Poseidon's Wake (17 page)

‘Heating elements in the outer skin,’ Nissa said, directing his attention to one display. ‘They’ll turn the ice to slush right under us and we’ll start sinking through. That won’t be fast enough, though.’ She tapped another diagram. ‘Active traction mechanisms. They’ll drag the slush from one end of the ship to the other, pulling us deeper – just like a mole burrowing into soil. Pitch-and-yaw stability, angle of attack, all under my direction. We’ll make about a metre a second at full crank.’

Kanu was dumbfounded. ‘You’ve turned your ship into a tunnelling machine.’

Nissa settled her hands on two lever-shaped controls which had emerged from the sides of her couch. ‘So let’s tunnel.’

She pushed the controls forwards and Kanu felt
Fall of Night
begin to burrow into Europa.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The moment of the Watchkeeper’s vanishing was too sudden and inexplicable to bring any sense of relief. It felt, instead, like the prelude to something else, one step in a conjuring trick which had yet to reach its conclusion.

It was only after hours of analysis and communication with Crucible that the disappearance began to be believed and understood. First and foremost, the Watchkeeper had not disappeared at all – it had simply moved away at unbelievable acceleration, somewhere in the region of twenty million gees according to the best estimates. This was in stark contrast to the normal movement of the alien machines as they travelled around Crucible’s system, but it did accord with the documented manner of their return, decades earlier: an almost instantaneous apparition. It was also the way in which Chiku Green’s Watchkeeper had ‘vanished’ after its departure from Crucible.

‘We always thought they had this other mode of propulsion,’ Mposi said, a day after the vanishing, ‘but it’s one thing to hypothesise about it and quite another to see it up close. The good news is that the radiation burst, all that blue light, doesn’t appear to have done us any harm. The ship is intact. In fact it’s slightly better than intact, if the technicians are to be believed.’

Ru frowned. He was addressing both of them, the trio sitting at one of the galley tables. Goma’s appetite had been slow to return, delayed by a sense that they were not quite beyond the Watchkeeper’s sphere of interest.

‘I don’t see how it can be better,’ Ru said.

‘It’s our acceleration: we are not using as much fuel as we expected. Which, of course, is impossible. But the technicians have double-checked their numbers.’

Goma picked up a pepper pot, allowed it to fall the short distance from her fingers to the tabletop. ‘Aren’t we at half a gee?’

‘Slightly less,’ Mposi said, ‘but we’re not losing any speed. Something is helping us along, so the engines have been dialled back a little. It will make life easier when we reach Gliese 163 if we don’t have to scramble around immediately to refill our initialising tanks. Even a Chibesa engine needs some fuel occasionally.’

‘This makes no sense,’ Goma said.

Mposi delighted in having the upper hand. ‘There’s something ahead of us. We’ve imaged it, but the quality is very poor – it’s at the absolute limit of our resolution. They haven’t had much more luck on Crucible, using synthetic data from the system’s monitoring devices. But we don’t really need better data, do we? It’s obvious what the thing must be.’

‘The Watchkeeper, I suppose,’ Ru answered.

‘The scientists have projected its course based on the acceleration burst. If it stays on that trajectory, it may end up on the same flight path we’re taking. It isn’t outpacing us, though – it’s matching our acceleration precisely, keeping about one hundred and fifty million kilometres of separation between us.’

Goma almost had to laugh. These numbers – accelerations of twenty million gees, distances wider than Crucible’s orbit around its star – were almost too absurdly large to bother trying to comprehend. Physics, with its exponents and Planck lengths and Hubble distances, left her feeling diminished, as if it would not be satisfied until she felt vanishingly irrelevant, annihilated between the tiny and the enormous.

You knew where you were with elephants.

‘What is it doing?’ Ru asked.

‘There are several possibilities. Clearing space ahead of us like a cosmic snowplough, perhaps. Space isn’t a perfect vacuum. If it holds this trajectory, we’ll have a much better chance of reaching Crucible without running into interstellar debris. Then there’s the acceleration boost. It’s as if we’re benefiting from whatever the Watchkeeper does to make itself move – we’re caught in its slipstream. The technicians want to make some measurements on the local vacuum, see if there’s anything different about it.’

‘It’s helping us?’ Goma said.

