On the Steel Breeze (6 page)

The light snapped off. Chiku blinked at after-images.

Namboze had screwed her eyes into knots. She had been facing
forward, with Noah and Chiku in the reverse-facing seats.

‘Something’s happened,’ Namboze said.

Chiku could barely bring herself to turn around, to see what the young politician had witnessed directly.

Zanzibar
was still there. It had not been ripped out of existence, the way
Pemba
had. Of course, they were too close for a
Pemba
event to be survivable. This had been nothing comparable, nothing of the same magnitude.

Nonetheless, something terrible had happened.

‘Hold approach,’ Noah called. ‘Assume fixed station at this distance, until I say otherwise.’

The taxi obeyed Noah, as it would have obeyed Chiku or Namboze. Seat restraints and foot stirrups tightened.

‘Holding station,’ the taxi informed Noah.

‘Are you all right, Gonithi?’ Chiku asked Namboze. ‘You caught whatever that blast was full on.’

‘I’m all right.’ She had managed to open her eyes again. ‘I think the filters dropped just before it reached full brightness. What do you think it was?’

Noah had unhooked himself from the taxi’s stirrups to float closer to the observation window. ‘Something pretty bad.’

There was a wound, still livid, in
Zanzibar
’s skin. It was a third of the way between the trailing pole and the holoship’s fat equator. The wound was weeping gases, spiralling out in a slow-winding corkscrew. Chiku lacked a clear view of the damaged area, but she guessed that it spanned several hundred metres, perhaps as much as half a kilometre. A hole in the hull wide enough to fly a shuttle through, with elbow room.

Gases were still venting. Air, water vapour, other critical volatiles . . . it pained Chiku to think of how little they could afford to spare. The winding corkscrew emulated a galactic whorl, the Milky Way in miniature.

Suddenly, the gush of gases ebbed to a trickle.

‘Containment control,’ Noah said. ‘They’ve sealed that chamber, whichever one just ruptured. It’s bleeding dry.’

‘What was in it?’ Namboze asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Chiku said. It was difficult to relate this external view to her mental map of the holoship’s interior.

‘Take us in,’ Noah told the taxi. ‘Minimum approach speed.’

By the time they neared the docking hub, the trickle of escaping gases had been all but staunched. Emergency crews were already at work, spilling out of hull locks and docking bays in service craft and individual
vacuum suits. By now they would surely be entering the compromised chamber from within
Zanzibar
as well. Chiku watched the figures as they traversed the outer skin, tiny and beetle-bright in their luminous vacuum gear. With
Zanzibar
still rotating – Chair Utomi had yet to order a spindown, and might not judge matters serious enough to warrant such a drastic measure – the emergency crews were effectively hanging upside down, only a slip away from being snatched into space.

The coming and going of service vehicles delayed docking for thirty minutes. The shuttle waited its turn, then fell into the open maw of the polar aperture.

Zanzibar,
like
Malabar,
had the proportions of a fat ellipsoid. All the holoships looked similar from the outside, and all were within a few kilometres of being the same size. Fifty kilometre walnuts, skewered on the long axis of their engines.

Chiku had seen them being born, in the year before she went to Quorum Binding. She had gone out to the birthing orbits from Triton, on a sumptuous high-burn liner the size of a small city-state. The holoships were strung out like beads on an invisible wire, all at varying stages of completion. Gravity tractors hauled in asteroids, mountains of rock and ice selected for size, composition and stability, raw matter for the shaping. They chiselled and cored the asteroids, voiding mighty chambers large enough to swallow the liner a thousand times over. They fused and glued loosely-bound rubble piles, infiltrated rock and ice with webs of spiderfibre reinforcement, until they had the integrity to withstand spin and the ferocious, barely-contained impulse of a truly monstrous Chibesa engine. They bottled and pressurised the interior chambers, then gifted them with warmth and water and ten thousand forms of plant and animal life. Then they built towns, cities and parks, schools, hospitals and seats of government, and allowed people to begin moving in, eager droves of them, in their hundreds and thousands. What had been a shell became a place.

