On the Steel Breeze (57 page)

‘Thank you,’ Chiku whispered.

‘Immediately after the crackdown, your name was mud on
Zanzibar
– almost as reviled as Travertine’s! The citizens felt you’d brought this trouble on us. But when the constables started tightening the thumbscrews, the citizens began to appreciate your point of view – that the
Pemba
Accord had become a noose around our necks. They still don’t know the whole of it, and most of them probably aren’t ready for that yet. But if they did, I suspect you’d shoot even higher in their estimation.’ Noah managed to produce a weary smile, something of his old self to lift her spirits. ‘Well, what else? Your house is still where you left it, and Mposi and Ndege take care of your flowers. They’re doing well in school – or what passes for school in the new regime. They ask after you a lot – Ndege’s always on the public nets, looking for news, and Mposi’s said more than once that he’d like to have gone with you aboard
Icebreaker!
I’m not sure he
really
understands what that would entail, but now that you’ve gained a certain notoriety, it’s as if they miss you more than they did immediately after you left. I think they’re very pleased to be Akinyas. And I’m very happy to have known one.’

She skipped to the next message in the time sequence – four years into her expedition.

It was very brief. Noah was sending it from a darkened room, leaning in close to an eye, his face diamonded with sweat. Even in the half-light, he appeared to have aged a decade rather than the year that had passed since the last transmission.

‘I can’t speak for long. The prosecutors came to my home this morning with a delegation of constables. They’re going to arrest me this time – and it won’t be some quick detention and slap-around to put me in my place. They’re organising a whole new series of trials, to be held before the full Council. I wasn’t home when they came and my friends gave them the run-around long enough for me to get here. But they’ll find me soon enough, and then I don’t know what will happen.’ He took a deep breath – he sounded as if he had been running flat out. ‘Mposi and Ndege are with Sou-Chun Lo now. I know she’ll look after them, whatever happens to me.’ Anticipating her doubts, he added: ‘Sou-Chun’s always been our friend, and she’s been good to the children since you left us. Please don’t think ill of her – or of me for placing my trust in her.’

The message ended abruptly – no sign-off, no expression of his concern for her well-being. Perhaps he was simply being pragmatic – if she
could read the transmission, then she was still alive.

Heart in her throat, she skipped to the next communication. More than eighteen months had elapsed since Noah’s last communication – five and half years into the expedition. This time the header informed her that the message had been sent by Mposi.

But there was some mistake, obviously, because the assured young man who presented by figment could not possibly be her son, the boy she had left behind in
Zanzibar.
Mposi was twenty-three. He had slipped from boy to adult like the passing of day into night.

‘I don’t know if you’ll receive this, or when,’ he said, lifting his chin the way she had seen him do a thousand times when he was about to say something she was not going to like. ‘I wish you didn’t have to find out this way, but you need to know. They’ve killed our father. There was a trial, which didn’t go well for him, then a series of public executions of the men and women implicated in breaking the
Pemba
Accord.’ He took a moment to compose himself, squaring that proud jaw again – it was cleft, she noticed, just like Noah’s. ‘It was painless – they didn’t make Father suffer . . . not at the moment of his execution, anyway. And he bore it well, in the end – with great courage and self-control. His last public words, before they took him to Anticipation Park, were that we shouldn’t turn against the new authority – that there should be no more deaths, no more bloodshed . . .’ Mposi fell silent, but she sensed he still had something more to say. ‘You might be thinking that Ndege and I hold you accountable for this. It’s true that we were angry, to begin with. Perhaps we still are, in some ways. But what they did to Father wasn’t your fault – he made us understand that. You only did what was necessary, and we can’t blame you for that. In our own way, we’re proud of what you did, and we hope you’re still out there somewhere, doing good work for the caravan. We hope you’re well. It’d be good to hear from you again, one day.’

There was no way to verify his news, but given the grave tone of his delivery, she did not doubt a word of it. So Noah was gone, the way he always feared it might happen. She had to admit that she was very grateful she had not been present for the public executions. She wondered if they would have forced her to watch her husband die – probably as a prelude to her own execution – or whether they would have kept her away, which would have been equally intolerable.

