘We have a measure of privacy here so we might as well use it. The younger human — Goma. What did she mean when she spoke of your “earlier message”?’

‘You’ve monitored all the transmissions between the two ships,’ Nissa said.

‘But she appeared to be referring to a conversation I do not know about. The mention of coercion, of lives being at stake — how could she know about the Friends, Kanu, unless you told her?’

‘Eunice would have told them.’

‘Eunice knows nothing of what has happened in any part of Zanzibar since her departure. This was specific, directed knowledge. How could either of them make such a deductive leap?’

‘It’s what we do,’ Nissa said. ‘Being humans.’

‘You think highly of your faculties. I don’t blame you for that. But it would be a mistake to underestimate me. If there was communication between Icebreaker and Travertine ahead of the exchanges I know about — or in parallel with them — I would very much like to know. What was discussed? What was considered, then abandoned?’

‘Nothing,’ Kanu said. ‘There was no communication.’

The Watchkeeper came in so swiftly that they had only a couple of hours to prepare for its arrival. It must have been among the gathering of alien machines on the system’s edge, waiting beyond the orbit of Paladin until Icebreaker’s movement snared its interest. For a little while, as it closed in with disdainful swiftness, it looked inevitable to Kanu that there would be a collision, or something just as catastrophic. This was nothing at all like the patient, inscrutable comings and goings of the Watchkeepers in the old system.

‘It’s not been damaged like the others,’ he said as they studied the sharpening images on the bridge — the Watchkeeper rendered as a stubby cone sidling in at a definite angle to its velocity vector.

‘Of course not,’ Dakota chided. ‘The corpses are as old as your hominid forebears. It has been aeons since a Watchkeeper was unwise enough to chance a close encounter with Poseidon; aeons since one of them was harmed. They learn slowly, but they do learn. You are quite wrong about the alien consciousness, by the way. It may be slower than you can perceive, but that does not mean it is absent. The machines have learned that the endurance of cosmological time demands no swift actions, no hasty measures.’

‘This looks pretty hasty to me,’ Nissa said.

‘An exception, because human activity is itself exceptional, especially when such activity is directed towards Poseidon. You would have drawn their attention sooner or later, even without that unfortunate accident. This movement, though, must be of particular interest to them — it originates with Zanzibar.’

‘They think you’re involved,’ Nissa said.

‘And that pleases them. These centuries are long to us. They swallow our lives as a whale swallows water. But they are merely a breath to the Watchkeepers — a moment between their great, slow thoughts. From their perspective, Zanzibar arrived a few busy instants ago.’

The image shivered, gaining a new layer of detail.

‘What should we do?’ Kanu asked.

‘Maintain our heading. Make no change. If it meant to stop us, it would already have done so. This is curiosity, concern, encouragement. It shares our desire to unravel the secrets of Poseidon.’

‘Oh, I’m just bursting with curiosity,’ Nissa said.

Kanu acknowledged that with a thin smile.

It came in closer still, slowly adjusting the angle of its course until its body was both parallel to Icebreaker and moving in the same direction. They were halfway along its length, with hundreds of kilometres of it to bow and stern. The nearest point was two hundred kilometres away, but in the airlessness of space where cues of distance and perspective were elusive, the Watchkeeper appeared to be dismayingly near. They had been closer to the corpse, but this one was very much alive. Blue radiance fought its way out between the close-layered scales of the Watchkeeper’s pine-cone armour.

Now something changed. The scales were angling apart, allowing more of that light to escape. It fanned out in hard blue arcs, sweeping across Icebreaker. They saw it on screens and sensors — had there been windows, the glare would have been too bright to tolerate.

‘Have we seen this before?’ Nissa asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Kanu said, offering a shrug by way of incomprehension.

‘They will speak to me,’ Dakota said, with sudden decisiveness. ‘Reduce our thrust to zero. I will go out to them.’

‘In Noah?’

‘On my own. I will make dung, then you will assist me with the suit and the airlock. I will not be outside for long.’

They put Icebreaker into a free-fall cruise and followed Dakota to the main airlock, where she had first come aboard. Her suit was waiting there, partially dismantled — its hard, curving sections looked more like the pieces of a small white spacecraft than something meant to be worn. The parts clamped around her and locked together with airtight precision, first the two Easter-egg halves of the body, then the four limb sections, complexly jointed and accordioned, and finally the monstrous trunked helmet with its two blank circular portholes for eyes. There was something horrible about the lifelessness of that helmet, as if a second, exterior skull now enclosed the first. She flexed the trunk, experimenting with its dexterity, while the suit’s life-support system puffed and wheezed and ticked.

Her voice, amplified and resonant, boomed through the suit’s speaking system. ‘The others remain here, Kanu, and they have their orders with regard to Zanzibar. You would not be so unwise as to forget that, would you?’

‘No, I think we understand the situation perfectly.’

‘That is good, because our conversation with Goma gave me some small grounds for concern. It will be good to know that I may put them to rest.’

‘How will you move outside?’ Nissa asked.

‘Let me worry about that. If you wish to witness, no harm will come of it.’

She moved easily into the lock and the cycle was soon complete. Kanu had stopped the engines by then — it would make a small difference to their arrival at Poseidon, but nothing that would seriously complicate their plans — and Dakota was able to drift free of the ship without being left behind.

It turned out that her suit, which they had not been able to inspect in detail, was fitted with a set of steering thrusters arranged for three axes of control. She looked perfectly at ease with this technology, directing it with a tap of her trunk against a control plate fixed between her shoulders. Kanu reminded himself that this extra-vehicular equipment must have been developed during that brief and hopeful period when humans and Tantors had coexisted within Zanzibar. The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world.

