On the Steel Breeze (8 page)

Besides, this was not where the trouble had begun.

She completed her search of the lower levels without incident. There were no survivors, nor any bodies. She checked her suit readings. Air pressure was now nudging below forty per cent.

‘I’ve found someone,’ Namboze said, grunting as she shifted position. ‘Still alive, but barely conscious. I’m going to get them into the portable preserver.’ Her voice was husky, on the edge of breathlessness.

‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ Chiku said.

‘It’s all right – I’ve got it under control. We could use another party to help us ferry the survivor back out through the chamber, though.’ Namboze paused, her breathing heavy. ‘Once this one’s stabilised, I’ll complete my search of the upper floors. We missed this one’s life-signs – maybe there are more survivors.’

‘I’ll call for help. Don’t take any risks, Gonithi – you’ve done well as it is.’

‘Did you find anyone?’

‘Empty down here so far. Pressure’s still falling, though, so pretty soon it won’t matter who we find. I’m going to take a look in the other dome, just in case there’s an air pocket. Call me if you find any more survivors.’

The map showed Chiku a ground-floor entry point into the secondary dome, protected by a sturdy internal airlock of antique but foolproof design. The lock admitted her. Beyond was hard vacuum. She shone her light around, trying to make sense of mangled architecture. The ceiling fragment had daggered its way to the ground, crushing and buckling interior floors and partitions, and come to rest at a sharp angle. She moved around it cautiously, not sure how firmly it was embedded. Judging by the absence of machines and equipment, this part of the complex had likely been reserved for administration and supervision. There were chairs and tables, bent and squashed beyond easy recognition. A small
refectory, unoccupied at the time of the accident. No survivors or bodies anywhere, as far as she could tell.

‘How are you doing, Gonithi?’

The other woman sounded much more confident now. ‘Got the survivor bagged and stable. I’ve tagged the location and am completing my search. What about you?’

‘I don’t think there’s anyone here, but I want to make absolutely sure before we tag it as searched.’

Chiku had swept the basement of the other dome, but it had not connected through to this one. She could see into the lower level at the point where the ceiling fragment had penetrated the floor. A staircase existed, but it was now buried under the rubble of the dome’s collapsed roof. The ceiling fragment itself offered a kind of makeshift ramp, if she dared trust it not to shift or collapse. The quilt of illumination elements studding the panel’s uppermost face – it had flipped over at some point after falling from the ceiling – promised enough traction to enable her to climb or scramble down.

Chiku moved to the edge of the gap in the floor and stood with her toes on the very brink. It was four, maybe five metres down to a scree of rubble piled up on the basement’s floor. To reach the steep slope of the ceiling fragment, she would have to leap across a good metre of clear space, and then hope that she maintained her footing. Hesitating, she bent down and scooped up a chunk of debris as large as her helmet. She hurled it at the ceiling fragment, the suit amplifying the power of her swing. The chunk shattered in a silent eruption, blooming into a blue-grey cloud. The fragment had absorbed the impact without a hint of movement. It appeared to be solidly fixed.

Chiku took a couple of paces back, then leapt across the threshold. She landed roughly, one foot slipping into empty space, but her other found a purchase. She grabbed hold of a pair of lighting elements and stabilised herself. The jump would not have fazed even Ndege or Mposi under normal circumstances, but she was alone, in a dangerous place, with only a spacesuit between her and vacuum, and for a few moments her heart surged on a rush of adrenalin and relief.

Chiku descended carefully, spidering down the quilt of lighting elements until her feet touched debris. The ground crunched, then supported her. She stepped gingerly off the ramp and turned around slowly, sweeping the beam over the jumbled and unwelcoming surroundings. Even the dust kicked up as she moved curtained back down with indecent haste.

‘Chiku,’ came Namboze’s voice. ‘I’m done here. There’s no one else
alive so I’m heading outside. I think I can manage the preserver on my own.’

