On the Steel Breeze (58 page)

But the ships stopped again when they were almost touching
Icebreaker
’s skin, so close that no easy view was possible from the windows. Chiku called up a mosaic of exterior images grabbed from the lander’s eyes and they watched, fascinated, as the six ships opened portions of their hulls, cunning as Chinese boxes. Long articulations of machinery elbowed out of the holes, quick as striking snakes, angling and swivelling with disarming speed. A node of light brighter than the sun glowed at the end of each arm and shaded from white into violet. Chiku flinched as the shutters descended but did not tell them to stop this time. The articulated arms were cutting through the lander’s hull everywhere the
light touched, and a bright-pink smear hyphenated Chiku’s vision.

‘Fusion torches, maybe,’ Travertine said. ‘Or maybe a very compact Chibesa reaction. The clever, clever things.’

‘We should move to the caskets,’ Namboze said, unimpressed with this machine-centric line of thinking. ‘No time to get into suits.’

But the Providers were not trying to cut their way in, Chiku realised. They were trimming the lander’s aerodynamic extremities without compromising its pressurised core. They sliced through wings and fin with surgical speed and precision, then made some other cuts that served no immediately obvious purpose. Finally they packed away their cutting arms, sealing up their hulls with the same swiftness as the arms had been deployed, and a moment after that the six ships moved closer still and clamped on to
Icebreaker
with some magnetic or mechanical purchase that felt as firm and immovable as solid rock.

And then the Provider rockets applied thrust, much more gently than when they had arrived, and
Icebreaker
and its imprisoning escort fell out of orbit into the scorch of atmosphere.

Chiku and her crew buckled into acceleration couches, but the robots took care of their human guests, never imposing a load exceeding one and a half gees. Chiku dared to hope that this was more than accidental. Perhaps Guochang’s intuition had been right all along, that the Providers would already have done them harm, had that been their intention.

Icebreaker
had been damaged – it could not possibly have entered the atmosphere under its own control – but most of its sensors and positional devices were still functioning. They were descending from equatorial orbit, following an arc that deviated only slightly to the south of their original ground-track. They had been passing over open ocean when the machines had clamped on, and shortly after they had traversed a quilt of islands spanning about twenty degrees of latitude. It was day. They pushed deeper into air, losing speed and altitude. Now they were over open ocean again, about a thousand kilometres east of Mandala. They were now deep enough into the atmosphere that the sky had colour – a deepening pastel blue, horsetailed with clouds. The blue gained intensity as they descended. Through the gauze of air, to her untrained eye, Sixty One Virginis f seemed exactly as colourless and hot as the Lisbon sun, though visibly larger. They could live here, she thought, given half a chance.

The ocean had looked glass-flat from space and leathery from high altitude, like an expensive blue textile stretched across the globe. They were much lower now, and Chiku made out the swell and chop of heavy seas. It was unmistakably liquid now, something you could drown in. Much
bigger than this little wounded ship. The foam on the swell was white, shading into a faint pistachio green – it made her think of flavours of whipped ice-cream, and ice-cream made her think of Belém and seagulls and Pedro Braga, the life and times of Chiku Yellow. The water itself was much greener than blue, a kind of salty turquoise veined with opals and ultramarines. The algal load was much higher than it had ever been in Earth’s seas. The waters of Crucible were a brimming matrix of floating organisms, as dense as soup and as layered as a Martian canyon.

They cruised lower still. Reefs chiselled through shallowing seas, edged with long lines of breakers. Here and there, sharp-sided islands pierced the ocean like green pyramids. Chiku even saw a partially active volcano near the horizon, burping out a Morse message of muddy-brown clouds.

And then there were Providers rising from the sea, four of them, easily as big as those she had seen on Earth. They stood at the points of an invisible cross, bending their mantis-bodies into the sky so that seawater came off them in thunderous curtains. The rockets slowed and stopped, hovering in the middle of the four Providers, and then completed their descent to the water. Only at the last moment was
Icebreaker
released and allowed to splash the rest of the way down. The rockets broke formation and peeled away on six independent arcs.