‘That’s one interpretation,’ Mposi answered, as if it was his duty not to alleviate her qualms. ‘Another is that these are accidental benefits, and that it neither knows nor cares what becomes of us.’

‘But it is moving in the same direction,’ Ru said. ‘That has to mean something.’

Goma felt her earlier apprehension reassert itself. ‘We’ll know when we arrive, I suppose. If it lets us.’

Within a few hours it was common knowledge that the Watchkeeper lay ahead of
Travertine
. From what Goma could judge, the other passengers shared her equivocal feelings. There was relief at not being immediately destroyed. Given the opacity of the Watchkeepers’ deeper motivations, though, it was hard to know whether to be comforted or unnerved by the continued presence of the alien robot.

There was some debate about how best to exploit the advantage provided by the slipstream effect. Ru felt that the technicians were being too cautious in their response. If they ran the drive at the planned level, they could exceed fifty per cent of the speed of light and reach their destination a number of years ahead of schedule. On the other hand, they would then be banking a lot on the Watchkeeper’s continued assistance. The holoships, travelling to Crucible, had made a similar gamble and been caught out.

Goma took Mposi’s view, which considered it better to keep to the existing schedule, saving fuel and engine life in the process.
Travertine
was not built to travel faster than half the speed of light, and to exceed that margin would be to place an additional burden on its hull insulation and navigation systems.

The point was argued, and Crucible weighed in. Messages crawled back and forth, stretched out by ever-increasing time lag. Eventually the verdict was in and Mposi’s cautious view won out. They would use the Watchkeeper to their advantage, but they would not make the error of trusting it.

It was a fault of the human condition – or perhaps a blessing – that there was no situation which did not eventually become the normal state of affairs. All the people on
Travertine
knew it would be centuries before they made it back to Crucible, if indeed there was a world left to recognise upon their return. By turns, though, their psychological adjustment was slowly completed. The ship was their world now, and they had better learn to like it. Most found a way.

So life on
Travertine
fell into a comfortable rhythm of sorts. Mposi had said nothing more about the sabotage rumour and Goma was content to assume that the theory had been quietly discredited. All the same, she chose to keep out of the way of the Second Chancers, especially Peter Grave, and with Ru’s collusion it was not so hard to structure her routines around that principle of avoidance. Their differences, the years of tension and separation on Crucible, were now fully behind them. They spent long hours together in their cabin, sharing warmth and silence and intimacy. Goma began to feel that at last there had come a healing, a point beyond which no more apologies or excuses were necessary. History and circumstance had done what they would to them, and they had been stronger. It was good to be loved, good to love another human being – even in the belly of a starship arrowing for unmapped space.

Ru and Goma both maintained an interest in news updates from the elephant reserve, and they shared a genuine eagerness to see how the Alpha herd had reshuffled itself in the wake of Agrippa’s passing. But over time, Goma found that she had to work harder and harder to sustain her intellectual engagement. She sensed the same thing in Ru as well. It was not that they had ceased to care about the elephants, but the direction of their concern now had a different, outward focus. What happened to Crucible’s elephants was increasingly not their business – Tomas and the others were managing their affairs with predictable efficiency. But Goma and Ru had a chance to offer some constructive help to the Tantors, and so the weathervane of their sympathies had swung to a new bearing.

Three months into the trip, with 61 Virginis now no more than a bright star in their wake – and the world they had known squeezed into that same dwindling glint – life on the ship began to change. With the drive running steadily and the Watchkeeper holding its position, some of the technical staff had already gone into skipover. So had a number of passengers, and more followed by the week. This was true also of the Second Chancers, who had no option but to submit to the skipover caskets even though (Goma did not doubt) they regarded them as a pernicious form of life-extension technology.

Goma and Ru were free to enter skipover whenever they chose, but neither was yet ready. Goma’s communications with Ndege had grown steadily less frequent as the distance increased, but at least there were communications. That would cease when she entered skipover, and cease for ever. Since the time was to be of her choosing, she could not bring herself to make the decision. She could spend years awake if necessary – there would always be someone else around for company, and no shortage of rations – but to die before reaching Gliese 163 would entirely defeat the purpose of her being on the expedition in the first place. For now, she had agreed with Ru that they would remain awake at least until
Travertine
stopped its acceleration boost and resumed spin-generated gravity. Very little could go wrong during the cruise, and when the drive was restarted to slow the ship down again, the technicians would have the benefit of all the knowledge they had gained during the acceleration phase, making a catastrophe that much less likely. It was a good plan, Goma thought. They were not yet bored with the ship, not yet bored with each other, and not yet ready to surrender to sleep. And if either of them changed their minds, skipover was waiting.

