Poseidon's Wake (16 page)

‘Of course you would be welcome on the Moon – indeed, anywhere in
UON
sovereign space. Your flight plan tells me that you have business in Europa – quite unusual, if you do not mind my saying. Very difficult to arrange those permissions. Might I ask the nature of your business there?’

‘Art,’ Kanu replied, as succinctly as he dared. Then he smiled again. ‘Well, Yevgeny – it’s very kind of you to track me down. And I’ll be sure to get in touch when I return.’

‘I have my eye on you now,’ Korsakov said, in tones that sounded friendly enough. ‘No escaping your old friend, Kanu.’

When it was over, Nissa floated opposite him, cross-legged. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Why would he care what you’re up to now? If he’s the one who had you kicked out of the diplomatic service, hasn’t he already got what he wanted?’

‘I don’t think Yevgeny is completely satisfied with my behaviour.’

‘What business is it of his?’

‘I’ve no idea. It’s very odd.’

‘Well, here’s something else that’s odd. Did you say he was transmitting from the Moon?’

Kanu nodded. ‘He never said as much, but the time lag fitted. Why – did you get a better fix?’

‘
Fall of Night
’s cleverer than he assumed. That time lag was a spoof. He was bouncing the signal through a dozen mirrors, but I could still back-track to its real point of origin. It’s a ship, a Consolidation enforcement vehicle, and it’s much closer than the Moon.’

‘That makes no sense at all. Yevgeny was the ambassador for the United Orbital Nations, not the Consolidation.’

‘In which case, apparently you’re not the only one starting a new chapter.’

Beyond the orbit of Mars they passed within visual range of a Watchkeeper. Kanu wondered if Nissa had bent their course to make it possible, seeking the thrill of a close encounter, something to take their minds off the puzzle of the Consolidation ship – even his own mind off his troubled dreams.

‘The moratorium is stupid,’ she was saying. ‘Look at the size of that thing, the power it must contain. If the Watchkeepers didn’t want us to be flying around in spaceships, does anyone think we’d still be able to?’

‘They make people nervous,’ Kanu said as
Fall of Night
’s cameras relayed an increasingly sharp image of the alien machine. ‘Perhaps it’s sensible not to do anything too provocative until we have a better idea of their intentions.’

‘Maybe they don’t have any intentions – maybe they’re just going to sit in our solar system like rocks until we bore ourselves to death waiting for them to do something.’

The Watchkeeper was a thousand-kilometre-long pine cone, interlaced and overlapping black facets wrapped around a core of glowing blue mystery. There were eleven Watchkeepers in the solar system now; some of them in orbit around planets, others floating in free space. Occasionally they moved, changing orientation or position. They swung like weathercocks and slid from orbit to orbit in mute defiance of parochial human physics. Occasionally a beam of blue light would pass from one Watchkeeper to another, or stab out of the solar system entirely.

They had communicated not the slightest thing to any of the human powers. What they wanted, what they would permit, what was forbidden, remained within the realm of increasingly fraught speculation. It was clear only that they were here for something – observation, perhaps, or a reckoning, which lay at some point in the future.

Kanu was glad when their course began to take them further from the Watchkeeper.

‘It never hurts to give them a wide margin,’ he said, feeling he needed to defend his qualms.

‘Did your friends on Mars feel the same way?’

‘My friends on Mars were three human beings, two of whom are dead now – and you’ve met the other one.’ But that was a harsher answer than her innocent question merited. ‘I had good relations with the machines through Swift. It was exactly that good relationship that Yevgeny Korsakov disapproved of – he felt it was tantamount to treason against my own species.’

‘Extreme. But given that we know so little about the Martian robots – who can say what they’re really up to? How can we be sure they’re not in secret cahoots with the Watchkeepers, plotting our downfall?’

‘Believe me, it’s not like that at all. I spent enough time with Swift and the other machines to know how they feel about the Watchkeepers, and the truth is they’re as in the dark as the rest of us. They don’t feel some distant kinship with the Watchkeepers. They’re as alien and frightening to the Evolvarium as they are to us.’

