Poseidon's Wake

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Nissa eased her bulky, suited form into the command position aboard the shuttle Noah, quickly familiarising herself with the layout of the instruments and control inputs: they were not too dissimilar from those aboard Fall of Night. Under normal circumstances, the shuttle would have gladly flown itself. But these particular circumstances were anything but normal, and the lander was all too willing to turn to human guidance.

‘The poor thing’s confused,’ Nissa said. ‘Like a dog being made to learn a new trick. It can’t find an acceptable entry solution and is wondering why it’s been placed in this position.’

‘You mean it knows we’re all going to die and it doesn’t want to be a co-conspirator?’ Kanu asked.

‘Think kindly of it,’ Swift said. ‘It’s a simple machine and it’s doing its best. Might I suggest a slightly steeper angle of attack — say, two additional degrees of nose-up elevation?’

‘Am I flying this or are you?’

‘My abject apologies. Under the circumstances, you are doing a most creditable job.’

But Nissa altered their approach angle anyway and consented to allow Swift to offer such advice as he deemed useful. The fact was, even Swift could not be expected to work miracles.

‘If it’s the last thing we do,’ Kanu said, ‘it would be a shame not to see one of the wheels up close. Can you find us an entry profile that gets us within visual range of a suitable wheel?’

‘Already done,’ Nissa said. ‘And it’s not just out of curiosity, either. Those wheels are the closest thing we’re going to find to dry land. I know this ship’s supposed to float but I’d sooner not stake my life on it.’

‘It’s a good plan,’ Kanu said.

But they both knew it was barely a plan at all. They would have no choice but to land in open water, for Noah had no means of setting down on the wheels even if there had been a suitable hard landing surface. For a few minutes they deliberated about attempting a controlled descent onto one of the floating biomasses, but all the evidence suggested that the living rafts were too tenuous to bear the lander’s weight, let alone absorb the shock of impact without rupturing. And then they would be back in water again, except this time choked in from all directions. Besides, none of the biomasses came within five thousand kilometres of any of the wheels.

With the lander still under thrust, Kanu made his way back from the command position to the Risen. They were in support hammocks identical to the ones on the larger ship. He braced a hand against the ceiling and leaned in to Dakota.

‘We’ll be hitting air in a few minutes. Nissa’s going to find us the smoothest way down, and we’ll try to hold our deceleration at a manageable level. I can’t promise it’ll be easy, though.’

‘Nor can we expect the impossible of you,’ Dakota said.

‘Of any of us. But before things get tough, we need to think ahead. You had years to plan this expedition. Is this ship well stocked with equipment?’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘Whatever we need to survive on the surface. We’ll float, while we’re able. But you knew this was a waterworld, and that the wheels are the only solid surfaces. How were you hoping this would play out?’

‘A close visual inspection of the wheels. The analysis of the encoded patterns — the understanding of their context.’

‘From the air?’

‘Most certainly. Your ship could have coped with atmospheric insertion had our approach speed been low enough. What can be learned from the tiny parts of the wheels at the ocean’s surface?’

‘Right now I’m more concerned with not dying.’ He would have smiled at his own remark had the black toxin of the Terror not still been within him. The absence of hope, the absence of purpose, the inability to see a point to any act, the realisation of the supreme and total futility of existence — he could not begin to imagine how it would be possible to live with this hollow, howling void inside him, sucking the hope out of every moment.

And yet Nissa said there had to be a way. She was feeling it, too — so surely were the Tantors. And yet, as Nissa had pointed out, Chiku must eventually have come to an accommodation with the facts of the Terror. Life could go on — purpose found again. Presently Kanu saw no way through his present despair, but for Nissa’s sake he would trust her judgement — trust that there was a path, a way of living, that would make this bearable. That the void would close.

‘We can use one of the wheels as a safe haven,’ he continued. ‘Those inscriptions, the ones we saw from space — they’re deep, cut into the wheel like ledges. If we can get onto one of those ledges—’

‘Then what, Kanu?’ Dakota asked, with an edge of desperation.

‘Mposi isn’t far behind us. I’ve told Goma to turn around, but if there’s a shred of Akinya in her, I might as well have been whistling in the wind.’

‘It will not help.’

‘I’m not just going to drown, Dakota. Or let you drown, for that matter. If the lander’s in poor shape, we need a survival plan. None of us is going to cope well with Poseidon’s heat even if we can breathe the atmosphere for a while. Let’s start with the basics. Can we cross water?’

‘There are powered rafts. They can be deployed and inflated when we are down.’

