On the Steel Breeze (11 page)

So Travertine had set verself on this path, constantly testing Assembly authority, chafing against restrictions, pushing vis luck. After the last censure, ve had done well to avoid imprisonment. But Travertine always rebuilt and pushed further. And Chiku had to agree with ver here – the Assembly always knew what Travertine was up to and chose not to intervene. Because on some unspoken level they wanted ver to succeed.

If there was one positive thing to be drawn from yesterday’s tragedy, Chiku thought, it was that Travertine must have been on to something.

‘Your experiment in Kappa was totally destroyed,’ Chiku said, seizing the opportunity to speak. ‘Along with, I’m guessing, all the records relating to it. But you’ll still be required to give an account of what was involved.’

‘So someone else can reproduce my work?’

‘So we can make sure no one comes anywhere near it,’ Utomi said.

‘Clearly, I made progress.’ Travertine’s chin was elevated now, with that familiar cocksure defiance of vis. ‘And if I had the chance, I’d do
it again. I ran an experiment and I got a
result.
That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.’

‘If you intend to show contrition,’ Utomi said, ‘now would be an excellent place to start.’

‘For what? Two hundred lives?’

‘Two hundred and twelve,’ a constable corrected, before glancing down. ‘Make that two hundred and fourteen. They’ve recovered two more bodies since we went into session.’

‘Make it three hundred. A thousand. You think it matters?’ Travertine surveyed the appalled faces that followed this statement. ‘I grieve for them, believe me. But the survival of this entire holoship depends on slowdown. That’s ten million lives. Hundreds of millions in the local caravan, a billion people spread throughout all the other holoships, and not just those en route for Crucible, but also the other extrasolar worlds in other systems. If my death would guarantee the breakthrough we need, I’d kill myself now.’

‘You truly believe this?’ Utomi said, consternation written in his features.

Travertine’s gaze was unblinking, resolute.

‘Absolutely.’

Chiku studied the dismayed reactions of her fellows. She could not be sure what disturbed them the most: the fact that Travertine could make such an assertion in the one place where ve ought to be pleading for clemency; or the fact that Travertine was utterly and irrevocably sincere in vis convictions.

Perhaps a little of both.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chiku returned to Kappa later that day. Putting on her suit, she deliberately found fault with as many components as she could without arousing suspicion. Fortunately, this was hardly a challenge since many of the suits were coming back with all sorts of minor ailments. By the time she cycled through into Kappa, Chiku’s assigned search party was far ahead and not making any effort to slow down. That suited her perfectly. She told them she would rendezvous with them after they had completed a sweep of one grid, at a junction a couple of blocks astern of the breach. They agreed; it was clear from their indifferent tones that Representative Chiku Akinya could do whatever the hell she liked as far as they were concerned.

Her ruse allowed her perhaps thirty minutes to make the rendezvous, which was just enough time to return to the laboratory and the collapsed basement. If she was late meeting up with the other search party, her actions might start to attract attention.

She found her way back into the damaged structure. From its ruined heart, Chiku looked up at the chamber’s distant ceiling, defined now by random constellations – the lights of repair teams lashed high above, trying to prevent more cladding from breaking loose. She turned her attention to the improvised ramp, the shard of fallen sky, which was still in place. Chiku vaulted the gap with more confidence than on her first attempt.

She started descending.

Chiku had been trepidatious before, but there was no time for that now, even with the knowledge that the floor might not be as secure as it looked. She reached the basement and moved through the rubble until she found the sheet of walling material she had placed over the hole in an effort to disguise it. It had not been disturbed. Chiku heaved the piece aside, taking care not to shatter it.

Then she stood on the edge of the hole and directed her helmet light
downwards. It was just as she remembered, except that it appeared to plunge deeper than she had originally thought. At the very limit of the lamp’s reach, the shaft began to curve around to a less steep angle, perhaps even to the horizontal. The recessed hand- and footholds looked intact. She could climb down them, no problem, but the real difficulty was getting to them in the first place – the aperture was only half as wide as the shaft under it.