‘Good work,’ Chiku said. ‘I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’

Leaning around a buckled metal pillar, she took cautious steps deeper into the basement. It had been subdivided into two large rooms, but the intervening wall had collapsed when the ceiling fragment came down. She stepped over and around chunks of knee-high rubble, watching where she placed her feet.

Namboze asked, ‘Where are you?’

‘Just completing a sweep of the secondary basement. It’s open to vacuum, but I wanted to be sure. Doesn’t look like there’s anything down here, though.’

Chiku fell silent, heart jamming her throat. She had been about to put her foot down into what looked at first glance to be a shadowy space between two chunks of debris. An instant before committing herself, she realised it was a void, not shadow.

There was a hole in the floor.

Namboze must have heard her draw breath. ‘Chiku?’

‘Still here. Nearly lost my balance.’

Chiku steadied herself. She poked at one of the boulders on the edge of the void. It teetered and fell in, increasing the diameter of the void. It had been big enough to swallow her foot to begin with. Now it was big enough to swallow Chiku.

If the boulder landed on anything below, it did so without a hint of impact. She found the void troubling in a way that felt monstrously disproportionate to its size. According to the aug, no sub-levels or infrastructure pipes lay beneath this laboratory, even allowing for decades of disuse or abandonment. The overlay had proven accurate so far.

Chiku was greatly unnerved by this sudden discrepancy.
Zanzibar
’s memory was as limitless and infallible as a person’s was cramped and unreliable.
Zanzibar
was meant to know every wrinkle and pore of itself.

But it did not know about this hole.

Chiku took another deep, steadying breath. What was more likely: that a hole had been present where none was charted; or that the accident, the violence of the collapsing ceiling, had shifted the structural foundations beneath the laboratory and revealed the opening? This rift could only have opened up today, when Kappa blew out. Given the scale of destruction Chiku had already witnessed – that four-hundred-metre-wide hole punched clean through
Zanzibar
’s skin to space – a lack of additional structural shifts elsewhere within the chamber would have been more remarkable than finding this one.

But then she risked leaning far enough over the edge to allow her helmet light to spill into the void, and saw that whatever this might have been, it was not another rift.

This hole was the entrance to a shaft, and the shaft’s walls were not only smoothly bored but set with recessed handholds. It curved away beneath her, out of sight and into darkness. And Chiku shivered, because such a thing had no business existing on
Zanzibar.

A secret passage.

She looked around and her gaze chanced upon a sheet of lightweight walling material that must have come loose when the overlying floor collapsed. Moving carefully – what little faith she had had in the integrity of the floor beneath her had vanished the moment she found the void – Chiku grasped the blade-shaped fragment and levered it free. She positioned the fragment over the hole, adjusting it until she was satisfied that she had concealed her discovery as best she could. The hole’s dark mouth was still visible under the fragment’s edges, but to the unsuspecting eye it looked like shadow.

There was no need to tag the location.

CHAPTER SIX

From the transit station, all the way up the winding stone-walled paths to her dwelling, Chiku ran a gauntlet of questions from well-meaning citizens. They had learned from Noah about her visit to Kappa and they wanted to know what she had seen inside. Most of all, they wanted reassurance. Chair Utomi might have told everyone that
Zanzibar
was safe, but what else could he say? Chiku had first-hand information and they were eager for it. She did not have to lie to them, or bend the truth to any excessive degree, to give them what they wanted.
Things will be all right,
she assured them.
It’s bad, but we’ll weather it. We have the local caravan to call on. There will be no more deaths.

Eventually she had to start telling them not to ask any more questions, that she had already told them all she knew. She directed the rest back down the path, to the people who had already interrogated her.
Talk to them, they know the picture.

When she finally reached the house, she was surprised to see Noah sitting outside it, squatting on one of the low walls. Mposi and Ndegi were at his feet, squabbling over a game of marbles. Noah had an odd look about him – not the relief and concern she had been counting on.

‘I’m glad you’re safe,’ he said, rising from the wall.