‘I hope they’re big.’

‘Do you think we would forget what we are, Kanu?’

‘I’m sorry.’ He scratched his glove through his bristle of white hair. ‘What about exposure to the atmosphere — do you have suits aboard Noah as well?’

‘There are emergency suits. They are not as capable as the one I wore to visit the Watchkeepers, but they will function.’

‘Can you get into them once we’re down?’

‘We shall try. As for the rafts, they are in the external compartments. They cannot be reached from here.’

‘As long as we can access them when we’re down.’ Something in him made him a place a hand on Dakota. ‘We’re not done yet. Not while there’s breath in our lungs.’

‘Do you believe that, Kanu?’

‘I’m trying to.’

It was a performance, a mental tightrope act. One foot before the next and never look down. Think only of the present moment, and perhaps the moment to come. Kanu wondered how long he could sustain it.

‘Kanu,’ Nissa shouted. ‘You’d better see this.’

While they were decelerating, Icebreaker had carried on ahead, meeting the atmosphere first and at a sharper angle. Now it was encountering significant friction, beginning to shroud itself in a cocoon of plasma. Kanu stared at it with a sort of horrified wonder, finding it hard to imagine that they had been inside that doomed ship less than an hour ago. It looked tiny now — a thing of utter insignificance against the larger backdrop of Poseidon.

‘Starting to tumble,’ he said, noticing that the hull was sliding in at an oblique angle, cats’-tails of plasma bannering out from the leading surface, the brightness of which was still turned away from them.

‘It won’t be long now,’ Swift said.

‘Are you still in contact with the image of yourself?’ Kanu asked.

‘We made our peace. But I am sorry for your ship. It did well to get us this far.’

‘Good job there’s another ship to take us out of this system,’ Nissa said.

Kanu nodded, glad to endorse the sentiment, although they both knew their chances of leaving this world, let alone this system, were diminishing rapidly.

He felt a bump, then a shudder.

‘Strap in,’ Nissa said. ‘Now it’s our turn.’

Noah’s engine had done the best it could; now aerobraking was the only thing that stood between them and a rapid crash into the sea. Kanu had offered Dakota the best assurance he could, but the projections of their entry profile gave him no great confidence. Depending on minute and subtle factors of aerodynamics and tropospheric physics, their peak gee-load could be anywhere between two and five gees. Even the upper limit might be tolerated by the Risen if it was short in duration, but he could make no promises.

Icebreaker was pinwheeling now, about fifty kilometres deeper into the atmosphere and throwing off molten pieces of itself like the arms of a spiral galaxy. Nissa’s entry profile had to take that into consideration as well — the last thing they wanted was to ram into debris from the larger ship or the turbulence stirred up by its passage. But she dared not steer too far off their plotted course or they might end up tens of thousands of kilometres from the closest wheel.

Kanu was surprised that the towering structures were not more obvious now they were sliding into the atmosphere’s thickening depths. But the wheels were much narrower than they were tall, and what was clear to long-range sensors was anything but distinct to the human eye. One wheel lay dead ahead of them, but it was edge on — no more than a pale scratch rising from the blue, which Kanu easily lost track of if he allowed his gaze to slip to either side of it. Besides, the air outside was beginning to glow, taking on a rosy flicker as Noah started to pick up its own cocoon of ionised atoms. When the brightness reached a certain level, the windows shuttered automatically.

As the air resistance increased, so the deceleration forces mounted. The load exceeded one gee, reached one and a half — the force they would experience on Poseidon’s surface, hard but bearable — and then climbed to two gees. Kanu dared hope that it would level out there, sparing the Risen more difficulties, but the needle was still creeping up. Two and a half, then three.

He twisted back in his seat to address them. ‘It can’t last too long. Hold out as best you can.’

‘Still climbing,’ Nissa said.

At four gees it was all Kanu could do to breathe. His view of the instruments and readouts blurred as darkness stole in around the edges of his vision. Even through the layers of his suit, the chair felt as if it was made of knives.

A minute of that, maybe two, and he sensed an easing. The ride smoothed out and the gee-load dropped smoothly down to one and a half. Without warning the automatic shutters raised again and the blue light of an alien world pushed its way into Kanu’s eyes. They were in the lower layers of the atmosphere now, still descending but under some aerodynamic control. The upper half of the sky remained very dark, a purple that inked to a starless velvet black, but it was gaining in blue opacity with each kilometre they dropped. Poseidon was a huge world compared to Earth, or indeed any planet in Kanu’s direct experience. Huge and hot, despite the coolness of its sun. That surface warmth made its atmosphere swell like a loaf of bread, puffing higher into space. But its surface gravity was higher as well, jealously tugging the atmosphere closer to the ground, acting against the effect of the increased temperature. The net result was that the atmosphere thinned out with height in close similarity with the air on Earth, with almost all of it was squeezed into a layer less than a hundred kilometres thick.