So here she was, wrenched out of time, hearing this dreadful news from a son she almost had not recognised, a son who could not be sure she would still be alive to hear his words.

She felt herself starting to cry.

‘Chiku,’ said Guochang, ‘you’d best come to the cockpit.’

His interruption felt like an affront, but Guochang sounded every bit as shocked as she felt.

She wiped her eyes and turned towards him.

‘What is it?’

‘Something’s rising from Crucible.’ The stocky roboticist was almost tongue-tied. ‘Multiple launch vehicles, coming straight for us.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

She followed him to the cockpit. Travertine had drawn the next sleep shift, so Chiku sent Dr Aziba to wake ver.

‘Rockets,’ Namboze said. ‘Coming up fast, from several launch sites. Mostly correlated with those areas of cleared terrain we flagged earlier.’

‘What type of rockets?’

Guochang directed her attention to one of the rising vehicles, which was already out of the atmosphere. ‘Something like a Chibesa engine, the old kind, judging by its emission signature. No surprise, really – that’s one of the core technologies included in their construction files, ready for them to access when they came out of the seed packages. They needed to be able to get into space, to service the satellites and construct the way-stations. The vehicles are small, compared to us, but there are six of them, and we don’t have anywhere near enough fuel to outrun them. I’m not even sure we have enough time to break orbit and attempt a re-entry.’

‘Then we won’t try,’ Chiku said, with a kind of calm fatalism. ‘We have to send our findings back to
Zanzibar
immediately – we came to see what kind of welcome was waiting for us, and this might be our last chance to report anything useful.’

‘I don’t think they’ll attack us,’ Guochang said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, but I can make some educated assumptions. Another technology included in the seed files was a short-range weapons system designed to defend against space-based threats, such as asteroids. The kinetic cannons were supposed to be up and running by the time the cities were finished.’

‘And your “educated assumptions” aren’t undermined by the fact that they never made any cities?’ Namboze said.

Guochang shrugged. ‘I can’t be sure, that’s true, but the kinetic cannons would have provided a viable basis for more effective weapons. I think we’d be dead by now if destroying us was their intention.’

‘And you didn’t think to mention the possibility that they might be armed
before
they started shooting at us?’ Chiku asked.

‘And you didn’t mention the true purpose of this mission until it was much too late for any of us to back out,’ Guochang pointed out reasonably.

Dr Aziba and Travertine squeezed themselves into the already crowded cockpit.

‘Ah,’ Travertine said, taking in the schematic of the rockets converging fast on
Icebreaker
’s position.

‘Perhaps this is their way of saying hello,’ Chiku said, in a doomed attempt to lighten the mood.

She had already composed a self-contained statement about the purpose of
Icebreaker
’s mission and her fears regarding the Providers, ready to be squirted back to the caravan at a moment’s notice, but they still had a few minutes before the rockets were perilously close. She accessed the earlier statement and began speaking, adding an addendum.

‘Chiku here. We’re currently experiencing first contact with the Providers in the form of some ships closing on us, launched from the surface. There’s been no acknowledgement of our space-to-surface transmissions, friendly or otherwise, so we have no idea whether their intent is hostile or not. Guochang thinks we’d already be dead if they wanted that, so . . . ’ Here she faltered. ‘It could go either way at this point. If you don’t hear from me again, I suggest you assume the worst. In that event, you’ll have two choices – stay well away from Crucible, or risk engagement with the Providers. Whichever option you choose, you’ll be shouldering a huge responsibility, an obligation not just to our citizenry but to the billions of people we left behind in the solar system. It doesn’t matter if we panic and overreact – we’re just a drop in the ocean – but the truth about the Providers can’t get back to Earth. It would be catastrophic – the collapse of every certainty that defines most of our lives. If people turn against the Providers, they’ll be turning against the Mechanism – and if the Mechanism decides to retaliate, we’re done for. That can’t happen. Whatever you think of me, please believe this one truth: the knowledge about Crucible is simply too dangerous to spread. It has to stay with us – with the caravan – and go no further.’