Chiku checked the time. Twenty minutes, give or take.

She cast around for a chunk of debris and found a chest-sized boulder that would have taxed her without the suit’s ampliation. She walked to the edge of the hole, raised the boulder to her sternum and thrust it down and away as hard as she could, stepping back in the same instant so that there was no risk of the boulder crushing her feet on its way down.

Her aim was true. The boulder crunched through the lip of overhanging floor, pulverising it. Chiku watched the debris rain down the shaft in perfect soundlessness. Now the hole was more or less the same diameter as the shaft. All she had to do was lower herself over the lip and start climbing.

Chiku crushed her misgivings. She knelt down with her back to the hole and began to drop her right foot into the void, maintaining balance so that the weight of her suit’s life-support hump did not tip her over the edge. It did not work. Why had she ever thought it was going to? If there had been a shaft like this in a normal part of
Zanzibar,
there would have been railings, or something to hold onto, to help the transition into a climbing position. Here there was nothing, just a hole in the ground . . . and nothing to stop her toppling into it. She could sit with feet over the edge and somehow try and wriggle around . . .

Chiku spotted something that might work. It was a length of pipe or spar as thick as her wrist, one end still embedded in a chunk of debris. The pipe was perhaps three metres long, its free end terminating abruptly, as if severed.

It was madness, and she knew it, but now her actions had a momentum of their own. She carried the spar and its ragged anchor to the edge of the hole, holding it like a pole vault, and rammed the severed end into a mound of debris. It crunched, jammed, then gripped. The other end, where the chunk was still embedded, she allowed to drop between two large boulders, where it became pinned in place. The bar now ran at a tangent to the edge of the hole, half a metre from it and half a metre above the floor’s level. Chiku gave it a kick, testing its fixity.

She knelt down, between the hole and the improvised railing. Now she was able to keep both hands on the bar. She lowered her right foot, scrabbled it around until it found the foothold. Placing more trust in the railing, she shifted her centre of gravity over the hole. Her left leg followed, finding another foothold. The bar shifted, then caught again.

Chiku’s heart resumed beating.

She released her right hand from the bar and lowered further, a foot at a time, until her right hand located a handhold and her face was nearly level with the rim of the hole. The foot- and handholds felt safe. With an intake of breath she released the bar, and descended fully into the shaft. Now there was nothing for it but to keep going down.

She soon found a rhythm. Climbing in the suit was much easier than climbing without it, since the power-assist gave the illusion of effortlessness. Even the gloves were augmented, so that her fingers never began to tire. This illusion of weightless ease was treacherous, of course. She could still fall.

Chiku paused in her descent to catch her breath and looked up. Craning her head back as far as she dared, she saw that the ragged hole had diminished to a milky circle, a false moon glimmering with the pale lights of the rescue workers in Kappa. Chiku had given no thought as to how far she ought to go before turning back.

Further than this, certainly. She checked the time again. Her margin had diminished to ten minutes.

She resumed the descent and kept going until she felt the shaft beginning to curve and level out. The descent became easier, but she could no longer see the hole above. No milky circle now, just swallowing blackness in both directions.

Chiku paused, torn between continuing and turning back. Then she swallowed and carried on.

The shaft levelled out and she stood – it was high enough that she could stand upright. The hand- and footholds were still present; perhaps they had been installed to assist locomotion under weightlessness, before the holoship was set spinning. She crunched past the remains of some of the debris dislodged from above that had fallen down the shaft, careened around the bend and come to rest here.

She paused again and tugged Travertine’s map from her thigh pocket. It had taken some nerve to smuggle it in under the scrutiny of the techs who had helped her suit-up. Not that the map was incriminating in
itself – it had the look of something executed by a child – but she had no easy explanation for bringing it with her.

