Alastair Reynolds: Poseidon's Wake

In the cold it was easy to believe that space was a hop and a skip away.

‘Garudi tells me you allowed Swift to eavesdrop on her conversation yesterday,’ said Korsakov, standing next to Kanu, the two of them with their helmets tucked under their arms.

‘Swift knew about it before we did.’

‘Nonetheless, Kanu. It’s hardly protocol, is it?’ Korsakov spoke slowly, as if each word needed consideration and that the patience of his listeners could be expected. ‘What is it about that one, exactly? What do you see in that machine, compared to the others?’

‘I enjoy Swift’s company. Anyway, why do I have to explain myself? Isn’t that what we’re here for — to communicate with them?’

‘Communication is fine,’ Korsakov said, his fine grey eyes surveying Kanu from beneath an imperious brow, surmounted by a sweep of long grey hair which he wore combed back. ‘But it can’t be more than that. These machines stole Mars from us. It was our world, our inheritance, and they tore it from our control.’

The flier, powered up and ready, was turning on a platform after being serviced.

‘I’m broadly aware of recent history, Yevgeny.’

The tall, stooping Korsakov began: ‘I can’t speak for the United Aquatic Nations—’

‘Then don’t.’

‘But your people have an expectation, Kanu. A tacit understanding that your sympathies, when put to the test, will always fall on the human side of the equation.’

‘Is anyone saying they don’t?’

‘The robot is using you, Kanu. Machines don’t understand friendship. This is leverage, pure and simple.’

Kanu was glad when the other two ambassadors arrived at the landing deck. They were also wearing surface suits, although their outfits hinted at their differing allegiances within the solar system. Kanu wore a blue-green suit pattened with starfish, their arms linked together in a kind of synaptic net. Korsakov, who stood for the United Orbital Nations, wore regolith grey, embossed with a representation of craters. Dalal, the representative for the United Surface Nations, carried the motif of a single tree, its branches hung with birds and fruit.

Lucien, the recently appointed ambassador for the Consolidation — everything out to the Oort Cloud that was not Earth, the Moon or Mars — wore a suit threaded with a ripple-like design of complex interlocking orbits.

‘Swift will be joining us?’ Dalal asked of Kanu.

‘Yes. He should be here in a moment.’

‘I don’t care for this arrangement,’ Lucien confessed. ‘We should be free to conduct our inspection without having a robot along for the ride.’

‘It’s what’s been agreed,’ Kanu answered, just as Swift appeared from a door leading onto the deck. ‘Transparency. Cooperation. It’s bound to help.’

‘Them, or us?’ Korsakov muttered, stooping to avoid scraping his head on the underside of the vehicle.

Once the flier was sealed, the air was pumped out of the deck and the dome opened to the sky. The passengers took lounge seats and tucked their helmets between their feet. By consent Garudi Dalal took the controls. She vectored them east, maintaining altitude at the agreed value. In the cabin, a soft automatic voice reeled off indices of airspeed, temperature and pressure. Kanu turned around in his lounge seat to view the receeding spire of the embassy, the dome clam-shelling tight once they were gone.

The embassy was a dark fluted spire with broad, rootlike foundations. It corkscrewed a kilometre and a half from the summit of Olympus Mons, a unicorn’s horn jammed into Mars. With the four ambassadors now aboard the flier, the place was completely devoid of human inhabitation. In fact, since the ambassadors were in the sky, there was now no human presence on the surface of Mars at all.

They had been under way for an hour when Dalal raised her voice, though without any particular urgency. ‘Something coming up. Three envoys, standard approach formation.’

Korsakov moved to look over her shoulder, studying the console displays. ‘Weapons readiness?’

‘Nominal,’ Dalal answered.

The flier itself carried no armaments — that would have been an express violation of the terms of the embassy settlement — but they were under constant surveillance and cover from the orbital fortresses. Kanu had been expecting the escorts, though. They were a normal feature of their occasional inspection flights.

‘They won’t harm us,’ he said. ‘Not with Swift as a hostage.’

Swift looked affronted. ‘I trust that is meant as a joke.’

‘You’d make a very poor hostage given what you’ve always told me about your massively distributed nature.’

Swift touched a hand to his frock-coated chest. ‘I am still very attached to this body. It would be a nuisance to have to make a new one.’

Korsakov scowled in annoyance.

The three flying things were smaller than the ambassadorial vehicle, each a bronze ellipsoid with blue and red lights glowing through from within. How they flew was open to conjecture. Once, humans would have harvested their technological cleverness for profit, but those days were long behind them. The three machines enclosed the flier in a triangular formation.

‘You are free to descend,’ Swift said.

Dalal took them down to an altitude of only two kilometres above the mean surface level, close enough that the robots’ workings were in plain view. At periodic intervals, the machines had built towering diamond-faceted citadels on the face of Mars. They studded the surface like anthills, beehives or ice-cream cornets. They were huge, candy-coloured, aglow with secret purpose. Tentacular tubes linked them, hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometres long. Glowing corpuscular things shot along these tubes, or occasionally moved through the air between the citadels.

Undoubtedly there was much more going on beneath the crust, beyond the easy scrutiny of orbital sensors.

‘Coming up on the impact site,’ Dalal announced. ‘Twenty kilometres dead ahead. Visual on it now. Dropping speed to minimum. Swift — please remind your friends of our agreed intentions?’

‘All is in hand,’ Swift said.

Still accompanied by their machine escort, the ambassadors made a slow approach to the object of their interest. It was bigger than Kanu had expected — skyscraper-sized. An ugly squared-off thing never designed to move through air, it resembled a grey metal filing cabinet and was jammed into a sand dune like a surrealist art installation. He thought of his grandmother’s sculptures, and wondered whether Sunday would have appreciated the comparison.

‘An hour is an insult,’ Korsakov said, tapping life-support instructions into his suit cuff.

‘We’ll make the best of it,’ Kanu answered.

‘Always the optimist, merman.’

‘I try, Yevgeny. There are worse habits.’

They could not land on or dock with the tilted, damaged wreck, but orbital surveillance had identified a possible entrance just above the point where the ship met the ground. It was a tiny airlock, but it would have to suffice. They circled once, verifying that the lock was as it had appeared from space, and then settled down about fifty metres from the wreck.

All in hand, as Swift had said.

When the flier was down, Dalal pumped the air out of the cockpit and lowered the boarding ramp. Korsakov and Lucien were the first to exit, followed by Kanu, then Swift — Swift, of course, had no need of a spacesuit — and finally Dalal, once she had secured the flier. The ramp folded up behind her, but the little vehicle was ready and waiting for their return.

‘Sixty minutes and counting,’ Lucien said. The youngest member of the diplomatic team by a margin of decades, ve represented the Consolidation — a coalition of political and economic interests which essentially included everything in the solar system beyond the old power structures of the Earth and the Moon.