Dakota picked up speed. It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit. But to an elephant, a monkey in a suit must have looked no stranger, no more of an affront to the expected order of things. They were both mammals, both creatures who needed air in their lungs.

She diminished, becoming a small white sphere with appendages, then a dot soon lost against the scale of the Watchkeeper. They tracked the electronic signature of her suit with Icebreaker’s instruments, and then quite suddenly she was moving in a way that could not be explained by the capabilities of her suit alone. She began to accelerate along the narrowing length of the alien machine, gathered in some net of invisible force, until at last her signature vanished into the tiny circular aperture at the Watchkeeper’s tip. Tiny only in the most relative of senses, of course — the proportions of things, even at the machine’s extremity, remained mountainous, and Dakota would have been swallowed into the Watchkeeper like a speck of plankton.

As they carried on watching, the platelets — each of which was easily the size of a small land mass — began to close again, eventually shuttering the blue radiation.

The better part of an hour passed.

‘Do you think she’d give the order?’ Nissa asked.

‘To murder the Friends?’ Kanu said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t want to find out the hard way what her limits are. It could be a bluff, but in Zanzibar I had the feeling she might go through with it. If they’ve already committed murder, which we as good as know they have, there’s no reason for them not to do it again.’

She gave him a sidelong, questioning look. ‘Is that you speaking or Swift?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be me?’

‘Because you have every incentive to find a way to back out of this. I’m not sure Swift feels quite the same way.’

‘Swift won’t agree to anything that puts the Friends’ lives at risk.’

‘No — but if there was a chance to turn around, without risking the Friends, would Swift accept that?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because Swift’s agenda and ours aren’t quite the same thing.’

Swift had been silent until then, but this statement was enough to draw him to speak. ‘I do not believe our concerns are all that different, Nissa. Aren’t we all here to gather knowledge — to learn more than we already know?’

‘Some of us didn’t have a lot of choice about being here.’

‘There is truth in that, but you would not have gone to Europa were you not also in the business of seeking knowledge. Curiosity motivates us in different ways, I agree. Kanu has spent his life searching for answers to the oldest of questions: how may I live peacefully with my neighbour? On Earth, he worked to foster good relations between the distinct and troubled factions of modern humanity — between the folk of the land, the folk of the water, the folk of the air. On Mars, he quite literally gave his life for the betterment of human — machine affairs. But Kanu knew that a deeper solution to our differences required answers he could not hope to find within the old solar system. They drove him to travel here.’

‘Did they, Swift? Or did you drive Kanu because you needed a head to travel in?’

‘Please,’ Kanu said. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by this. I know why I’m here, and Swift is part of it but not the only reason. And this discussion changes nothing because we still have to think of the Friends. We can’t forget about them, and we can’t abandon Dakota inside the Watchkeeper and hope there’ll be no consequences. I’m sorry, but going through with her expedition is the only course open to us.’

‘Even if it kills us?’ Nissa asked.

‘Yes. Even if. Because what is the alternative? To take a gamble with thousands of human lives? I’m not suicidal — not any more. But I’d rather die than have their deaths on my conscience. Nothing’s worth that.’

‘She’s coming back,’ Swift said.

They had a lock on her suit signature again and observed as it emerged from the narrowing waterspout-like proboscis at the very limit of the Watchkeeper’s shell, a seed spat out into vacuum. At first she moved with the same implausible speed and agility they had witnessed before, until the Watchkeeper surrendered her to the steering and propulsion of her own suit and she closed the distance back to Icebreaker. As she did so, the Watchkeeper turned on its axis and fell away at an unnerving acceleration.

Whatever business it had with them, it was clearly concluded — for now, at least.

Kanu readied the lock and watched as Dakota slowed her approach before tucking herself back inside the ship. When the lock had begun to cycle, he returned the drive to power and resumed their earlier acceleration. Kanu and Nissa were at the lock when she emerged back into Icebreaker, and — with the aid of the other Risen — set about divesting herself of the suit. As they were removed from her, the pieces gave off a rank pungency. Kanu suspected that the inside of a human spacesuit would not smell all that appealing to an elephant.

‘Are we back on course?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘We didn’t lose too much time — certainly not enough to help Goma. What happened to you inside the Watchkeeper?’

‘The continuation of a process. The continued revelation of that which demands to be revealed. Beyond that, I do not think any answer would satisfy you.’

‘You could try,’ Nissa said.

‘Then I shall. Such doubts as I had have now been set aside. I feel emboldened — confident that this is the right course. The machines have eased my misgivings and reaffirmed my absolute conviction to the cause of knowledge-gathering. Has there been contact from the other ship?’

‘Not since we spoke to them,’ Kanu said.

‘Then you will prepare a transmission. I have no wish to stir up trouble with these people, but they must be made to understand the utter inflexibility of our position. Tell them to turn around. If they go back to Orison, there will be no more difficulties between us and we may yet find common ground. But they must come no closer to Poseidon.’

‘We’ve tried persuading them already,’ Nissa said. ‘Look where it got us.’

‘Words alone will not change their minds.’

Kanu hardly dared ask. ‘So what now?’

‘Tell them about the Friends. If Eunice is who she claims to be, she will validate the fact of the Friends’ existence. She will also convince the others that I am fully capable of destroying each and every human life in the skipover vaults. Tell them that, Kanu. Tell them and make them turn around. We will be watching and waiting.’