‘You think.’

‘You have a great many genes in common with an oak tree. Do you feel an intense kinship with oak trees?’

‘They’re both robots, Kanu. Try seeing things from our perspective for a while, not theirs.’

That was as close to arguing as they got. It was only four days from Earth to Jupiter space, hardly enough time to start getting on each other’s nerves.
Fall of Night
was certainly not large, but the provision of two cabins meant there was more than enough privacy available to keep irritation at bay.

After their breakfast discussion, Kanu had been careful not to raise the matter of his disquiet again. It was better that way. He allowed her to believe she had settled his misgivings, putting them down to the unpleasantness of his recent experience on Mars. And, indeed, Kanu was ready to concede that a component of his feelings could be explained away as a kind of post-traumatic episode. But he knew there was more to it than that.

On the third day, twenty-four hours from Jupiter, he was alone in his cabin when he became unaccountably certain he was being watched; that he was sharing the room with a silent observer. Out of reflex he twitched around, and for an instant he was convinced he had seen something, a figure or the shadow of a figure, out of the corner of his eye.

In any other situation he would have gladly put the matter behind him. But it was just Kanu and Nissa and her little spaceship, and there was nothing between them and another human being except millions of kilometres of vacuum. Nissa aside, he was more alone here than he had been on the surface of Mars. Nor had he ever been one to jump at shadows.

And yet there had been someone – some
thing
– there.

Perhaps it was just a glimpse of his own reflection in the mirror above his private washbasin.

Yes. Just the mirror.

That was it.

But now a question pushed itself to the forefront of his mind. He voiced it aloud, but in a quiet enough whisper that it was easily drowned out by the noise of
Fall of Night
’s
systems.

‘What did you do to me?’

Because his thoughts were following the groove of a different, darker orbit now. Not that the machines on Mars had somehow erred in putting him back together, botching part of his brain wiring, but that this might be deliberate.

That all of this might suit some purpose of which he was not aware.

*

A day later they reached Jupiter. Nissa put extra power into
Fall of Night
’s electromagnetic deflectors, cocooning them from the worst effects of the Jovian magnetosphere. They were still moving quickly, about five hundred kilometres per second of excess speed, but Nissa had allowed for that with the aerobrake passage, knifing her ship through Jupiter’s extreme upper atmosphere at an oblique angle. It was as bumpy as she had predicted, but – she assured Kanu – the buffeting and heating were well within tolerable margins, and the dodge had shaved many hours off their flight. In fact he found the experience more bracing than unpleasant. By the time they reached clear space again, their speed was down to a manageable hundred kilometres per second, more than sufficient for operations within Jupiter’s system of moons.

Nissa was on the flight deck, confirming that their approach authorisation was in order. The certification was complicated and in a state of continuous adjustment and review, with a chance that it might be rescinded at any moment.

‘Something giving you cause for concern?’ Kanu asked, rubbing his face with a moistened towel. ‘I thought you had all the details covered.’

‘So did I, but there’s a heavier Consolidation presence than I was expecting. After that business with Yevgeny . . . what his surname?’

‘Korsakov.’

‘Him, yes. I’m starting to feel rattled. Sure, I’ve bent a rule or two, but I haven’t done anything to deserve this kind of attention.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘Well, of course
you
haven’t.’ She gave him a quizzical look. ‘Unless there’s something you haven’t told me.’

Kanu thought about it for a few moments. ‘I don’t believe those enforcement craft are anything to do with us. They’re here for some other reason entirely.’

‘And Korsakov’s interest in you? The Consolidation ship from which he’s transmitting is here, too.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I tracked its heading, and here it is. Doesn’t that concern you?’

‘He must be on diplomatic business, intergovernmental work. Europa’s a constant background problem for all the governments. That’s why those permissions are so difficult to arrange.’

‘I’ve fought long and hard for this, Kanu. No one’s taking it away from me now.’

On their fall to Europa they were interdicted by two of the Consolidation enforcement craft, pincering
Fall of Night
from either side. Kanu had a good view of the official vehicles – dark, shark-shaped ships with the interlocking ripples of the Consolidation’s emblem glowing along their sides.