They were in the lower quarter of that layer now and Noah’s wings were becoming increasingly effective. They were flying, nearly. Kanu knew that their difficulties were far from over but it was a blessing to have made it this far, and he vowed not to be ungrateful for it.

‘Nice job.’

‘Thank you. But we’ve taken a fair battering.’ Nissa directed his attention to the many warning symbols on the console. ‘We came in harder and hotter than anyone ever intended.’

Kanu was certain that the air in the cabin was warmer than it had been before they hit the atmosphere.

‘But we’re still here, so the damage can’t be too great, can it?’

‘I think the hull got pretty chewed up in places. You say this thing is meant to float?’

‘So I gather.’

‘Then let’s hope we’re not full of holes.’

The ride was smooth now, the gee-load coming from Poseidon rather than their own deceleration. He unbuckled, anxious to check on the Tantors. He moved cautiously, feeling like he was carrying at least his own body weight on his back.

In an instant his world turned white, a white that shaded to pink at the edges where it rammed through the lander’s windows. Now the forms of the windows were precise negatives of themselves, burned across his retinas like brands.

‘What—’ he started to say.

‘Icebreaker,’ Swift said, with disarming coolness. ‘The Chibesa core must have detonated.’

‘Did you know that was coming?’

‘It was always a possibility.’

‘Then you might have mentioned it!’ Kanu pulled himself further along the cabin. His vision was clearing slowly, the after-images fading — they had not been exposed to the full and direct effect of the blast, but it had been bad enough. Reaching a window, he stared at the curve of the sea below, so smooth and flawless that it might have been machined from an ingot of hard blue metal. He watched a line slide across that flawlessness, a demarcation, travelling impossibly quickly, turning the shining sea to a leathery texture where it had passed.

‘Nissa! Shock wave! Bank hard. Put our belly to the blast. When that wave hits—’

She had already begun to turn them, anticipating exactly that, and Kanu grabbed for a ceiling rail as Noah pitched steeply. He watched the Risen swing in their hammocks, elephant-masses providing a demonstration of pure Newtonian mechanics.

The shock wave hit. Kanu had braced for it, but still he was jolted from his feet and sent tumbling against the opposite wall. His suit absorbed the worst of it but the impact was still hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. He was too stunned to know whether he had hurt himself or not. But however unpleasant it had been for him, it must have been worse for the Risen. Their hammocks were meant to absorb continuous loads, not sudden shocks.

‘Nissa?’ he called.

‘Levelling off. Guessing we’re through the worst of it.’

‘Any damage?’

‘How long have you got, merman? Whatever was wrong with us before, that didn’t help.’

‘But we’re still flying.’

‘On a steady descent, about five hundred metres per minute. We should have brought Fall of Night, not this barely flyable brick.’

‘Can we still make it close to that wheel?’

‘Depends on your definition of close.’

‘We can cross water if we need to. There are rafts — big enough for all of us.’

‘They’d better be. We’re coming up on the wheel now — this may be your one chance for a good look before we ditch. Do you want to see it?’

‘More than anything in the world. I’ll be there in a moment.’

He had reached the Risen. He knelt by Dakota, glad when her pink-rimmed eye made contact with his.

‘We’re through the worst of it, I think. Icebreaker blew up and we ran into the shock wave. But other than the splashdown, we shouldn’t hit anything you can’t handle. Are you all right?’

‘I was always the hardiest of us, Kanu. Hector is alive, though weak. But Lucas has passed into the Remembering.’

It took only a glance to confirm this news. Hector looked drowsy, but his gaze still tracked Kanu and a twitch of his trunk signalled the presence of life. The other Risen’s eyes were open but quite unseeing. Kanu stared at the mountainous swell of his ribcage. It remained as still as a rock.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We are stronger than you in so many ways, yet weaker in others. How far are we from the sea?’

‘Pretty close now. When we ditch… well, I’ll do what I can for everyone. Best stay in the hammock until we hit water.’

‘I shall.’

Kanu glanced out through the window again. The waters ruffled by the shock wave were returning to their former stillness. He tried to estimate their height from the hammered texture of the wave-tops, but it was impossible. And there was nothing down there, no rock or living thing, no trace of human presence, to offer the slightest hint of scale.