‘You’d better wrap that up,’ Travertine said quietly. ‘They’ll be on us in about two minutes, maybe less.’

Chiku closed the transmission, offered a silent prayer to fate, and then committed her message to space via a narrow beam aimed at their best guess for the caravan’s coordinates, and also in a broader signal that would allow for a high margin of error in their estimates.

It was done. No force in the universe could catch up with that signal now.

She thought she would feel relieved, having finally unburdened herself of this secret, which could only help her reputation – presuming anyone still cared or indeed was still alive to debate it. But all she felt was an emptiness beyond emptiness, like the phase transition between one state of vacuum and the next. They could absolve her, if they wished, but she had no authority to forgive herself. She had been a fool to think it would be that easy.

She moved to the cockpit window, bracing herself for the arriving ships – or missiles. Two of them were very close now, but they were slowing, not accelerating, and at the last moment they braked hard enough to have killed any human passengers. They came to a halt on either side of the lander, two identical craft about half the size of
Icebreaker.
They were tapering cylinders, fluted like a wine glass, with a blunt, chisel-like nose. The thick end obviously contained the main engine parts, but apertures and vents elsewhere in the ships’ hulls might have been for steering or retro-rocket functions. They were coloured a slightly lustrous slate grey, and there were no windows or distinguishing markings.

For several minutes they just sat there. Then two more of the ships completed their burn and assumed orientation above and below the lander. Chiku saw nothing to distinguish these from the first two – nor, when the fifth and six had arrived, was there anything to mark these from the first four. The final pair fell into position aft and foreward of
Icebreaker,
so that the lander was bracketed from all sides. There had never been any prospect of fleeing the vehicles, but it was out of the question now.

Chiku and her companions waited. Guochang could offer no protocols for this situation. There was nothing more they could do to announce their presence and signal their willingness to communicate.

Between one moment and the next the cockpit filled with intense red light. At first Chiku squinted. The shutters were lowering on some automatic reflex, but she ordered them to remain open. The light was bright but not blinding. It pulsed and strobed and fell into shifting grids and furrows. Occasionally it achieved a very tight focus, almost too bright to look at. They watched intense little knots of it beetle over the window glass.

‘They’re mapping us,’ Guochang diagnosed, although the others had already reached a similar conclusion. ‘Optical lasers, projected from all six directions. They must be building up a complete three-dimensional image of the ship – laser tomography!’

Chiku realised that his earlier tongue-tied state had been as much the result of enthusiasm as of fear.

‘Surely they already knew what to expect,’ Dr Aziba said. ‘They knew we were coming – they’re the ones who’ve been lying, not us!’

‘Maybe they need to make sure we’re who we appear to be,’ Namboze said.

Chiku found herself nodding. ‘Yes. They can’t be too careful. They’ve had no direct contact with humans before – as far as we know, at least – and we’ve made enough alterations to the lander that it won’t match anything in their files.’

The red lights snapped off abruptly.

Chiku and her crew floated in silence, waiting for
something
to happen. But the six ships were holding station, mute as rocks. Chiku suspected that the ships were probably specialised robotic devices, self-contained and indivisible, each a kind of Provider in its own right. Guochang had already alerted her to the fact that the machines could assume many forms: the huge, stalking forms they manifested on Earth and Venus shapes not the only anatomy open to them. And given the length of time these machines had been acting without human supervision, it was possible – probable, even – that they had devised many specialised forms that owed nothing to the functional templates in the original seed packages. Adaptative speciation, Guochang said, grinning at the very idea.

‘Something’s happening,’ Travertine said.

But they had all seen it. The ships were closing in, reducing their respective distances from
Icebreaker.
The motion was not fast enough to look like an attempt to crush the lander, but still Chiku feared the worst. They had no weapons, no defences beyond the hull’s normal integrity. It had been difficult enough selling the concept of an exploratory mission to the Assembly – she doubted even her seasoned diplomacy could have persuaded them to turn the lander into a warship.