‘If it came to it,’ he said, ‘do you think you could outrun them?’

‘Down to the ice, maybe. But I’d be in a world of trouble when I came back out.’

It was a formality, more or less. Her authorisation was queried, then re-queried. Even though she had filed all the necessary requests, the Consolidation ships still insisted on signalling for confirmation. Kanu and Nissa endured long hours of waiting while photons bounced around the system, pinballing from one encrypted router to the next. Meanwhile Nissa tried to get a signal through to her contact in Europa, informing them of the delay, but the omens were not propitious.

‘Something’s not right down there,’ she said when the response was late returning. ‘The last I heard, the Margrave was having trouble with border control. I hope the situation hasn’t worsened.’

As abruptly as they had arrived, though, the Consolidation ships broke off. Kanu watched them fall away with a vague feeling of resentment. No apology for detaining them, or for wasting hours of their time. Not even a
bon voyage
.

‘Rude.’

‘Planetary geopolitics looks a bit different when you’re one of the little people, doesn’t it?’ Nissa said.

‘I’m getting used to it.’

Europa had no atmosphere, so they were able to come in hard and fast until the last moment. The moon was an almost perfectly smooth sphere, an off-white eyeball crazed and veined by healing stress fractures, but with no mountains, valleys or craters. Abandoned cities littered the Europan plains, spires buckled and domes cracked, sagging down into the ice on their stilts and buttresses like drowning cathedrals. It was much too expensive to return these cold, airless, radiation-sleeted ruins to viable habitats. Besides, their economies had always depended on the cities and markets under the ice, in the blood-warm ocean. The abandoned cities were merely the ports of entry to the hidden kingdom, and now the kingdom was lawless.

‘Looters have stripped out almost anything useful,’ Nissa said as they vectored low over one of the tilted ruins. The clustered vanes and docking towers of the abandoned settlement brought to Kanu’s mind the image of a sailing ship, hemmed in by pack ice, its masts and rigging angled closer to the horizon than the zenith. And the thought shaped itself: only the ice traps that ship. She could still sail again, if only she could break free of its hold.

‘Kanu?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was saying that looters have stripped out almost anything we might be able to use in those cities. Power, computer systems, elevator links through to the ocean. The ice has shifted, anyway. Unless those elevator shafts are constantly maintained, the ice soon severs them.’

‘Are you expecting the Regals to come up and meet you on the surface?’

‘No – they almost never show their faces.’

‘Then you have a problem.’

‘Only if I hadn’t done my homework first.’

Nissa had preselected a landing spot near the equator and where the ice was thinner. Jupiter’s swollen one-eyed countenance lorded it over the sky, as if it had them pinned beneath its singular gaze. A case could be made for the beauty of Saturn, Kanu supposed, but never Jupiter. It was as ugly as an ogre, and it guarded its moons with an ogre’s mad-eyed jealousy.

Fall of Night
settled onto the ice without landing legs, letting its hull take its weight. Europa’s gravity was barely a seventh that of Earth, less even than Mars, and after the two gees of their flight out to Jupiter, Kanu felt nearly weightless. It did not escape his attention that Nissa had put them down nowhere near any of the empty cities.

‘This is where I start testing the letter of the law,’ she said. ‘We’re not about to violate the terms of my authorisation – but we
are
going to make use of them in a way the Consolidation didn’t expect.’

‘Continue,’ Kanu said.

‘I was given forty-eight hours of surface time. That would be just enough to get in and out of the ocean if the elevators were working, but they’re not, and the Consolidation knows that. So they don’t believe I’ll be able to reach the sea.’

‘You, on the other hand, have your own plans.’

Nissa patted the couch adjoining her own. ‘Strap in next to me. I think you’re going to like this part.’

Kanu did as he was told, apprehension and curiosity vying for control of his emotions. Nissa was selecting navigation options he had not seen before, and beyond the enclosure of the command deck he sensed the ship going about some urgent new business. The hull was doing something. He felt the thud and whirr of activating mechanisms.