‘You’re missing the show,’ Nissa said.

He returned to the command deck, trying to put aside thoughts of what lay ahead by confining himself to the present moment, to the spectacle the universe had seen fit to let him witness.

Half of the wheel was hidden to him, lost beneath the water’s surface. The visible portion arched from the ocean in two places, separated by the two hundred kilometres of the wheel’s diameter. The nearest of those two points was only a few tens of kilometres from Noah. They were circling it now while also losing height — and still coming down harder and faster than Kanu would have wished. The upper portion of the wheel was not visible at all, but that owed less to Poseidon’s curvature than to the presence of so much atmosphere in between, hazing out detail and contrast. Looking up, he could track the ascent of the nearest arc, soaring almost vertically to begin with but gradually evidencing its great circular curve as it pushed higher and higher, finally cresting the atmosphere and vaulting into open space. There was much less air to obscure his vision when he looked to the zenith and the wheel’s arc was traceable far past its maximum height. He followed the fading white scratch until it vanished into the haze, pointing to the place on the horizon where the rest of the wheel must lie.

They continued descending. The wheel’s tread was a kilometre across; its rim had about the same depth. From space they had detected a suggestion of dense patterning on the surface, a complex, shifting backscatter of metallic traces. Now their eyes were all the equipment they needed to gather more data. The wheels only looked smooth from a distance; up close they bore a finely printed text. A pattern of grooves had been cut into both the tread and the rim, as sharp-edged as if they had been lasered yesterday. On the tread, the patterns consisted of horizontal grooves, one above the other, running nearly the full width of the wheel. The grooves were only straight when averaged across their length. On a scale of a few metres, they exhibited a series of angular changes of direction, sometimes doubling back before resuming course. Each groove appeared distinct from those above or below it, but it was impossible to look at more than a few at any one time. There were no more than ten metres between each groove; if the wheel’s circumference was somewhere in the region of six hundred kilometres, then there could be many hundreds of thousands of these grooves — more grooves than there were words in a book. The rims, meanwhile, carried about a hundred concentric grooves — circular statements which Kanu presumed continued all the way around the wheel. On the wheel’s concave face, too, were yet more angular grooves.

Kanu reminded himself that there were other wheels all over the planet. Some intuition told him that the wheels must each contain distinct patterns. If each wheel was a book, then Poseidon was a library.

‘I’m no expert,’ he said, ‘but that looks like the same sort of writing they found on Mandala.’

Nissa nodded. ‘No surprise if the M-builders were here.’

‘The same language,’ Swift said, ‘but not necessarily serving the same function. Eunice was only able to trigger the Mandala because the syntax provided a set of operating rules. This has to be something different.’

‘Operating rules for the wheels?’ Kanu speculated. ‘We know they’re multifunctional — they can become the moons, if needed, or the moons can turn into wheels.’

‘Perhaps,’ Swift said.

‘You think it’s something else.’

‘If the Terror taught me one thing, it’s that there are answers here — otherwise why guard against the likes of us? Perhaps a history, an accounting of what became of the M-builders. The wheels may encode that history, collectively or individually, and we have been granted permission to read it.’

‘Then it’s a pity we don’t have the lexicon,’ Nissa said. ‘Or did Eunice share that with you during your blissful communion?’

‘No — there wasn’t time for anything like that. But you are right — she would know what to make of this, I think. Better than I do, at any rate. I think I may have outlasted my usefulness to you both.’

‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ Kanu said. ‘Anyway, you’re here for the same reason I am — to see and learn. So make the most of it.’

‘Believe me, I am doing my utmost.’

As they spiralled down, Nissa strove to bring them closer and closer to the point where the wheel rim thrust from the waters. The scale of it had been overwhelming enough in abstract terms, but now Kanu had the sense of some stupendous cliff or pillar rising from the sea, a thing of imperturbable mass and solidity. They could dash Noah against it and not even leave a blemish.

‘One more circuit, if we’re lucky,’ Nissa said. ‘Are the Risen ready?’

‘It’s just Dakota and Hector now. I’m afraid Lucas didn’t make it.’

She must have heard something in his voice. ‘You’re sad about that, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. A little while ago I’d have given a lot to see the three of them dead. But I can’t rejoice.’

‘Maybe Lucas was the lucky one — he got it over with quickly.’

‘We’ll see.’

Chimes sounded; Noah had detected the approach of the sea’s surface, thinking in its simple-minded way that it was still ferrying people from orbit to Crucible.

Whatever happened, it would not be long now until they hit the water.