She had expected to find him indoors, preparing a meal, not daydreaming out here. ‘Yes, I’m safe,’ she said guardedly. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Noah embraced her briefly, breaking contact almost as soon as he had initiated it. ‘We have . . . well, it’s difficult to explain. I think you need to go inside.’

‘Why are you waiting out here?’

‘I think you need to go inside,’ Noah repeated, as if she had not heard him the first time. ‘I’ll wait here with the children. You can decide what we should do next.’

This was definitely more strangeness than she needed at the end of a hard day. But Noah was a good husband and not given to dramas. She
nodded wordlessly, knelt down to kiss the children – tousled their hair, whispered that they should play nicely. And then – steeling herself – she entered the house.

Travertine was sitting at the kitchen table, hands before ver, fingering a wine glass.

‘Hello, Chiku.’

Chiku said nothing at first. Travertine had poured the wine from the same bottle she and Noah had started the evening before their mission to
Malabar.
Chiku eased into the seat opposite Travertine and helped herself to a sip from the same glass. Then the sip became a gulp, and she carried on drinking until the glass was empty and her throat was burning.

She said: ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘In the immediate sense, or the existential?’

‘Dead, alive, whatever – you shouldn’t be in my house. Not after whatever happened today.’

‘I have no idea what happened today.’

‘Whatever went wrong, it started with your laboratory. You did this. You did this and they’re going to hang you for it.’

‘Well, it’s good to know I can turn to friends for reassurance.’

‘Get out of my house.’

Travertine took the glass from her and poured more wine. ‘I’m not an idiot. I expect to be arrested for this. The only reason I was able to get here in the first place was because there was so much chaos and confusion.’

‘Were you in Kappa when it happened?’

‘If I had been, we wouldn’t be having this cosy little chat, would we?’

‘I can’t shelter you.’

‘I’m not asking you to.’

‘What happened? What the hell were you doing?’

‘Nothing much. Just trying to save the world. And how was your day?’

‘You were punished once. You were lucky they didn’t lock you up then. Wasn’t that lesson enough for you?’

‘All it did was teach me that I needed to be cleverer.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, that little problem of ours hasn’t magically vanished. Does it keep you awake at night? It really ought to. It gives me cold, shivering nightmares.’

‘I won’t argue with you. There’d be nothing to gain. Are you going to turn yourself in, or do I have to call the authorities?’

‘You
are
the authorities, Chiku. That’s rather the point.’ But Travertine
sighed, then. ‘I am going to turn myself in – it’s not as if I’d have a hope in hell of evading justice.’

‘So why have you come here instead of going straight to the constables?’

‘There’s something we need to discuss.’

‘I’ve heard enough of your justifications over the years. You just blew a hole in the skin of the holoship.’

‘True. But you know what? It proves there’s something we don’t understand.
Pemba
proved it, too, but that time there was no wreckage to comb through, and no survivors to question. We had no idea what they’d been doing in there before it all went pop.’

‘The same as you – meddling.’

‘Meddling is what we do. It’s what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That’s the way of it.’ Travertine examined vis fingers. They were strong and elaborately wrinkled around the knuckles. Unlike Chiku’s, they looked like they had done honest work.

‘Well?’ she prompted, after Travertine fell silent and appeared to be in no hurry to speak again.

‘I found something. A hint of a breakthrough, a door into Post-Chibesa physics. A glimpse of the energies we’ll need to decelerate, when we approach Crucible. I decided to investigate further with a simple experiment. In secret, of course – underneath my lab.’

‘I think you should save all this for the hearing.’

‘When you dig under something, Chiku, you often make discoveries.’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Travertine?’

‘I have some information that I think might interest you, both as a respected member of the Assembly and as someone with influence in the Council of Worlds.’

‘And exactly how long have you had this “information”?’

‘I always knew the time might come when I would need your support, so when I made my discovery, I decided not to act on it immediately.’

‘You kept it back as a bargaining chip.’