Icebreaker
had been designed to float and the changes imposed on it in space had not affected its seaworthiness, so the lander bobbed easily on the swell. Chiku extricated herself from the acceleration couch, steadying herself as a wave tilted the floor. Water blurred the windows. This was not how she had imagined their arrival.

‘I wish they’d say something,’ Dr Aziba said. ‘Anything – it doesn’t matter what.’

‘Maybe they’ve forgotten how to talk,’ Travertine said.

They were tripping over each other, racing from one watery window to the next. A large percentage of the hull was submerged, but Chiku did not think they were taking on enough water to cause difficulties.

‘They’re moving,’ Namboze said. ‘Guochang – are we still transmitting those handshake protocols?’

‘Yes – for all the good it’s doing!’

‘These aren’t really Providers,’ Chiku said. ‘They look like them, but they’re under Arachne’s control. We should assume she’s here, puppetting everything.’

‘Then perhaps we should ask Arachne what she wants!’ Aziba said, and his voice had a mildly hysterical edge.

Something clanged against the hull, followed immediately by a
ghastly scraping sound, metal on metal, as if an anchor were being dragged along the outside of the lander. Chiku hopped between the lander’s public eyes until she had a satisfactory view of proceedings. One of the towering Providers had extended a tentacle tipped with a heavy circular fitting that looked like an electromagnet. The Provider was sliding it up and down the hull like a physician’s stethoscope.

The tentacle halted sharply. There was silence for a moment as the cabin rocked and pitched. They were all breathing much too fast.

Chiku was weighing the likelihood that the tentacle was holding a listening device when the circular thing started drilling. The hideous, tooth-grinding sound intensified and rose in pitch as the drill spun ever faster. Sparks catherine-wheeled into the sea and the lander shuddered under the assault. Chiku glanced at her companions. She had nothing to offer, no reassurances or suggestions. She had brought them to this, and now she was powerless to protect them.

‘We could still return to the caskets,’ Namboze said.

‘We could play charades,’ Travertine said. ‘It’ll achieve as much.’

The drilling continued. Once or twice the machine stopped, and when it started up again the pitch was different, as if it had switched cutting tools. Chiku agreed with Travertine – they could go into the caskets or don their suits, but it would only delay the inevitable, whatever that turned out to be. In bleak despair, she thought of suicide pills. They should have brought something like that, or devised a protocol authorising the medical robot to euthanise them quickly and painlessly should the need arise.

When the machine finally broke through the hull, it did so with a much smaller cutting tool than Chiku had been expecting. A circle of the inner hull about the circumference of her thigh gained a sparking rim and then dropped smoking to the floor. Immediately machinery began to bustle through the still-glowing aperture. Chiku’s crew backed away from the point of entry, squeezing against walls and bulkheads on the opposite side of the cockpit. The thing protruding from the hole was an arm with a flowerlike appendage on the end, finely perforated. It swung around, apparently locking on to each of them in turn.

A hissing sound issued from the nozzles, accompanied by some kind of colourless, odourless gas.

‘The masks,’ Chiku said, already knowing it was too late for that. The masks were one feature of their sketchy contingency plan for surface exposure, in the event that the Providers had not built anything that could be pressurised for human habitation. They were tucked in a locker somewhere at the back of the habitation volume, too far away to be of
any use now. She was already feeling thick-headed. Part of her wanted to fight the gas, but another part did not think it mattered. The gas would get them anyway, regardless of what they did.

She slipped into unconsciousness watching the flower wave back and forth, spraying its contents into the air.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

She had the sense that the girl had been speaking for some time, but it was difficult to hold on to the flow of things. She frowned, but that only made things worse.

The girl paused for a moment, realising that her words were only making partial headway. She smiled a little, nodded and then began again.

‘Can you understand me, Chiku? I do hope you can. I also hope you’re not too uncomfortable – you mustn’t hesitate to tell me if there’s anything we might improve upon. We’ve done our best, but unfortunately our experience with the living has been rather limited.’

She wore a red dress with white socks and well-polished black shoes and held a violin in one hand, resting it against her knee. The other hand held a bow.

‘I know you,’ Chiku said.

‘I doubt that,’ the girl said, but appeared to take no pleasure in the contradiction. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

‘You’re Lin Wei.’