But Goma need not have worried about boredom.

‘Do you remember that business we spoke about a little while ago?’ Mposi asked.

Goma was alone with him. Once or twice a week he dropped by their cabin for a brief social visit, often contriving to make it look like he was simply stopping in while on his way elsewhere. Goma went to his room more often than he came to theirs, but she was inclined to draw no negative conclusions from that. It was simply Mposi being his usual shrewd self. Living in such a confined environment, it was virtually guaranteed that nerves would begin to fray over the span of the expedition. Being asleep for much of it would make very little difference; there would still be months or years of wakefulness when they reached their destination. Given that even the best of friends could grate on each other if pressed into the same space for too long, it made no sense to hasten that process.

Still, when Mposi came to see her that evening, it was immediately obvious that his mood was unsettled.

‘Hard to forget,’ she said. ‘Although I was hoping it had dropped off the agenda.’

‘So was I,’ Mposi answered, gravely enough. ‘Indeed, it was starting to look as if that might have been the case. Updates from Crucible – a suspicion that the original intelligence was no more than malicious rumour-mongering.’

‘And now?’

He sucked breath through his teeth. ‘It turns out there might be some truth in it after all. A while ago I asked you to be my eyes and ears. Have you picked up on anything?’

‘Not really. Then again, I haven’t been going out of my way to mix with the Second Chancers.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of blaming you for that. Here’s the thing, though. Let us suppose someone on this expedition has a very real desire to see it fail, one way or another. Very possibly someone prepared to die to serve that end. When the Watchkeeper took an interest in us, there was a chance that the saboteur wouldn’t need to do anything at all.’

Goma reflected on the prospect of imminent destruction they had all felt, followed by the uneasy sense of a stay of execution once the Watchkeeper vanished.

‘You mean the saboteur was hoping the Watchkeeper would destroy us?’

‘Not
hoping
– but allowing for the possibility, certainly, waiting to see what transpired. Why risk acting and being detected in the process if the aliens are going to achieve the same ends? It needn’t have been total destruction. For all we knew – for all the saboteur knew – the Watchkeeper might have just forced us off course, or damaged us enough to make us abandon the expedition and return home. There was every good reason to lie low and see what happened.’

‘And now?’

‘Things have stabilised. The Watchkeeper didn’t destroy us, and it appears to be content to hang ahead of us, clearing our path. Meanwhile, the ship seems to be working properly – well enough that people have already begun to go into skipover. Crucible’s intelligence is that the saboteur may have been instructed to resume working towards the original plan – whatever that might be.’

‘And you still don’t know?’

The door began to open. Goma had closed it as Ru’s return was unexpected.

Goma groped for the thread of a plausible conversation – anything to give the impression that they had just been passing the time of day rather than discussing a secret conspiracy against the expedition. She felt paralysed and looked to Mposi in the hope he had come up with something.

‘Am I interrupting?’ Ru asked.

‘Not at all,’ Mposi said, rising to leave. ‘We were just . . .’

‘What?’

‘Just catching up on gossip,’ Goma said, with what she hoped was the right note of breezy innocence.

Ru kept looking at them. She had opened the door but come no further into the room. ‘Fine.’

‘Ru . . .’ Goma began. ‘It’s not what—’

But Ru had shut the door, already on her way somewhere else. ‘I’m sorry—’ Mposi started.

‘We should have told her.
I
should have told her. If there’s anyone on this ship I trust . . .’ But before she could complete her own sentence, Goma was on her way out of the room. The door closed behind her, leaving Mposi alone. Ru was nearly at the end of the corridor, about to reach one of the stairwells. ‘Ru!’ Goma called out. ‘Stop, please! You’ve got to let me explain!’

Ru halted, but when she looked back her expression was icy. ‘Explain what? Why you feel the need to talk behind my back?’