On the Steel Breeze (53 page)

Chiku made short work of her curried chicken and rice, then headed up to the lander’s cockpit and looked out through the windows. The ship’s tail was still aimed towards Crucible, as it had been during the two hundred hours of the deceleration burn. ‘Turn us around,’ she told the ship, and the vessel complied. The movement of the gyroscopes was gentle enough that she only needed her fingertips to avoid drifting into the cabin wall. A fistful of dim stars crawled by from one side of the window arc to the other. Then, quite without fanfare, a planet loomed.

Crucible.

It was still very small, but recognisably a disc rather than a point of light. Off to the right were Crucible’s two moons – both as large as Earth’s and responsible for prodigious tides. Chiku voked an enlargement of the planet, projected as a figment above the console. She magnified it in factors of two until it was as large as a football, then touched her finger to the image and spun it around like a painted globe.
Icebreaker
’s final few hours of burn had brought it into exact alignment with the ecliptic plane of 61 Virginis f, a deliberate strategy to place the orbiting structures into maximum visibility against Crucible’s surface.

The orbiting structures, the twenty-two dark, brindled pine cones, were still present, hard blue light ramming out in spokes from their outward-facing surfaces. She was struck again by the extreme and unforgiving alienness of these objects. What kind of intelligence could conceive of making machines on such a scale, a thousand kilometres from end to end?

These were tools to stab and bludgeon a world.

It was impossible to tell how long the orbiting things had been around Crucible, but Chiku had a feeling that they had not been there for ever. She thought it more likely that they had also been drawn across space
by the enigma on Crucible’s surface. A structure, visible across tens of light-years, had snagged both human and alien inquisitiveness.

Providers had left evidence of their presence. Most of their activity was meant to be concentrated on Crucible’s surface, but they had also positioned relay satellites around the planet and in orbits circling the star. These satellites were the source of the transmissions
Zanzibar
and the other holoships had been intercepting during the crossing, and they were still active – their existence apparently tolerated by the alien forms. Perhaps this frail and feeble human technology did not even register with them.

Chiku mapped their positions and searched for signs of other mechanical activity. The Providers were supposed to have established way-stations around the planet to assist with the settlement process, but there was no evidence of any spaceborne structures or traffic other than the relay satellites.

She wheeled around at a noise behind her. Just the medical robot, come to inform her that Travertine was about to reach consciousness.

Chiku followed the idiot robot back to the skipover bay. The lid on Travertine’s casket had already slid aside and the form within was breathing normally.

‘Bring me some more chai,’ Chiku told the robot. She remembered that Travertine preferred it unsweetened. ‘No sugar.’

The robot scuttled off. Chiku waited by the casket for further signs of life. Eventually Travertine stirred. Chiku gave ver time to speak. Ve opened vis eyes slowly, then screwed them shut again. Travertine gave a grunt of primal displeasure. Ve angled vis head, took in Chiku.

Travertine’s lips moved. Vis voice was a rasp, barely audible over the gentle hiss of the air circulators.

‘Where are we?’

The robot returned with the squeezebulb and Chiku pressed it to Travertine’s lips.

‘Exactly where we wanted to be. Your engine works, Travertine.’

‘I always knew we’d be all right.’

‘Good for you. I wish I had your confidence.’

Travertine took another suck from the squeezebulb. ‘How long have you been up? Weren’t we all supposed to wake up at the same time?’

‘That would have been too much work for the robot to handle, so I staggered the wake-up cycle, with Aziba’s blessing.’

‘Then where’s Aziba?’

‘Next out. You and I are the first.’

‘And then the others? Have you checked the caskets – did we all make it?’

‘No drop-outs,’ Chiku said.

Travertine stretched vis arms and started levering verself out of the casket. Chiku moved to assist, but Travertine brushed her away. ‘You did this on your own, and so can I.’ The bracelet knocked against the side of the casket as ve eased into a weightless sitting position, legs dangling over the side. ‘It’s strange,’ ve continued, ‘but I’m not sensing the atmosphere of ecstatic jubilation I was expecting.’

‘I’ve reasons not to be ecstatic.’