Last of all, the Chibesa engines were lit. With the slowness of clouds the readied arks began to pull away from the birthing orbits. They went out in caravans, for mutual support. Each caravan was part of a larger flow of holoships, assigned to a particular solar system. Hundreds, for the most popular target systems. Typically a dozen or so holoships would be organised into a local caravan, with one or more light-years between each caravan.

It took years, decades, for the holoships to reach their cruising speeds. But once that had been attained – presently a whisker under thirteen per cent of the speed of light – there was no immediate requirement
to re-employ their engines. Some of the holoships, like
Zanzibar,
had partially dismantled their engines so that the forward and aft polar apertures could be used for the docking of large ships. The dismantled components were moved into secondary chambers, like the pieces of an ominous puzzle.

Chiku’s little vessel was now sliding into the space that would once have been occupied by the end of the Chibesa engine. Larger ships, shuttles and taxis were attached around the curving walls, linked by connecting tubes and service umbilicals. The taxi matched rotation, docked. Clamps secured and the airlock connector grappled into place.

Chiku set about loosening her restraints. ‘An hour ago, our only concern was how our presentation had gone down.’

‘The elephants are safe, aren’t they?’ Namboze asked. ‘Whatever was in that chamber, that’s nowhere near the elephants.’

‘They should be all right,’ Chiku said. ‘The damage is nowhere near the main community cores, either, or the school chamber.’

They disembarked from the taxi. Chiku had been anticipating chaos in the processing area on the other side of the lock, but everything was surprisingly ordered, albeit busier than usual, and with an unmistakable air of heightened tension. Walls were alive with status reports – images and text updates, refreshing and scrolling constantly. Pulsing bars of red, outlining doors and windows, signified a shift to emergency conditions.

Chiku struggled to remember the last time this had happened. The
Pemba
loss, perhaps. Maybe the occasional emergency drill. But even those were extremely uncommon.

Chair Utomi, busy with crisis management, had tasked another Assembly member to meet the diplomatic party at the dock. Chiku was only slightly surprised to see her old colleague Sou-Chun Lo.

‘Have you any idea what happened?’ Namboze asked.

‘Whatever it was, it doesn’t seem to have gone beyond Kappa Chamber. We’re hoping and praying that was the end of it.’

‘Kappa Chamber,’ Chiku echoed in a low voice. A weird chime of déjà vu, there and gone in a moment.

‘Chiku, Noah – your children and immediate family have been accounted for and are safe,’ said Sou-Chun Lo. ‘Gonithi – there’s no immediate reason to worry for your friends and colleagues. I doubt any of them were in Kappa, unless they had a direct connection to any of the research programmes.’

Chiku, Noah and Namboze nodded their thanks.

‘You have all been working hard,’ Sou-Chun Lo said, steepling her fingers in a prayer-like gesture. ‘You should go home now.’

‘Provided there are suits to spare,’ Noah said, ‘Chiku and I intend to assist with the search in Kappa.’

Chiku flicked a glance at her husband. They had discussed no such thing.

‘There is no need, really,’ Sou-Chun Lo said kindly. ‘You have all done more than enough for the committee in recent days. Your particular commitment has been noted, Chiku.’

She wondered if that was a reference to their hopes of obtaining skipover.

‘I’d still like to help,’ Noah said.

Chiku shook her head. ‘You can help by going and finding the children – they must be scared out of their wits. I can take care of myself here. It’s important that someone from the Assembly gets their hands dirty in the rescue effort, so it may as well be me.’

‘I want to help, too,’ Namboze said. ‘I have suit and field medical experience.’

‘We’re not expecting to find many alive,’ Sou-Chun cautioned. ‘You should be ready for that. It’s going to be messy.’

‘We know,’ said Chiku. ‘We saw the explosion.’ But tired as she was, she made an effort to strike a positive note. ‘Still, there’s a chance a few may have survived the blast and managed to get to suits, or pressurised structures, or even into the service tunnels under the chamber. Besides, the whole place has to be searched regardless of the likelihood of finding anyone alive. We need to know what happened in there, and whether it continues to pose a risk to us.’

‘There are no immediate structural concerns,’ Sou-Chun said. ‘The blast and pressure loss deflected our course by a very small amount, but our trimming motors can easily correct for that. Most of the citizens wouldn’t have felt anything – the first they knew of the accident was when Utomi appeared in their homes.’