Travertine had identified this probable entry point and indicated how the shaft linked into the underground network ve had already begun to explore. There was a junction not far ahead, and a little way beyond that – within easy walking distance, Chiku judged – was the barrier, or impediment, that had blocked Travertine’s progress.

Chiku walked another fifty metres, according to the suit, now moving horizontally, parallel to Kappa’s surface, but away from the breach. The tunnel met another. As she pushed on, trusting Travertine, she checked the time. She could still make her planned rendezvous with the search party and avoid difficult explanations – but only if she turned around soon.

Then her helmet light fell on something ahead, at the limit of her vision, and she had to know what it was. The shaft widened ahead, the smooth-bored walls curving away on either side of her, and she could just make out something waiting there, dark and squat, curves and angles. Some kind of machine. It could have been a generator or water purifier.

It was neither of those things.

It was a transit pod, big enough to carry both freight and passengers, shaped like a fat, blunt-ended capsule with doors and cargo hatches in its curving, slug-back sides. Chiku’s memory prickled. She had travelled in pods like this, in the early days of the voyage, but fifty or seventy-five years into the crossing,
Zanzibar
’s entire internal transit network had been ripped out and refurbished. Somehow the engineers had missed this pod along with Travertine’s forgotten subterranean tunnel system.

The pod rested on triplet induction rails spaced around the widened shaft at separations of one hundred and twenty degrees. They gleamed clean and cold, stretching into the distance as far as her helmet light could illuminate. Concentric red circles glowed at intervals along the tunnel.

This was wrong. She could accept a minor detail of
Zanzibar
’s history being forgotten and omitted from the structural logs. But this tunnel was huge and the presence of a transit pod suggested that it continued for some distance. And the pod was big enough to carry almost anything Chiku could imagine.

She touched a hand to its side. Through the glove, she felt dead ages of cold and silence, as though this pod had been waiting here, biding its time with a monumental patience. She could also feel the faintest
tremble of waiting power, as if it was still energised, still drawing wattage from the induction rails. They ended here, terminating in large angled buffers designed to stop a runaway pod. This one had stopped safely a couple of metres from the buffers.

Chiku walked to the end facing into the tunnel, where the converging lines of rails gleamed back in brassy tones. The pod was sealed. She brushed her hand against the faint oval outline of the forward passenger door, wondering who had last travelled in this vehicle – someone still aboard
Zanzibar,
perhaps, or one of the holoship’s architects, completing their final inspection before the CP drive had been lit.

The door’s outline lit up at her touch, glowing neon purple against the pod’s black surface. Chiku took an involuntary step backwards as the door bulged out of its recess and slid to one side along the hull.

Chiku stared at the cabin space. Subdued lights and an arrangement of deep, plushly padded seats made the interior look warmly inviting. The tunnel was in vacuum now, but the passengers would normally have boarded in a fully pressurised environment.

Chiku could not help herself. She stepped into the glowing cabin and took one of the seats, which looked brand new. There were no controls to speak of, merely an angled console beneath the curving forward window. An illuminated three-dimensional map of the holoship’s transit links appeared to hover under the console’s glossy black surface. Chiku compared it against her memories. Though the basic arrangement of chambers had been fixed since launch, the interconnections had undergone several changes. Over the years, the citizens aboard
Zanzibar
had imposed workable, human solutions on the architects’ scrupulously logical intentions. Major routes, designed to be vital trunks, had fallen into puzzling disuse, while a number of secondary connections had proven vastly more popular. The most direct routes between chambers were not always preferred, and over the years the map had been redrawn and simplified, pruned of surplus branches.

Chiku touched her glove to the console and one route flared to particular brightness. She tried to follow it through the confusion of connecting lines, but the knot was tangled. It led forward, though, to the holoship’s leading pole. Chiku noticed some words hovering beneath the console’s surface that had not been there a moment before.

Chamber Thirty-Seven.