‘And are you ready to talk about those reasons, whatever they might be?’

Chiku’s smile was mirthless. ‘Finish your chai, get used to being awake, then we’ll talk. Are you hungry? I can have the robot bring you something here, or we can take it up to the cockpit.’

‘I’m not hungry. I think it’s the bracelet – messes with my metabolism. Do I look suitably refreshed to you, after my nine years of sleep?’

‘You look exactly the same.’

‘Honesty is the best medicine. Frankly, I feel like a bag of old sticks.’ Travertine finished the chai and passed the empty bulb back to Chiku. ‘No sugar. Very
sweet
of you to remember.’

‘Are you sure you’re up to moving around?’

‘The flesh is weak but the heart is willing. Will the robot take care of Aziba?’

‘Yes – he should be joining us within the hour, then Gonithi and Guochang.’

‘What’s so special about them that they get the early wake-up call?’

‘I need to be clear with you about something,’ Chiku said, sidestepping the question. ‘I wanted you along for the ride for a couple of reasons. Three, actually. Firstly, you know the PCP engine – if we’d run into technical difficulties, the robot would have woken you first.’

‘You can scratch that off your list.’

‘Indeed. Secondly, you’re ridiculously smart in more ways than one, and your input will be very valuable to me given the situation we’re facing here.’

‘Flattery will get you everywhere. And thirdly?’

‘I need a friend.’

‘And you think I still count as one?’

‘I hope so.’ Chiku paused – they were nearly at the cockpit. ‘I was as
clear as I could be when I approached you about this expedition.’

‘You were as clear as fifty light-years of tungsten.’ After a moment, Travertine added: ‘I understood the deal, Chiku. You were offering me a pardon under the only terms your administration would have accepted. It was also obvious to me that you had something to hide from everyone else. It’s all connected to this ship, isn’t it?’

Chiku did not reply until they were in the cockpit. ‘You’re right, mostly. At this point it would probably help if I showed you Crucible. Would you like to see it?’

‘It’d be perverse not to after coming all this way.’

Chiku called up the magnified image of the planet she had conjured earlier. ‘For now, you’ll have to take my word for it that the dot you can see through the window is the same as the planet represented by this figment. A day from now, it’ll be big enough to see with our naked eyes.’

Travertine took vis time before answering. Ve looked at the projected globe from all angles, spinning it around as Chiku had done earlier, increasing and decreasing the magnification. ‘This must be a composite,’ ve said eventually, ‘assembled from several rotations’ worth of data.’

‘It is. But it’s also an accurate representation of what we’d see if we were a lot closer.’

‘Mandala’s there.’

‘Yes.’

‘But no obvious surface construction. The cities and towns – I knew they’d be small, but surely we’d see some evidence of them at this resolution?’

‘Absolutely – but the Providers haven’t built anything in advance of our arrival. Crucible’s barely been touched.’

‘I see.’ And there was a long, measured silence from Travertine while ve digested this news that Chiku had known for years but still found difficult to accept. Eventually, ve asked, ‘The Providers . . . what became of them?’

‘We’ll find out when we get there.’

‘Did something destroy them?’

‘I don’t think so. The uplinked transmissions from Crucible’s surface were being broadcast by something. The Providers are still here, I think – just not doing what they were meant to do.’

Travertine nodded slowly. ‘And what about those other things surrounding the planet?’

‘There are twenty-two of them,’ Chiku said. ‘They’ve been orbiting
Crucible for at least as long as we’ve known about Mandala, but they were edited out of the original data.’

‘When you say “edited out”—’

‘We built an instrument called Ocular to observe extrasolar planets in great detail, and then shackled it to a powerful artificial intelligence, an entity called Arachne – the only thing capable of processing the Ocular data stream and searching for signs of extraterrestrial activity. The catch is that we may have made her too clever.’

‘Her?’

‘She’s a thing, a mind, with a will of her own – and a strong instinct for self-preservation. For some reason, Arachne took it upon herself to doctor the raw data and stripped out the portions of the image which contain these objects.’

‘And no one noticed that?’