‘What about the research programmes? Most of those were housed in Kappa, right? Thousands of scientists, engineers, all their support staff . . . hundreds of them must have been there at the time.’

‘Including Travertine,’ Noah said quietly.

That was the connection she had almost made for herself. Travertine and Kappa.

How could she not have seen it?

‘The hours ve kept . . . how could Travertine
not
have been there?’

‘Travertine?’ Namboze asked, incredulous. ‘The
same
Travertine?’

‘There’s only one Travertine,’ Noah said, with a long-suffering expression.

‘I thought Travertine wasn’t allowed to conduct experiments any more,’ Namboze said.

‘Not quite,’ Chiku answered. ‘Travertine didn’t break the old rules deliberately, they were just drawn up badly. After
Pemba
there was a mad rush to create new legislation, and it wasn’t done properly.’

‘I think Travertine knew full well what ve was doing,’ Sou-Chun said.

‘You could just as easily say ve acted in the interests of the local caravan,’ replied Chiku. ‘No one ever thought Travertine had been motivated by personal gain, just a desire to solve the slowdown problem. Look, can we save this for later? For all we know, ve’s among the dead or dying.’

‘I’ll see if I can reach the children,’ Noah said. Then he put a hand on Chiku’s elbow. ‘Be careful, please.’

‘I will,’ she said, and made a mental note to the effect that from this day forward she would never once complain about having an uneventful life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Chiku and Namboze went to the nearest transit point and requested pod conveyance to Kappa. When the pod arrived, it brought four workers who would soon be suiting up and going outside. The workers disembarked and Chiku and Namboze boarded and took opposite facing seats. The pod gathered speed, smooth-bored rock rushing past its airtight canopy.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Chiku told the younger woman.

‘Nor do you.’

‘I’m old enough to take some risks – and some responsibility. How old are you, Gonithi?’

‘Thirty-eight.’

‘In absolute years?’

‘Yes. I was born thirty-eight years ago.’

‘Then you’ve only ever known
Zanzibar.’
Chiku shook her head as if this were some strange and miraculous condition, like the ability to part waves or turn base metals into gold. ‘No skipover intervals?’

‘I haven’t applied, and at my age I doubt there’d be any point.’

‘I still can’t get my head around the idea that there are grownup people walking around who’ve never lived anywhere but the holoship.’

Namboze produced a shrug. ‘It’s normal enough to me. This is my world, just as Crucible will be my world when we get there. What was all that about, by the way?’

‘All what?’

‘Well, two things. I wasn’t sure whose side to take when you started talking about Travertine.’

‘Travertine’s a pretty divisive figure. Ve’s a friend of mine – or was, I suppose. When ve was last in trouble, I was one of those who pushed for a lighter punishment. The issue split the assembly – Sou-Chun was among those who felt we needed to make a clearer example of ver, if only to keep the rest of the local caravan happy.’

Namboze brooded on this for a few seconds. ‘Weren’t you and Sou-Chun political allies at one time?’

‘We’re not exactly enemies, even now. I’ve known Sou-Chun for longer than you’ve been alive, and we have a lot in common. Sure, we had our differences over Travertine. And then there was that whole stupid business over what to do with the high-capacity lander – whether we should keep it or dismantle it and make room for something else. But it’s nothing, really.’ In her mind, she added:
You’ll see how it is, when you’ve played at politics a little longer.
Aloud, she said, ‘I still have a lot of respect for Sou-Chun.’

The pod swerved sharply into a different tunnel and Chiku’s stomach tingled. They were travelling against
Zanzibar
’s spin, counteracting it to a degree.

‘What if this mess turns out to be something to do with Travertine?’

‘It won’t. Everything that went on in Kappa was under tight control. All the research programmes. Improved energy conversion and storage, better skipover protocols, more efficient recycling and repurification techniques. Rehearsal of methods that will serve us well when we land on Crucible. Agriculture, water management, low-impact terraforming. God, I sound like a politician, don’t I? But that kind of thing, anyway. Even simulations of what we can expect when we start hands-on investigation of Mandala.’