Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘I sincerely hope so,’ Kanu said, not for one moment doubting her words.

She flashed back a quick smile. ‘Well, if I’m wrong — it’ll be quick.’

Not a stray photon of starlight made it down through the twenty kilometres of icy crust. Fall of Night was swimming now, its motion smoother than when it had been tunnelling. Their angle of descent was shallower and the only sound beyond the ordinary life-support systems was the whirr of water-thrusters. They could have been in the most perfect starless vacuum, adrift between the galaxies.

‘Nissa,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need—’

‘Can’t you turn off your anxieties, merman, just for a few hours?’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

And there was the first flash of real irritation.

‘What’s troubling you now?’

‘More than we have time to cover at the moment. This objective of yours — can you tell me a little more about it? I understand you wanting to keep things as close to your chest as possible until we got here, but we’re on Europa now. Shouldn’t I know the full picture?’

Nissa gave a small sigh and called up a map of the Europan surface, peeled open like an orange. ‘We’re here,’ she said, jabbing with a finger. ‘All these dots, these are abandoned cities. Abandoned doesn’t mean empty, of course.’ Her finger skated to a knot of ruins, settling on one bloated dot. ‘This is Underthrace. It was one of the biggest subsurface settlements before the Fall — a bubble economy, skirting the brink of what was legal or ethical elsewhere in the system. You can see why it would have appealed to your grandmother.’

‘You have proof that Sunday was here?’

‘Concrete. I’ve seen the paper trails. When your family’s finances were on the slide, it looks like they tried to move a lot of their more questionable holdings into Underthrace’s independent credit system. My guess is Sunday was shrewd enough to want to safeguard her art as well.’

Kanu nodded slowly. ‘I’m sure you’re right. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if she banked some of her artworks here. If nothing else, she wouldn’t have wanted the market flooded with her work after her death.’

‘I’m glad you approve of my theory. It would be a little disappointing to be wrong.’

‘I don’t think you are. But I suspect there might be something else in Underthrace.’

Nissa twisted to face him again. ‘Something to do with Sunday?’

‘I doubt she would have had direct knowledge of it. It’s more likely to have been initiated by the next generation — my mother, her contemporaries. They’d have had the time and the knowledge.’

‘The time and the knowledge for what?’

‘Nissa, it’s time I spoke frankly. This isn’t what you think it is — there’s something much bigger going on. You’ve come to Europa on some pretext, but so have I — our meeting wasn’t coincidence after all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I always knew you’d be in Lisbon, and that there was a good chance we’d run into each other.’

‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘I was there. I saw your reaction. You were as surprised as I was.’

‘At the time I believed it was a genuine coincidence.’

They had descended twenty kilometres since breaking through the ice — deeper than any part of Earth’s seas — and mindless black fathoms lay beneath them still. From the hull there came not a murmur of complaint as it bore the smoothly rising stresses.

‘Only yesterday,’ Nissa said, ‘you told me you didn’t feel quite right. I reassured you it was to be expected and dismissed your concerns, but it’s obvious now that I was wrong, for which I apologise. I should have listened to you. But we’re on Europa because I chose to come here, looking for art. Not because of some grand conspiracy you dragged me into. Can you hold on to that simple truth for a few hours?’

Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself.

‘I want to.’

‘So do me a favour and try. There are some floating structures coming up soon which we’ll cut through to save time. We may stir up a few Regals as we pass and I don’t want to be distracted if that happens.’ Then added, under her breath: ‘The four days home are going to be interesting.’

There was no point in stealth. Fall of Night ’s searchlights pushed out at all angles into the surrounding water, turning the little ship into a neon-spined pufferfish. Nissa did not care who knew of her arrival, only that she did not startle the unwary.

They nosed through looming dark structures still secured to the ocean floor, ovals or spheres for the most part, strung along the tethers like baubles. Each of the ruins was large enough to be considered a city in its own right, and indeed — according to the maps and records — many of them had been autonomous enclaves, bubbles within the bubble, exploring their own fringes of the edge economy.

Nissa was justifiably nervous. There were hot spots and pressure gradients, evidence of recent or ongoing inhabitation. Kanu felt the tension boiling off her.

‘They talk about the Regals as if they’re one thing,’ she said, keeping up a commentary as if it was the only thing holding them both on the right side of sanity. ‘In truth, there are about a hundred different factions down here, and most of them hate each other more than they hate us.’

‘Who is your contact? What are you hoping to exchange for the artworks?’

‘My contact is the Margrave. As for leverage — money’s useless down here. There are no economic ties to the rest of the system, no way of moving credit in or out.’ But then she noticed something. ‘Oh, what’s this?’

‘Show me.’

‘Movement. Warm objects.’ She tapped her finger against a smudge of thermal signatures emerging from a fissure in one of the tethered structures.

The thermal signatures were Regals, but moving too swiftly to be swimming under their own power. There were a dozen of them, organised into an arrowhead squadron. Fall of Night ’s sensors picked out the powered drones they were using for propulsion, each Regal drawn along by one of the machines. They could swim, of course — all of the Regals had tails and flippers rather than legs — but machines would always be faster. They were armed and armoured, but it all looked makeshift, cobbled together from technological junk and detritus — the scavenged titbits of what had once been a thriving submarine economy.

‘The Margrave’s people?’

‘Probably. We’re in his sphere of jurisdiction, more or less.’

‘You don’t sound certain.’

‘I was told I wouldn’t be contacted until we reached Underthrace itself.’

‘Could we outrun them?’

‘Oh, easily. Wouldn’t gain us much, though. If you don’t do business with the Regals, you don’t do business with anyone.’

The Regals carried their own lights. They had glow-sticks and luminous paint, some of which flickered and changed in a way that reminded Kanu of Sunday’s psycho-reactive graffiti. Their submarine armour was horned and bladed. They also carried long, spearlike weapons with triggers and gas canisters.

Nissa allowed them to approach. She did not increase Fall of Night ’s speed or take evasive action. Equally, she did not deviate from their original course.

The Regals split their formation and surrounded Nissa’s ship. They had no difficulty matching pace. Kanu heard clangs and thumps as they knocked carelessly against the hull, followed by the long fingernail scrape of a spear or harpoon being drawn down the length of the ship.

‘It’s intimidation,’ Nissa said. ‘That’s all.’