‘Did I mention that Arachne’s fiendishly clever? No one noticed the deception, and on the basis of this doctored imagery – which still contained Mandala – we sent Provider seed packages to Crucible, and then launched the holoships.’

‘In other words, this doctored data triggered a significant development in human history – migration into interstellar space and the push to an extrasolar planet.’

‘Yes,’ Chiku said. ‘But it’s possible – likely, even – that the human consequences were just a by-product, a side-effect, of Arachne’s main intention. Which was to propagate herself – to expand machine intelligence beyond the solar system. Which she achieved by infiltrating herself into the Provider seed packages like a virus.’

‘You’re saying she’s there now, ahead of us?’

‘Something connected to her, at any rate – a daughter intelligence, perhaps. Multiple daughters, who knows? Part of her – perhaps the main part – is still active in the old solar system. Chiku Yellow met her. I know what she’s capable of.’

‘That’s encouraging, given that we’re heading towards another aspect of her.’

‘I never said this would be easy. But are you beginning to see why this advance mission is necessary, and why I couldn’t go public with the truth about Crucible? Can you imagine the panic that would have caused?’

‘I can, and it’s not pretty.’

‘I’m sure you have all sorts of questions about the alien objects – those pine-cone things. I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much. They’re big, and they might have contacted Arachne, or she may have
intercepted a transmission they were broadcasting, whether that was the intention or not. We think they may have been here for a very, very long time. Beyond that, I’m in the dark.’

‘“We”,’ Travertine repeated carefully. ‘And who are your co-conspirators in this great adventure?’

‘Allies back home. My counterpart Chiku Yellow, for one, and another woman who was directly involved in Ocular’s development. Plus various other interested parties. They’ve all been working under conditions of extreme secrecy, trying to piece together something of the truth without bringing their activities to Arachne’s attention. It’s been very, very difficult, and my involvement didn’t help things much. Arachne locked on to Chiku Yellow, tried to kill her on Venus and then on Earth. The safest place in the universe! Arachne’s infiltrated the Mechanism itself, haunting it from within.’

‘Then there’s nothing to be done.’

‘Maybe not, but we have to try. Negotiation, bargaining. Pleading for our lives. Grovelling, if it comes to that. Anything that might persuade Arachne not to turn on her former masters any more damagingly than she already has.’

After a silence, Travertine said: ‘I think I’m going to crawl back into the skipover casket, close the lid and try to wake up again. This is obviously some kind of delirious nightmare.’

‘It’s real. I’ve been living with it long enough.’

‘Is this the explanation – the reason for everything you’ve done?’

‘More or less.’

‘I know there’s more you’re not telling me. How you learned about Arachne in the first place – what any of this has to do with Kappa.’

‘I’ve told you everything you need to know right now. The rest is . . . complicated. I will tell you the rest, but I suggest we leave that until we’ve attended to Doctor Aziba and the others.’

‘How much do they know, exactly?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Oh, they’re going to
love
this. At least I had an inkling from the get-go that something wasn’t right.’

‘I’m probably going to need your help,’ Chiku said, ‘to maintain order and help get my point across. That’s why I woke you first – I hoped you might see things from my point of view.’

‘And there was me thinking you missed my conversation. My first thought is – why wake the others at all? The ship can operate itself.’

‘I don’t plan on waking everybody. I had to accept a larger crew than I wanted, but it was the only way to sell the Assembly on this expedition.
Truthfully, I think we’ll be doing the others a kindness if we keep them in skipover.’

‘Given our chances of survival, you mean?’

Chiku nodded grimly, biting her lower lip. ‘But we need Aziba and the other two, I think. Guochang knows Providers, and Gonithi should be able to tell us how Crucible’s surface conditions compare against our expectations.’

‘All right,’ Travertine said eventually. ‘Let me be blunt. The way I see it, I have two choices. I can fight you and try to turn the rest of the crew against you. But we’ll still be aboard a ship with almost no fuel, falling towards the Providers. Or I can accept what you’re saying, accept that you allowed all those awful things to happen to me for a reason –
this
reason – and that in your position I might have made the same choices. And I can try to persuade the crew not to mutiny and rip your throat out.’