The girl shook her head. ‘No, I’m Arachne.’

Chiku tried to stay calm, despite the rising terror she felt. ‘No. If you were Arachne, I’d be dead. You tried to kill me on Venus and again in Africa.’

‘I have no recollection of these events. You might conceivably have met another aspect of me, but I’ll have to take your word for it until I read your memories.’

‘You look very like Lin Wei.’ But then comprehension of a sort dawned upon Chiku. ‘You look like her because she made you – she must have used her own personality as a template for your persona before inserting you in Ocular.’

‘I know of an individual named Lin Wei, and if you believe my persona to be derived from hers, I will file that information for future reference.’

‘You don’t know where you came from?’

‘I know that I came from another solar system, but beyond that, I can’t verify much – at least, not to my satisfaction.’ The girl extended the hand that held the bow. ‘Please, would you like to stand? Come to the window – I think you’ll find the view pleasing.’ She was still holding the violin against her knee.

Chiku was in a chair, not a bed. At first she thought she was still dressed in the lightweight garments they had all worn on
Icebreaker.
But as she moved, the fabric felt silkier than she remembered, and it was much too clean for her to have been wearing it since she came out of skipover. It was, she decided, a clever copy, not the original garment.

She studied her surroundings. She had come to consciousness in a circular room with curving walls and ceiling, interrupted by wide elliptical windows. The room was set with plain but functional furniture.

Through the windows she thought she could see a landscape beneath a sky that appeared to shimmer between pink and orange depending on the directness of her gaze.

‘Do you speak for the Providers?’ Chiku paused for a moment, then added: ‘Are you the Providers? Are the Providers you? Is there more than one of you? You say “I” sometimes and “we” at others.’

‘Come to the window, Chiku. There’s nothing to fear.’

‘Where’s everyone else – Travertine, Doctor Aziba and the others?’

‘They are all alive and well, and you’ll be reunited with them soon.’

‘Are we your prisoners or your guests? Are we free to leave if we want to?’

‘I don’t know enough about you to answer that question yet.’

‘Why did you attack my ship?’

‘That wasn’t an attack.’ The figment or replica of the girl, whatever it was, produced a teasing smile. ‘You saw my capabilities, Chiku. I could have attacked and destroyed you any time from the moment you entered this solar system.’

Chiku rose from the chair and moved to the window. The floor under her feet was a cushion of grey, yielding to her footsteps. Blood-warm and clammy, it reminded her of elephant skin.

‘Are we on Crucible?’

‘Yes. We know from our scans of your ship that you mapped our surface from orbit. Doubtless you saw the evidence of our work?’

‘We saw a lot less than we’d been led to expect. You were supposed to be making cities for us.’

‘Cities? There are only five of you! Plus another fifteen in your caskets,
of course. Why aren’t those people awake? Are you intending to wake them at some later point?’

‘Have you hurt them?’

‘Goodness, Chiku – we really do have a massive gulf to cross before you’ll trust me, don’t we?’

‘It was a simple question. You ripped my ship apart, dragged us into Crucible’s atmosphere and then pumped narcotic gas into our hull. You ignored our handshake protocols and uplinked false data to our ships. I’m sorry, but that’s not how you go about building a basis of mutual trust.’

‘Then you must educate me on the correct procedure.’

The girl was standing by the window with her back to the scene. She beckoned Chiku closer, gesturing towards the landscape with her bow, as if presenting a painting for discussion. ‘Crucible,’ she said admiringly. ‘Quite lovely, isn’t it? We’ve travelled some way from where you landed. It will be sunrise here shortly – I thought you’d like that.’

From the view, she surmised that they were in a tower. A number of similar structures were visible from the window. They were pale stalks, rising from a dense canopy of trees or tree-analogues, their leaves a green so dark that it was closer to the lustrous black of a magpie’s feathers. Bean-shaped capsules with elliptical windows topped the stalks, and lower down, aerial bridges linked the stalks in a cat’s cradle of intersecting walkways. Some of the towers were lower and squatter than others, with fatter capsules. Beyond this grouping of structures, she could see no other sign of construction between here and the horizon.